Jody Wendt, five years old, saw the Pumpkin Boy through the window over the kitchen sink, outlined against the huge rising moon like a silhouette against a white screen. Jody had climbed up onto the counter next to the basin to reach the cereal in an overhead cabinet. Now he stood transfixed with a box of corn flakes in his hands, mouth agape.
The Pumpkin Boy had a bright orange pumpkin head with cold night steam puffing out of the eyes, nose, and mouth cutouts, and a body consisting of a bright metal barrel chest and jointed legs and arms that looked like stainless-steel rails. Even through the closed window Jody could hear the creaking noises he made. He moved stiffly, like he was unused to walking: His feet were two flat ovoid pads, slightly rounded and raised on top, made of shiny metal. As Jody watched, one of the feet stuck in place in the muddy ground; the Pumpkin Boy, oblivious, walked on, and then toppled over with a sound like rusting machinery. He lay on the ground like a turtle on its back, making a hollow chuffing noise like Saaaafe, saaaafe, saaaafe. Then he slowly righted himself, rising to a sitting position, and then turned slowly to search for his lost foot. Finding it, he fell forward and clawed his way toward it. He closed his hands around it. His head fell forward and hit the ground, rolling away from the body, and the hands immediately let go of the foot and grabbed the head, realigning it on the stilt body with a ffffffmp.
Then the foot was reattached to the leg and the Pumpkin Boy stood up with a groaning, complaining metal sound.
The Pumpkin Boy reached back down, creaking loudly, to pluck two fat organic pumpkins from Mr. Schwartz’s field that grew in back of Jody’s yard, and began to move off, away into the night.
“Wow…” Jody whispered against the windowpane, making it fog. He quickly cleared it with the cuff of his shirt and watched the Pumpkin Boy stiffly climb the fence that bordered Mr. Schwartz’s pumpkin patch from another behind it. In the process the Pumpkin Boy lost hold of one of the pumpkins he held but paid no heed.
“Wow…” Jody whispered again.
Jody was alone in the house; it was the half-hour in-between time when the afternoon sitter went home and his mother came home from her job in town.
He had been told repeatedly that he was not to leave the house during in-between time.
The forgotten box of corn flakes lay spilling cereal into the kitchen sink as he climbed down, pushed his arms into his jacket, and opened the door that led from the kitchen to the backyard.
As Jody Wendt stood on the top step of the back stoop, the storm door closing with a hiss and bang behind him, he saw the Pumpkin Boy once again outlined against the moon but moving quickly away. He was already two fields over and would soon drop behind the slope that led down to Martin’s Creek and the valley beyond.
Mouth still open in amazement, Jody was working at the zipper to his jacket, which wouldn’t zip. His feet were already carrying him down the steps, across the yard, to the split-log fence.
He dipped under the fence, forgetting the zipper, and stood in Mr. Schwartz’s pumpkin patch on the other side.
The Pumpkin Boy’s head was just visible, and then the slope down made him disappear.
Jody hurried on.
Mr. Schwartz’s pumpkin field was furrowed, bursting with fat vined pumpkins that would soon be picked and sold for Halloween. Jody tripped over the first row he came to and landed on his hands.
He found himself face-to-face with a huge oval orange fruit, its skin hard and strong.
It looked like a human head.
Jody pushed himself up and stumbled on.
He fell twice more. But still, in the distance, he could hear the metallic creaking sounds of the Pumpkin Boy. There were two more fences to manage, one again of split logs, which Jody scooted under, and the other of chain link, which he climbed with difficulty.
He nearly toppled over when he reached the top, but then, in the distance, he saw an orange flash in the moonlight: the top of the Pumpkin Boy’s head. He held on and descended to the other side.
There was a rock wall, which Jody had never known existed, separating two more pumpkin fields.
Jody was now in unfamiliar territory. Even from his bedroom window, just before harvest, the fields surrounding his house were awash in taut orange fruit, and now, for the first time, he knew just how complicated the layout was.
At yet another rock wall he paused to look back. He could no longer see his house.
He heard a sharp metallic creak in the far distance and hurried toward it.
The pumpkin field ended in a tangle of weeds and brambles and a ledge. Abruptly, Jody found himself teetering at the top of the slope. A tuft of brambles caught his foot and twisted his ankle and, with a short, surprised gasp, he was tumbling down the damp, soft bank.
At the bottom, he came up short against an uprooted oak trunk and came to a stop with one of its gnarled roots pointing at his face like an accusing finger.
He sat up, soiled and wet.
Suddenly he realized what he had done.
He looked back, up the slope, and shuddered with the thought that even if he could climb the steep incline, he would not be able to find his way back home through the tangle of pumpkin fields.
A quick, hot shiver of fear shot up his back.
But then: In front of him, like the sound of the pied piper’s flute, there came the creaking sound of the Pumpkin Boy moving. The pumpkin head flashed through the trees, and Jody forgot his fear. His wonder renewed, he stood and ran after it.
The moon was partially hidden by a thick tangle of trees on the far bank of Martin’s Creek, which made shafts of gray-white light on the ground. Jody splashed into the water before he knew it was in front of him. His hurt foot slid down nearly to his shin into icy tumbling water and lodged between two rocks.
Jody cried out in pain. For a moment he couldn’t move and panicked—but then, suddenly, one of the stones upended in the water and rolled over, and he was free.
Now both sneakers were in the water, and the slight current tugged at his legs.
He tried to turn around, but the water hurried him out farther.
He sank another half-foot.
The current was trying to make him sit down, which would bring his head underwater.
He gave a weak cry as he lost his struggle—and then there was water in his mouth and he could see nothing but the blur of moving wetness.
Almost immediately, his body pressed up against something long, dark, and solid, and his forward progress stopped.
It was a half-submerged log.
Jody clung to it and slowly pulled himself up.
To his surprise, the creek was only two feet or so deep here; the whooshing sound of water angrily churning around the log filled his ears.
He held on to the dry part of the log and coughed water out.
He wiped his eyes with one hand and had another surprise: Not only was the water shallow, it was not half as wide as it had been just a few yards upcreek.
Holding the log, he pushed his way through the shallow water to the far bank.
He sat down and his eyes filled with sudden tears.
I want to go home, he thought.
He stared out at totally unfamiliar territory: The creek, he now saw, twisted and turned, and he could not make out the spot where he had descended the slope, which was nearly a hundred yards away and impossibly wide. At the peak of the ridge, reflected in moonlight, were the green-vined tops of a few elongated pumpkins.
He turned and saw that the line of woods was close, and darker than it had looked from the other side of the creek.
The trees were nearly nude, a carpet of yellow and red fallen leaves at their bases looking light and dark gray in the moonlight.
A few late leaves pirouetted down as he watched.
Deep in the woods, he heard the Pumpkin Boy move.
Jody looked once again behind him, and then back at the woods.
He got painfully up and hobbled toward the trees.
It instantly became darker when he entered the woods, a grayer, more sporadic light.
Almost immediately, Jody lost his bearings.
There were many strange noises, which confused him. He thought he heard the Pumpkin Boy nearby, but the sound proved to be a partially broken oak branch, creaking on its artificial hinge. There were rustlings and stirrings. Something on four legs scuttled past him in the near distance and stopped to stare at him—it looked like a red fox, bleached gray by the night.
Jody tried to retrace his steps but only found himself deeper within the trees, which now all looked the same.
Jody’s ankle hurt, and he was beginning to shiver.
He stopped, even hushing his own frightened breathing, and listened for the Pumpkin Boy.
The sound of the Pumpkin Boy’s movement was completely gone.
A soft wind had arisen, and now leaves lifted from the forest floor, as if jerked alive by puppet strings.
It had turned colder—above, the moon was abruptly shielded by a gust of clouds.
The woods became very dark.
Jody sobbed again, stumbling forward, and stopped in a small clearing surrounded by tall oaks. Again he heard scurrying in front of him and felt something watching him.
The moon blinked out of the clouds, and Jody saw what was, indeed, a red fox, regarding him with wary interest.
The fox became suddenly alert. As the moon’s nightlight was stolen again by clouds, the animal bolted away, seeming to jump into the gray and then darkness.
Jody stood rooted to his spot, trying not to cry.
Something was out there.
Something large and dark.
The bed of leaves shifted with heavy, creaking steps.
Something ice-cold and long and thin brushed along his face in the darkness.
“I want to go home!” Jody blurted out in fear and despair.
The cold air was suddenly steamed with warmth.
Cold braces closed around Jody’s middle from behind.
He shrieked and wrenched his body around.
He was blinded by something larger and brighter than the moon—a face staring down at him, a jack-o’-lantern, warm, wet fog pushing from its triangular eyes and nose and impossibly wide, smiling mouth. A slight, mechanical chuff issued along with the sour, oily-smelling steam.
The slender mechanical steel arms tightened around Jody.
He shrieked again, a mournful sound swallowed by the trees and close night around him.
As he was carried away he saw, as the moon broke forth from the clouds again, on the forest floor, caught in gray light, the smashed leavings of a dropped pumpkin.
Another damn Halloween.
