Prompted by a visit to a farm shop recently.
Comments always welcome
All Hallows
He drove past the farm on his way to work. It was an old ramshackle place. Greenhouses that no longer kept out the cold or nurtured their inhabitants. Poly tunnels had become home to weeds. Old plastic sacks of compost vied with old tyres for a place on the tired ground.
An old couple lived there, had lived there for as long as he could remember. The house was like everything else, tired, sad and ready for oblivion. A faded and battered sign at the gate declared, Free Range Eggs For Sale, written in a childish script. He had seen the odd car, its driver having pulled in to buy eggs. He’d laughed to himself, ‘Free range! A con. They’re half the price at the supermarket!’ His next door neighbour declared them to be the best he’d ever tasted. Telling him that the owners were a slightly eccentric couple whose hens had the run of the place. They never killed any of them letting them live out their natural lives. They even took in battery hens and nursed them back to health.
‘Should flatten the lot and build retirement flats.’ He’d said to his wife last time they’d passed. Her reply to this had been, ‘It has a certain rustic charm, it looks as though it’s been there for ever!’
‘Rustic charm! It’s a wreck. I don’t know how anyone can live there! They should put that old couple into a home. From what I’ve heard they’re both gaga.’
He had no intention of ever calling in - under any circumstances.
After a while he managed to drive past and not see its decrepitude.
Until one day.
He noticed something different. He hadn’t time to register what it was.
On his return journey, he slowed.
Was astonished to see an old wheelbarrow piled high with the biggest pumpkins he’d ever seen.
‘How could that old codger manage to bend and pick all those beauties?’ He knew that they had no children and his neighbour had told him that they had no help on the farm.
He was intrigued.
He was ready next time and pulled over and looked at them properly.
They were a lovely, deep orange colour. The distillation of ‘orange’, if there was such a thing. It was as if the entire orange colour of the world had found its way into these wonderful orbs.
The prize specimen had been placed on the top. A skilled hand had carved into it a grinning face.
He suddenly remembered.
It was Hallowe’en at the end of the month.
He became obsessed by the pumpkins, left home early in order to slow down and look at them, arrived home late for the same reason.
‘Why don’t you just go and buy one?’ his wife had said.
‘I’m not setting foot in that place,’ had been his answer.
It was a week later. He’d stayed late at the office and by the time he reached the farm it was dark. As was his habit of late he slowed as he got closer. The pumpkins had absorbed all light that was remaining and even seemed to have an inner glow of their own. The grinning one on top of the pile had an even bigger smile. He was surprised that they left them out all night but then supposed it was too much trouble to bring them in.
No sooner had the thought entered his mind than he acted. He stopped the car, leaving the engine running, ran across the road and grabbed the grinning pumpkin. It was unexpectedly heavy and had a strange clammy coldness to it. He put it on the back seat and was on his way home again before he had time to regret his actions.
‘You called in at the farm then?’ his wife said when he got home.
‘No! They’d got some at the greengrocers in the village. I got one from there,’ he lied.
‘Well it’s certainly a wonderful specimen,’ she said, ‘although it does have a slightly sinister look.’
It was given pride of place in the porch, with a nightlight inside to enhance its sinister grin. ‘It should keep away all those ghosts and ghoulies and long legged beasties and things that go bump in the night,’ she laughed.
He couldn’t quite decide when the nightmares had started, had it been the night that the pumpkin had arrived? But they were getting worse and more frightening. He was waking up in the small hours soaked in sweat and unable to go back to sleep, partly because he was afraid to. His wife suggested he should see a doctor and get some sleeping tablets. As with most dreams details were slightly fuzzy but with each night they seemed to be getting clearer.
He was at the farm in one of the dilapidated greenhouses and it was night. At each of the windows in the house was a lighted pumpkin with not just a sinister, but an evil grin. They seemed to watch and turn as he tried to find his way out. When he eventually woke up and managed to escape from his dream he had the feeling that something awful was about to happen.
He moved the pumpkin to the shed, telling his wife it had been a childish whim to buy it. It seemed even heavier, and colder, and the grin had taken on an evil look.
But the dreams didn’t stop and he had the feeling that the sightless eyes of the pumpkin were still staring at him.
October the thirtieth. He had not had a decent nights sleep now for well over two weeks and had at last been persuaded by his wife to take one of her sleeping tablets.
He was in the greenhouse again, all the panes of glass smashed about his feet and in their place an orange grinning head with its own internal light. Sitting on a box in the middle of the space were the old couple who owned the farm, and they both had that same strange, evil grin of the pumpkins. They each had in their laps a pumpkin, and they were carefully carving into its flesh a grimacing face.
They looked towards him.
He couldn’t move, he felt as though he was anchored to the spot by iron chains.
They put down their pumpkin heads and walk towards him holding their knives.
He just knew what they wanted.
He screamed.
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