The Pumpkin Man (6 page)

Kirstin came home an hour later and dropped her bag on the floor. “They fuckin' fired me,” she announced, hands on hips. “They didn't even let me finish out the term. RIF'ed to the curb like, NOW, and don't let the door hit you in your pretty little ass on your way out.”

Jenn looked up from the arm of the couch, her eyes red. “You, too?” She'd been so upset, she hadn't even thought to check. When something hurt her, she retreated into herself. Her friend was the opposite: she told the world.

“Patrick and Darren took me out for a beer afterward. They
couldn't believe it,” Kirstin said. “I don't know how the hell they're going to cover my classrooms.”

Jenn shook her head. She'd been wondering the same thing.

“Sister Beatrice didn't even give me a chance to ask—” Finally it dawned on Kirstin what Jennica had said, and she eyed her friend in shock. “Wait a minute, they canned you, too? Effective immediately?”

Jenn nodded.

“Oh, shit.” Kirstin's mouth hung open in shock. “How the hell are we going to cover the rent?”

Jenn laughed. “Oh, that's easy. We won't have to.”

“Huh?”

Jenn shoved forward the letter from the landlord. “The building's going condo. We have sixty days to get out.”

October 17, 1984

They turned on him today. George was carving a child's portrait into one of the pumpkins down near Postens' Farm Stand when the boy's mother turned up. He said she started yelling at him to leave her son alone, and slapped his hand.

“Molester,” she screamed at him. “What are you doing to our children? What did you do to Billy Hawkins?”

She called George a monster, and the little boy started to cry. Then she ripped her son away and dragged him from the pumpkin stand. But that wasn't the end of it. After she left, Nick Postens came down from the barn and asked George to leave, too. Just like that. “You're not welcome here anymore.” As if somehow carving faces into pumpkins was the devil's work and his eyes had just been opened to it.

They're scared is what it is. Scared of what happened to the missing Hawkins boy. Scared of what I'm doing up here. Not that it stops them from coming up the hill to ask me in secret if I can make a charm for this or a drink to cure that. But deep down they're suspicious of my magic as much as they want it. And now they're making George pay, since they don't dare touch me. I'm the witch, right? But what they don't understand is that if they hurt him, they ARE hurting me.

All I've ever tried to do was to draw healing from the natural forces. I tried to help. But maybe it's time that I stopped helping. Maybe it's time to use the power that is there for the taking to hurt them back.

Jennica closed Meredith's journal and shook her head. People were crazy all over—fickle, untrustworthy, always ready to kick you in the teeth as soon as they scented a hint of weakness. Her aunt's journal entry was dated more than twenty-five years ago, but nothing ever really changed. Her aunt sounded more than a little crazy, but the problems she had faced were the same either way. People always sucked. Only the names changed. Jenn knew about trying to be nice to people and having them kick you in the face as thanks.

She curled up in a ball on the couch and hugged her pillow. Reading Meredith's journal wasn't helping her mood. For the past few days she'd felt worse than she could ever remember.

From the back of the apartment a sudden pounding beat rocked the picture frames on the wall, and a moment later Kirstin came dancing down the hall in gray sweats and a baggy white Hello Kitty T-shirt singing AC/DC's “You Shook Me All Night Long.” Jennica couldn't help but laugh when her roommate held the phantom mic to her lips and then wriggled her hips like a rock star.

“Off the couch, you moody bitch!” Kirstin demanded. She tried to drag her friend up by the hand, but Jennica waved her off. Kirstin didn't stop, but instead danced her way around the living room, dancing with a lamp and then miming obscene things with a flashlight she pulled from the hall closet until the song ended. Finally she launched herself to land on the cushion next to Jennica, breathing hard.

“Good workout,” she proclaimed. When she caught her breath, she said, “Look Jenn. I know it's all gone to hell over the past month, but life has to go on. You can't just keep
sitting
here.”

“No,” Jenn agreed. “In about forty-five more days we're going to be sitting in the street.”