Len Schneider was beginning to work up a deep and real hatred for holidays in general, and this one especially. Halloween, he knew, meant nothing but trouble. He’d moved to Orangefield for lots of reasons—among them the fact that it had a real town with a genuine small-town feel—it was the only place he’d lived in the last twenty years that didn’t have a Walmart and wasn’t likely to get one. The people seemed friendly enough, but he’d found, as a police detective, that people were pretty much the same everywhere, from the inner city to Hometown, U.S.A. “People are funny,” Art Linkletter used to say, and one thing Len Schneider had learned after eighteen years in law enforcement was that they were anything but.
And now this thing came along—the thing he’d left Milwaukee to get away from…
“When was the last time you had a missing-kid case?” he’d asked Bill Grant, the other detective on Orangefield’s police force. Grant had been at it a long time, too, but all of it in this town. In the year and a half Schneider had been here, he’d found Grant polite but almost aloof. No, aloof wasn’t the right word—it was almost as though he wasn’t completely there. The two packs of cigarettes a day he smoked didn’t seem to help, and the emphysemic cough that went along with them, along with the booze he drank, had turned him almost sallow.
Schneider thought he was haunted himself by what had happened back in Milwaukee—but this guy looked like he was haunted by real ghosts.
He’d tried to get Grant to open up a few times, once over a bottle of Scotch, but all that had happened was that he’d opened up himself, letting his own bile and anger out. He wondered if Grant even remembered, though he had a feeling he did. Behind the hollows of those eyes, the cop’s mind still worked—and Schneider had been told that Grant was very good at his job.
He had found out on his own later that Grant had begun to change after a case involving a local children’s book author, Peter Kerlan. Something about Kerlan’s wife being eaten alive by insects…
Grant was leaning back in his chair, his fingers idly drumming the neatly arranged desk in front of him. The man’s skin looked almost jaundiced. Just as Schneider was about to repeat his question, Grant said, without moving his eyes or head, “We’ve had a few over the years. They almost always turn up.”
“Ever anything…”
“Like yours?” Grant almost snapped. The confirmation that Grant not only remembered The Night of Scotch but had absorbed and cataloged everything that had gone on startled Schneider.
“Yes, like mine,” Schneider replied evenly.
“Not unless you go back a long way. Long before you or me.”
Schneider waited for elaboration, but there was none.
“Any chance you’d like to take this one?” Schneider tried to keep his voice light but knew he may have failed.
Another silence hung between them, and then Grant’s voice came out of the emaciated face again: “None.”
Schneider was swiveling toward his own desk with a sigh when he caught Grant leaning forward, his eyes finally giving him attention. He swiveled back, his hands on his knees.
Grant was staring at him, a bit too intently. His own yellow fingers had stopped drumming and lay perfectly still on his desk blotter. Schneider suddenly saw the intelligence in the sunken light blue eyes.
“It’s got nothing to do with you,” Grant said carefully. For the first time his gaze fell on Schneider as something more than a concept—Grant was actually looking at him. “It’s just that this one has that…aura around it. And, frankly, I couldn’t go through that again. There are things that happen around here that are perfectly normal, and then there are other things…”
“If you’re talking about the Kerlan murders—”
“That,” Grant shot back, “and other things. Usually around this time of year.”
“All right, then, Bill.” Schneider moved to swivel back to his desk, but Grant’s eyes held him.
“There are worse things than a kid getting killed,” Grant said quietly.
Sudden anger flared in Schneider, but he saw that Grant seemed to be looking inward, not at him anymore.
Grant seemed to catch himself, and his sallow neck actually reddened. He fumbled with the small notebook that lay neatly on his desk, opened and closed it.
“I’m sorry, Len,” Grant said, his voice lowered almost to a whisper. “I can imagine what that case of yours was like in Milwaukee. That kid’s parents, especially his father going insane. Wasn’t he some kind of genius or something?” He shook his head slowly from side to side; the flush of color had left his features. “There are some things you never forget. Sometimes I think about myself too much…” For a brief moment his neck reddened again. “Sorry…”
Then Grant leaned back in his chair again, his fingers drumming lightly on the neat desk.
The interview was over.
There are worse things than a kid getting killed…
“No, there aren’t,” Len Schneider said to himself, and loud enough for someone else to hear.
The kid might have been eleven or twelve. Without a face, it was hard to tell if he had been good-looking or not—sometimes by that age you can tell how the features will set through the teen years. He looked as though he was sleeping when they dug him up—resting his hand under his head; the face, or where it would have been, was turned into the dirt so that it looked like he had nuzzled into a pillow. The hand was covering a ragged hole in the boy’s head where his brains had literally been beaten in. He was still fully clothed, except for his shoes and socks—later they found that he had been undressed and then redressed by Carlton, who had kept the footwear—along with one of the boy’s toes—as souvenirs.
Jerry Carlton had almost boasted about it at his trial—his shaggy hair had been cut and combed, his red tie knotted, his eyes covered with mirrored sunglasses which, thank God, the judge had made him remove. He smiled through the whole proceeding and played with his watch. He could fix a tractor, a television set, could build just about anything, and had murdered five boys in three states, calling himself Carlton the Clown. He’d worn a different clown costume for each murder.
Len had never forgotten that: Carlton the Clown.
He’d wanted only three minutes alone with Jerry Carlton, but they wouldn’t give it to him.
Just three minutes…
And nearly every night, because he made a mistake, Len Schneider dreamed of a kid with no face, turning his head from where it was nuzzled into his pillow and staring at him with empty eye sockets, trying to speak without lips…
This time, Len Schneider vowed to himself, he’d get his three minutes.
And he wouldn’t make any mistakes.
Schneider was convinced the Wendt kid was not merely missing. Everything pointed to it. The kid’s mother (another thing that made it worse: There was no father; he had died in a construction accident four years ago) swore her son had never left the house by himself before. Which led Schneider at first to conventional lines: that whoever had taken the child had learned the house routine and knew that there was a window of opportunity every once in a while when the child was alone for a half-hour, between his afternoon sitter leaving and his mother getting home from work.
But there were no signs of forced entry, which led Len automatically to the next line of inquiry: that the child had unlocked the back door himself and let the abductor in.
Which could have happened—although, again, there was no evidence that anyone had been in the house. It had been a quick snatch, if that had been the case—which meant that the boy had probably known the assailant.
Which was possible, up to a point—the point being a weird one. It had rained a few days before the abduction, and the ground had been fairly soft—but there were only one set of footprints in the backyard, leading away from the house to the back fence.
Indicating that someone had lured him over the fence—something he had never done before—without actually stepping into the backyard himself.
When he asked Mrs. Wendt for a list of people, with the emphasis on males, who might be enough of authority figures in her son Jody’s eyes to entice him to do such a thing, her face went blank. There were no clergy, no relatives, no real male role models who he would follow over that fence, she was sure.
He told her to think about it, and if anyone came to her to let him know right away.
At that point Schneider did the conventional thing: He followed the child’s footprints as far as he could. And it was quite a job: Behind the Wendt property was a patchwork quilt of pumpkin fields owned by various farmers. He nonetheless was able to follow the boy’s movements through four of these fields to the edge of a fifth, which then dropped off down to a shallow valley and a thin ribbon of water known as Martin’s Creek.
From the marks he found, it looked as though the boy had slid or fallen down the embankment.
There were indications that he had crossed the creek at one point.
For a moment Schneider’s heart climbed into his throat when he saw how deep the creek was at the point the boy entered. He followed the line of water downstream, fearing that the boy’s drowned body might turn up at any moment.
But he found markings on the other side of the water at a shallower area where a fallen tree bridged the creek (perhaps the boy was in trouble until he came up against this spot), and these fresh marks led into the tangle of trees on the other side of water.
The odd thing was that there were only the boy’s tracks. He broadened his search and discovered that a second, oddly shaped set of tracks led from the pumpkin field behind the Wendt house down the embankment into the woods, but they were nowhere near the boy’s.
Which led him to believe that, perhaps, the boy had been following someone?
Out of breath and sweating a little, his slight paunch only one indication of how out of shape he was (thirty years old and already starting to look like an old cop), he found himself at a spot in the patch of woods marked by a broken pumpkin where both sets of tracks converged.
It was here, obviously, that the boy was abducted.
There were signs of a struggle. And then only the second set of prints—which were very odd indeed, not shoe or boot prints but large, flat ovoids, which made him think that someone had worn some sort of covering over his shoes, to disguise the prints—led away.
And then, abruptly, in the middle of nowhere, among a gloomy stand of gnarled trees, so thick and twisted they blocked all light from above, they stopped.
At that point, the hair on the back of Schneider’s head (where there still was hair, a good part of the top of his head being bald) stood on end. He looked at the clearing he stood in, covered with leaves and dead branches.
Where…
He brought in dogs, of course, and along with two uniformed policemen he brushed the area of leaves and twigs, looking for an underground opening. But there was none. Even the dogs, who had been given a piece of Jody Wendt’s clothing, had stopped at the same spot Schneider had.
One of them threw back its head and bayed, which, again, made the hair on Schneider’s head stand on end.
Jody Wendt had disappeared into thin air.
