Every Halloween, the children on Maple Street carved pumpkins and lined them up along the stone wall outside Mr. Parker's house. It had been that way for as long as anyone could remember. Ten children, ten pumpkins, ten small candles glowing in the dusk.
This year, Emah counted eleven.
"Count again," her brother Jake said. He was dressed as a vampire, and his plastic teeth made him whistle when he talked.
She counted again. Eleven. The last pumpkin sat at the very end of the wall, past the streetlight, where the road turns dark and the old oak trees lean over the pavement. Its smile was wider than the others, and its edges were too clean, as if it had been carved by someone who had done it many times before. Its flame did not flicker, even though the October wind was howling through the leaves.
"Who brought that one?" Emah asked.
"Nobody had". Tyler said it was probably Mr. Parker's. Lily said it was a prank. But Mr. Parker's porch was dark, and his curtains were closed, and the other children were already pulling at their costumes, eager to go.
"Come on, Emah," Jake said. "The good candy goes fast."
So they went, door after door, porch after porch. Emah smiled and said "trick or treat" and held out her bag, but she kept looking back down the street. From far away, the pumpkins looked like a row of tiny orange stars. And the last one, the eleventh, looked brighter than the rest.
Then she noticed something that made her stomach turn cold.
The other pumpkins faced the street. But the eleventh was facing the children. And every time she looked back, it seemed to be a little closer to the others.
"Jake," she whispered. "Did that pumpkin move?"
"Pumpkins don't move," he said, whistling through his plastic teeth. "You're just scared."
She was, by the time they reached the end of the block, the streetlights had begun to flicker, one after another, and the laughter of the other children sounded thin and far away. A dog was barking somewhere, and then it stopped, all at once, as though something had told it to be quiet.
"Let's go home," Emah said.
"Fine," Jake sighed. "But I'm going to run ahead and check the wall. I bet you I can prove it's just a normal pumpkin."
"Jake, don't...", but he was already running, his cape flapping behind him, his teeth whistling in the dark.
Emah followed as fast as she could. When she reached the wall, the other children were gathered there, bags in hand, looking confused. "Where's Jake?" she asked.
"He was just here," Tyler said. "He ran right past us."
"He was right in front of the pumpkins," Lily whispered. "And then he wasn't."
Emma's heart began to pound. She walked along the wall slowly, looking at each pumpkin. Her own. Tyler's. Lily's. Their candles glowed warm and yellow.
Then she reached the eleventh. The candle inside was gone. In its place was a pale, steady glow, the color of old bone. The smile was wider than before, wide enough to split the pumpkin's face in two. And behind the jagged teeth, tucked deep in the shadows, she saw something small and white and shiny.
Plastic vampire teeth, slightly crooked.
"Jake?" she whispered.
The pumpkin whistled back.
It was a soft, thin sound, exactly the way Jake whistled when he talked. And then, from somewhere inside it, a voice that was almost his said, "Emah . It's warm in here. Come and see."
The other children screamed and scattered. Emah should have run with them, but she stood frozen, her feet stuck to the pavement, as the glow inside the pumpkin grew brighter, and brighter, and something in the darkness behind the teeth began to move.
It was Tyler who grabbed her arm and dragged her away. They ran until their lungs burned. She did not stop until she was inside her house, with the door locked, the porch light on, and Dad's voice calling from the kitchen asking why she was out of breath.
She could not tell him. How could she?
That night, she lay awake listening. The house was quiet. The wind had died. And then, very softly, from just outside her bedroom window, she heard it.
"Emah. count again."
She pulled the blanket over her head. She did not look. She never looked.
In the morning, the wall outside Mr. Parker's house was empty. Every pumpkin was gone, even the ones the children had carved themselves. Nobody on the street ever talked about Jake. It was as if no one remembered that he had ever lived there at all except her.
And every Halloween since, when the children of Maple Street line up their pumpkins along the wall, someone counts them. And someone always gets a different number.
Last year it was twelve. This year, Emma is counting again. And she is almost certain that one of the pumpkins is smiling at her.
Image is by Google Gemini.