Kirstin shook her head. “No we're not. We're going to be sitting on the beach in California ogling surfers.”

Jenn raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

“C'mon,” Kirstin continued. “We've got no jobs, and in a month we've got no place to live. You just got handed the deed to an empty house near the ocean. We should at least go check it out. It's not like we have anything better to do! You just don't get opportunities like this very often. And usually, if you do, you've got too much going on to make use of the opportunity.” She grabbed her friend by the shoulders, blue eyes hypnotic and wide. “We have no responsibilities. We have nothing to lose. We are two hot chicks with the key to a house on the beach. Let's go to California!”

“Well, one of us is hot, anyway,” Jenn replied. Kirstin rolled her eyes. “And I don't actually have the
key
to the house.”

“Puh-leez. It'll do us both good to get out of here. We can pack this place up over the next week, put our stuff in storage and go see what your aunt left you. If we like it, maybe we'll stay. You've always said you wanted to live somewhere warmer, and I've always wanted to live near a beach.”

“I keep telling you, I don't think Meredith's house is near the kind of beach where people actually swim,” Jennica protested.

Kirstin put a finger to her lips. “Where there is ocean, there is swimming.”

Jennica had to admit the idea held an attraction. She'd always hated Chicago winters. And what did they really have to lose? She had no more family, no job, and soon no place to live. But she'd always thought of herself as Aesop's ant and Kirstin the
grasshopper. Wasn't it more prudent to stay and use the month they had left to make sure they had someplace to live and the money to pay for it?

“What are we going to do when we come back?” she asked.

“We could stay with my mom for a while if it came to that,” Kirstin said. “But maybe, if we're lucky . . . we won't be back.”

Jennica shook her head but didn't say no.

Kirstin stood up and held out a hand. “C'mon, couch potato. We have a lot to pack. Know where we can get some boxes?”

October 23, 1984

There is a pause in the air.

“Make sense, Meredith,” you say. “Speak clearly, not in drama.” But I can say to you again, there is a pause in the air.

It's unlike any wind I've felt before in any other place. Maybe it's the influence of this house, or maybe just this hill. The movement of the sea against the rocks must brook a special power here, where the freshwater flows into the salt, where the earth rises from beneath both seeking the clouds. The moments after dark are pregnant seconds, each clock tick an interruption of some
thing
driven by land and sea and air. If you walk out onto the grassy hills after nightfall, if you only still your own noise enough to take it in, you can feel it. You can feel how the earth has fallen silent, how the breath of the day has drawn in.

Yes, there is a pause in the air here as the earth awaits the next movement, the next chance to give and take life, like a tide of animation. The brackish water is just an illusion before the maelstrom, for the power of that earthen pause may be the key to the magic hidden here. The pause in the air is a conductor, a promise and a threat.

That pause, I believe, is worth the silence of a thousand souls.

The plane ride was long. Really long. Kirstin had never been good at sitting still, and four and a half hours tied to a chair was pure torture.

She shifted in her seat, crossing her legs left and then right, kicking Jenn in the shins as she did. Her friend occasionally glanced up from her book with a dark-eyed scowl to convey her indignation at being foot-butted, but mostly she stayed buried in her reading and headphones. Kirstin was plugged into her own iPod, but she couldn't seem to settle on an album. She'd gotten bored with Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, moved to classic hair metal and jumped through Bon Jovi and Whitesnake, then tuned in to a saved podcast she had about relationships called Too Much Information (TMI). But when the hosts started talking about how to manage a successful one-night stand while on your period, she dialed away and settled for putting the iPod on shuffle.

After they finally landed, picked up their luggage, and got their rental car—Jennica had rented a car at the San Francisco airport that they could keep for a few days—it was four p.m. Pacific Time on Thursday afternoon. It was sixty degrees, but the sky was gray as they merged onto the 101 to head north out of the city.

“Maybe we should stay down here for the night,” Kirstin suggested, noting the restaurants and bars and shops that lined the streets.