The poster, which read uncle lollipop loves you!, was upside down. He was glad his mom had taught him to read. There was more writing at the bottom of the poster, but he couldn’t make out what it said because it was too small and it was also upside down. So was everything else. The sign was in bright colors, red and blue and yellow and green, as if the colors had been splashed on or finger-painted—they ran over their borders and still looked wet. The room smelled like paint, like the time his mother had painted his bedroom in March and left all the windows open. He’d slept on the couch in the living room that night (sneaking the television on at three in the morning, but there had only been commercials on for exercise equipment—some of which Mom had—and for calcium and vitamin supplements, and he had soon tired and turned the TV off; even out here he could faintly smell the paint on the walls of his room) and when he went back to his room the next night he got sick to his stomach, even though the paint was dry and the windows had been left open a crack. A week later all his own posters and his bookshelf with Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (his favorite book) and The Wizard of Oz and The Halloween That Almost Wasn’t were back, and the smell was gone. He’d forgotten his room had ever been painted.
But the smell wasn’t gone here—it was stronger. It had a curious burning odor underneath the paint smell, as if someone was heating paint in a pan.
That was funny, heating paint in a pan…
He felt light-headed, and suddenly he wanted to throw up.
Ahhhhh…
The discomforting noise he made caused another noise out of his vision, a shuffling like a dog had been disturbed. He could not see. Except for the upside-down poster and an upside-down coat hook next to it with a raincoat that was hung near the floor and ran up the wall (again: funny! And despite his queasy stomach he gurgled a short laugh), he could see little else. The wall was colored chocolate brown, and it was stuffy in the room.
Again he heard the dog-shuffle.
Something new came into his view, in front of the wall poster—something just as brightly colored. It was accompanied by the shuffling noise, which was caused, Jody saw when he strained his eyes to look up (which hurt), by the slow movement of a pair of huge clown feet, which were red with bright yellow laces. His vision in that direction was impeded by a sort of cap that appeared to be on his head, though he felt nothing there. There was a sharp rim, and he could see no farther. What he saw of the ceiling under the clown’s feet was the same color as the wall.
Jody looked down, and his sight trailed over the figure of a circus clown dressed in blue pants, a red-and-green striped blouse with baggy sleeves and white gloves, and a white face with an impossibly wide, bright red smile, eyelashes painted all around his eyes, all topped by a snow-white cap with a red pom-pom.
The shuffling stopped; the clown was facing him now, and Jody noted that the figure’s real lips inside the painted-on smile weren’t smiling. The eyes looked serious inside their cartoon lashes, too.
“Ted?” the clown whispered, in an impossibly gentle voice. “You’re awake, Ted?”
Jody tried to tell the clown that his name wasn’t Ted, but the feared throw-up rose hotly in his throat, out his mouth, and ran up his face.
It was now, through the paint smell and dizziness and headache, that he realized he was upside down, not the room.
The clown tsk-tsked, and a wet cloth was pressed to Jody’s nose and cheeks, rubbed gently.
The bile was gone.
It was getting very stuffy in the room.
“Soon, Ted, soon…” the clown said, and then he shuffled out of Jody’s sight.
“I—” Jody managed to get out.
The shuffling stopped. “Yes?” the clown asked, and there was a closed-in hush in the room.
“I…no…Ted…” Jody spit out, along with more bile, before his vision began to blur.
“I know, Ted. Yes,” the clown answered, in what was almost a sing-song whisper.
Then Jody closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, he was hungry.
The paint smell was still there, and the queasiness, and the headache, which was worse now, and he was still upside down and couldn’t move. But, somehow, he felt more alert.
He saw immediately that the poster— uncle lollipop loves you!—was partially blocked by a familiar sight: the Pumpkin Boy, or at least part of him. The Pumpkin Boy’s chest, which was a thicker tube of metal than the articulated stalks that composed his arms, was open, revealing a cavity within with something red, suspended in a web of golden wire, that throbbed darkly. The web shivered noticeably with each beat. The cavity’s door lay hinged back against the Pumpkin Boy’s side. He seemed to be missing from the legs down (or up, to Jody’s eyes) and his head was hinged open at the top. Now, in the light, Jody saw that the head itself looked to be made of some sort of ceramic or plastic or other hard surface; it was too hard-edged and brightly colored (a hue as bright as the poster colors, and the clown suit colors) to be real. There were no seeds stuck to the inside of the lid, which looked smooth and clean.
A trail of golden wires led out of the Pumpkin Boy’s head, the back part behind the eyes, nose, and grinning mouth (could there be a hidden compartment back there?) and were bundled together with white plastic ties. There looked to be hundreds of individual hair-thin wires. The bundle ended in a curl, like a rolled hose, on the floor.
Jody saw that the Pumpkin Boy wore a pair of ordinary leather carpenter’s gloves, like the ones his mother used in the garden.
Jody now realized how quiet it was.
“Hel…lo?” he said. His voice sounded like a frog’s croak.
There was no answer.
Feeling stronger than he had before, Jody tried to twist himself around.
Whatever he was trussed to, it gave little, but it did give. He turned a bit to the right, then swung back, as if he were suspended on a rope. He had seen the wall beyond the Pumpkin Boy and the poster: flat brown, unadorned.
He twisted again, harder. His legs were asleep, which at least meant that his twisted ankle didn’t hurt anymore. His hands were also asleep, but he could feel enough of them now to discover that they were bound behind his back, tightly.
He tried for a time but couldn’t loosen them.
This time as he turned he saw the wall and something on the true floor: a table, a bright silver machine with a big black dial, and the edge of a huge white clock face with too many numbers around the edge.
He came stubbornly back to rest.
He was growing weaker.
The Pumpkin Boy hadn’t moved, was staring straight through him.
Jody gave a mighty turn, with an ooofff!
This time he felt as if a lance had pierced his forehead. He cried out in pain—but he saw the whole silver machine, which was on casters, and other machines, one of which looked like the emergency generator Mom kept in the garage, and a door. No windows. The clown suit was draped over a single chair, next to a lamp—
The door was just opening.
Jody swung back to rest, the pain still driving through his head. He knew he was crying.
The shuffle sounded frantic.
“Ted—!”
He passed out with the man’s hands on his head, or what felt like through it.
A hum in his ears.
It sounded like bees, or millions of ants. He’d seen millions of ants once, two armies fighting in the forest, brown and black. He went back three days later and they were still fighting. His cousin Jim, who was fourteen years old, told him to make a cone out of the comic book in his back pocket, and when he did, he put the wide end of the cone near the massed ants and the other, the tighter end, next to his ear. He heard a roaring, a scrabble and hum that sounded like the mighty armies he saw fighting in books.
He thought Jim had played a trick on him, and he took the homemade horn away from the battle, but there was Jim ten feet away from him, grinning.
“Somethin’, ain’t it?”
“Wow…”
It had sounded like this, only less so…
Jody opened his eyes. It felt, now, like his head had been split in two, like a melon. There was a dry burning behind his eyelids, and a circle of hot pain all around his head, as if a heated clamp had been tightened around it.
He heard a mewling sound, and realized it came from his mouth.
“There, Ted, there…”
A cool hand rested on his brow, above his eyes, and then withdrew.
The hot pain circling his head increased.
His eyes were watering, but he blinked and then could see, almost clearly. The Pumpkin Boy sat where he had been, staring mutely at nothing. To his right, the silver machine with the big black dial and white clock face had been positioned at a slight angle; next to it, on another dolly, was a similar, smaller machine.
The thick bundle of hair-thin silver wires was now plugged into the side of the silver machine; another bundle was plugged into the opposite side of the machine and ran to the floor…
…toward Jody…
He cried out, in pain and terror—
“There, there, Ted…”
Again the soothing hand, the clown glove; as it withdrew from his face Jody saw the clown face close to his own, peering into him as if his head were a fish bowl. The lips didn’t smile, nor the eyes.
“…out!”
“Yes, Ted,” the soft voice sing-songed. “Yes…”
The clown hand came back to pat his forehead.
He writhed, tried to loosen his hands, his feet, to snake down from his captivity.
The soothing voice became almost scolding.
“Ted, you mustn’t—”
The clown hand reached out to the huge black dial on the silver machine—Jody saw the hand grip it hard and twist it—
Pain came, and he went back to sleep.
Pictures of Jody.
She didn’t know whether to take them down, put them away, turn them to the wall, or put them in new frames. Nothing, Emily Wendt knew, would work. If she put them away, it would be a defeat, an admission that he was gone, as well as giving up hope.
But having him staring out at her from every room in the house was almost unbearable. She had never realized how many pictures she had of her son: They were everywhere, framed on the hallway wall, in a gilt frame next to her bed, stuck under magnets on the refrigerator door, herded with other family portraits on top of the television, on the hunter’s table behind the sofa, the last Sears portrait, from Christmas, on the phone table—
In the end, she put them all away except the one next to her bed.
That had been the first portrait she’d ever had taken of him, when he was one. Jack had still been alive, then. She remembered how much trouble they had keeping Jody still; the photographer had posed him in a chair covered with a blanket, and Jody, who had recently taken his first steps, kept trying to dismount the chair. It was obvious he was fascinated by the camera and wanted to study it. Finally, the photographer had to let him look it over, click the shutter twice, and then promise him another look if he sat still for the picture.
You’d never know he had been any trouble by looking at the finished product. The portrait showed him staring quietly, with big eyes, at the camera; his face held a measure of interest that proved he was only thinking about getting his hands on that machine again. A lick of his thin auburn hair had fallen over his brow (later his hair would thicken, becoming almost coarse; unless cut very short, it tended never to stay combed or brushed for long) and his pudgy hands were folded on his lap.
This would be the picture she wouldn’t put away.
