The Pumpkin Man (34 page)

“That doesn't help us tonight, though,” Jones continued.

Scott's hope faded. “What do you mean?”

“I just have this feeling in my gut that someone's going to die tonight. I figured it would be last night, but . . .”

“Do you want me to stake out the Perenais house?”

Jones nodded. “Sure, keep an eye on the kids. But . . .”

Scott raised an eyebrow, waiting.

“Never mind.”

The younger officer shrugged and left the room.

Jones sat at his desk, watching the other man leave. In his head he heard the rest of the words he wanted to say, words the other cop would never understand.

“But . . . don't let the Pumpkin Man see you.”

Emmaline couldn't wipe the smile from her face the entire ride home. She'd done her best to scare the bejeezus out of those kids and she thought she'd succeeded. She hadn't been able to find out if they had discovered the dark chapel yet, but since they'd mentioned the crypt and not the chapel she thought not. Finding that room might actually be a great lever to scare them into leaving . . . but more likely than not they'd involve the police, and after that, even if she finally got her family legacy back, it would be stripped of all that was truly valuable. So she hadn't asked anything directly. Better to wait. Drive them away by other means.

She let herself into her small home and kicked off her flats at the door with a sigh. Flipping one light on in the hallway, she walked immediately to the basement door and down the stairs in her bare feet. Harry remained where she'd left him, as he always did.

Emmaline walked up to the mummified corpse of her husband and ran her fingers softly over the sandpaper rough surface of his skin. He'd been dead so long now, but she never failed to kiss him good night.

“You should never have hurt George,” she whispered, as she always did just before she touched his lips. Then she smiled and picked up a book from where it sat on a small shelf nearby.

Flipping to a place in the middle, she began to speak the strange and guttural words aloud, as if the shell of her husband were listening. She had read from these flaking yellowed pages
every night for the past six months, ever since she'd retrieved the book from Meredith's room. While the Perenais house had legally passed to Meredith's brother, and shortly thereafter her niece, Emmaline had made sure that the Perenais
Book of Shadows
was not there. The tome had documented the rituals and occult discoveries of her family for generations. There were some things that only blood should see.

Blood. She was the sole true blood remaining of the Perenais line. It would all end with her, Emmaline realized. It was a pity, since she'd never really grown into the family talent. The outsider, Meredith, had proven a better witch than she. Despite his disinterest in the art, her brother George had proven a better conduit for the powers of the other side. She'd never guessed he could be, given his shyness. But that hadn't stopped his vengeance. The amusing part was that if she didn't do something to stop it, the dark magic set in motion by her sister-in-law might just keep haunting River's End forever, long after she was dead and buried. Who knows how many people the specter of the Pumpkin Man would claim before his vengeful fire burned out? Once she was gone, who would have the slightest idea of how to stop it? Maybe River's End would, ironically, after its history of dark spirits, become a ghost town.

Emmaline smiled at the thought. She had entertained many fantasies over the years of this tiny town's ignorant populace being gutted like the cattle that they were. Maybe her selfish bitch of a sister-in-law had done something right after all.

She read slowly the handwritten foreign words scribed in her family
Book of Shadows
. The text had been penned by a great-great-great-great-grandfather some 350 years before, and it referred to luring demons with human blood to entertain your bidding. The author's name had been Willum, and while living in England he had written his secret diary entries in Latin to cloak his proclivities from the casual browser who might stumble on his diary. Thankfully the entries had remained private, hidden by
the family for centuries. But Emmaline had studied them. She'd also studied her family's notes about their own performances of his rituals.

Willum had been a believer in the power of bones. And of blood. He'd strived to find just the right combination of the two, mixed by the light of candles molded from the fat of corpses rendered beneath the light of the full moon, corpses heated by fire lit from the embers of their own hair. He had stacked the bodies of his victims in a dark and hidden cellar and visited them on nights when the moon ascended to a particular position. Willum had also believed in the movements of the heavens being a sort of indicator of when the spirit realm was open to contact and could be exploited.

