Leave the Jack-o-Lanterns Alone

My friends and I used to love causing mischief on Devil’s Night. We’d do basic teen stuff – tp trees, throw eggs at windows, hit mailboxes with baseball bats, and of course, smash jack-o-lanterns. I suppose we thought it was all just some harmless fun; we didn’t really consider how it impacted the victims – kids who woke up to find their carvings destroyed, parents who had to spend hours finding all the egg stains on their houses, elderly couples forced to pay someone to get all the toilet paper down from their trees. In our minds, if we didn’t see the harm, it didn’t exist. We just never thought about it—we should have, though.

Last year, we all crammed into my friend Liam’s clunker of a car and set off for our usual ritual. Greg passed around a crudely wrapped joint, and Ryan handed me a bottle of Screech rum.

My face scrunched up, “Can’t you steal anything better?” I asked, but I still took a swig before shaking my head and sticking my tongue out in a theatrical show of how much I disliked the taste.

“What, you don’t like the taste of Newfoundland?” Ryan said, feigning offence. “You’ll never be a real Newfie if you can’t handle your Screech.”

“You know what? Deal!” I replied with a laugh. I’d never been to Newfoundland anyway, though I really had no right to complain about the liquor selection considering I was underage and broke, so I dulled the taste of the rum with a hit off the joint.

Now, obviously, if you’re going to do pranks, you need to drive somewhere no one recognizes you. That’s like rule #1. I fully admit we were idiots, but we weren’t completely brainless – well, not yet anyway. So, we drove down backroads for over an hour, windows down, crisp autumn air on our faces, hooting and hollering the whole way, before we picked our first targets. We decided on some isolated farmhouses out in the countryside. In retrospect, that was probably a dumb idea – most farmers have a rifle, don’t they? – but like I said, we were idiots.

We tp’ed one house, then drove fifteen minutes, egged another, and so on. We were having a blast when we saw a little red-brick bungalow surrounded by an army of at least three dozen jack-o-lanterns. The pumpkins were adorned with a wide array of designs; some had intricate cutouts that looked like an artist had spent hours on them, while others had crude faces that appeared to have been done by a toddler. When Liam slowed down the car and my friends hopped out, I understood what was on the agenda. We took out our baseball bats and got ready to turn those pumpkins to mush. It was right then and there that the Screech and the weed hit me hard, churning my stomach.
“Hey guys, I think I’m going to be sick,” I said, and sure enough, my supper was soon climbing up my throat and out of my mouth.

“Gross,” Liam said, scrunching up his nose in disgust before turning his attention to a large pumpkin with a portrait of Elvira on it. He raised his bat above his head and smashed it down hard, leaving behind a mash of orange pulp.

“You okay, man?” Ryan asked with more concern as he swung a pumpkin with a smiley face into a nearby oak tree. “…cause we can drive you home if you’re not.”

Liam groaned and seemed ready to protest, but after a stern look from Ryan, he agreed, “Yeah, I guess we can.”

“No, no!” I replied, waiving away the thought even as I felt my stomach preparing to eject more of its contents. “You guys have fun; I’ll just stay here.”

And so, I stood there, leaning over tufts of grass as I held my stomach with one hand and propped against Liam’s car with the other. All the while, my friends went to town on the glowing gourds.

A few minutes after puking up the entire contents of my stomach, I felt well enough to grab my own bat. I hovered it over a pumpkin with a ghost carved into it, preparing to strike.

Before I could bring my wooden weapon down, the charcoal gray door of the house opened with a loud creak. The inside of the house was dimly lit, but we could see what appeared to be a small child in a red-and-yellow clown costume standing in the doorway, looking at us, his features hidden in shadow.

“Shit!” Ryan yelled, already sprinting for the car, “We gotta go.”

Liam grabbed his keys out of his pocket, and Greg, Ryan, and I all hopped into the back seats so fast that we ended up stacking on each other like logs in a cabin. Liam peeled off down the road before we could even shut the door, leaving the smell of burnt rubber and a trail of tire marks behind us.

At first, we worried the cops might have been called—had anyone seen our car? There was no way that such a young child could see our license plate, let alone remember it, right?

After a few moments or nervous silence, Greg suddenly burst out laughing. Soon we were all giggling hysterically, chuckling so hard that tears rolled down our faces. The thrill of getting away with our petty crime was more intoxicating than even the weed or booze was.

Liam wiped his eyes and declared, “You guys all looked so dumb!” before mimicking what our faces supposedly looked like. He turned up the music. Michael Jackson’s Thriller burst through the car and out into the night.