Later that day, after the session, she and Jody and Jack had gone to the taco place in the mall, the one and only time they had ever eaten out together. She still remembered what Jody had done to the burrito they had gotten him, how he had dissected it like a frog—
She found herself weeping—the first time, in the week since Jody had been taken, that she had cried. She had thought her life was over after Jack was killed, but now she knew just how much she had still possessed, even after the loss of her husband. There was a hollow place in her now that felt as if it had been scooped out with a trowel, and she knew it would never fill in.
This was nothing like it had been when Jack died.
She collapsed to the floor, hugging Jody’s picture, and sat with her legs folded beneath her, rocking and crying.
“Oh, Jody, Jody…”
She thought she heard him call her name.
She froze in mid-sob and wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater.
“Jody…?”
She knew how foolish this was, but she had heard him call to her.
Forgetting the picture, she pushed herself to her feet and stumbled to the back of the house. The noise had come from the kitchen.
A blast of cold air hit her. She saw that the kitchen door leading to the backyard was open.
Holding her sweater closed and shivering, she stepped out onto the back stoop.
“Jody?” she called, almost fearfully.
The backyard was awash in unraked leaves pushed into dunes by the wind. The sky was overcast, huge banks of gray cumulus clouds rolling over one another from west to east. The temperature was falling. The pumpkin fields beyond the fence looked ominous, cold, brown, and wet. The far hills surrounding Orangefield were dark, the trees stripped of green.
It looked like the landscape of a particular kind of hell.
She shivered, still holding her sweater closed, and turned around.
She gasped and put her hand to her mouth.
There, staring straight up at her, was the face of a pumpkin. Puffs of steam issued from the eyes, the nose. The surface of the face looked hard and glassy, and, from within, there was a soft orange glow.
There was a body below it, the size of an older boy or young teen, sharp angles and shiny metal. The thing had its hands on her shoulders, holding her. There were gloves on its hands, but she could feel sharp metal fingers within.
The face came closer. There was a flat metallic smell, like three-in-one oil. The eyes stared into her, studying her, as if watching her from a far distance.
A long puff of metallic-smelling steam hissed forth from the mouth, which was smiling impossibly wide through its two angled teeth.
The jet of steam held a word, in the form of a question:
“Mmmmmom?” Jody said.
It was getting dark.
Len Schneider looked like a man who was thinking. He stood with his head down, hands in the pockets of his jacket.
He glanced at his watch.
Almost time to go.
His hands clenched into fists.
It had turned even colder. The last few days had each announced, with increasing earnestness, that autumn was here and winter wasn’t far behind. A curt wind was dervishing dead leaves into some of the shallow pits they had dug. The deeper holes were filled with muddy water and blankets of leaves.
There was nothing else in any of them.
Where the hell are you, you son of a bitch?
His fists clenched tighter.
“Detective? We’re gonna roll now.”
Schneider looked up to see Fran Morrison, one of the fresh-faced uniformed cops, standing in front of him. Behind the tight cluster of trees, in a small clearing, a work crew was loading shovels and other tools into a truck: an emblem on its door, in orange letters on a black background, read town of orangefield, public works.
As Schneider watched, one of the crew opened the door, climbed into the truck, and yanked it closed behind him.
Morrison was waiting for him to say something, so Schneider let out a long breath and said, “Yeah, Fran, we’re done here. You might as well go, too.”
“You need a ride back?”
Schneider looked down at his shoes, which were covered with mud. “No, I’m good.”
Morrison, almost sighing with relief, turned and was gone. A few moments later, Schneider heard his patrol car spitting leaves from its tires as it followed the truck out of the road they had made and hooked up with a dirt road a quarter of a mile away.
He was alone now.
But he knew he wasn’t. He felt it.
“Damn it!”
His voice echoed through the forest.
He couldn’t blame Morrison and the rest of them if they thought he was obsessed. He knew he was. But there was no way he wasn’t going to do everything he could to find Jody Wendt.
And Jody Wendt was here, somewhere.
Whoever had taken him had a lair here, somewhere.
Schneider knew it.
For a moment, Jerry Carlton’s smirking face rose into his memory, wearing those goddamn mirror shades.
“Not this time,” Schneider said out loud.
“My party this time,” Grant said.
The bar itself was crowded, but the booth area, at three o’clock in the afternoon, was nearly empty. Bill Grant placed a fifth of Dewar’s gently on the table, as if setting down a piece of porcelain, and sat as he produced two eight-ounce glasses, one with ice, one empty. He hesitated as he pushed the empty one toward Len Schneider.
“This is the way you like it, right? Neat?”
Grant had already lit the first of what would probably be a hundred cigarettes.
Schneider nodded. “I didn’t think you were paying attention last time.”
Grant gave a slight smile and pushed the empty glass to the other side of the table.
Schneider was working at the cap on the bottle, and twisted it open with practiced ease.
He poured for himself, then reached across and studied the amber liquid as it trickled over the ice in Grant’s glass.
“I thought we should talk outside the office,” Grant said.
Schneider’s ears immediately pricked up; already he detected a focus in the man he hadn’t seen before.
Len replied, still looking at the Scotch in Grant’s glass, “You here to give me the fatherly pep talk? I’m sure Franny Morrison and the rest of them think I’m nuts.”
He looked up from Grant’s glass to meet the other detective’s eyes. To his surprise, Grant had pulled his cigarette from his mouth and was smiling.
“You think I’m nuts, too?” Schneider asked.
Grant’s smile widened. “As a matter of fact, I do. But I understand. Thing is, I know now that this isn’t…weird shit.”
Schneider had downed one Scotch and refilled his own glass. Grant’s new attitude had begun to irk him just as much as his old one.
“This isn’t weird enough for you?” he said. “Did you hear what Jody Wendt’s mother claims happened to her two days ago? That a pumpkin-headed robot appeared on her back stoop and spoke to her in Jody’s voice?” Schneider let out a bitter laugh. “You don’t find that strange?”
“Frankly, I find it charming. She told me the same story.”
“You interviewed her?” Schneider said with sudden anger.
“On my own time,” Grant added quickly. His smile faded a bit, and he actually looked apologetic. He lit another cigarette, blew smoke, and said, “It has nothing to do with you, Len. I just had to know.”
“Had to know what?” Schneider’s voice had risen—a few of the patrons at the bar, one of whom was a cop they both knew, looked around before turning away. Schneider finished his drink and poured a third.
Grant put his hand on Schneider’s arm. Schneider looked at the hand, still angry—but his anger drained when he saw that the familiar haunted look had returned to the other detective’s face. Grant’s skin had the yellow pallor of the tepid cloud of smoke from his cigarette.
Schneider let a long breath out.
Grant had finished his own Scotch and was pouring a new one. He drained half of this past its ice, which had mostly melted from the natural heat of the liquor, then put the glass down. He coughed.
“Remember when I said there were worse things than a kid getting killed?”
Schneider’s anger was back in an instant, but Grant pushed immediately on.
“I know how callous that sounded. Believe me, I do.” He stopped for Scotch and then a fresh cigarette, which he chain-lit from the remains of his current butt, only half devoured. “But I’ve seen things much worse than anything you can imagine.”
“Like what?” Schneider replied, not hiding his mood.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” Grant said. His voice became a near whisper, and Schneider was once again reminded of the vague, haunted man in the office the day he had taken this assignment. “I don’t ever want to talk about that.”
He looked straight at Schneider, who was working on his own Scotch. “But there are other things I will talk about. There was a local beekeeper named Fred Willims. He was involved in the Peter Kerlan case with me. That was the children’s book author you’ve heard about.
“We had a closed-door session with the district attorney at the time, who sealed the case shut. His name was Charles Morton. He warned Willims never to say anything about what we’d seen happen on Halloween to Peter Kerlan or his wife. Me, he didn’t have to tell, though I’m telling you now that Kerlan and his wife were both killed by hornets. As far as I know, Willims never said a word. But some time later Willims was found dead, hung from a tree with his eyes gouged out. The eyeholes were filled with hornets. Morton died, too, the same day, of anaphylactic shock from a hornet sting. And then there was a girl named Annabeth Turner—”
“I read that case after I got here,” Schneider said. “Tried to hang herself in a park—”
Now it was Grant’s turn to interrupt. “That’s what the report said. There were two other suicides, both of them successful, at almost exactly the same time. There was more to it than just a bunch of suicides, Len.”
Again, Schneider asked, “Like what?”
Grant shrugged, looking suddenly deflated. “Never mind. But here we are again at that special time of year in Orangefield, when the pumpkins get sold, Pumpkin Days come, the farmers get rich, and weird shit crawls out of the woodwork. Only this year, my friend, for once it’s just plain old crime.”
Schneider said nothing.
Grant leaned forward and said earnestly, “What do you believe in, Len? What do you really believe in?”
Grant’s question was so unlike him, so unlike his meticulous procedural ways and evidence building, and his manner so suddenly needy, as if some sort of damn had burst within him, letting out all the fears he’d tucked away, that Schneider said nothing. He looked at his Scotch, then drank it. He started to get up.
“I believe in not fucking up a second time, Bill. That’s what I believe in.”
