The Pumpkins of Fir Street
In honor of Halloween, gentle readers, here’s some fiction for you!
It was a sunny day when we moved into the house on Fir Street. The neighbors glanced curiously at us as we carried our belongings up the path, wrestling with mattresses and heavily-laden boxes of books, and periodically they drifted over to say hello, sometimes bringing a lamp in or steadying an imbalanced box.
My wife picked the house. She said she liked it because of the Victorian architecture and the established garden, with squash vines and corn stalks already firmly rooted. It reminded her of the small backyard garden at our old house in Cincinnati, and since I was indifferent to where I lived, as long as there was a roof and four walls, I consented. The realtor assured us that the house was a “real charmer,” and that we were “lucky to get it.” It had only been on the market a few weeks, and I wondered who planted the garden and then abandoned it, letting it wilt a little in the summer sun before the day we moved in and my wife watered the garden deeply at dusk, barefoot in her torn jeans.
It was a sleepy little town, and it didn’t take long for us to get the story of the house and its former gardener. The man who owned it before us left suddenly, apparently, after his wife disappeared in June without a trace. He stuck it out for a month or so, the neighbors told us, but everything in the house reminded him of his wife, so he left, moved to another city far away.
Like all old houses, the house on Fir Street had its problems. It creaked and groaned in the night as it settled, and sometimes the pipes clanked mysteriously. Part of the porch was rotted out, and would need to be replaced, but the garden flourished, with the plants growing big and lush, almost comically oversized. And we were happy there, settling in to our new jobs and getting to know the neighbors, who seemed like friendly, decent people.
In August, the house started making me uneasy. Those Victorian Gothic moldings which looked so bold in the July sun seemed almost malevolent on the first overcast day, and I realized that the tall trees along the property line shaded much of the house, making it dark, damp, and gloomy. The rustlings in the walls made me fear mice, and the groaning of the floors led me to beg the contractor for a repeat visit to check the joists again.
Sometimes, doors I thought I left shut were wide open, and sometimes I couldn’t close a door at all.
“Happens a lot in these old houses,” the contractor told me. “Frame swells right up. We can shave it down for you.” He replaced the lock on the front door after it kept popping open, assuring us that “these old locks fail all the time, you know,” and he insulated the pipes to muffle the clanking, but it continued.
The neighbor’s dog kept digging in the back yard, leaving black oozing clots of dirt which were dark with compost, which attracted the crows. My wife put up a scarecrow in the corn to frighten them away, but they just settled on its arms, cackling to themselves like a gang of juvenile delinquents. Even with the crows, the garden kept growing, the pumpkin vines putting out big bold flowers and the last of the tomatoes swelling and bursting on their trellis.
One misty night, I looked out the window and saw a tall, dark woman sitting in the garden, looking at the last of the beets. I opened the window to call out, and she vanished. My wife said that I was probably imagining things, but I heard the back gate creak, and the next morning, there were footprints filled with water in the thick soil. I started losing things. House keys, my morning coffee mug, my favorite socks. My wife thought I was being absent-minded, and said I should get out more.
At the community barbecue in late August, I pledged to donate our growing pumpkins to the pumpkin carving contest. They were the envy of all the neighbors, huge, and so orange that they were almost red. They seemed vibrantly alive, and some days I could have sworn I heard the sap pulsing through the vines and leaves.
In September, I was picking apples and I fell and broke my leg. I felt the step in the ladder rot and give way beneath my feet, but when I hobbled out several days later, the ladder was right where the EMTs left it, perfectly intact and lying on the ground, coated in a thick layer of goo from the fallen apples. The crows had flocked around it, and they gave me bored, almost resentful looks as I approached before fluttering away at the last minute, beating the air viciously with their wings.
My wife said I must have imagined the crunch of the step, said that maybe it was the sound of the supportive branch giving way, but all the branches on the apple tree were present and accounted for, with not even a snapped twig. I said that maybe the same spirit who was playing with the doors was responsible, and she gave me a scathing look. My wife, ever the practical ob/gyn, did not believe in spirits or malevolent presences, but I did.