“So? You look dumb all the time!” Ryan joked back as we shoved each other playfully before trying to sort ourselves out.
“Yeah, well…” Liam lost his train of thought as his eyes suddenly went wide. He only had time to scream out, “Holly fu…” before he swerved the car into a tailspin. Something collided with the car door nearest my head, smashing it shut against my skull. The blow felt like a large boulder had been dropped on me. Before I blacked out, I heard something thudding over the roof of the car and looked back to see what I thought was a brightly coloured sack of potatoes on the road behind us, then glanced forward just in time to see the front bumper slamming into an old pine tree.

When I woke up, my head was throbbing like a chainsaw had been run through it. The air was hazy and smelled of burning starch. Everything was silent. I looked around to see my friends coming to all around me. Liam’s face was buried in an airbag, but we were all alive.

Now, if we had any intelligence, we would have stayed in the car. I mean, we could have had spinal injuries or something. I for sure had a concussion. But like I already said, we weren’t smart, so we all got out and walked onto the road, holding our cell phones up in search of a signal. We couldn’t find any.
Greg was the first one to look back at what we’d hit. “Oh shit!” he cried with a despair in his voice like I’d never heard before. “Oh shit! Oh shit! Oh shit!”

I turned to look at the source of Greg’s distress. The thing on the road, the thing we hit – it wasn’t a sack of potatoes. It was a child, maybe preschool age, wearing a bright red-and-yellow clown costume, just like the one we’d seen the kid at the brick house wearing. It couldn’t possibly be the same kid, though, by that time we’d driven a good quarter mile down the road from that house.

The kid we hit had orange hair; his face was on the asphalt, hidden from view. A baseball bat lay limply beside him. He wasn’t moving.

“Fuck!” Liam yelled, tearing at his hair. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

“What the hell do we do?” Greg asked, looking around as if desperately hoping one of us had a plan.

None of us had any clue.

After a few seconds of screaming at each other, pacing, crying, and generally freaking out, Ryan went to turn the kid over.
“Are you sure you should touch him, man?” Greg asked tentatively.
“I’m just going to make sure he’s alive!” Ryan snapped back. We all knew what Ryan meant was “I’m hoping he’ll be alive”, because that kid looked dead as hell. Slowly, he rolled the kid until the distant streetlights illuminated his face.

“Oh shit!” Ryan cried as he fell backwards and crawled away from the body, his face pale as the moon.
I didn’t ask Ryan what he saw. I assumed it was gore beyond my comprehension – maybe the kid’s face had been entirely scraped off against the road or dented in or something - but soon enough I’d learn for myself.
To our astonishment, the kid got to his feet with the same limber clumsiness of a child getting up from the floor after playing with toy trains. Most of us were giddy with relief, both that the kid was okay and that we wouldn’t be looking at manslaughter charges, but, to our confusion, Ryan kept screeching in terror.
The rest of our enthusiasm turned to dread when we saw the kid’s face. His eyes, nose, and mouth were all holes like…like a jack-o-lantern.

The kid grabbed the bat and slowly lumbered toward us.

Quivering with fear, we grabbed our own bats out of the car to use as self-defence weapons before sprinting into the nearby farmer’s field. As we got halfway across, pumpkin vines shot up around our feet, sliding like snakes, wrapping around our limbs and strapping us down to the damp earth.

The kid walked up to Liam first. He twirled his bat over my friend’s face, cocking his head side to side as if examining a bug. Before Liam could do anything but scream, we heard a crunchy WACK. Each time the weapon came down, the sound got – well, the best way I could describe it is “mushier.” It made my skin crawl and my stomach crawl. If I had anything left to puke, I’m sure I would have thrown up again.

I felt as though my heart was trying to escape out of my throat as I watched the kid walk up to Ryan next. WACK. Then Greg. WACK.

The kid came up to me last. My fear had become an animal gnawing through my insides, desperate to get out. If I could have torn through my own skin to run away, I would have. That’s the kind of fear I had, the kind where you would cut off your own leg to escape.

The kid’s bat was covered in the blood of my friends, just like their bats had been covered in pumpkin juices.
“Please,” I screamed, “don’t hurt me.”

The kid considered me, then inspected my bat. He looked at me with his hollow eyes and nodded. The vines released me as I watched him walk across the field until he disappeared into the darkness.

It took me a while to realize why he’d spared me, but as I reflected on that night, I eventually figured it out.

So, leave the jack-o-lanterns alone this Devil’s Night. They don’t like to be smashed.