From behind her, she heard the devil laugh. “You can run,” he said with Nick’s tongue as she turned and ran for the door back to the pantry and the kitchen, “but I will always find where you hide.”
She reached the faint light of the kitchen, and there Jenn turned and raced for the front door. But when she reached the front room, she slowed. Where was she going to go next? Was she going to outrun Nick in the darkness?
Travis gave a last shriek, which cut off abruptly as if someone had pulled the plug on a stereo. The house was silent.
Jenn took her hand off the doorknob and looked to the Book of Shadows, which was still sitting open where she’d left it on the end table near the couch. The thing that was in Nick was not going to go away just because she got in the car and drove a hundred miles. Or a thousand. It could live for a millennium and inhabit a hundred bodies to achieve its aim. It was going to follow her, and it was going to kill her. She could hear it laughing even now in the other room as it carved a hideous shape from the clay of Travis’s dying body.
Jennica picked up the Book of Shadows. Maybe, somehow, Meredith had left her a clue. Her aunt had started this; wouldn’t she have known how to end it? That was her only hope.
She flipped through the pages, not knowing what to even look for. Much of the text vacillated from French to Latin, and she could only make out a few words here and there. But then she found a clump of pages stuck together, and she slipped a finger between them to split them. It was obvious now why they were stuck together. The pages were glued with blood.
Emmaline’s? Hadn’t this book come from Emmaline?
Jenn’s eyes widened. Her aunt’s sister-in-law had probably been wounded by the Pumpkin Man as she read the words on this page. Emmaline would have known about this monster, would have known how to make it go away. Maybe. And, Jenn could make out some of these words herself. They were in French, and the top of the page said simply, Banishment. Beneath, a paragraph described something about destroying the home of a soul to banish it, the heart and bones—
The door to the pantry slammed.
Jenn started again toward the front door and then realized her car keys were in the bedroom. It would do very little good for her to run for the hills without a vehicle, so she ran for her bedroom holding the book in one hand, and snatched the keys from her dresser with the other. But as soon as she picked them up she could hear Nick’s feet in the hallway outside. She wasn’t going to be leaving by the front.
Well, sometimes you had to sneak out through the back door. She darted toward the basement entrance, unlocked it and slammed the door behind her. She pulled the cord to light the basement, but as soon as she stepped down a few stairs, she heard the door above her open.
Fuck.
She ran as soon as she reached the floor of the basement, but she slowed when she reached the workbench. Once, long ago, Meredith’s husband had used this as his office. She’d noted it before, filled with drills, saws, hammers, goggles and other hardware. The wall above the bench was filled with screwdrivers, pliers and other things, all hung from small hooks.
Jenn stopped at the bench and slipped her hand around a wooden hammer handle. It felt good in her hand.
Pulling it off its hook on the wallboard, she kept running. She raced down the corridor toward the crypt, not slowing even as she entered that cloistered room. She knew the bones of the Pumpkin Man rested here, or at least the bones of George Perenais. This demon was tied to him, wasn’t it? Destroying those bones would destroy it. So she had to hope.
She thought about kneeling to ask forgiveness, but then decided that there really was no time. “We’re done,” she said at the front of the coffin.
Footsteps whispered behind her.
“Fuck,” she breathed, laying the book out atop the coffin, flipping back to the bloodstained page on banishment, praying to see anything more that might help her. She knew she could escape from him now—she could go up the back stairway to the graveyard and run down the hill toward town. But that was just a delay. He would follow her. No matter where she went.
Jenn skimmed the blood-spattered page, looking for words that could save her. Banishment, the page read again in French. Destroy the place the soul calls home.
Then it was too late. She was out of time. He was there.
“Jennica,” Nick said from the doorway. “Don’t run away. I love you.”
Jenn looked at the blank expression on his face and answered, “I don’t believe you.” She lifted the hammer in her hand and felt its weight.
Nick moved closer, and Jenn eyed the stone casket beside her. The casket that had stood atop the hidden heart tucked in the floor of the Perenais house for the past twenty years or more. The hidden heart . . .
Jenn looked around on the floor for the wooden box she and Nick had taken out of the lockbox in the floor. It was just a yard away from her foot.
Nick—or, the Pumpkin Man, really; Jenn stared into his eyes and detected no hint of her boyfriend in the glint of murder that lived there—began to close the gap between them. Jenn took a deep breath and then dove for the ground. She grabbed the box, rolled to her feet and held it out at him in a threat.
“I have it,” she said defiantly. “Stay back.” “What do you think you have?” The Pumpkin Man sneered, still walking toward her.
She opened the wooden box and lifted out the shriveled organ that had once been a heart. It was almost weightless in her hand.
“I’ll destroy it!” she threatened.
The Pumpkin Man kept coming.
Jenn threw the heart on the ground and lifted a foot to step on it. The Pumpkin Man lunged, though, and instead of her foot coming down on the heart, she threw herself to the left to avoid his knife and stumbled awkwardly to the ground. Nick’s lips curved in a smile that crowed victory.
She didn’t give up. As his hand reached for her ankle and his fingers closed around it, Jenn brought the hammer around and slammed it into Nick’s arm. The Pumpkin Man yelled in pain and pulled away.
It was the break she needed. Jenn shimmied to her feet and in two steps was back at the heart. She raised her foot again, and this time nothing stopped her from crushing the ancient organ on the floor of the crypt. When she lifted her foot, gray powder was all that remained. She stepped down again and again, twisting her foot back and forth, grinding the powder farther into the floor.
“Die,” she said to the Pumpkin Man. She grinned in victory.
Instead of slumping to the ground, Nick’s body rose, one arm rubbing the other where she’d hit him. “That wasn’t my heart,” the voice said simply. “Though somewhere I imagine the bones of P. Stephen Gifford are rolling over in his grave.”
Nick stepped closer, and his eyes were slits of dark anger. Jenn felt her heart sink. She’d thought for a moment that she’d won, that she’d broken the secret that let this devil steal people’s bodies. Now, she wasn’t sure what to try, assuming she was ever given another chance.
“You silly creature,” Nick’s voice said, but she knew that it wasn’t Nick talking. Knowing that didn’t make it any easier to hear. “You think you can stop me? Me? I’ve been alive for centuries, and lived in dozens of human shells. Though I must say, your aunt gave me the best story to live up to of any witch who’s called me.”
He twirled the knife in his hand and grinned as he stopped and reversed its spin.
“The Pumpkin Man,” he said. “What a great gimmick. At first, I was just giving George power to carve really good jack-o’-lanterns. With those knives, he tapped into the very essence of that which he wanted to carve. But eventually, I convinced him to dip his knives deeper. That’s when he began to taste their souls. And that’s when he lost his soul to me.”