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Jack Carver
by
Tricia Urlaub
The wind shifted and snaked through triangular eyes and gaping mouth. The candle inside flickered to near death, then relit.I watched for trick or treaters behind the living room window. As a kid I’d always loved a good scare so I kept the lights off. A CD played, one of those with lots of howls and screams. A dirge-like piano melody in the background held it together. Green and red dots and dashes on the stereo pulsed at me through the dark.
It was nearing nine o’clock and most of the ghouls and goblins had come by for their offering. Now the big kids - fourteen, fifteen-year-olds too cool to wear costumes but still humble enough to beg for treats - were making their rounds.
“You know you ought to turn a light on - someone’ll sue you for breaking their neck down these stairs.” He wore a Red Sox cap and palmed a baseball in one hand, a weighted pillowcase in the other. He jumped from the top stair and cut across the lawn.
“He’s right you know.” I stopped and held the front door open a crack. The wind sang a whispery tune through the fishing line that ran from rail to ceiling along the porch’s east opening. Seven wires helped guide my gloriously blue morning glories toward the sun. But they were dead now, and I didn’t yet have the heart to take the wires down. Brown rotting corpses puckered along the lines and now and again one of them floated off and skittered onto the porch.
“Who’s there?”
A blast of cold wind made me shiver. The old planks of the porch groaned as if someone jogged the length of it.
“You should have a light on, everyone else does. Look across the street.”I looked across the street and saw that, yes, the Peacock’s did have a light on.
“Who’s there?” I poked my head from the door and looked to both ends of the porch. Was someone under it? I stored lawn items behind the lattice panels. Someone could have easily snuck under there.
I walked to the center of the porch and looked down at the slats. “Listen, if you don’t come out from under there I’m gonna grab my butcher knife and force you out, got it?”
I studied the darkness between the slats. Looked hard for movement, listened carefully for that held-breath silence, but sensed nothing. I recalled briefly the time I found a bone in the dirt down there. I took it to the neighbor who said it was probably a dog’s leg, though to me it looked too large for that.
My will pushing me stronger than anything, I strode to one side and then the other to peer over the edge. The night was dark with burgeoning clouds but ambient light from the neighbors’ houses lit my yard well enough.
The bushes rustled in the breeze and I sensed no concealment within them.
“Here come some more.”
A split second later a group of kids rounded the bend and climbed the stairs.
“Trick or treat!” I held out my plastic bowl and they descended on it like vultures.
My body went weak and watery, my heart beat furiously.
Earlier this afternoon I had placed a large, golden-orange pumpkin on my kitchen table. I had taken a seven-inch serrated knife to its flesh and given it a face. Even from behind I could see the faint glow of the candle through its porous skin. The stalk twisted up and to the left like a silly hat.
I placed the bowl of candy on the porch floor and walked down the front steps. The night had a metal-edge cut to it. When I reached the sidewalk I turned and stared at the pumpkin sitting on the porch rail.
I studied its triangular eyes and upside-down triangle nose. I’d given it a large mouth with uneven, step-like teeth. It wasn’t perfect and I’d done better in the past, but it was enough to appease the dead on All Hallow’s Eve.
My thoughts were silly. The pumpkin wasn’t talking to me. How could it talk? It had no voice box, no body, it had no tongue. Hell, it was a pumpkin! A damn gourd!
“He’s coming back you know.”
The voice was deep and raw, as words might sound traveling over stringy orange guts.
I walked toward the stairs and looked at the pumpkin. It hadn’t moved when it spoke to me. Stared straight ahead with those pointy eyes, the candle burning low.
“Who’s coming back?”
“Jack Carver.”
“Who? Who’s Jack Carver?” Wind whipped my hair behind my neck. I shivered and rubbed my hands together.
“The man who killed me.”“Killed you?”
Someone stepped into my peripheral vision. Two women, probably following their kids.
I waved then stepped onto the grass. The bushes grazed my jeaned thighs, a thorn pierced my skin.
“Who are you?”
I looked at the pumpkin but my gaze shot back and forth beneath the porch. Somebody was obviously underneath, trying to give me a good scare.
“Name’s Hoffman. Louis Hoffman. I lived here ‘round sixty five. Nice house, porch could use some work.”
The name rang a bell and for a moment I was caught up in looking at the pumpkin and believing it.
I lowered my eyes and let out a breath. I needed to get inside and call the police. If this guy had gone through this much trouble to scare me, what else might he do?
“Louis Hoffman, huh? And you say someone killed you?”
“Yep. ‘Ts what I said.”
“How?”
Laughter from across the street. Porch lights blinking off. Exhaust and red tail lights as a minivan drove past.
“Sliced me up.”
“Sliced you up?” I swallowed hard over a nutty lump in my throat.
“Hasn’t your Daddy ever told you the legend a-Jack Carver?” The voice continued before I could say a word. “There’s this man, he lived all alone. He loved Halloween time and he loved carvin’ pumpkins to put outside for all the little children to admire. And they did, year after year. Ever year his pumpkin carvin’ proved better than the last. Amazing likenesses of famous dead people like Lincoln, Washington, even Christ. Can you just picture that? Jesus Christ’s face carved on a pumpkin for Halloween? Anyway, ever year they got better and better and then one Halloween night all his pumpkins was smashed. Some young hoodlums come by, took those jack-o-lanterns from his porch and threw them into the street. They stomped on ‘em and laughed and laughed. Well, as you can imagine Jack was devastated. He didn’t have nothin’ but them pumpkins ever year. He lived alone, had no family. Now some people think maybe he’d killed his family, but as the legend goes, after the third year of those pumpkins gettin’ smashed in front his house the way they did, all that hard work he did throughout the year practicin’ on melons, well, the man went crazy. Thought maybe he could get just as much pleasure from slicin’ human flesh as slicin’ through some gourd. Got me the first year, and Jack don’t come ‘round ever year, no, ever third from what I can gather. No one could ever find him again but they called him Jack Carver after they found pieces of me in the living room. An eye, I think, and maybe my hand. Don’t know what he did with the rest of me.”