Emmaline laughed. She'd never found that exploitation needed specific timing. It could be accomplished simply by using the proper tools. In her case, a smile. She had spent her life coercing people with smiles, and she had gotten, more or less, all the things she wanted. She wouldn't call it magic, but she called it fun.

The small refrigerator in the corner held a shelf of old mason jars, some of them actually bottled by her father, Satan rest his wicked soul. The family had once bottled so much that their work had lasted a century. She'd taken some with her when she married and moved out of the house, using them in her own chapel sacraments. Over the years she'd replenished what she used, draining new offerings in the sewer beneath her house. Still, the blood that her father had spilled tasted best to her, and so she'd made those jars last. She'd open the lids and sniff the foul scent of iron wafting up from the dark red liquid, and then she would slip her fingers in the blood and deftly coat herself, lips and breasts and belly and more . . .

Emmaline unbuttoned the blouse that she'd worn to meet her step-niece and let it fall to the dirty ground of the cellar; then she unhooked the metal tongs of her bra and let that join her
top. Moments later she'd dropped her skirt and panties, and she stood naked in the mildewed basement, staring at the desiccated corpse of her husband. She still felt warm just looking at his remains, and she didn't suppress the urges nakedness brought, fingering herself both above and below.

Dipping those hungry fingers into the cold jar of blood, she smeared that aged redness across her chest and pressed it, cool death, between her legs. She wondered sometimes about the lives she painted on her body, but she didn't think about them too hard. The end more than justified the means.

Blood-smeared and horny, Emmaline knelt, feeling the perversion take her. She wanted suddenly to press a man to the ground and grind herself against him in an animalistic orgy, and she knew why: the act would satisfy the demons that watched from afar, and she wanted to satisfy them more than herself. She longed to be satisfied by them, too, to lie back and open herself to them, a horde of them, as they thrust themselves within her and spread her pelvis so wide that—

Emmaline stopped herself with a mental slap. Her devotions had rarely resulted in the kiss of demons, no matter how she dreamed. She'd never even been able to levitate herself through the air, like she'd read some of her ancestors did. But she had, in her life, known the power of being of the Perenais family. She remembered a time in high school when she'd really wanted a particular boy. Derek Tatum, his name had been. He'd always been the weird guy in school, listening to bands nobody had ever heard of, reading banned books and getting in fights. She'd been curious about what he would be like—his taste, his smell—so she'd called on the power of her family to help her get the little bit of him that she could. She'd lured him to a private place and slaked her lust on his body. Then, when it was over, she'd taken a razor from where she kept it hidden in her bra and took the rest of him, from his anger to his fear. His last scream still echoed in her dreams. She loved the sound.

Emmaline anointed herself now in his blood, blood she had saved from Derek, blood from a man thirty years dead, and said a prayer to the spirits who loved the degraded and sick. Then she made the upside-down sign of the cross over her naked breasts and rose.

Wadding her clothes in a ball, she stepped quickly up the plank stairs. It was long past bedtime. Still, she was anointed in blood, so she'd need a shower. Magic and demonology really had nothing on the demands of real life. In the end, all that really mattered were sleep and food. She'd had the latter and now she needed the former. She could think of nothing more than bed.

Emmaline dropped her blouse and skirt into the hamper in her bedroom and then turned on the shower to draw out the hot water. She brushed her teeth. When she stepped inside the tub, the water ran dark red. She rubbed the shampoo across her breasts and smiled as the death washed away, and then she scrubbed her hair and leaned her head back. The blood stripped back from her skin. She'd let it all go: the soap, the sin, the evil thoughts.

She luxuriated a final moment in the warmth of the water and then forcibly stopped, shutting off the tap with a quick twist of her hand. She was done. Now she really needed sleep.