Grant grabbed his arm and urged him back into the booth. His eyes pinned Schneider in place, like a butterfly to a board. When he spoke again, his voice was level and harsh. “Take me seriously, Len. The good news is that you don’t have to worry about weird shit. At least not this time. The bad news is I think you just might fuck up again, if you’re not careful. I think you should let me have this case after all. It was a mistake for me to let you take it to begin with. You’ve got that mess in Milwaukee so tied up with this that you’re liable to screw up. I’ve seen it happen. It happened to me, and just like you, I was concentrating on payback instead of doing my job—”
It was Schneider’s turn to be level and harsh. He leaned forward in the booth. “That bastard Jerry Carlton sat there during his trial taking his watch apart and putting it back together. He never glanced at the jury, not once. At the end of the trial, he looked up from his watch and mouthed the word Ted at me. That was the kid in Milwaukee’s name.” His voice was shaking. “I could have saved that kid, Bill.”
“Maybe,” Grant answered.
There was another two fingers of Scotch in Schneider’s glass, and he drained it, poured again. Tears abruptly filled his eyes. “I could have saved him.”
“Like I said, maybe. Then again, maybe not. Maybe you still would have gotten there too late. Maybe Jerry Carlton would have killed him earlier, if he saw you coming. Maybe—”
Schneider drained his glass and gripped it so hard he could feel it getting ready to break. He looked at Grant, who was studying him; Grant’s pallor had assumed its yellow, haunted tinge.
“Be careful, Len,” Grant almost whispered. “Do your job and don’t let things get out of hand.” He paused to light yet another cigarette. “Advice from an old fart. Someone named Riley Gates, my mentor, once gave the same advice to me. He also saved my life by not shooting me when I was about to fuck up big-time.” He gave a short, bitter laugh that ended in a cough. “He also saved my career, such as it is.”
The anger was back, and this time when Schneider stood up Grant didn’t try to stop him.
“This case is mine, Bill. Stay the hell away from it. And I don’t need a goddamn mentor—especially not a burned-out lush who’s seen the bogeyman one too many times.”
As Schneider stalked off, Grant stared straight ahead, unconsciously pulling another cigarette from his pocket. He didn’t look at it as he lit it from the one already in his mouth, which had barely burned.
“Careful…” he said.
Boring.
Here it was, almost time for the Pumpkin Days festival, and Scotty Daniels was bored silly. He was sick to death of little-kid stuff. In his kindergarten class, they’d already done their pumpkin cutouts for the windows and made their “special designs” for the school projects display during the festival. They had already taken their bus trip to Mr. Frolich’s farm to pick their own pumpkins.
They had tied yellow ribbons for Jody Wendt to one of the sycamore trees in the field behind the school, and Scotty himself, who had been one of Jody’s best friends, had picked out a special pumpkin at Frolich Farm, which now sat on Jody’s empty desk. There was a bulletin board in the back of the room with cards and balloons remembering Jody thumbtacked to it.
And now, there was nothing to do but wait for the festival to begin.
Or:
Think about hunting the Pumpkin Boy.
Scotty had first heard about the hunt from his older brother Jim, but the story had traveled like wildfire through all of the schools in Orangefield. One of Jim’s friends, Mitchel Freed, claimed he had seen a boy made out of silver stilts with a pumpkin head walking through one of the fields at the edge of town; Mitchel’s older brother was a police officer and claimed that the Pumpkin Boy had visited Mrs. Wendt after Jody disappeared. Soon there were Pumpkin Boy sightings everywhere, so many that the Orangefield Herald had carried stories about it, which Jim read out loud to him.
But when he asked if he could go with Jim when he and his friends went looking for the Pumpkin Boy tonight, Jim had only laughed and ruffled his hair.
“No, way, little man! Mom would kill me if I took you.” He looked suddenly serious and said, “And anyway: Mitch and Pete and I might get killed!”
Then he laughed and walked away to use the phone.
Scotty could hear him using it now, arranging for Mitchell to come by in ten minutes and that they’d go in Jim’s car.
Bored.
Scotty wandered into the family room, where his younger sister Cyndi was watching the Cartoon Network. He sat down grumpily next to her on the couch and tried to wrestle the TV remote from her hands. She clutched it tightly and said, “Hey!” Finally, he gave up and threw himself into the far end of the couch, among the sofa pillows, and folded his arms, feeling ornery.
He glanced out the window to the street, where a passing car’s headlights momentarily blinded him. He continued staring, and when his sight came back he was staring at Jim’s car at the curb.
The trunk was open.
A sudden idea formed in his mind.
At that moment he heard Jim get off the phone, yell down to the basement to tell his father that he’d be going out for a little while. After his father answered with a grunt, he heard Jim, loudly as always, go into the bathroom in the hallway, slamming the door behind him. In a moment there was water running and the sound of Jim’s bad singing voice.
Scotty got up off the couch and walked past Cyndi, who didn’t even look his way, her eyes glued to the television screen.
Scotty went quickly to the hallway, removed his jacket from its hook, and put it on.
He eased open the front door and slipped out, closing the door with a quiet click behind him.
It was chilly out, and there was a breeze. Scotty zipped his jacket all the way up to his chin and ran to Jim’s car.
The trunk was indeed open. Inside were the bundled old newspapers that Jim was supposed to bring to the recycling center. There were three bundles, thrown in carelessly.
Scotty pushed two of them aside, snugged himself into the trunk, and then worked the trunk lid partway down.
He hesitated.
From around the corner, someone appeared, walking briskly.
It was Jim’s friend, Mitch.
Scotty held his breath and snuggled down.
Whistling, Mitch bounded past the car and up the steps to the front door of the house.
Scotty peeked out.
At that moment the front door opened, swallowing Mitch.
Without further hesitation, Scotty closed the trunk all the way.
He heard the solid click of the latch but immediately saw the glowing escape bar that Jim had showed him when he’d bought the new car. Of course Jim had showed him how it worked—then told him a few gruesome stories about older cars that didn’t have the device, and what had happened to the kids who had been trapped inside. One of them, which Scotty didn’t believe, involved a baby who had accidentally been locked in the trunk of a car one summer day in 1960: “…and when they opened the trunk that night they found the baby cooked alive, looking just like a roasted pig!”
Scotty began to think about that baby. His heart pounded, and he was just about to reach for the glow bar and sneak back into the house when he heard the front door of the house open. Almost immediately, the car rocked on its shocks as Jim and Mitch jumped into it.
In another second the car pulled away from the curb, the two older boys laughing.
Almost immediately, they started to talk about girls.
They made one other stop, and Scotty heard one other boy, who he guessed was Pete Henry, get into the car. The talk was still about girls, but then it eventually turned to the Pumpkin Boy.
“You think he’s real?” Pete Henry’s voice asked.
Mitch immediately answered, “It’s real, man. I told you what my brother said. It’s a fact that it went to Jody Wendt’s house, scared his old lady half crazy. Dragged her into the house after she fainted, then left. And my brother said a couple tourists from Montreal were picking pumpkins out at Kranepool’s Farm and saw it walking through the woods. Just taking a stroll. My brother talked to them himself. He says there are at least ten other reports on file. One guy said he threw rocks at it, but he was drunk so the cops didn’t take him too seriously. The Pumpkin Boy’s real, all right.”
“What if we really find it?” Jim said. There was uncertainty in his voice.
“If we find it, we kill it!” Pete Henry said. “Then we get the reward money!”
“There isn’t any reward money,” Mitch replied immediately. “Use your head, Pete! If we bring it in in one piece, we’ll get in the papers. Then maybe somebody will write a book, and we’d be in that, too. If there’s a book we could probably get some money out of it.”
“I still say knock it to pieces!” Pete answered. “I ain’t letting that thing near me!”
“You bring the camera, Pete?” Jim asked idly.
There was silence for a moment, then Pete Henry’s dejected voice mumbled, “I forgot.”
Jim and Mitch roared with laughter.
Jim said, “That’s okay, Pete. I brought my kid brother’s camera. You’re covered. Here, take it. And don’t lose it.”
Scotty almost shouted out with annoyance, but kept his tongue.
“Good,” Pete said. “If we get a picture, that would be almost as good as capturing him. I bet the Herald would pay us for that.”
Mitch laughed. “I heard they’ve already gotten a bunch of phony pictures. One of them was a scarecrow with a pumpkin for a head.”
Jim chimed in. “There was a story in the paper today. Another photo they got was of some guy’s kid with a costume on, holding a pumpkin in front of his face!”
They all laughed. In the trunk, Scotty smiled. Jim had read him that story.
Suddenly the car moved from smooth road to a bumpier surface. It was harder to hear what the boys were saying with the added noise. One of them—it sounded like Pete—said, “How much farther?”
“Couple miles,” Jim answered. “I want to get as close to the site as we can. You sure the police won’t bother us, Mitch?”
“My brother said they packed up and moved out. Dug a bunch of holes but found nothing.”
“You really think this Pumpkin Boy snatched Jody Wendt?”
Mitch replied, “Who knows? Most of the places he’s been seen are around this spot. You got a better idea?”
Again there was silence.
“I still say we should kill him,” Pete Henry said.
“Maybe he’ll kill you!” Jim said, and then there was another, longer, silence.
Eventually the car came to a stop, after going into and then leaving a pothole.
“I think we ought to leave it here,” Jim said, his voice clearer.
“Sounds good to me,” Mitch said.
Car doors opened and then closed. There were sounds of fumbling and then Scotty heard them leaving the car.
The shuffling footsteps suddenly stopped.
“Hey, Pete, did you bring the camera?”
Amid more laughter, Pete said, “Shit,” and Scotty heard a car door open and then close again.
