The Great Pumpkin

A Peanuts, HP Lovecraft mashup

Linus took a thin, tattered scrap of blue felt from his pocket and rubbed it absently between his fingers and thumb. He leaned back into the camp chair he’d brought with him and stared up at the cold, disconsolate stars. In years past he would’ve waited on his feet, pacing and soliloquizing, daring it to show up. But he couldn’t muster that kind of energy this year. It was his forty-first year of watch.

For awhile, when they were still children, his sister and friends had come with him each year. Mostly to taunt him in his inevitable embarrassment. But now, well, Lucy had cancer, Chuck worked two jobs, and Sally- he wasn’t supposed to dwell on Sally. Linus cleared his throat and sat up, turning to grab the bag he’d brought with him. Something small scurried away at this movement, rustling the dying pumpkin vines. He took a thermos of hot coffee and a book from his bag. The flashlight he’d brought with him clipped to the back of the camp chair for easy reading. An LED lantern sat at his feet. He’d lit a fire one year, and had quickly learned that farmers don’t like flames anywhere near their dry fall harvests.

The book was an old and worn leather-bound volume held together with a rubber band. Linus took a few sips of coffee and opened it, his fingers running down the columns of strange script he’d somehow understood instantly as a child. No one else he’d shown it to could read it, and he’d shown it to a lot of scholars over the years. They’d all begged him to part with it, let them study it further, and though he dearly wished he could, he never had.

It was his curse.

His burden. None could bear it but Linus, who had found the unfortunate book in the woods one day as a child. He still carried around a piece of his childhood blankie to soothe away the horrors the book held inside. The nightmares he was used to by now. The dread, the anxiety, the panic attacks, they were just a part of his life. Part of being Linus.

He drank more coffee and leafed through the book until he got to the page he was looking for. On it was a drawing of a floating jack-‘o-lantern with a light, illustrated in sickly yellow-green, illuminating a mouth crammed with sharp teeth and big oval eyes. Its vines stretched out like long tentacles, each one was tipped in a sharp hook and seemed to thrash across the field. Below the monster were the corpses people and animals, blood flowed from their cracked skulls in crimson rivulets through the withered pumpkin patch. It wasn’t illustrated, but Linus saw it often enough in his nightmares to know that the blood would feed the other pumpkins in the field, awaken them. And the horror would spread. To the side of the picture was the caption, written in the same strange, unknown language as the rest of the book:

Behold! The Great Pumpkin
On Hallowe’en his terrors begin
Ruin and ravage, death and blight
Until a brave one snuffs his candle light

Though the book was filled with horrors, torture devices, monsters, plagues, scenes depicting massive wars with thousands of dead, only this one rhyme held an implicit threat. Everything else in the book was written about with an almost academic detachment. Possibilities, not probabilities. Or historical anomalies already dealt with by others doomed to be heroes. Among the beasts with long claws and soft footfalls, the witches, the famines, the diseases that had already been conquered and left to history, was this Great Pumpkin and its future threat of horror and violence. Linus’ Monster.

Linus rubbed his eyes and checked his phone, three AM. He took another swig of coffee and surveyed the darkness. Not that there was much to look at. Just a field of withered vines and plump, seemingly non-sentient pumpkins. Rustling to his right made him jump. A rat. He held up his lantern, nothing moved. A pause, then he heard it again behind him, he turned. The lantern swayed in his grip, casting wavering light over the dark pumpkin patch.

“Fudging rodents.” Linus watched his breath curl into the night. Something was moving in front of him, just beyond the lantern’s arc. A low mound came creeping toward him through the dark. Linus waited until he could see it, The Great Pumpkin. It was huge, nearly as tall as him. Its vines, snaking across the ground beneath, him began to writhe and twist. The fat orange pumpkins they held shook and bumped along the ground. Linus stood still, a strange energy crackled around him with the sound of the contorting vines. A single wavering light appeared in the center of the mound, glowing a sickly green. The color of ill-gotten conquest, of ancient evil. Linus’ eyes glinted in his lantern light. It was finally time. The moment he’d been waiting for. His faithful observance over all these years had not been in vain. He’d believed, he’d believed when no one else had and it had finally come time conquer this demon.

“Until a brave one snuffs his candle light,” Linus whispered. He set the lantern down and picked up the machete he’d brought. The shape in front of him drew closer. Vines rippled out at him, he slashed with the blade, deftly severing their hooks. The Great Pumpkin opened its mouth and screeched, exposing the flickering flame inside its cavernous head. Linus heard dry rattling all around him as vines began to coil closer. He gripped his machete and steeled his nerves, slashing vines as he moved to meet the monster. He quickly patted his pocket for the secret weapon he’d brought. It was mistake. A vine wrapped around his leg while his attention was elsewhere, its hook digging into his calf. Linus growled and slashed the vine in two. When he looked up, The Great Pumpkin was upon him. Slick strings of pumpkin guts glistened from behind razor sharp teeth as it grinned.

It spoke in a sibilant croak, in a language only Linus understood.

“You have waited long.”

Linus shoved his hand in his pocket. “No one has been more faithful than I,” he said, pulling a small device free from the fabric. His leg ached and he could feel the wet torrent of blood filling his shoe.

“You will be a sacrifice, a gift to give me strength.”

“Actually I’m afraid I can’t let that happen.” Linus whipped his hand up, pressing a button on the device as he did. It’s blades whirred to life, releasing a strong torrent of air. The Great Pumpkin’s light guttered in the air flow. It roared. Linus shoved the small, personal fan closer to the creature’s mouth. The light went out. The Great Pumpkin slumped to the field. Linus let out a barking laugh. And then staggered. He’d lost a lot of blood. But he’d done it. The Great Pumpkin, was no more! He snapped a picture with his phone, as the flash illuminated the creature’s corpse, he saw that it looked just like any other pumpkin, no face, no flame.

“I saved the world and no one will ever believe me!” He screamed into the dark, bitter night, before staggering back to his truck.

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