The Pumpkin Man (29 page)

“I can't help but think that we should be using something from here,” she said, gesturing to the rows of mason jars. “Something here has to do some good.”

“I'm not sure I want to know a good use for a jar full of human eyeballs,” Nick answered. “Of course, I'm not sure how I feel about wanting to kiss a girl in a house filled with secret passages, rooms stacked with the bones of the dead, and a desiccated mummy.”

“Wait a minute,” Jenn said. “Are you saying you want to kiss me?”

He shrugged and gave her a half smile. “Maybe.”

She turned and planted her lips on his. The act filled her with happiness, and she raised an eyebrow in question as she pulled back. “Like that?”

He nodded. “Just like that. I just wish you weren't doing it in a house where my best friend was killed. A house filled with the bones of dead people. And I wish that there wasn't a killer who wanted to add us to these bones, take our heads and replace them with pumpkins. Just sayin'.”

Jenn sighed. “So, let's find out what's behind the Pumpkin Man so I can grant your wish. I'm happy to kiss you anywhere you like”—she steeled herself for whatever was to come—“but first we need to see what's in the floor beneath the crypt.”

They wasted no time walking through the basement and the
passageway beneath the backyard. When they arrived in the room with the old coffin, Nick moved straight to the serpent on the floor, knelt down with his ring and began sticking various keys into the lock. Which one would it be?

On the third try the key fit. Nick twisted and pulled first one way and then the other, not entirely sure which motion would make the lock open. After a couple of twists, Nick smiled.

“Found it,” he announced.

“Great,” Jenn said, her heart pounding. “Now what's inside?”

The panel of black tile opened down into a fairly small space. Nick reached in, carefully felt around and discovered a small wooden box. “I don't know,” he said, lifting it up and showing the box to her.

“Open it,” Jenn said.

Nick slid a fingernail beneath the wooden lid and pushed. The lid flipped easily back, and he gasped as he peered inside. A small blob of something organic rested there.

It was dark, almost bloodless, but clearly flesh. Forgotten or abused, but nevertheless flesh. He reached in and gingerly lifted it out, cupped in the palms of his hands. Jenn stared at the hunk of withered flesh and didn't question her intuition for an instant.

“It looks like a heart,” she said.

Nick nodded. “That's what I thought.” His fingers shook, then steadied. “So . . . great. We have a mummy, a bunch of bones and a desiccated heart. Now what?”

Jenn shook her head. “This is no regular heart,” she declared. “Someone hid it here, beneath the floor, on purpose. I think this is the key. But—”

“If it's the key, what exactly is the lock?” Nick finished. “Are we supposed to do something with it?”

“Maybe,” Jenn offered. “Maybe something in the hidden room. Maybe this is the heart of the mummy.”

“Oh, great,” Nick guessed. “And now we have to stitch it back in place.”

“Maybe,” Jenn said. “I have no idea.”

She noticed writing in the bottom of the box, beneath where the heart had rested. It was faint, but she could just make out the lettering.
GIFFORD
it read.

“I know that name,” she said. “It was in one of the books I read.” She thought a minute. “Gifford was a British druid who performed all sorts of obscene rituals to try to bring back the soul of a dead guy. Do you think this could really be him? He had to have died, like, two hundred years ago.”

“Let's go back upstairs,” Nick suggested. “I can't think straight down here.”

He set the wooden box on the floor near the coffin and took Jenn's hand to lead her away from the crypt. They alternated between a walk and a run back to the stairs.

Up in her bedroom, Jenn pointed. “Sit,” she said.

She walked over to the dresser as Nick stretched out on the bed with a heavy sigh. Digging out Meredith's journal, she brought it back to the bed, laid down next to him and rested her head on his arm as she began turning the pages, searching for some entry that might relate to the secret places in the house.

After a few minutes of skimming and shifting back and forth, Jenn stopped and pointed at a page in the book.

“I think I found something,” she whispered, and Nick looked past her hand to read the words:

 

I found a key in the back of the steak knife drawer today. I wasn't sure what it might go to, and George wasn't home to ask, so I poked around in the house on my own. I still feel like I'm living in someone else's home, and I know I've got to stop asking him for everything. I need to make this house mine, so this seemed like a good first step.

What's the key for? I should know all of the locks in my own house, right? I looked in my closet and downstairs in the basement, and I looked in the spare room. In the end, it was right under my nose. Well, my nose when I'm in the kitchen. The key opened a lock at the back of the pantry, and that lock opens the door on a legacy that I'm not sure what to make of. George has always begged me to let it all alone. His family has a history, and it's one he never wants to talk about. But I'm not sure he ever knew what was behind those pantry shelves. I'm not sure he understood the depth of what his family unlocked.

To be honest, I'm not sure I do either. But I do know this. The dead live in that room behind the kitchen. They walk, and the floors creak beneath their feet. They speak in the spaces between the winds, and their bones bind them here. The Perenais family used those souls. I don't know for what, or how, but I hope to learn. Because I've found their
Book of Shadows!

“What's a
Book of Shadows
?” Nick asked, toying with a lock of Jennica's hair.

She smiled. As she did, it occurred to her that this pleasing attention was what made Kirstin addicted to boys. Her friend couldn't live a day without. Jenn enjoyed the feeling, but she didn't live for it.

But the thought of Kirstin made her eyes mist over.

“It's like . . . a spell book, I think,” Jenn answered. “A place where you write down all of the stuff you've learned.”

“Like, a witch's recipe book? One hundred and one ways to use bats as aphrodisiacs?”

Jenn snorted. “Something like that, I guess.”

“So, your aunt found a book of spells behind the pantry, and that's what made her a witch?”

“She probably used some of what she found in there, yeah. That's what it looks like.”

