Blood Pumpkin

"What in the hell are those?"

Clarence had gone to Reggy's Veggies to buy seeds, just as he had every year since Reggy had opened. David Decker probably bought his seeds here, too, Clarence reflected. It was part of the reason Clarence kept coming back. The fact that Reggy was a friend since boyhood and Clarence taking his business to the new feed store up the road would hurt him was secondary.

Clarence wanted to beat David, wanted to beat him so bad he could taste it.

David was a bit of a local celebrity, a legend in the agricultural community, and he'd grown the biggest pumpkins in the county for the last five years running. For the last five years, Clarence had been content with second place, but he felt that this year was different somehow. This was the year that he beat David Decker and took his rightful place as the biggest pumpkin grower in the county.

This year was also different because Reggy said he had something special for Clarence. He had what he called a secret weapon, and he assured him that it would finally wipe the smile off ole Decker's face. Reggy had no reason to dislike Decker. He was probably one of Reggy's best customers, but the ole man had been getting cocky lately, and his bravado had turned the humble produce peddler's stomach.

Clarence picked up the packet and looked at it. It was just a normal pack of seeds, maybe a little old and crumpled, but clearly just seeds. Reggy had found them in a trunk that had belonged to his grandfather, and they looked eldritch on the semi-modern countertop. The paper had taken on that soft velvety feel of a material that has seen the fall of the second world war, and the seeds inside felt like hard little bullets under Clarence's thumb. The paper declared them to be "Blutkürbisse" and everything on the package was in a foreign language. He would have sworn it was something Reggy had bought from a joke shop if he hadn't been so serious. To be sure, Reggy was a practical joker, but his face was stone serious as he looked at me from across the counter of his vegetable stand.

"Blood Pumpkins?" Clarence said skeptically.

"Blood Pumpkins." Reggy intoned back with deep seriousness.

"I don't know, Reggy. These things look older than God. You sure they'll grow?"

"Ab-so-lutely." Reggy stretched the word into three, "Grandad brought them back from Germany, and he said the pumpkins he saw over there were huge."

Clarence scoffed, "Your grandad was a sodbuster just like mine, Reggy. When did he go to Germany?"

"During the war, same as your Grandad. 'cept your Grandad spent it in Alaska."

Clarence wanted to take offense to that, but Reggy was right. Grandad had gotten a very cushy post, while Reggy's grandad had gotten half his leg blown off by a potato masher and was sent home with honors. Reggy's grandad had used the payout the government had given him to buy the building where the feed store now sat, while Clarence's grandad had used the money to buy the land where his farm was.

Just because Reggy senior had been a drunk, who had squandered the family business was no fault of his.

"Let me get my usual spread of regular pumpkins, too, Reggy, to be safe. So how do these work anyway? Any special instructions for these German pumpkins?"

"Grandad always said that the man who gave him the seeds said that a "sacrifice" was required to see them reach their full potential. What that sacrifice was, the man wouldn't say. Grandad figured if anyone knew anything about sacrifices, it would be farmers like us."

Reggy wasn't wrong. All farming was one sacrifice after another. Farmers sacrificed their time, their love, their family, their hair, and damn near everything else so they could afford to keep the taxes paid and the lights on year after year. Sodbustin was nothing but sacrifice in many ways, and Clarence figured he'd plant the seeds and see what came of them. He honestly figured he'd get more out of the other packs of seeds than these too-old pumpkin bullets anyway.

He would look back on that moment and reflect that he had known nothing of sacrifice.

The seeds went into the ground in the east field just like generations of pumpkins had before. As he stood up and rubbed the dirt off his hands, he looked across the field he had nurtured and felt the same sense of pride he always did. Corn was coming up, potatoes and yams, beans and peanuts, the fruit trees were filling the orchard with a sweet scent, and now the pumpkins would be the crowning jewel of his farm. The July sun beat down on him, and he shaded his eyes as he surveyed his kingdom. Clarence knew it wouldn't be long before harvest time. Soon the fields would be filled with the sounds of picking and packing, and it would be time to take another load down to Reggy so he could sell his wares. Clarence could lay enough back to make it through the winter, and maybe even a little more for the inevitable repairs to the barn or the house, maybe even some expansion next year when the taxes came in.

