Free Pumpkin by Bill Pronzini Page B

the barn. He was annoyed at what he called her “foolishness,” and Amanda couldn’t really blame him. The incident with the pumpkin had already taken on a kind of surreal quality in her memory, so that she had begun to think that maybe she and Manuel and the other workers were a pack of superstitious fools. 
    She went out to sit on the porch, bundled up in her heavy wool sweater, as night came down and blacked out the last of the sunset colors over the ocean. An evil pumpkin, she thought. Good Lord, it was ridiculous – a Halloween joke, a sly fantasy tale for children like those her father used to tell of ghosts and goblins, witches and warlocks, things that went bump in the dark Halloween night. How could a pumpkin be evil? Pumpkins were about as harmless a fruit as there was. You made pies and cookies from them, you carved them into grinning jack-o’-lanterns; they were a symbol of a grand old tradition, a happy children’s rite of fall. 
    And yet… 
    When she concentrated she could picture the way the strange pumpkin had looked, feel again the vague aura of evil that radiated from it. A small shiver passed through her. Why hadn’t Harley felt it too? Some people just weren’t sensitive to auras and emanations, she supposed that was it. He was too practical, too logical, too much of a skeptic – a true son of Missouri, the “Show Me” state, where he’d been born. He simply couldn’t understand. 
    How did the damned thing get in their field? Where did it come from? 
    What was it? 
    She found herself looking out toward the east field, as if the pumpkin might somehow be pulsing and glowing under its plastic covering, lighting up the night. There was nothing to see but darkness, of course. Silly. Ridiculous. But if it were picked…she did not want to think about what might happen if that woody, furrowed stem were sliced through, that thick dark orange rind cracked open. 
     
    ****
     
    The days passed, and October came, and soon most of the crop had been shipped and the balance put away in the storage shed, and Manuel and the other laborers were gone.All that remained in the fields was the massive exhibition pumpkin that Harley would enter in this year’s contest, and the dwarfs and damaged and withered fruit that had been left to decay into natural fertilizer for the spring planting. Those, and the strange pumpkin near the east fence, hidden under its thick plastic shroud. 
    Amanda was too busy, as always at harvest time, to think much about the pumpkin. But she did go out there twice, once with Harley and once alone. The first time, Harley wanted to take off the sheeting and look at the thing; she couldn’t let him. The second time, alone, she had stood in a cold sea wind and felt again the emanation of evil, the responsive stirrings of terror and disgust. It was as if the pumpkin were trying to exert some telepathic force upon her, as if it were saying, “Cut my stem…open me up…eat me….”  
    She pulled away finally, almost with a sense of having wrenched loose from grasping hands, and drove away determined to do something drastic: take a can of gasoline up there and set fire to the thing, burn it to a cinder, get rid of it once and for all. 
    But she didn’t do it. When she got back to the house she had calmed down and her fears again seemed silly, childish. A telepathic pumpkin, for heaven’s sake! A telepathic evil pumpkin! She didn’t even tell Harley of the incident. 
    More days passed, most of October fell away like dry leaves, and the weekend before Halloween arrived – the weekend of the Pumpkin Festival. The crowds were thick on both Saturday and Sunday; Amanda, working the traditional Sutter Farm booth, sold dozens of pumpkins, mainly to families with children who wanted them for Halloween jack-o’-lanterns. She enjoyed herself the first day, but not the second. Harley’s new exhibition pumpkin weighed out at 348 pounds and he fully expected to win his long-awaited second