For a moment I couldn’t move. I realized then the voice wasn’t coming from the pumpkin, necessarily, but from the porch somewhere. Under it? From the swing? Behind one of the bushes? Hard to be sure. I leaped up the steps and imagined an arm curling out from under them. I pulled the door open, slammed it closed and threw the lock into place.
Pushing apart the blinds I peered out front. The pumpkin glowed dully. The Peacock’s light had turned off. It was harder to see out there now. I turned on the porch light but it cast a yellow, sickly glow and I turned it off. I felt safer with it dark.
And I had, for a split second, actually thought the pumpkin was talking to me. I closed my eyes and held my hand to my heart.Had I locked the back door? I ran through the hallway, found it locked and picked up the phone.
“Police? There’s someone here. Playing games or something, I think he’s under my front porch.”
“Under your front porch?”
“Yes, please, can you send someone over?”
They said they would. Right away.
Movement outside the kitchen window. Was that someone’s head? I ran to it and looked but could only see the night. This time I felt it though, the sensing of another presence, the hairs on my body sang with it. I realized then the window was open just a crack. I slammed it down so hard a tiny splinter appeared.
Every nerve in my body jangled, stretched raw like the strings on a violin. I turned off the stereo but the silence in the house roared at me and I quickly turned it back on. I raced from window to window to check the locks, making a complete circle back to the kitchen.
In the sink the seven-inch serrated knife gleamed. Flecks of pumpkin guts were caught in the teeth. The tray of drying seeds sat on the oven, waiting to be cooked.
A knock at the front door.
I sprinted down the hall and flipped on the light. I left the chain on and opened the door.
“Everything alright, Ma’am?”
“Side of the house.” I lifted a finger to my mouth and then curled it to point to the left.
I followed his path from the windows. He held a high-beam flashlight and called out, “Police!” and then he knocked at the back door. “No one there ma’am. Did you hear someone? See someone?”
“I uh, I talked to them. Check under the porch.”
He followed the same route to the front. “You talked to them?” He held the flashlight beam on the pumpkin. With the porch light on I couldn’t tell if the candle was out.
“Yes.” I noticed the gun at his hip, though he wore jeans and a brown suede jacket. He pushed his fingers through his grey hair and when he spoke the corners of his eyes creased.
“Maybe I ought to check the house?”
I nodded and the policeman stepped inside. I closed the door just as a thought was forming. It snipped off like words cut with scissors.
I followed him as he climbed the stairs and checked each room. He looked about the age to retire, and I wondered how many of these calls he had answered on Halloween.
“What did he say to you?” For a moment he shone the flashlight in my face, then directed it to a closet.
I shrugged and waited for the screaming CD to move onto something else. “Said he was Louis Hoffman. I think he must’ve looked up the records on the house or something because I think a Mr. Hoffman lived here a while back. Something about a legend about Jack Carver.” I laughed, for the first time in hours, because the whole story sounded so ridiculous now.
The officer uncurled from his crouched position and looked out my bedroom window.
With the bedstand light on I could see his reflection in the glass. He was looking at me.
He turned slowly and held the flashlight beam to my face again, but this time he didn’t take it away.
“A Louis Hoffman, huh.”
“Yes, that’s right.” I shivered and hugged myself against a draft.
“Some man said he was Louis Hoffman...” The policeman eyed me warily and continued. “What else did he say?”
“Well, he said something about Jack Carver coming back.”
“Who was coming back?”
“His killer, Jack Carver. I know, it sounds really dumb. Jack Carver was the guy who stabbed him I guess.”
The man went pale. And in that second I knew. How funny it seemed that a look could express so much more than words in a fraction of the time.
I turned to run but he caught me by the collar. And then I remembered. The pumpkin had spoken to me again. After I’d let the man in my house. Louis’ voice. “That’s him.”
“Where do you think you’re going?”
I yelped and his fingers tightened around my neck. Warm and powerful. His breath washed over my ear and as I cried out, his hands choked off my words.
“How could you have known? How?” Words through a haze. Opening my eyes I realized I was on my knees. My nails buried into his hands but still he held tight. I let go of him and flailed my arms. My hand settled on his gun and I wrestled to free it. He was laughing. It crumpled in my palm.
Plastic.
Just then, pounding at the front door. “Police!”
A moment’s hesitation in Jack’s efforts and then he squeezed tighter. I caught a quick metallic flash, then tiny black dots pricked through the edges of my vision. They grew and bred until they were one, and then like a candle snuffed, I couldn’t see or feel anything. But the music remained. The screams and the rattling chains chewed through me like the serrated edges of a knife. Throaty, deep piano notes echoed the slowing beat of my heart. I sensed dampness. Dampness all over me. And openings, like dew on freshly blossomed morning glories.
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© Urlaub, 2006
This story was first published in Frightwriter in October 2002.
Tricia Urlaub has had numerous short stories published both online and in print magazines. She lives in upstate New York with her three young sons, husband, one very old dog and three cats. She works as a search engine optimizer by day (and sometimes night) but her first passion has always been and always will be, horror fiction