And, he reflected, once he won this year's grand prize for biggest pumpkin, Clarence could open his own stall the following spring and sell his own wares just like his father used to do.

It was a great plan, and now it was time to see if it could bear fruit.

The pumpkins grew slowly, as pumpkins do, but after a month, Clarence had three that he believed could be real contenders. He had named them, as he did every year, and the names he had chosen were no less grand than the pumpkins themselves. Hercules, Goliath, and Sampson dwarfed their fellows by quite a bit, and it seemed that these would be his entries this year. Some people thought it was silly to name pumpkins, but Clarence always named the ones he thought would be entries into the fair. The other forty or so would be sold to pie makers, pumpkin carvers, and all sorts of other folks, but these three would be weighed, judged, and then made into pies by Mrs. Clarence for the pie contest to be held two days hence. He always laughed about it, but Clarence always felt a little sorry to see her make those pumpkins into pies after he'd worked so hard raising them.

On the other hand, the Blood Pumpkins had sprouted only a single offering. Clarence had named him Fritz and set him apart from the rest. So far, it was underperforming, and Clarence didn't think it would amount to much. Fritz wasn't even as big as most of his regular pumpkins, but he kept tending it and hoping that maybe Fritz was just a late bloomer. He had been surprised when he'd gotten a pumpkin at all from the seeds, and Clarence had held out hope that maybe Reggy's grandad was right and that these pumpkins would be bigger than the regular ones. He pruned it and weeded it by hand, just as he did with the other three, in the hopes that maybe it would grow bigger and he could sell it as an oddity at Reggie's stand. While his other pumpkins were orange, this one was a deeper orange, like blood orange, and its leaves had a strange wilted look to them. Clarence was certain it would make someone an extra creepy jack-o-lantern when Halloween rolled around, but he really didn't have too high of hopes for the stunted little thing other than that.

Then, one morning, after caring for it for the past four weeks, Clarence was in for a surprise.

A painful surprise.

Clarence was out tending to the pumpkins, tracking their growth as he nurtured them. His top three were still larger and fuller than the others, and Goliath was quickly showing himself to be the front runner for this year's contest winner. He was pruning around Fritz, his mind wandering, when the shears caught the edge of his index finger. It wasn't a deep cut, but like any wound, it bled a bit. Clarence snatched his finger back to put it in his mouth, but not before a few drops of blood splattered on the earth around the pumpkin. He didn't think much of it at the time, it was just a cut, and he slid the bandana out of his pocket and held it to the wound. He waited for the bleeding to stop and then got back to work.

He didn't think anything about it until the next day.

When he went to check on the pumpkins, Clarence noticed something odd had happened.

It wasn't substantial, the pumpkin hadn't grown giant overnight, but the blood pumpkin had grown. The day before, it had been no bigger than a craft store decoration, but now it bulged from the ground like a blood-red tumor. Overnight it had become larger than Sampson, the smallest of his entries for the fair. Clarence scratched his head as he took in the anomaly, getting knee-bound so he could take a better look at Fritz. He had done nothing different besides giving it his blood, and then he remembered what Reggy had said. The plant required a sacrifice. The pumpkin needed something more than water and sunlight to thrive, and Clarence suddenly wondered how big Fritz could get?

Wasn't the notion of beating Decker worth a little blood?

As though in a daze, Clarence pulled out his buck knife and slid the blade across the meat of his palm. The sting was little more than an afterthought, and as he squeezed his fingers together, he watched a scarlet stream fall onto the soil beneath the pumpkin. The drops splashed onto the vines as well, a single fat drop splattering the body of the gourd, and as it fell, Clarence could swear he heard it growing. It was a soft, whispery noise like the trees in a light wind. As the ground drank his blood, it left nothing behind. It grew before his eyes, looking bigger than it had a minute ago. Clarence wrapped the same bandana around his hand and got back to work. The pumpkins required a lot of TLC, but it would all be worth it once he wiped the smile off David Decker's face.

When he returned the next day, Fritz had grown three inches overnight.

