Free Pumpkin by Robert Bloch Page B

way. I’ve got no job and no prospects. Winter’s coming, we’re stuck out here in the middle of nowhere, and God knows what happens next year when we run out of savings. Is it any wonder I’m uptight?”
    “That part I can understand. But since we came here you act as if you were afraid of something—”
    “Afraid? You’re imagining things.”
    “I think you’re the one who’s imagining. That look you had when I said Billy was across the road tonight. And other times, when you just stare out the window.”
    David scowled. “I told you I never wanted to live here in the first place. It gives me the creeps.”
    “What does?”
    He lowered his glass. It was empty, and so was the expression in his eyes. “All right. I didn’t want to say anything but it’s probably better than letting you think I don’t have both oars in the water.” He sighed and leaned back. “If you must know, this isn’t the first time I’ve come to live here.”
    “David—you never told me that—”
    “I never told anyone. But a long time ago, when my mother took sick after the divorce, I spent a summer and part of the fall with my aunt and uncle in this house. I was just about Billy’s age then. So you see, I know.”
    “Know what?”
    “About the place across the road. The first thing Uncle George did was warn me never to go over there, because the old man didn’t like strangers.”
    “Who was he talking about?”
    “Jed Holloway. He lived on the property all alone, ever since anyone around here could remember. Uncle George moved in here right after he and Aunt Louise were married, but he said that even then Jed Holloway was an old man. God only knows how long he’d been there or what he did to keep going. Maybe he raised enough food from his vegetable garden, because nobody ever saw him at the stores in town. Folks said he had a wife once, and after she died he never left the place, just boarded up all the windows like they are today. If the salesmen or anybody else showed up he’d run them off the property with a shotgun.”
    “Didn’t anyone ever do anything about it?”
    David shrugged. “Like what? It was his place. If he wanted to cut off the water and electricity that was his own affair. He had an old well and an outhouse in back, and he must have used candles in the house because some nights you could see lights flickering from cracks between the boards on the windows. It wasn’t as if he was breaking any law—just an old coot who went off his rocker when he lost his wife. Maybe he lost a kid too, because she was supposed to have died in childbirth. That would explain why he hated children so much.
    “I know he hated me. Playing in the yard here, sometimes I saw him puttering around in his garden, mumbling to himself. I’d never seen anyone talking to empty air before and it scared me. The way he looked was pretty scary, too—tall and skinny, with long white hair down to his shoulders and a beard that hid all of his face except the eyes. That was the worst, those eyes of his, glaring at me when he noticed I was playing outside. I’ll never forget it, him standing there dressed in rags like some kind of scarecrow come to life, a scarecrow with little red-rimmed eyes staring—”



David broke off and reached for the bottle again.
    “So that’s why you didn’t want to come here again,” Vera said.
    David finished pouring and raised his glass. “There are other reasons. Oh, I never believed those stories floating around about Holloway getting into magic and practicing witchcraft. That stuff about his putting curses on people and making spells to wither their crops and kill off cattle sounded pretty wild even then, and nobody ever proved anything. I probably would have gotten used to how he looked and acted if it hadn’t been for Halloween.”
    David drank, then sat back. From the hall beyond, the ticking of the grandfather’s clock echoed through the silence.
    Vera leaned forward. “Aren’t you