“Yeah, I’ve got it.”
“And you brought a flashlight?”
Again the word: “Shit!”
Mitch laughed. “Stay with me, bozo. If we find the Pumpkin Boy, we’ll let him eat you.”
“Eat this,” came Pete Henry’s reply, and again there was laughter.
The voices, laughter, and shuffling steps receded.
In a few moments, Scotty was alone.
And, suddenly: He felt alone.
He realized he had not brought a flashlight, either.
And where was he going to go?
He had no idea where he was, or where to look.
He knew his only chance to find the Pumpkin Boy was to trail along after his brother and his two friends.
Otherwise, he might as well stay in the trunk of the car.
He reached out and pushed the glow bar.
Instantly, the trunk popped open.
Scotty climbed out.
It was not as dark as he feared. There was a fat rising moon that peeked through the trees with yellow-gray light, and Scotty’s eyes were already used to being in the dark from being in the car trunk. The car was parked on the side of a rutted dirt road, with thick woods to either side.
He could still hear Jim and his friends, though barely; there was a blurt of laughter, and he went that way, to the left of the car, into the woods.
To his relief, there was a narrow path, half covered in leaves and pine needles.
The laughter came again, a little closer, but still far away.
And then, suddenly, there was real silence.
It was as if a stifling cloak had been thrown over the forest—nothing moved or breathed.
Scotty became very afraid, to the point that he had no further interest in the Pumpkin Boy. All he wanted to do was go back to the car and wait for his brother to come back.
He turned around, but now was unsure which way he had come. The path had branched off and there were two paths in front of him, which split at a fork. He walked tentatively up one, looking for scuffmarks of his own sneakers, but it was smooth and untouched.
He turned back to find the other path, and now couldn’t locate it.
The moon dipped into clouds, leaving darkness—then burst out with orange light like the light through Venetian blinds, cut into slats.
Scotty had no idea where he was.
He heard a single sound, a loud thump, and then stifling silence again.
As if the forest was waiting.
Then: a faraway snort of laughter.
He wanted to head in that direction—but there was no path.
Then he saw a flash of light close by.
“Jim?” he called out, loudly.
The light flashed again, just ahead and to the left of the path he was on.
He walked in that direction.
A third glint, and he broke through a rank of bushes and found himself in a clearing.
The moon glared down, higher now, filling the leaf-scattered bare spot he was in with orange-gray light.
He took a step and fell into a depression filled with leaves. He sank almost to his knees, then waded to the lip and pulled himself out.
Now he saw that he was surrounded by holes and depressions. It was like being on the cratered moon. He remembered what his brother and Mitch had talked about in the car: a place where the police had been, full of holes.
Now he became very afraid.
There were muted sounds all around him now: rustlings, the break of a twig, scampering sounds.
He felt as though he was going to wet himself, and he closed his eyes, beginning to whimper.
A rasping voice said: “Scccotty?”
He thought he knew the voice, and opened his eyes with hope—
But it wasn’t Jim.
Scotty yelped.
The Pumpkin Boy stood right in front of him, his huge orange jack-o’-lantern head glinting in the sallow moonlight.
“Ohhh…”
Scotty wet himself.
The Pumpkin Boy cocked his head to one side; his smile, lit dimly from within, looked almost comical. When he spoke again, a slight hiss of steam issued from his mouth and eyes and nose holes: “Sccccotty, it’s me. Jody Wennnndt.”
A portion of Scotty’s fear left him, but he was still trembling. The wet spot on the front of his jeans and down one leg began to feel cold.
With a series of little creaks, the Pumpkin Boy sat down on the leaves in front of Scotty. His thin metal limbs jutted out in all directions. “Sit down, Scccotty. Talk to mmme.”
Scotty felt himself almost collapse to sit in front of the mechanical man.
“Is…it really…you?” Scotty got out in a halting whisper.
“I…thinnnk so. I can see, and wwwwalk, and talk. It feels like I’m in a ddddream. And my hhhhead hurts all the ttttime.”
“I…” Scotty didn’t know what to say.
“And I nnnnever sleep now. And my eyes are hhhhot.”
“You went to your house—”
“Yes, I ccccan’t do that again. He won’t llllet me. He ccccontrols what I do.”
“Who—”
As if he had forgotten something, the Pumpkin Boy suddenly unfolded his limbs and stood up. The process seemed to take a long time. There was the faint odor of machine oil and heated air.
Scotty looked up; the Pumpkin Boy was now looming over him, his gloved hands opening and closing.
“I’m ssssorry, Sccccotty,” Jody whispered.
“For what?” Scotty said.
With the sound of metal sliding on metal, and a faint metallic groan, the Pumpkin Boy reached down and gripped Scotty around his waist. Scotty felt himself hoisted slightly up and then pressed tight to the Pumpkin Boy’s cylindrical chest.
He heard a faint beating there.
The smell of oil was stronger.
The Pumpkin Boy walked with Scotty pressed tight against him with one enfolding arm.
Scotty, his own heart hammering, counted five long steps.
He let out a long, weak cry.
Jody’s voice said, very softly, “I’m ssssorry, Sccccotty, but he says I’m not a ggggood Ted.”
Grant felt as yellow and dried out as he knew he looked. It was getting bad again—like it always did after Pumpkin Days began. He couldn’t get through the mornings without that first drink at breakfast, and, by lunch, if he didn’t already have a pint in him, his hands began to shake and he couldn’t concentrate.
But with the booze in him he was as good at his job as he ever was.
He still knew he was a great cop—even if he was a walking car wreck.
And today, with the first pint already smoothly settled in his gut and veins, he could even face the pumpkin festival itself.
God, how he hated this town—and loved it. As Len Schneider had told him, people were the same all over, a healthy cocktail of good and rotten, and they were no better or worse here in Orangefield. There was greed, corruption, untamed anger, cheating, thievery, and, occasionally, even murder, just like anywhere else on the good green Earth. All the deadly sins, all in a pretty row. But Orangefield was one of the lucky communities of the rotten creatures called men who had learned to put a good face on it. They had dolled it up, made it pretty, which, somehow, made it bearable. The entire history of Orangefield was one long cavalcade of greed, one long pursuit of money, and the town fathers had finally, when they discovered—and then exploited—the serendipitous fact that pumpkins grew here like nowhere else on the planet, found a way to have their cake and eat it, too. They could make money hand over fist, and, like Las Vegas, still pretend to be one of those “nice” places to live. Good schools, good facilities, good services, a mayor who always smiled, and a police force who kept things in order.
As corrupt and rotten as anywhere else, only with a much better makeup job.
Grant took a deep breath, coughed, and chided himself; he knew damn well how cynical he had become, and he knew that his problems came from something outside the normal proclivities of Orangefield itself.
From…the weird shit.
The weird shit that had begun that Halloween night when Peter Kerlan was killed, and then continued until that other Halloween, the one he wouldn’t talk about, after Corrie Phaeder came back from California…
He shivered, a physical reaction, and ducked off the midway of the main festival tent into an empty space behind one of the booths. He fumbled the new pint out of his raincoat pocket and twisted the top off with shaking fingers, putting the bottle quickly to his lips.
Two long gulps, another racking cough, and most of the demons went away.
This would be a bad day, and he would end up in his bed alone tonight, with the night sweats and insomnia and a hangover with all its own requisite horrors…
Still, he felt like he had a job to do.
One that Len Schneider wasn’t doing.
He firmly screwed the cap back onto the bottle and thrust it deep into his pocket.
No more until you’re finished for the day, Billy boy. He took a deep breath. You’re still a cop. The best.
He looked at his trembling hand, which eventually steadied under his willful gaze.
Go to work.
Grant was in the midway again, standing out in the lights under the huge tent, with the ebb and flow of the crowd around him. It was like being at a carnival, only a one-color one: Everything, everything, was in shades of orange. The tent was orange-and-white-striped, the booths hung with orange crepe paper, the display tables covered with orange tablecloths. Light was provided by hanging lanterns shaped like pumpkins.
And everything displayed was pumpkin related—pumpkin toys, forty different foods made from pumpkins, books on pumpkins, school projects made from pumpkins, the biggest pumpkin, the smallest pumpkin, one and a half inches wide—
The sweet, cold, slightly cloying smell of fresh-carved pumpkin hung in the air like a Halloween libation.
Music drifted in from outside the main tent—there was a bandstand in the auxiliary tent, and tonight, thank God, it was forties dance music. He did not want to be here when it was rap night…
The lights overhead flickered; there was a gust of chilled October air…
He was entering the entertainment section of the midway: nickel and dime games of chance (proceeds to charity), a local magician, a balloon toymaker. The hiss of helium brought an oddly nostalgic tinge to Grant’s mind: He remembered when television was in black-and-white and on Saturday morning there was a guy who twisted impossibly long balloons, which he first inflated with that same insistent hiss, into impossibly intricate animals—a giraffe, a rabbit, a dachshund that looked like a dachshund. He paused for a moment at the booth—this guy was not as good. His latest creation was something that looked like a duck but that the balloon-twister proclaimed an eagle. He presented it with a flourish to a little girl, who promptly declared, “It’s a duck!”