For the next two weeks, Clarence made a splash of his blood a regular part of the pumpkins diet. It was never much, the amount you'd get from a diabetes test, but in two weeks, he noticed a change in the size of the blood pumpkin. It grew as big as any of the pumpkins Clarence had planned to enter, overshadowing Goliath by a large margin. By the last week of August, Fritz was the clear entry for the fair. The sight of Fritz filled Clarence with pride, but it also made his fingers itch. Anyone who cared to look would have seen the bruises on his fingertips and palm. Mrs. Clarence had certainly made a lot of them as she doctored them at the dining room table, but she was the only one so far. The farm had a lot of visitors in the last week of August, to his surprise.

Someone, it seemed, had seen the Blood Pumpkin.

It was his neighbor first. He could hardly miss a pumpkin that was nearly five feet tall and four feet wide. He wondered if he could come to have a look, and Clarence had taken him to the field to see it personally. After that, he was visited every day by curious townspeople wanting to see this miraculous pumpkin. They never went unsupervised, of course. As he spent more and more time with the pumpkin, Clarence was becoming quite protective of it. He began to worry that this was as large as it was going to get, topping out just shy of five feet, and he started increasing the amount of blood he gave it. He was back to cutting his palm for the fat red drops he'd gotten before, but even that didn't make it grow. The ground drank, but the whispering never happened. Clarence slept poorly, began neglecting his other crops, and Fritz the Blood Pumpkin became somewhat of an obsession.

On the fourth of October, Clarence got the visit he'd been expecting.

He called on him early, just a short series of knocks that drug him from the table where he'd been listlessly eating breakfast. He was dressed in overalls and a blue work shirt, boots with the rundown heels after many years of use, and a round top brown hat that probably was meant to make him look like a cowboy but just made him look even more like a farmer from a John Wayne movie. He hadn't taken the hat off and just stood grinning on the front porch as though they were the best of friends.

"David," Clarence said, hiding his mistrust behind his grin, "What brings you out my way this early?"

Decker grinned, "Well, I'd heard tell that I might have a spot to worry about this year. Seems like you've got a real contender on your hands. Mind if I get a look?"

Clarence sniffed, sure that he'd heard all kinds of things. Clarence was sure he'd seen pictures and heard gossip, but in the end, Decker decided that he really wanted a look at this miraculous pumpkin. As sure as Decker was, Clarence was just as sure that he didn't want him to see his pumpkin.

Maybe it was jealousy, maybe it was mean-spiritedness, but he felt like it might be something else.

Clarence felt pretty sure the pumpkin didn't want Decker to see it.

"Sorry, David, but if you want to see my pumpkin, then you'll have to wait till the contest."

Clarence swung the door closed then, the conversation at an end, just like the pleasantries, and found the tip of one of those rundown boots blocking the way.

"Come on now," Decker drawled, "Just a peak? Hell, you've let half the town see it, so what's the harm in letting me have a gander?"

"I said no, David." Clarence said, his voice a little harder than he strictly meant it to be, "You can see it in three weeks when it's got a blue ribbon attached to it."

He moved his foot then, allowing Clarence to close the door, but when he nodded his head and showed him his grin again, Clarence knew it wasn't the genial smile he'd seen before.

"Suit yourself then. I'm sure I'll see it in due time."

He was right, of course, but the seeing would prove to be Decker's undoing.

He got his look three nights later.

Clarence stiffened when he heard the sound of someone cursing softly.

He was in bed, his wife snoring peacefully beside him. He had been unable to sleep, his eyes making a map of the dark topography of the ceiling, when he heard the noise from the yard. It could have been the wind, but he knew it wasn't. Clarence felt himself getting out of bed and walking down the hall as he made his way into the kitchen. He moved around the dark table and stood in the screen door as he gazed at the shadowy east field. It was late, midnight by the clock on the stove, and there should have been no way for Clarence to see anyone in the field at all. Standing in the dark kitchen, though, he became very sure that he could see someone walking into the field, carrying something with a long handle.

Clarence sleep walked from the house, silent as a ghost, and though the October wind sent goosebumps up his bare legs, he hardly noticed. As he passed by the woodpile, his hand clambered out to wrap around the old, splintery ax that sat buried in the ancient stump. As he approached, Clarence saw the person staring at the pumpkins, staring at Fritz, and in the moonlight, it was easy to see them transfixed by the silhouette of the swollen gourd. They stood stock-still, contemplating the thing for nearly a minute, and Clarence was less than thirty feet away when they raised the tool and swung it down into the pumpkin with a wet, meaty thunk.