In moments she was out of the shower and toweled off, pulling on a nightshirt and heading with staggering steps to bed. Exhaustion had washed over her like a wave; her legs felt like tree trunks sunk solidly into the ground. But the glint of silver on the sheets woke her.

At first she only realized there was something that didn't belong in her room on her bed. Then the color of that errant object registered. And then the shape: a butcher knife. Emmaline stopped and looked around.

At first, all seemed fine: The dresser with votive candles and a small painting set on a plate holder. The painting was of a symbol, if abstract and strange, just a collection of thick and
thin black lines. The sight of it made the skin crawl; there was something about it that was just
wrong.
The eye caught that and complained on every viewing.

But Emmaline wasn't afraid of the symbol; she knew what it was most intimately. The Perenais family had decorated their homes with it for generations. It was the sign of the devil they had courted for over 300 years. They had given him the blood of virgins and the blood of whores. They had done deeds so evil that writing them down only led readers to laugh and nervously exclaim, “Oh, come
on
now.” But Emmaline's ancestor had been one of the original members of the cult, and for generations the Perenais family had continued the study of Maldita, bringing the cult to the new world and settling in a remote location to hide their proclivities.

She looked away from the dark symbol and saw the empty doorway. Nobody was there. But in the past ten minutes since she had walked through her room and taken a shower, someone had broken into her house, gone into her bedroom and laid a knife upon the bed.

Suddenly, Emmaline's life of secret evil seemed like just a game. This was no game. Someone had left her a sign. But what kind of sign?

She racked her mind for some kind of spell, some protective ward to render ineffective someone who wished her ill. She came up with nothing. She had always been slow at turning her wishes into actionable magic, and now her mind was completely blank. She wanted to call to her ancestors for help, but she wasn't sure of the right words.

She stepped closer to the bed, intending to pick up the knife, but a low laugh filled the room from somewhere nearby.

“That one's for me, not you,” the voice said. The laughter had stopped.

“You!” Emmaline said, staring in surprise at the face of the man who'd entered her bedroom. “But you're . . .”

“I am,” he agreed. “And now I'm going to show you what it really means to worship Maldita.”

“But you aren't one of us. You aren't even . . .”

He smiled, and with one hand he raised a second knife. It was long and thin in his black-gloved hand. “It doesn't matter which hand holds my instruments. It only matters that I am here and this is now. This
is
now, yes?” he asked.

Without thinking, Emmaline nodded.

The man grinned, his mouth going wide in a way about which she'd only had nightmares. “I am here for
you
tonight, Emmaline. I have waited a long, long time.”

“But,” she said, struggling to find an argument. “But, I am family.”

He nodded. “The weakest of two hundred years. Accept without protest, and I promise my blade will be quick. Or . . . at least I will not prolong your crossing more than I need to. You will feel the transformation, though, and for a moment see yourself through other eyes.”

“No,” Emmaline gasped, and broke for the door.

He whirled and brought the knife down fast. She felt it slice against her spine, a cold bite that turned hot in an instant. His hand grabbed her shoulder, but she threw it off, half ran, half fell through the open door into the hallway. She felt the wetness of her life seeping out to drench the back of her nightshirt, but she forced her feet to keep moving. Time was of the essence.

There was only one way she could think of to thwart her enemy, now that he had shown himself as such. This was not the soul of Maldita manifesting, as it might like her to think. But it was the Pumpkin Man, the thing that had possessed her brother. It was one of the cold creatures of the dark beyond, one of the things her family had courted for centuries. George had paid the price, and she didn't intend to join him.

Emmaline grabbed for the handle of the basement door, twisted it hard to the right and pulled. The door shot open. As
it did, though, another shot of pain seared her side, horrible fire that made her long to double over and hug the floor; the Pumpkin Man's blade had split two ribs. She screamed and felt liquid in her voice. The blood slipped like water into her lungs, and her scream ended in a wet cough.