“So, let me guess. Now we have to find the book.”

Jenn smiled. “Good guess, Nick. How else are we going to know what to do with the mummy and that heart?”

He groaned. “Why do I feel like everything has just gone completely off the rails?”

“Because they have. We're way off the tracks.” Jenn sighed. “There are no tracks. I mean . . . we've got a fuckin' mummy in the pantry!”

“Well, it's not really in the pantry,” he said.

She elbowed him in the ribs. He responded by rolling atop her. The journal fell to the floor and Nick kissed her, playfully at first and then more urgently.

For once, Jenn didn't fight the need to be loved. She felt his excitement grow against the zipper of her jeans, and she encouraged it, grinding herself against him as her tongue wrestled his. Without words they both shed their clothes, quickly, as if somehow stripping off the horrors of the week. Then Jenn put her arms around Nick and held him close, enjoying the feel of his wiry chest hair crushed against the soft skin of her breasts. She never wanted to let him go.

For a while, she didn't.

Jennica woke to the light of the moon streaming in through the window across her naked hip, silently limning her skin with iridescence. She pulled a sheet up to cover herself but then realized the reason she'd awoken would force her out of bed. Snuggling back into the warm, snoring body of Nick was not an option. Not for long.

She pushed back the sheets and slipped out of the bed as quietly as she could, trying not to wake him. The light of the moon made it easy to see her way to the bathroom, and she did her business as quickly as she could. But just as she was rising from the toilet and about to flush, she heard something thump deep within the house. Her stomach clenched, and she hunched back down for a minute to listen.

The house remained still. The silence made the hair on her skin stand up. Jenn flushed the toilet and stood, softly padded back toward the bed.

Thump.
The noise sounded like it had come from the kitchen.

Jenn looked at the bed where Nick lay snoring. She reached out toward his feet but stopped. Something glinted at the side of her vision. A light?

She looked to her right, toward the bedroom door, but saw only the wall of the hallway. The edge of the hallway closet was a darker area carved into the shadows, though she could just make it out. The light of the moon was strong in the bedroom, but there was something else, too. Another light? Yes. A faint, glimmering mist between her and the hallway.

Jenn turned and crept closer to the bedroom door. There was something about the way the light played. It twisted and twined, mistlike, looking for a second like a windblown fog and then coalescing into something else entirely: a cigarette smoke ghost, with spectral arms and a face that made Jenn gasp.

The face. It was familiar! She could see the hall closet through those ghostly cheekbones, but still she knew these features. She'd seen them in a hundred pictures. She even had a vague memory of childhood meetings.

“Aunt Meredith?”

The mist contracted and moved toward her. Then, a second later, like a breath huffing out, it dissipated and blew away down the hall toward the family room.

“Wait!” Jenn hissed. All of her questions might be answered by her aunt, but now her aunt was leaving. She couldn't let that happen.

She followed the luminous mist as it slipped out of the room. Into the hall she stepped, seeing the glowing tail disappear into the kitchen. Without thinking, she moved forward, anxious to catch up.

In the kitchen, the light of the moon struck her face in a blinding white beam. The celestial orb was brilliant tonight, and it shone even stronger here than in her bedroom. The white light almost washed away the eerie fog she'd followed, but as Jenn's eyes adjusted she caught that separate glow again.

Meredith. The woman's spirit hung before her in the air.

It was her aunt; Jenn was sure of it now. The soft jaw, the thin nose so much like her dad's. The shadowed, deep-socketed eyes. But as the specter of her aunt stared at Jenn, something within Jenn's soul froze. The look in those dead eyes was not a look of love. It was the look of obsession.

“Aunt Meredith?” Jenn whispered again.

The floor seemed to shake. She could feel the noise vibrating
all around her, a movement that shook the room and the very air.

Thump-thump.

Thump-thump.

Jenn's teeth chattered with the sound, and she looked at the stern face of her ghostly aunt. “What's going on?”

The fog that was her aunt, or the ghost of her aunt, or simply a dream come real for a moment, faded away. Or, really, it slipped away. It suddenly blurred and shifted, the area that was brighter—just barely—than the light of the moon streaming in from the windows, and it moved to the corner of the kitchen. To the door of the pantry.

She stepped forward, but it was already too late. The ghost of her aunt had gone, and she knew exactly where. Into the room with the mummy, the altar and the bones.

Finally, Jenn did what she'd wanted to do five minutes before. She went back to her bedroom and reached out to shake Nick's thigh.

“Wake up!” she begged.

He moaned and shifted beneath the sheets. “What's wrong?”

“It's Meredith,” Jenn said. “We have to go into the room behind the pantry.”

“Okay,” Nick mumbled, already falling back asleep. “We'll do that tomorrow.”

“No,” Jenn complained. “We have to go now. She's waiting for us.”

“What?” Nick's eyes opened.

“I just saw her, and she was leading me to the pantry. Come on,” Jenn insisted. “Or I'll go by myself.”

“What the hell,” Nick said, slowly rising. But by the time he blinked his eyes enough to really take in the room, Jenn was gone.

“Damnitall,” he grumbled, and slapped his feet to the cold floor. Calling out for her to wait, he hurried to follow.

The ghost light sparkled like a fever dream, faint and slippery, moving through the night with a hint of intelligence and a flash of mystery.

Jenn grabbed the key to the room behind the pantry from the kitchen counter where she'd left it and followed into the room beyond. Her heart pounded as she fumbled the key into the lock, because she'd caught just a glimpse of Meredith hovering near the back of the pantry. Then her aunt was gone.

She pushed the key into the lock and turned it until she heard the metallic click deep within the wood. When she pushed the entry opened, she was suddenly inside that strange dark place.

Death hung in the air like fog.