Clarence screamed in anguish as he ran, bare feet slapping the earth as he churned up the ground. The person must have heard him because they turned mid-swing. In the moonlight, Clarence failed to register the round crowned hat and the face full of white, snarling teeth. In his rage, it didn't matter who it was. They had hurt his pumpkin, and now he would end them. He buried the ax in their chest, blade bitting into the wood of the hoe which they tried to use to block the swing, and as the wood splintered, he saw the blood splash across his undershirt.

David Decker looked at him with stunned and unbelieving eyes, but those eyes didn't fill with fear until something wrapped around his ankle.

His blood had fallen on the ground between them, and even now, the earth was drinking it greedily. He turned drunkenly, ax still buried in his chest, and as he did, he fell to the ground as the blood began to bubble from his lips. The red fell on the face of that unholy gourd, and Clarence saw it grow and writhe before his very eyes. Its vines twined around him, long stalks wrapping about him like the coils of some monstrous snake, and all at once, the earth began to writhe and churn as its roots came up to join its tendrils. In his terror, David struggled. His hands lashed out feebly with the broken hoe as he was drug beneath the soil. Clarence watched as he disappeared into the earth and seemed to come back to himself as his rival disappeared. He felt his knees unhinge all at once and was knee bound on the soil. As the roots began to slide over him as well, his mind slipped away. As the shadow of the Blood Pumpkin fell across him, now six or seven feet tall and five or six feet wide, he could hear it growing and groaning. It grew with a sound like thin trees in a high wind, and as Clarence blacked out, he never expected to have another thought on God's green earth besides that last.

He thought that maybe he had finally made his sacrifice and that this pumpkin would take him into the earth as its next meal.

It might have been kinder if it had.

Clarence awoke in the field with his wife standing over him.

The pumpkin, that seven-foot-tall behemoth of orange skin and green vines, towered over them both.

His shirt was clean, the ground was undisturbed, and all signs pointed to the night's events being just a dream.

Except for the broken hoe and the ugly little scar on the left side of Fritz where the tool had bitten into him.

David Decker was never seen again. The sheriff found his truck not far from the farm, and he came by one afternoon to ask Clarence some questions. The old sheriff sat at the table as his wife sat out lunch, tipping his cigarette ash into a saucer as Mrs. Clarence shot him dark looks as he stank up her kitchen. He asked all the expected questions. Had he seen him, and had he been here, and did Clarence know anything about his disappearance? Clarence told him no. He told him that he had seen Decker yesterday, but he had left and gone where ever it was he had returned to. Clarence couldn't very well tell him that one of his pumpkins had eaten Decker up and stay out of the nuthouse. The sheriff made some notes but ultimately dumped his ash into the garbage can and took his leave. He said the visit was just a courtesy anyway and that they wouldn't keep Clarence from his harvest.

The harvest that year was tremendous. The Blood Pumpkin wasn't the only thing that had benefited from David's sacrifice, and the yield that year was so great that Clarence could have bought his own stand without the money from winning the contest. That hardly mattered to him, though. Nothing really mattered at this point.

By that time, Clarence didn't care about anything but the Pumpkin and keeping it happy.

October fifteenth, five days before the contest, he began to notice a change in Fritz. Though still connected to the ground and still seven feet tall, it was beginning to take on a definite sag. It was waxy looking, possessed of an over-ripened look to it, and Clarence had serious doubts that it would make it to the fair. His blood would no longer sustain it, and whatever it had gotten from David was gone now. It appeared another sacrifice was required, but Clarence did not have the strength to catch its food for it. The pumpkin was his obsession, but he did not have the resolve to feed his neighbors to it.

He was sitting at the kitchen table one morning, trying to figure out what to do, when providence provided.

He wasn't willing to lure victims for his monstrous pumpkin, but he couldn't stand the idea that it would be lost so soon. To have come so far and stumble at the finish line was unthinkable, but to give the gourd the sacrifice it desired was equally barbaric. Clarence had no clue what to do, and even from here, he could see the pumpkin waning. It had grown so large that he could see it from almost any place that overlooked the backyard, and the sight of it was awe-inspiring. Had there ever been such a pumpkin as his? Had anyone ever grown a pumpkin so grand? And now he was just going to let it die?

