EQMM 2007-09-10 by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

Author:Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine [Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

A Cozy for the Jack-o’-lanterns

by James Powell

© 2007 by James Powell

Author of some 150 short stories of a mysterious and humorous sort, James Powell is one of our most valued contributors. Elements of fantasy occur in his tales, but always in the context of a mystery — often, as here, a whodunit. His stories have appeared in Best Detective Stories of the Year and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.

❖

When she’d gouged out their eyes, Kate O’Lantern dropped the peeled potatoes into the water in the iron pot. They settled on the bottom, staring up at her like the ghosts of pumpkin children. Kate saw her own reflection, too, her hollowed-out head worn witch-wise with the stem pointing forward above the saddest of smiles. She began to cry again and turned away to mourn for her murdered husband.

The small basement window over the sink framed the Halloween night. It was always Halloween in Shocksville out Gourd County way. Pumpkins grinned from every porch, all cats were black, belfries scattered their bats across the yellow moon, and the town’s young witches flew among them, using their binder-twined corn-sheaf bodies for broomsticks. Once Kate had flown up there, too, before Jack, her scarecrow husband, took her to their wedding bed. And now he was dead.

An hour ago she’d brought mulled cider up to his third-floor office: a mug for Jack, another for Sam Spook, the private eye and pest exterminator. (Most townies held two jobs. Kate was witch and boardinghouse keeper. Jack was scarecrow and taught high school history.)

Alarmed by the locked door and the smell of burnt pumpkin juice through the open transom, Kate used her key to get in. She found Jack lying across the desk, his pumpkin head broken into large pieces, the candle stub inside extinguished but still warm. Papers burned in the fireplace.

In tears, she phoned the town constable and went back down to buzz him in. (All Shocksville had installed these buzzers after a magic-spell overload crashed the witch-hazel hedgerow that kept the Outside out. The few minutes it was down allowed an aluminum-siding salesman who took a wrong exit off the freeway to find them. His going door-to-door terrorized many until the ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties who clerked at the local Things-That-Go-Bump-in-the-Night-R-Us store ran him off. Shocksville had been having terrible dreams ever since.)

Constable Hubbard arrived promptly. A tall many-sheaved young man with a badly carved face set low on a knobby dark-green head, he’d pinned his tin badge up high, perhaps in the hope people would mistake his steep forehead for a bobby helmet.

Kate led the way upstairs, explaining how she’d found Jack’s body and about his visitor. The O’Lanterns had run into Sam Spook, all trenchcoat and fedora, at that morning’s walkabout, when the whole town turned out to visit and chat while their corn sheaves swept the sidewalks clean. Jack had asked him to look into their bat problem. But Spook said he was too busy hunting the Phantom Sapsucker.

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