Sometimes, after bringing her food at the hospital when she was working late, I thought I saw someone in the window of our bedroom, the same dark woman I saw in the pumpkins, but after I fought with the suddenly recalcitrant lock and pried the door open, everything was as I had left it, clock ticking on the table and curtains hanging silently to keep out the cold.
When I asked the neighbors about her, they looked at me strangely, and explained that the missing wife had been tall and dark, “quite attractive, really,” the policeman who lived next door said. Some of the people in the neighborhood privately thought the disappearance of the wife was fishy, that there was more to the story than the husband had told them. He said he woke up one morning and she was gone, her half of the closet emptied out and her car missing from the driveway. No note, no call, no nothing, her house keys lying on the table where she always left them after coming home at night. She’d been taken into the witness protection program, one person said. Another said that the couple hadn’t been happy, had fought bitterly, even on the last night that she was seen. She certainly hadn’t turned up anywhere else, and no one had heard from the husband.
I kept losing things, coming home to find the oven on when I knew it had been off, finding the taps dripping in all the bathrooms. My wife said I was being absent-minded again, and suggested that I cut down on work.
“You’re stressed out,” she said. “It’s a new place, we’ll get used to it.”
The pumpkins grew and grew, developing strange blood-like splotches on their swollen rinds, and the neighborhood children peered over the fence every day in awe. The house creaked and groaned during the day now too, not just at night, and my wife got testy when I mentioned the strange dark woman. I started avoiding the third floor altogether, because I thought I heard voices and whispers there.
My wife didn’t seem to notice anything strange in the garden, that strangely lush garden with its mammoth vegetables, and she cheerfully harvested them and served them at dinner. I started coming home late, to avoid dinner altogether, and she took the leftovers to the hospital, eating them on her breaks. Like the garden, she seemed to be growing strangely large, hale, and hearty, but when I measured myself against her, she was the same size as always.
The Saturday before Halloween was earmarked as the big pumpkin harvesting day, and the neighbors helped us hack through the sighing vines and stack the pumpkins on the sidewalk for the community pumpkin carving. The sap seemed strangely dark, but no one else seemed to mind. I proposed tearing the vines out and plowing everything under to get ready for the winter, but my wife said that we should let the vines dry up a bit first.
The children swirled around the pumpkins, picking out their favourites, and I could still hear the sap beating, like a heart, in the severed stems, which oozed dark liquid like blood. My wife picked one out to bring into the house and carve, while I sat on a chair on the lawn, propping my broken leg on an apple crate and supervising the laying out of the pumpkins and the assembly of newspaper and tools for carving.
The chattering of the children and the music from the impromptu band was so loud that I didn’t hear her scream. Apparently no one did, and everyone said I couldn’t have been responsible for not hearing her. The policeman got thirsty, chasing his two daughters around, and he’s the one who went into the house for a glass of water and found her while I was sitting on the chair on the lawn.
She was lying in a pool of blood and pumpkin pulp, like she’d been surprised in the act of carving, and the carving knife had been turned against her. Her eyes gaped and her bloody throat frothed and bubbled as she tried to form a sentence, he told me later. As the policeman picked up the phone to call the ambulance, the children were taking the tops off their pumpkins and screaming too, because inside each pumpkin was a piece of her, the dark woman. The throbbing heart, right hand with fingers writhing blindly, severed legs and feet and, most horrifying of all, her head, with the eyeballs gouged out of their sockets and hanging limply against her cheeks.
The policeman saw the disembodied left hand grasping the carving knife and inching across the floor and didn’t know quite how to react, since police officers are not trained to deal with that sort of thing, but he recognized the heavy gold wedding ring on the finger and whispered “Lucy,” and the hand whirled around to face him, knife raised, and he shot it, not knowing what else to do, and it abruptly decomposed, turned into a pile of fingers and a few tendons covered in dense soil, like the hand of a woman who was cut up on a hot June night and buried under the pumpkin patch, and all of the other pieces of her withered and wasted away, splayed on the sidewalk in a sea of screaming children and pumpkin gore. The dark woman had her day in the sun and she was finished.
Tags: fiction