He was weighing his options when the knock came at the door.

Clarence shuffled numbly to the door, and to his surprise, he found Reggy standing on his front porch, wiping sweat from his brow and smiling hugely.

Reggy; the only one left in town who hadn't come to see the pumpkin.

"Thought it was time that I came by for a look. They say in town that this pumpkin is something to see."

Clarence nodded, a wad of cotton resting in his throat as an opportunity presented itself before his very eyes.

His wife was out visiting a sick friend.

The usual crowds had dissipated for now, and this was the first day in weeks he hadn't had to play tour guide.

It was just Reggy and Clarence, and he wanted to see the pumpkin, the one he'd heard so much about around the stand.

Reggy had walked from his farm a few blocks away.

He had probably told no one where he was going.

Clarence offered him a glass of tea as they walked through the kitchen, and then he took him to the east field so he could marvel at the pumpkin.

As he goped in disbelief, Clarence slipped his hand into his pocket.

"This is wild! Grandad said they were big, but this is huge."

Clarence wrapped a hand around the buck knife he'd used to feed it his own blood.

"Even if Decker hadn't disappeared, I'm pretty sure that not even he would be able to grow anything big enough to compete with this."

Reggy had his back to him and thus didn't see the knife slide out.

"What have you been feeding this thing? Grandad said it took a sacrifice; you must have spent a lot of time out here."

He was so lost in his own rambling that he didn't hear the metallic click as the knife came open.

"Unless you've been making actual sacrifices out here in your east field." He said, jokingly, "What's the secret, buddy? Virgins blood? Goats? A little full moon…."

He stopped talking when the knife slipped into the side of his neck.

Stopped talking and started gurgling.

The ground accepted him, and when his wife got home from her friend's house, the pumpkin was twelve feet tall.

A week later, the judges came to Clarence's house to see Fritz the Behemoth.

Clarence won the contest, hands down. It wasn't even a contest. The judges couldn't find a pumpkin even half as large as his, and when Mrs. Clarence came for her yearly sacrifice for the pie contest, he gave her the other three instead. She seemed disappointed. Perhaps she had noticed what a mania this pumpkin had become for her husband, but she took them anyway and won the pie contest that year with the tastiest pie the judges had ever had. As she left the field, her arms laden with pumpkins, Clarence first heard the slithery voice of the serpent as it offered its apple. The voice was autumn wind and winter's promise, but he had heard it before, hadn't I? It was the voice that tells the farmer that he can squeeze in one more crop before the winter, the voice that tells the prideful that it won't be that cold tonight, so there's no need to bring the livestock in. It's the voice of creeping winter that's hungry for its sacrifice.

The voice told Clarence that if he gave the field his wife, his fame would be eternal.

On that day, Clarence turned away from it.

On that day, he was strong.

* * * * *

The sounds of laughing children and swaying scarecrows filled the air as the plastic flags snapped in the breeze. The annual pumpkin patch was something that Clarence looked forward to with great anticipation, and this year he had a prize-winning pumpkin to display amongst the others. He had always played second fiddle to David Decker and his patch, but this year, Clarence was the star of the show.

It appeared there was a new local celebrity this year, though Clarence suspected that it was the gargantuan that sat behind the little fence in the patch.

Clarence had arrayed the smaller pumpkins for sale, and even Hercules sat amongst them since he'd been spared the pie. The people milled about the patch, looking in awe at Fritz the Behemoth as they made their choices. Clarence was at the card table where they sat the cash box, his wife playing the dutiful hostess out in the field.

From his vantage point behind the table, Clarence saw the kid when he stepped a little too close to the massive pumpkin.

He wanted to say something to him, tell the kid to back up, but he hesitated as he watched him waddle closer. Look at the kid. He was a porker. He was a hefty kid from a family of hefty adults, and he had stopped to stare at the pumpkin as he held one of its smaller cousins in his pudgy hands. All at once, he shifted the pumpkin under his arm and stepped towards the mountainous gourd with a hand outstretched to touch it. Clarence started to say something, should have stopped the kid before he could get any closer, but as Clarence started to raise his voice to warn him, he heard the voice of the serpent again asking him to stand aside, commanding him to stand aside.