Grant snorted a laugh and moved on to other booths and displays:
Someone selling rug shampoo, who had managed to procure a bright orange rug to demonstrate on; a pumpkin cookie stand; a pumpkin-colored-pretzel stand; a dark, long, well-enclosed booth with flaps over the cutout windows. Inside there were rows of benches in the dark, and an ancient sixteen-millimeter movie projector showed black-and-white cartoons against the back wall. Grant peeked in. Popeye and Olive Oyl on the screen, and, sadly, only a few children with their parents watching.
Grant turned away—another reflection from his own childhood, only then the benches would be packed and popcorn merrily thrown at the screen…
A wide, high booth near the end of the midway caught Grant’s eye. Immediately, and for no reason he could put his finger on, that sixth sense that he knew made him a good cop tickled and came alive.
There was something about it, about the guy who was in it…
The booth was brightly lit, deep and wide, and had attracted a crowd. Behind a rope barrier covered with crinkly black and orange crepe paper, on a white wooden platform far away so that he couldn’t be touched, a clown solemnly performed. He was dressed in orange-and-black motley, head topped with a white hat with orange pom, his face painted flat white with a huge orange smile and black lashes completely circling his eyes. He was juggling three balls, two orange, one white.
Behind him, plastered on the back of the wall, was a huge, grotesque poster of a more vivacious clown dressed in brighter clothing, which proclaimed, uncle lollipop loves you!
On the bottom of the poster, in small letters, was written: brought to you from madison, wisconsin.
The little tickle of awareness in Grant’s head turned to a buzz of recognition.
Wisconsin…
Grant studied the clown for a moment: He was of medium height, medium weight. He barely looked at the crowd. His lips were thin inside the painted smile. His eyes were empty, staring at nothing.
Grant moved past the remaining booths—an orange juice stand, a table selling gardening tools: make your pumpkins the biggest in orangefield! a homemade sign proclaimed—and pushed through the tent flap to the outside.
Crisp night air assaulted him. The band music, “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” not played very well, was louder. Ranier Park was filled with strollers, a lot of teenagers milling in groups, the occasional policeman put on extra duty since the second child abduction.
He hurriedly lit a cigarette.
Butt firmly between his lips, Grant buttoned his raincoat as he walked around the tent to the back facing the booths he had just observed.
A cloud darker than the night sky came toward him, and he held his breath as it resolved into what looked like a swarm of hornets.
It fell to the ground and swirled past him: a tornado of tiny leaves moved by the wind.
No weird shit this time, he thought, with a strange peace.
This time it’s merely real horror.
Again he briefly thought of Peter Kerlan, and Corrie Phaeder, who came home to Orangefield from California…
There were vehicles parked in a ragged line—Winnebagos, SUVs, a couple old station wagons, at the far end a semi with bifford foods painted on the truck in bold letters. Grant counted down from his end to approximate the back location of the clown’s booth and found a large white panel truck without markings bearing Wisconsin rental plates.
The hair on the back of his neck stood up.
He studied the back of the truck: There were two outwardly hinged doors, closed at the middle and locked through a hasp and staple with a large, heavy, new-looking padlock.
The front of the truck was empty, the door locked, no key in the ignition.
He walked to the back and put his hand on one of the doors.
In a fierce whisper, he called out: “Jody? Scott?”
There was no answer.
He slapped on the door with the flat of his hand and put his ear to it but was met with only silence.
What he wanted to do, and what he was supposed to do, were two different things. He wanted to borrow the nearest crowbar and pry open the back of the panel truck. But if he did that, no matter what he found, none of it would be admissible in a court of law.
Even “just cause” wouldn’t cover it.
Then again, if he did nothing, he would not be able to live with himself for much longer. If that truck held what he feared it held and he did nothing, and his hesitation was the difference between those two boys being alive and dead, he knew that the demon memories that chased him, the things he wouldn’t think about, never mind talk about, would catch up, and that would be the end of him.
He thought of Len Schneider briefly—this was, in essence, Schneider’s dilemma: I waited too long…
“This one’s for you, Len.”
Grant tramped farther down the line of vehicles, avoiding thick electrical lines that led from the tent to ground outlets farther off, till he came upon two men sitting on the dropped back end of a pickup truck and smoking. He showed them his badge, angling it in the faint light so they could see it.
“You guys have a crowbar?”
One of the smokers flicked his cigarette away and nodded. “Sure thing.”
In a moment Grant had what he needed. Gripping the strong metal bar, he went back to the panel truck.
Throwing his own cigarette aside, he angled the crowbar into the curl of the lock’s closure and gave a single hard yank.
With a weak groan, the lock snapped open and fell away with a clank.
One of the doors, uneven on its hinges, swung slowly toward Grant, opening.
Light filtered into the back of the truck, illuminating the interior.
“Shit almighty,” Grant whispered.
Len Schneider dreamed. Except for the one about the kid with no face, he didn’t dream much. But when he did, they were significant.
In this one, he was flying like a bird. He had wings of long blue feathers, white-tipped, and he soared high into the clouds and then dived, his mouth open in exultation.
And then: In the manner of dreams, things changed, and he was in a balloon. His wings were gone. He was floating, at the mercy of the wind. The basket, which was constructed in a loose weave that let him see through the breaks in the bottom, shifted precariously when he moved, threatening to break apart. But he was unafraid and held tightly to the ropes that secured the gondola to the balloon. He peered calmly out.
He was passing over a huge green forest that spread out below him in all directions. At one horizon was a line of mountains, impossibly tall and thin, their peaks like snow-capped needles. The sun was either setting or rising. A glint of something that might have been a vast body of water shimmered in the direction opposite the sun.
But he studied the trees.
Suddenly (as in the manner of dreams) he held a spyglass in one hand. He peered through it, and the tops of the trees looked close enough to touch. While still looking through the glass, he reached down and did touch the tops of trees, feeling the light brush of healthy leaves vaguely redolent of moisture against his fingers.
And then something rose large as a whale into his vision, and he felt the flat, hard touch of an artificial structure slide under his hand.
When he stood up gasping and threw the spyglass away, the thing had already disappeared behind him. When he looked back anxiously, he saw nothing but the receding tops of trees waving their leaves at him, going away—
“Jesus!”
Schneider opened his eyes. For a moment he was still in the dream, which he needed no interpretation for: He could smell the rushing high air from the gondola and the faint hot breath of the balloon overhead; he moved his arms and for the briefest second thought they were ridged in feathers.
“Jesus,” he gasped, fully awake now, and jumped out of bed and began to dress quickly, strapping on his shoulder holster.
“That’s right: Carlton. C-A-R-L-T-O-N,” Grant said. The voice on the other end of the line said some words, and then Grant answered: “No, the panel truck was empty, but I still think he’s the guy who took the kids. Call it a gut feeling.” More words from the other end, and then Grant once more: “That’s right, he was gone when I went back into the tent.”
The phone receiver pressed tight to his ear, Grant tried to shake another cigarette out of the pack but found it was empty. Grunting in displeasure, he crumpled the pack with his free hand and fumbled in his raincoat for another. He coughed. His hand found the pint bottle but moved impatiently past it. Among loose change he located the new pack and grunted again, this time in pleasure, as he drew it out and expertly opened it, tapping a butt out and lighting it.
While he waited on the phone, he turned to regard Deputy Sheriff Charley Fredricks, who he had grabbed from his post at the entrance to the music tent in Ranier Park and brought to the station with him. The kid was bright and willing, and hadn’t opened his mouth about this not being sheriff’s business. Charley was young, but he had seen his own share of weird shit in Orangefield.
Grant said to him, “Anything on who rented that panel truck?”
A second receiver pressed to his own ear, Charley made a face. “On hold.”
“Damn it. You tell them this is an emergency?”
Charley looked hurt, then gave a sour grin. “Guess that’s why they didn’t just hang up.”
Grant scowled, then pressed his receiver tighter to his ear. “Yes? You sure?” There was a pause. “Well, thanks, Warden.”
He hung up the phone and traded puzzled looks with Charley Fredericks, who was still on hold.
“Jerry Carlton is safe in his cell at Madison State Prison, reading an old copy of National Geographic as we speak,” Grant said.
“Maybe an accomplice?” Charley asked, trying to be helpful. “Someone he worked with who didn’t get caught?”
“Carlton killed five boys, all on his own. He was a loner.” He gave a heavy sigh. “I’ve got to talk to Len Schneider, find out if there was someone else…”
Charley nodded absently, giving sudden interest to his own phone. Grant suspended his own punch-dialing expectantly.
Charley said, “Shit,” and looked at Grant. “They just changed the music, is all.”
Grant shook his head and jabbed in Schneider’s number.
It rang until the answering machine took it.
“Isn’t Schneider off tonight?” Grant said to no one in particular.
Charley Fredericks shrugged, then said, “Yes?” into his receiver and began to nod. His pencil went to work on his notepad.
Behind Bill Grant the voice of Chip Prohman, the night sergeant, fat and laconic and nearly useless, chimed in. “You looking for Schneider? He called in a little while ago. I just sent two black and whites out after him. He sounded out of his head—claimed those two kidnapped kids were out in the woods after all.”
Grant was about to answer when Charley Fredericks hung up and waved his notepad at him. Grant squinted forward to read what it said.
“Holy God.” Grant turned viciously on Prohman and spat: “Where the hell is Schneider?”
The sergeant answered, “Out in the woods—”
“Where?”
