When I got home that night, I noticed the smiling jack-o-lantern in my front yard was crushed. The candle inside was still lit, somehow avoiding the brunt of the crushing force; the carved mouth grinning through the injury.
It was a dark, blustery night in October. The temperature had dropped into the low thirties, the leaves scraped across the ground, tumbling in the autumnal breeze. I looked around my neighborhood, lit intermittently with street lights, but I saw no one. The streets were dead, and the houses too. I decided to take the pumpkin with me into the house, and I set it on the kitchen counter to be thrown away with the morning trash. I headed upstairs to shower, leaving the burning candle and the pumpkin to fend for itself. Walking into the master bathroom, I turned the shower dial to hot with a squeaky squeal. The water gradually warmed, filling the room with steam as I undressed. Once in and shampooing my hair, I heard a thud downstairs. “Typical”, I told myself. My cat was probably rummaging around as she usually does, and the thought left my mind as quickly as it had entered. I turned off the shower, pulling my hair back, squeezing the water out, quickly wrapping myself in a towel.
I left the bathroom and put on my pajamas, heading downstairs to make dinner and watch television. As I turned into the kitchen I opened my wine refrigerator, pulling out a bottle of chianti. When I turned to get a glass however, something was different. I looked at the jack-o-lantern, perched on the counter, the candle inside snuffed out; a serpent of smoking slithering through the air above it. I walked over to the candle, the wick still smoldering. I looked around, turning in a circle. No cat, no noise, nobody. I walked into my dinning room, turning on the lights, nothing there. The laundry room; the same. Living and washrooms? Empty.
I brushed it off, maybe the wick burned down too much, or maybe the cat batted the candle with its paw. There were so many unaccounted possibilities. I turned on the TV in the living room tying to settle down, and headed to the kitchen to warm up leftover chicken parmesan. I opened my refrigerator blocking the view of the TV, and my wine glass fell to the floor, shattering on the hardwood. My food which was once in a to-go box, sat on a porcelain plate, laminated with plastic wrap. I was in shock, and I knew at that moment someone was in my house with me. I pulled out my cell phone, calling the police. I whispered, telling them I thought someone was in my home. Distraught, I closed the refrigerator, and with my view unobscured, I looked at the television; off. I ran to the front door frantically, bolting out of the house. I sprinted across the street to wait for the police. Turning back, I expected to see a shadow in the windows, but there was none. The lights began to turn off, one by one, one room after the other. I dropped to the curb, hand on my head, overwhelmed with emotion and fear as I heard the siren’s blare come ever closer.
The police arrived, and in a panic I told them about the jack-o-lantern, the thud I had heard downstairs, the food, the television, and the lights. They sent several officers in, who emerged a few minutes later, shaking their heads. “Nobody in there ma’am”, they said. They took me to the police station to file a report. When I returned home, the officers who had been assigned to watch the house left. Hesitantly, I pushed open my front door with a creak, the lights still off. I stood in the doorway, staring down the hall, my eyes locked on the faceless smile fixated on me. The candle in the smashed pumpkin ignited again, its menacing grin shining up from the floor at the end of the hallway.
Submitted October 19, 2015 at 06:51AM by MichaelJMahoney http://ift.tt/1MxT4iK halloween
No comments:
Post a Comment