The mustached man cleared his throat at Clarence, and Clarence sat back down. He reached for the man's money, his eyes still straying to the boy as he laid one fat pink starfish against the blood-red skin of the monster. He cast his eyes away, but even that didn't fully save him from witnessing the end.

The kid went into the ground without a sound, and when the pumpkin shattered on the ground next to its gargantuan cousin, no one was the wiser.

The police were called when his absence was noticed, and they searched the fields and the forest beyond for a week without finding a thing.

The boy's parents sat at the kitchen table, his mother crying into a square of silk as Clarence's wife poured tea and assured her he'd turn up. She had kept right on assuring her of it until nearly ten o'clock that first night. Clarence was lucky his wife was such a hostess because all he could do was sit, shell shocked, in a chair as she puttered about and made small talk. Everyone thought he was broken up about the kid, and in a way, they were right.

After all, it's not every day you watch a child get pulled under the soil while no one's looking.

* * * * *

Clarence saw the flashing lights from the inside of the tent as the fair raged outside. They had given him his own circus tent to draw in the crowds, and Clarence had no lack of people wanting to see his pumpkins. It wasn't every day you got to see a twenty-foot tall pumpkin, and he had been making the circuit for the better part of four months. People were always amazed that the pumpkin stayed so fresh, so alive, but Clarence knew the reason.

The best fertilizer always seemed to walk right through the flap of his tent, didn't it?

He won the contest the year after the kid had disappeared too. People said he had a knack for growing pumpkins, but, really, it was the same one. When it got eighteen feet tall and twelve feet wide, it started to attract tourists from farther than the local hollers. Some of them never made it back to wherever they were from either, but the wreckers never asked too many questions when they came to tow their cars. By that point, Clarence was numb to the sacrifices. The pumpkin ate, the pumpkin grew, and as the tourists began to pay to see it, Clarence found that he didn't have to be a farmer anymore. The pumpkin made his farm a natural stop for tourists on the road, and they never grumble too much about a few dollars here or there to see it.

That was how he had come to be on the road in this tent.

The man in the suit had offered him a startling amount of money if he'd go on the road with his gourd, and Clarence knew he'd be a fool if he didn't take him up on it.

They loaded it up on a flatbed trailer and took it to county fair after county fair so the whole state could see the World's Biggest Pumpkin.

They did it for five years, and in those five years, Clarence remembered hearing about a suspected serial kidnapper plaguing the state. They dubbed him the County Fair Kidnapper, and in five years, he abducted more than twenty children and five adults from State Fairs across the state. The state police even questioned Clarence, though not as a suspect. They wanted to see if he'd seen anything amiss, and he always told them no. He hardly had a choice, after all. If he'd suddenly told them that his prize-winning pumpkin was eating people at an alarming rate, they'd have slapped him in a loonie bin. Clarence knew he wasn't blameless in this whole affair, but the pumpkin was good for his family.

The pumpkin was good for the town, after all.

In truth, the massive pumpkin in Clarence's east field was the only thing that kept the town from being just another cow flop midwest nothing. The pumpkin brought in the crowds, and the crowds stopped in at the cafe' to have a bite. They stopped at the gas station for gas and road snacks. They stopped at the farmer's market to buy fresh produce. They spread their money up and down the street from May till November, and the town always had a corn maze or a fair of some sort to draw them away from the pumpkin and back into the town proper. At one point, Clarence's face and a picture of the pumpkin were even on the town sign when you drove over the city limits. "Come see the world's biggest pumpkin," it stated in bold black letters, and at one point, you could damn near see the thing from the city outskirts.

In its hay day, it towered up nearly thirty feet high and was wider than the farmhouse.

By this point, Clarence was blind to its feedings for the most part. Hell, by that point, Clarence was complicit in the murders. He had killed two for Fritz already and was responsible for all the rest as far as he was concerned. He had turned aside, hadn't he? He was content to sit in his lawn chair out by the fence and charge people for the opportunity to stand at the base of the giant and feel small in the shadow of a pumpkin. Unfortunately, Clarence had made the same mistake that many men in his position often make. He had lived in the shadow of the dragon for so long that he believed he was safe, that his family was safe. It depended on him, after all, and he believed that he and his family were safe from its slithering grasp.