Prohman was almost yawning. “Same spot he dug all those holes. You ask me, he’s just plain out of his gourd—”
Grant was already half out the door, with Charley Fredericks, perplexed, studying the name on his notepad as if it was an ancient rune telling him nothing, behind him.
Grant could see the roof flashers of the cruisers ahead of him. He felt as if he was in a dream. Charley Fredericks had talked all the tire-screaming way out, but Grant felt as if he was alone in the car.
It all came down to this.
To this: the most horrible thing of all, at least in this world.
For a tiny moment he almost wished it was the other business, weird shit, that he was dealing with.
With a shiver, he let that thought go.
His only hope was that he wasn’t too late.
The car bumped in and out of two successive dirt ruts, and he slammed the brakes behind the first of the lined-up patrol cars.
There wasn’t a cop in sight—but flashlight beams danced in the woods off to the left.
His gun was already out of its holster as he pushed himself out of the car.
“Hey, Bill!” Charley Fredericks shouted behind him, unheard.
Grant pushed through the brush as if it wasn’t there; dried vines and branches slapped at his arms and across his face.
Behind him, Charley, his own flashlight on, made his way carefully along the path into the woods.
Grant heard voices now, one of them loud and irrational:
“Hold those lights on the front of it, damn it!”
Grant broke into the clearing—into a tableau from a nightmare.
Like a nightmare, there was a strangely ethereal beauty to it. Three uniformed police officers stood stock-still, holding their flashlight beams on a single spot up in the trees. The gnarled mass of denuded branches there at first showed nothing to the eye, they were so tangled and uniform—and then the eye resolved a section of them pinpointed by the triple beams into a man-made opening, a brown door set neatly into the branches.
In the doorway, frozen in place and looking confused and lost, staring straight into the lights pinning him like a butterfly, was the orange-and-white motleyed clown Grant had seen in the tent at Ranier Park. His pom-pomed cap was gone, showing a thinning head of light-colored hair; there were rips in his orange-and-black motley costume and his makeup was smeared, pulling his smile into a high, grotesque grin on one side. The blacking around his eyes, which had been used to line his lashes, had run together.
On the ground in front of the three police officers, Len Schneider, looking disheveled himself, a pajama top peeking between his shirt and pants, stood in a two-handed firing position, his eye sighting down the barrel of his .38 police special trained tightly on the figure in the doorway.
Grant, holding his own revolver at his side, but in a tight grip, said, in as reasonable a voice as he could, “Len, put your gun down. It’s all right. He’s Ted Marigold’s father, Lawrence Marigold.”
There were tears streaming down Schneider’s face, but his hands were rock steady on his revolver. “He’s Jerry Carlton!” he screamed. “And this time I got here in time!”
Grant kept his voice level, but slowly brought his handgun up. “Jerry Carlton is in Madison State Prison, Len. I talked to the warden there twenty minutes ago. The man you’re aiming at is Lawrence Marigold, the father of the last kid Carlton killed. Ted’s father. Remember him, Len? The genius biotech engineer? How he went insane after his son was murdered? He escaped from his institution. You couldn’t save Ted, but you can save Ted’s father. Just lower your gun.”
Schneider ignored Grant. “I told you!” he screeched at the figure in the doorway. “Send them down now!”
The clown turned away for a moment, and then a long rope ladder rolled out of the doorway like a red carpet, its end swinging to rest just inches from the ground. The clown stepped aside, and Jody Wendt appeared in the doorway and carefully descended the ladder.
“Jesus,” Charley Fredericks, who had stopped beside Grant and was aiming his own flashlight at the opening, said.
“Now the other one!” Schneider screamed.
The clown moved aside and said something that sounded like a sob. “Ted.”
There was darkness in the doorway and then something else, not a boy but boy-sized, with impossibly thin, bright metal limbs and a head made of a pumpkin, climbed out and began to descend the ladder with practiced ease. Little puffs of steam issued from the cutout holes in its face as it came down, gazing mechanically back and forth.
Charley gasped and said: “Je-sus!”
Grant’s own gun hand began to tremble, but he steadied it with the realization that what he was looking at was something real, something that had been made by a man.
The Pumpkin Boy stood at the bottom of the tree, next to Jody Wendt. He continued to stare back and forth, with a look almost of fright on his cartoon face. His gaze finally settled on Jody. “I’m ssssssscared…” he said in a horribly distorted, faraway voice.
“Where’s the other boy! Where’s Scotty Daniels?” Len Schneider screamed, his attention still riveted on the doorway in the trees.
“I—” the clown said confusedly, his voice swallowed by the night.
Then he turned back into the doorway and disappeared.
Grant took the opportunity to say, “Len, please listen—”
“Shut up! Shut the hell up!” Schneider wheeled on him for a moment with the gun, his eyes wild. Grant could see the muscles standing out like taut cables in his neck. “If you shoot me in the leg, Grant, to try to stop me, I’ll blow the bastard’s head off!”
There was movement in the tree-house doorway, and with an almost animal growl Schneider swung his aim back that way.
“Here…” the clown said.
Charley Fredericks gave a shout of horror: There in the doorway was the body of a young boy, trussed upside down and suspended from some sort of wheeled rack. On his head was a silver cap with a thick arm of wires leading from it.
“Oh, God, what did he do to that poor kid…” Charley Fredericks said, reaching for his own revolver.
Even Grant hesitated, starting to move the aim of his gun from Len Schneider to the doorway of the tree-house. “Son of a—”
The boy moved. He twitched in his bonds, looking like Houdini trying to make an escape.
“Let him go, Carlton! Now!”
Lawrence Marigold made a confused motion, and then his shoulders sagged. He looked down at the pumpkin-headed robot at the bottom of the rope ladder, who turned his face up to regard him.
Marigold sobbed out, “Do you remember…what I used to say to you when you were a baby, Ted? When it was just you and me and Mommy, and I stopped at the store after work and bought you the candy you loved? Do you remember what I always said after you squealed and held your hands out, laughing, when I gave you your candy? Do you remember what I used to say? Uncle Lollipop loves you!”
Still weeping, he disappeared into the opening, then reappeared, reached down, and did something to the bundle of wires on the boy’s metal skullcap.
And then something happened that caused even Len Schneider to open his mouth in wonder—
The steam issuing from the Pumpkin Boy’s facial cutouts increased in intensity, until an orange fog engulfed its head. A thin trail of something that resembled fire and smelled like electricity curled out of the cloud, rose up the bole of the tree, and snaked into the tree-house opening.
Two flashes of tepid lightning lit up the doorway. Grant could see the edge of another poster inside the hut like the one the clown had mounted in the tent in Ranier Park.
The boy suspended from the rack began to writhe and cry out in pain.
On the ground, the Pumpkin Boy stood mute.
Len Schneider again had his .38 trained on the tree-house doorway.
“Cut him down! Now!”
In another few moments, the boy was loose and rubbing his hands and legs.
Lawrence Marigold, his face a nightmare of streaked makeup and tears, stood dumbly as Scotty Daniels climbed slowly down the ladder.
“Get the kids out of here, Charley,” Grant said.
Fredericks nodded. When Scotty reached the ground, he herded the two young boys, Jody Wendt limping slightly, away from the Pumpkin Boy and down the path to the cars.
Grant thought, At least they won’t see any of this.
Out loud he said: “Len, you’ve got to put the gun down right now. It’s all over. You did a great job.”
“I won’t make any mistakes this time, Carlton!” Schneider screamed, ignoring him.
“I just borrowed them!” Lawrence Marigold said, throwing his arms out in supplication. “I thought you would let me!”
Grant saw Schneider straighten his aim. “Not this time, Carlton!”
Oh, God, Grant thought, his own finger tightening on the trigger of his police special. In the next split second he thought, Goddamn it, Len, don’t make me do it—
Two shots that sounded like the echo of one rang out.
Two bodies crumpled.
Shit!
Grant saw that by the length of the time he had allowed himself to think, he had been too late to save Lawrence Marigold.
Len Schneider was down, unmoving, and in the doorway of the tree hut Marigold collapsed with a huffing grunt. He sat tilted on the sill of the tree hut for a moment, then fell forward.
He hit the ground a moment later, groaned once, and was silent.
Grant walked over and knelt down to study his face.
It had the same lost, mad look it must have held for many months and years, since the night his boy had been taken.
“I’m so sorry,” Grant said.
“Ted…” the clown whispered, staring past Grant at nothing, and then was silent forever.
Grant stood up. Two of the uniforms were working on Len Schneider, but Grant knew it was a waste of time. He hadn’t missed.
He was good at his job.
Hands shaking, he lit a cigarette, coughed, and thought about the bottle he would have to open later.
Another nightmare for the menagerie.
And Jerry Carlton sat snug and warm, reading a magazine in his cell at Madison State Prison.
Idly, Grant wondered if the Warden would let him visit with Carlton, for just those three minutes Len Schneider had so badly wanted.
It wasn’t until much later that Bill Grant discovered that the Pumpkin Boy was missing.
The Pumpkin Days Festival came and went.
Halloween came and went.
Newspaper headlines came and went.
Years came and went.
But:
Some nights of some years, out in the fields behind the house where Jody Wendt used to live in Orangefield, when the moon was just rising like a huge sickly white lantern, and the ground was covered with fattening pumpkins, they said you could see something outlined against it in black, like a hand puppet silhouette against a wall:
Something that looked like a pumpkin.
Something that looked like a boy.