Pumpkin (4 page)

David lurched to his feet and opened the top drawer at the side of the sink. His fingers fumbled, then closed around the handle of a big butcher knife. Pulling it out, he headed for the kitchen door. By
God, if
my
boy wants a jack-o’-lantern he’s going to have one.

Stumbling across the road, David felt no fear. He wasn’t afraid of the night, not even when the moon hid behind a cloud. Perhaps the moon was afraid of the wind and the way the shutters banged against the boarded-up windows of the old house, but David didn’t care. The woods down below were black as ink and he could hear the groaning of dead branches rubbing against the gnarled tree trunks, but that didn’t scare him.

He weaved across the weedy garden, searching for the dark outline of the pumpkin on the ground below. When he found it there was nothing frightening about that either. Perhaps this was why people got the idea in the first place—carving a harmless vegetable into a hobgoblin face just to show they weren’t afraid.

David knelt beside the pumpkin, wrenched it free from the rotting vine, and lifted his knife. Drink made his fingers clumsy at first, but they steadied when he went to work. Squatting in the darkness he hollowed out the inside, then sliced away at the surface. First he cut two inverted triangles for eyes, then a longer one for the nose below.

Now the moon came out from behind the clouds and David wielded the knife quickly, forming the mouth into a grinning gash. The result was a perfect pumpkin head and he stared at it with a smile of satisfaction.

Suddenly the face of the pumpkin disappeared in shadow, looming from behind.

Then David turned and looked up into the
other
face.

t was a wonderful surprise, seeing the face in the front window as Vera drove into the yard. Billy saw it too and he bubbled. “Look, Mom—the jack-o’-lantern!”

Vera nodded. Gazing at the pumpkin resting against the window ledge inside she felt as though a weight had been lifted from her. The candle within the hollowed-out pumpkin danced merrily behind the eyes and nose and mouth as the jack-o’-lantern smiled its warm welcome.

Her own smile warmed as she realized what its presence meant. David had come to his senses and from now on all would be well.

She cut the lights and motor, then emerged from the car. Billy’s door was already open and he slid out from the seat; he was so excited he dropped his trick-or-treat bag, and its contents spilled across the ground below.

“Pick that stuff up,” she told him. “I’m going in.”

The front door was unlocked and she entered quickly, not even stopping to turn on the light. The parlor was dark, but over at the window the jack-o’-lantern cast its friendly glow.

“David, where are you?” she called.

There was no answer, nor any need of one. For as she moved to the window she saw what rested beneath it.

David was slumped against the windowpane. And the jack-o’-lantern wasn’t on the ledge. Instead the pumpkin was perched between David’s shoulders.

On the stump where his head had been.

omehow Vera found the strength. The strength to keep Billy in the yard while she called the state police, the strength to tell them what happened when they came, the strength to lead them down into the woods to Jed Holloway’s grave.

It had been disturbed, its surface uprooted, the earth mound yawning open so there was scarcely need to dig. But setting down a lantern at the graveside, they did. A trooper offered a sympathetic shoulder and Vera pressed against it, averting her gaze as the other two officers wielded their shovels.

One of them spoke now. “Hey, look at the coffin—the lid’s all splintered.”

He slid it back, then gasped.

It was his gasp that caused Vera to look up, then run forward and peer down into the grave, into the open coffin and the moldering outline of what lay within—a fully articulated skeleton, the skull mouth frozen in a ghastly grin.

Cradled in its bony arm was David’s head.