Halloween Haunts: Setting the Stage & the Brown County Jack-o-Lantern
by K.A. Schultz
It is not terribly late, but the sun is about to set, its last lighted dregs trickling out from beneath the gathering wall of clouds. The rays tint the air a pinkish gray, imbuing the autumnal dusk, the wet leaves, and the shiny sidewalks with a quick-fading warmth. From my second-floor apartment, I see costumed children making their way down the block; the youngest ones have already finished with their rounds. I see patches of candle glow on porches and in windows below, lopsided grins and sinister eyes carved less to illuminate some welcoming path than to simply announce, The goods are here, kids. It’s all so sweet, so quaint, so mundane.
There is a knock on the door, followed by a muffled, “Trick or Treat!” from young voices aimed against the barricade of my locked front door. I startle, but recover instantly, assured they cannot possibly know I am inside. I make my way, slowly and as quietly as possible, to the vestibule so I can unplug the nightlight, to make sure there is not one bit of light to suggest someone might be inside and willing to participate in the superficial largesse of the evening.
After a second attempt by the kids, this time delivered as a cluster of small-fisted raps on the door, there is silence. Good. They’ve left. Hopefully, they will all soon be done with their night, and no one will be around to see me exit the building. No doubt the children, eager to make good on their quest, have hurried off to sweeter addresses. They have no time to waste, for the city- sanctioned trick or treat hours are almost over.
***
The sidewalks and street below have grown quiet. Here and there, porches have gone dark. A lone jack-o-lantern glances up at me from across the street. He won’t tell. A group of teen-agers saunter along the sidewalk, arms linked, passing below my window. I watch them, appreciating their tender forms. One lugs a pillowcase full of what one would assume is Halloween candy. I imagine a bottle of something illicit is stashed in there as well. The kids laugh and stumble, joking amongst themselves as they exit the scene, disappearing behind the low hanging branches of the oak trees that line the street. The heavy canopy bars my view of most the block, thanks to the stubborn hold of the leaves, which always hang on far longer into the winter than they should. I regard them idly as well, at the fickle sturdiness they embody, for it is only a matter of weeks when the whip of numbing winter winds will finally strip them of their last bite on life.
***
I have set the stage for today’s HWA Halloween Haunts blogpost with a set of paragraphs, intended to raise the curtain on yet another stage, namely, my short story entitled, “Indulgences,” from my 2022 horror story collection NEITHERIUM. “Indulgences” is, interestingly, the only short story I have ever written, to take place on Halloween night.
But what a beloved stage it is! Best set, I think, with a repertoire of classic descriptives, invoked time and again in horror and speculative fiction, where it is, after all, about looking eyes-wide-open into the shadows. For me, the visuality of such a scene is centered on a rather precise time of day, what in German has its own word, Dämmerstündchen, which means “dusk’s small/brief hour.” Where our literart genre is concerned, it is the diorama we craft, in which the sun will have just set, which places one into that day-night transitionality, a heightened atmospheric setting that suggests, “anything can happen.” It also allows for the soft glow of autumn-imbued leaves to do their swansong thing – residual colors juxtaposed against myriad shades of gray, something quite darkly beautiful. Add to that a smattering of rain to lend a slight, damp chill: air ripe for an unbidden bout of the shivers, for spirits and ghosts, any kind of a diminished sense of sureness and security. This does also include one rather magical, all-ages, all-participant component, which is when jack-o-lanterns quite literally “come to life.” It’s that moment when it’s finally dark enough outside, that the pithy flame of a votive candle or tealight suddenly blooms with enough luminous power to set fire to the hollowed-out, facial features of all the carved pumpkins out there, seated on their porch railings, their front doorsteps, their windowsills.
Gold-flickering triangle eyes, irregular noses, and grinning sawtooth mouths, seemingly afloat, here, there, everywhere. What an iconic image of delight! And for us horror fans and writers, it’s fodder as fundamental and good-for-us as is the basic food group to which these amazing fruits (yes, fruits) belong.
***
As such, I’d like to share a little story about a real pumpkin, a jack-o-lantern:
We raised our daughter camping and spent several a fall breaks in southern Indiana amidst the rolling, wooded hills of the Brown County State Park. Halloween was a huge deal there, and campers were encouraged to decorate their sites. One year, we happened to select a massive, ivory-white-skinned pumpkin from a roadside stand for our campsite jack-o-lantern. Back at the campgrounds, while carving the pumpkin, we noticed how fragrant the rind was, and were compelled to taste it. The fresh, crisp pumpkin was as sweet and mild as cantaloupe. Amazing! This jack-o-lantern served us wonderfully well for the remainder of our week at the park. We subsequently brought him back home to stand sentry at our house on Halloween night. The jack-o-lantern stayed firm and fresh for the longest time – what with its glowing, alabaster skin and its perfect and huge, round form, this pumpkin was an uncannily wonderful product of Nature. I saved many of its seeds, which I generally did for purposes of roasting, salting, and snacking. These seeds, however, I did not prep for food. I saved them instead as garden seeds. It so happened on that Halloween, a parent commented on how beautiful our pumpkin was. I told her of its origins and gave her a few of the seeds. The following Halloween, she returned with her kids to our house for trick or treat, and told me she had indeed planted those seeds and had grown their own pumpkin! Isn’t that cool?
Fast forward about a dozen years, long after we had moved from that house to a different home, this one located in the woods where there was, is, neither the requisite sunlight hours nor flat terrain to plant any kind of garden, and I find myself just a few months ago, chatting with a gal at a family get-together in Brookings, South Dakota. She happens to be from a family known all over the region as the pre-eminent pumpkin growers. My husband remembers buying pumpkins at their family’s stand when he was a child. I tell her about our Brown County pumpkin, and about the seeds, and we agree, that I will deliver some of the seeds to her for her to plant at their farm next spring.
So it is, as of now, after all these years, my plan and my hope to eventually hold in my hands the progeny of this special pumpkin from all those years ago. Would I be calling this a Nashville Jack? An Indiana Jack? Jack Brown? I promise, if this pumpkin project comes to pass, I will post on it!
Here is a photo of “Jack,” seated upon his tree-stump throne at our campsite at the Brown County State Park, taken
October 27, 2012.
Back to “Indulgences” and spook-potential stages set with the written word: while the excerpt sets just that kind of mood, where such as a glowering jack-o-lantern helps launch its subsequent narrative, this short story isn’t really about Halloween at all, though it relies 100% on its rich, age-old realm of impressions. Rather, it is about a killer, a slasher, who sets about ushering in for himself a most macabre end-of-life, which is both reflective of and reactive against what he has done, for which he now wishes to “pay,” in hopes of some ideation of salvation. And his penance – is it retribution, and against whom? You will have to read the story to see what happens. I tried to make it as macabre and elegant as I could…
If you would like to read “Indulgences,” I have posted the story to a webpage labeled “Indulgences” at www.butterflybroth.com. Click here to read it, or access the page via the QR code below. Enjoy and Happy Halloween!
