Somehow her arms and legs had become lead, and she could only lie there and feel the excruciating pain as he severed her features. When he gently slid the blade into her nose, she could feel the resistance it met. Then he slid his bloody knife across the skin of the pumpkin, inserting the blade a centimeter at a time until it dug all the way in, pressing her blood into the space left behind. Each stroke was leaving her there—not just the blood she spilled, but pieces of her soul.
She felt herself blink and cough, and then her killer’s knife dug into her remaining eye. She wanted to cry and beg—anything to make him stop—but she’d already lost her tongue. The world grew briefly brighter as his blade cut deep, but then, as he spoke secret words in a sibilant whisper, her view changed forever. She found herself blinking out from a haze of light to see his face grinning down at her, shards of light growing and changing and swirling in violent violet eddies from his eyes.
What have you done? she asked in her mind.
“I gave you a new perspective,” the glowing creature answered. “I thought you’d like to see the world through different eyes.”
Maybe, Emmaline admitted, reminded of her earlier dreams of power. But not these!
“No worries,” her killer said. The modern slang sounded wrong said in those sepulchral tones, but the possessed body didn’t match the thing inside either. “You won’t last there long enough to complain.”
Emmaline watched as he pulled out a long butcher knife from his rolled-up leather packet. The blade glinted in the basement’s dull light, and somehow she could see the shriveled image of Harry in it. She thought he looked angry. If he were here now, he’d probably want to kill her, too.
“I’m sorry,” she said, aiming her sentiment at her husband.
The Pumpkin Man answered. “So am I,” he said.
The demon inside the man laughed, then, and he stepped away from her pumpkin head. He ran his blade along the center of her body, deftly pulling away the material to expose her breasts as Emmaline watched. Then he slit the rest of the thin cotton and lifted that away as well. She could see herself lying naked on the dirty floor, though she knew she wasn’t entirely dead yet. The blood still flowed in shallow spurts from a half dozen wounds.
“In time you will rejoin your body,” the Pumpkin Man promised, and then he set his cleaver against the soft white of her neck. This time, he didn’t spare the pressure when he pressed down. She could hear the grinding steel as he worked his way through her vertebrae.
It was over in an instant. The Pumpkin Man stood up from her corpse, holding her severed head by the roots of her graying hair.
“Your tiny soul is mine now,” he pronounced, and he lifted the bloody head to gently kiss her dead lips. Emmaline could see it all from the pumpkin, though she noticed that the room seemed to be growing fainter.
“Say good-bye,” her killer suggested.
As she prepared to do just that, he, the pumpkin, and everything else she’d ever known, was gone.
CHAPTER
FORTY-FIVE
Scott was well stocked with coffee and french fries as he sat in his unmarked car on the side of the long driveway that led to the Perenais house. Earlier that day, Jennica had offered to let him stay in the house when he told her that he’d be keeping an eye on things outside. He’d declined. That would sort of defeat his purpose. He hoped to see the killer approach, and for that he needed to have the broad view, not be trapped inside just waiting for the doorknob to turn. So hopefully he was just getting ready for a long night of nothing, offering unnecessary protection to the two kids inside. He just wished he knew more about whatever or whomever he was protecting them from.
The first hour slipped by quickly, the high point being the setting sun. Out here, the sky seemed to slip from bright blue to black in a matter of minutes, but several of those minutes were beautiful.
Scott saw the lights go on in the house, and then the yard became too dark to see much beyond the porch and front door. He was tired. Coffee or not, it had been a long, stressful week, and the hillside town of River’s End was nothing if not a perfect dose of natural Sominex. The fries diminished, and the remainder grew cold. The breeze whispered dreams of the moonlit ocean across his face.
Scott leaned back and stared up the hill at the entrance to Jennica’s house. He had watched with some interest a few minutes before as Emmaline Foster got in a car and drove away. He’d ducked down as she passed, and he believed she hadn’t caught a glimpse of him. But why had she been here?
The question kept him awake for the next couple hours, long after the lights in the house clicked off. But curiosity wasn’t enough. The faint rush of the waves told him to sleep, and presently he did.
Not long after, a dark shape moved past his quiet car. A moonlit shadow dipped across the sleeping officer’s face, but instead of moving closer, it moved away, as if somehow satisfied by Scott’s unconscious state. Behind the figure bled a long trail of darkness, shadowy tentacles suggesting malformed legs and arms, and the round blob at the end of one long arm suggested the shadow of a pumpkin.
Captain Jones tossed and turned in his bed across town. His dreams were filled with images of Meredith Perenais kissing a dead man back to life. He saw her dancing beneath a rain of blood, and laughing as she danced and stripped off her dark-stained clothes, dropping first her blouse and bra to the mud and then kicking off her skirt before disappearing into a grove filled with jack-o’-lantern scowls.
Blood thunder cracked overhead and the wicked grins went on and on, thousands of pumpkin smiles. They were laughing and threatening to bite. Flames lit their orange pumpkin skin fangs like hellfire, and those mouths slowly opened and closed, laughing at him. Jones backed away from the flickering smiles, but those teeth only crept closer, floating dangerously through the dark like burning ghosts.
Travis Lupe felt something. The hair on his arms stood on end, and inside . . . inside he could feel pain. Not his own, though. He felt the life of someone else being drained. It was like being a voyeur to a murder, only he couldn’t really see the act. He lay awake in the dark and felt his body react, and knew that something was happening somewhere near. Something bad. Something related to the Pumpkin Man.
He stayed awake for a long time, staring at the tree branch shadows swaying across his ceiling. Eventually, the phantom burning faded in his brain and his eyes closed and acquiesced to a troubled sleep. But behind that he knew he had to take action. He just wasn’t sure how yet.
Something woke Jennica. She had a sense of something moving in the house, a clattering, some kind of noise. Struggling her way up from a heavy sleep, she rolled over in bed and reached out instinctively for Nick, automatically expecting him to be there. How easily that had come.
She found his shoulder, cold to the touch above the sheets. He responded, slipping his arm beneath the covers and around her waist.
“I had a dream you were gone and I was all alone,” she murmured.
His hand rubbed her lower back and he said, “Well, I’m here now.”
“Is it going to be okay?” she whispered.