“Careful…” he said.
6
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 that 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 of 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 phoney 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?”