Even after five years, he didn't really grasp its slyness, its cunning, until it finally took someone he couldn't turn away from.

It happened suddenly, but the horror of it would never leave him, no matter how long he lived.

* * * * *

He was standing in the back door, watching her work in the garden. He was trying to ignore the creeping voice as it told him it had to feed. She was out in the field, tending some vegetables in the space he no longer used, and as he watched her, he began to wonder if he might resist this evil and win free. Clarence had been this pumpkin's puppet for nearly eight years, eight long years of dragging its burden around his neck, and his heart was growing heavy with the burden of that sin. As he watched her in her purity and love, he began to think that he might escape this evil thing and be the man he once was. They could leave, just pack their things and go. They could leave this cursed earth behind them as they set out to start anew somewhere else. She had noticed something was off, likely noticed from the start that something was off, but she was dutiful, she was obedient, and she loved him more than he could ever love her.

He would never have let her get near that field again if he had.

She was coming in, carrying a basket of produce, and he would always remember the way she smiled when she saw him. Her face, that old-young face of hers, stretched into a smile, and she raised her hand to wave. Clarence had raised his hand, had it half-cocked for a wave of his own, but it died on his wrist when she dropped into the earth. Dropped, dropped was the right word. She didn't sink. She wasn't pulled. It was as though a hole opened up and swallowed her in one gulp. Her basket fell, tumbling vegetables across the dirt, and it was all the evidence that existed that she had been there at all.

Clarence hitched in his breath as he stared at those rolling vegetables, the scream of rage and pain nearly ripping his throat apart as it rocketed into the world.

It laughed at him as he dug up the field.

Clarence dug it up in furious crumping sweeps of the shovel, but he never found a trace of her.

He stayed out there digging until well past moonrise, with only Fritz for company.

She was the last sacrifice he was a part of.

She was the last meat that Fritz didn't have to catch for himself.

That was also the last time Clarence tried to square up with the terrible giant.

It was black dark when he went inside, but it was past midnight when he stood in the shadow of the pumpkin again. He was drunk, weaving, and bleary, and in his hand was a tin holder with a rag in the neck. Clarence had concocted this plan as he crawled head first into a jug of corn whiskey, and it was the best plan he could think of.

The coal oil would burn hot and bright, and when he threw it on the pumpkin, it caught immediately.

He sat back and watched as the flames ate the fuel, but the pumpkin did nothing but laugh at his futile effort.

The slithering voice told him that he couldn't kill it that easily.

It told him that the two were stuck together now, and there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it.

It had been wrong on the last account, or so Clarence hoped.

* * * * *

He set up a fence after that and never let the tourists get close again. They could pay their money and observe from a distance, but no one was allowed to go into the field again. It cawed at him as Clarence sat in his chair by the fence. It said this was a useless gesture, that it couldn't stop him if it wanted them, but he ignored it.

He kept his vigil, kept his silence, and as the two lived, the town shriveled around them.

It had gotten too powerful, too evil to be contained, and those who spent time close to it became susceptible to its voice.

They came in the night, and they died silently in the field as they were drawn into the earth. The sheriff, the owner of the feed store, the girl who served the coffee at the dinner, they all came to the field to give their lives to the gourd. Clarence tried to stop them, but no matter what he tried or how he fought, they all came to the gourd and gave it their life's blood.

The town sat deserted, a ghost town in a country full of such towns, and the only thing to see was Fritz.

Fritz the World's Oldest Pumpkin.

They are both shriveled now, a couple of relics from a bygone age, and those who come to see them usually say how they saw Big Fritz when they were kids. Clarence still keeps his vigil, but the pumpkin is a lot more manageable now. He sits in a glass case, small and red and angry, and those who stand around looking too long always come away with headaches. For five dollars, you can get your selfie and have a pamphlet on the ninth wonder of the world, but the crowds have mostly gone now. He's a shriveled old thing, small as he was before Clarence dropped his blood on him, but if you spend too long in his company, you can start to hear his creaky old voice. You can start to feel his influence in your head.

Spend too much time around him, and one night he might just draw you into the field to begin the cycle again