“With what money?” Jenn asked. “We'll be in River's End by dinner. Free room and board.”

The sun dropped out of the sky like a rock. As they passed through Bodega Bay and drove the last few miles into River's End, Kirstin felt as if they were entering Brigadoon. The night closed in like a blanket, quiet and dark both filtering down at the same time, until all that she knew was their car and a black ribbon of asphalt. Jagged branches stretched out over the road in either welcome or warning. She wasn't sure which.

The radio seemed to have lost all stations except for a canned Top 40 outlet and a talk radio station currently suggesting a conspiracy between the U.S. government and a South American dictatorship. Their headlights opened up a hazy path through the darkness but otherwise failed to reveal anything more than the stars above. Kirstin felt as if they'd left the planet and entered the Twilight Zone.

“Are you sure we're even on the map?” she asked.

Jennica grinned. “Not only are we on the map, but”—she pointed at a green road sign ahead—“we only have eleven miles to go.”

The road wended and curved, a yellow-striped night snake looming off ahead. It drifted through a brief string of cabins and a convenience store across from a quaint and cozy-looking place called the Rio Villa Beach Resort. That place was surrounded by dark trees, and a neon sign in front read vacancy.

“It says beach resort,” Kirstin pointed out. “But where is the beach?”

Jenn shrugged. “It does seem to be a bit of an oasis.”

As fast as they spied the little town, they were soon past it and winding through the dark again. The blackness felt almost palpable; Kirstin had to remind herself at times to breathe. And then a few minutes later, just as suddenly as the Rio Villa had appeared out of the dark, they were there, the tiny lights of homes and stores just ahead and bleeding through the blackness.

“The directions say to turn right just after the bed-and-breakfast,” Kirstin read by the light at the base of the rearview
mirror. Then we take a one-lane road to the right, stop at a gate, open the gate, and go a quarter mile up a gravel road. The key is under the gargoyle.” Kirstin paused and grinned. “Cool. They have a gargoyle?”

The B&B was obvious, its wood front porch illuminated and its small parking lot filled with cars. Jenn turned right at the next street, and suddenly they were on a steep incline. When they reached a T in the road, a sign cautioned them that the road allowed two-way traffic. Jenn turned and saw why that was a reason for caution: the asphalt was barely wide enough for
one
car.

They passed a half dozen houses that all seemed perched precariously on the hill. Old rusted cars were parked next to garbage cans alongside the narrow road on gravel insets instead of in garages. The dull glow of lights within showed that at least three of the homes were inhabited. Jennica guessed that some of them had to be getaway cottages.

The road ended as promised in a three-slat wooden farm gate, and Kirstin hopped out and used the key they'd been mailed to unlock it. She pulled the gate open and waited for Jenn to drive past before pulling it closed and refastening the padlock.

“I don't know who they're trying to keep out,” she said when she got back into the car. “There's hardly anyone around.”

“Maybe they were trying to keep something in,” Jenn replied, followed by her deepest, “Bwa-ha-ha-ha!” It wasn't very convincing.

They followed the rutted gravel road farther up the hill, winding around a gully before finally arriving at a turnaround in front of a stone house. A small light beat back the darkness just enough to illuminate a small wooden porch. The two women stepped out, and Jenn put both hands in the air and stretched. Kirstin let out a long groan and bent over to ease the kinks.

“Listen,” Jenn said.

“What? I don't hear anything.”

“Exactly.”

They stood without words and just listened to the almost imperceptible movement of the wind. From far away, at the edge of the night, the thrum of the ocean was calming and hypnotic. The sound was almost undetectable, but its steady motion was there, just under the stillness, if you paused.

Kirstin yawned, stifling the sound with a fist. “All right,” she said, breaking the silence. “Let's see if this place has any decent beds. I'm wiped.”

Jennica walked up on the porch and found the gray-green gargoyle. She tilted the two-foot-tall statue slightly to the side and, as promised, found a house key on the wood beneath. She scooped it up.