Once, twice, three times the hammer descended, sending orange vegetable fragments flying everywhere. The spider's web and the silly luminescent skeleton were torn down, and then both promptly stamped into the dirt. The hooded, masked figure was about to smash the second grinning pumpkin when a dog started barking, and a moment later, an upstairs light clicked on...
Arthur Tompkins was what you would call an ordinary man. An unremarkable man in his mid. fifties. One of those people you see in the street but don't, almost as if they're invisible, because they are so ordinary and unremarkable. Arthur habitually wore a neat 'off the peg' two-piece, charcoal business suit bought from a respectable if boring high street clothing and food chain. You know the one; it once used to be considered slightly 'upmarket!'
Arthur worked in a bank, having done so for twenty-odd years and, remarkably, surviving all the branch and staffing cuts of the last decade as online banking denuded high streets of those once-seemingly permanent fixtures. Perhaps not surprisingly, Arthur was the ideal bank employee: quiet, loyal, unambitious, reliable, punctual, and eminently trustworthy. He was also dull, boring, and…well, SAD, a word female staff had used over the years when talking about him.
He'd accepted the enforced changes, moving whenever necessary with his aged mother, who'd been far less enthusiastic about such upheavals, but that hadn't disturbed Arthur's equanimity; even her death hadn't. After all, it was to be accepted as inevitable just as there were always those who'd default on their mortgages or exceed their overdrafts.
Death, war, famine, plague, whatever, Arthur was unperturbed, not that he'd been affected by such and probably wouldn't have been had he encountered such horrors. The last series of railway strikes had been a minor irritation, chipping away at his mania for punctuality. Otherwise, he remained quite unperturbed or untroubled by anything… except Halloween!
Arthur Tompkins hated and loathed Halloween with an almost tangible intensity. He even had a first disciplinary warning on his otherwise bland staff file after one unreasonable outburst and tirade that reduced one of his junior female colleagues to hysterical tears two branches back! An unwarranted, unexpected, foul-mouthed tirade that had surprised the entire bank at the time.
Arthur was all too conscious of that first and only written warning he'd received in the Area Manager's office, and such things weighed heavily in his neat but rigid, rule-bound mind. He still exploded but silently; he'd save such indignant fireworks for those lesser, non-working hours. Or likewise when he ventured forth into the Autumn night to do war upon 'that loathsome imported foreign practice' as he deemed it. The American invader!
It was the only time he allowed vile curse words to trip off his tongue as he sat chewing on his supper, usually a microwaved TV-style dinner, for boiling the kettle was about the extent of Arthur's culinary abilities, well, maybe cooking a couple of eggs and popping bread in the toaster, but not much more!
Every year, it was the same repetitive monologue. "Fucking American import! Bloody supermarkets, they started it. Corrupting decent kids with all their silly, cheap, rubbishy Chinese-made costumes and bloody pumpkins! Money-grubbing supermarkets and probably Yankee-owned. Whatever happened to playing conkers and bonfire night? That's what we had in my day: conkers and bonfire night, firework night. Good old British autumnal pastimes, none of this American rubbish. Hadn't even heard of fucking Halloween, and he'd never even seen a bloody pumpkin when he was a kid? Who the hell had back in those days? Bloody Yank import!"
Not quite true, but not far off. Halloween had been a virtual non-event in the UK until relatively recently, and Arthur was not alone among his generation in pointing the finger at the local supermarkets. Of course, the internet and global presence might also have played a significant role. No man is an island, and all that stuff!
Inevitably, to use that word again, Arthur's unreasonable hatred peaked in the early autumn as the date approached. The fact that it was technically associated with a religious event, being on the eve of the Western Christian feast of All Hallows' Day, meant nothing to Arthur. He wasn't religious, despite regular attendance at Sunday school at his mother's behest until he was fourteen. Sermons and so forth passed him by; his only interest was collecting the fortnightly stickers of saints or whatever his particular Church Sunday school doled out to the 'faithful' for regular attendance. Such gifts had ceased once he reached his fourteenth birthday and so had his attendance.
His hatred of Halloween had simmered until three years ago, when he'd been a casualty of another bank branch closure. As a loyal, reliable and 'cheap' ageing junior, he'd been offered a post with a travelling van branch that toured a wide rural area, providing fortnightly two-hour morning or afternoon banking sessions.
The advantage for Arthur, aside from not having to drive the van because he didn't have a full driving licence, was the location. He rented a small cottage, and the van picked him up at the village church bus stop five mornings a week and every third Saturday morning. The advantage, though, was that with the aid of his little moped, he was finally in a position to wreak his revenge on those Halloween idiots and their wretched, silly pumpkins!
…the 'Pumpkin Avenger' glared briefly at that suddenly illuminated upstairs window and then slipped away quietly and quickly into the night, pocketing his hammer. It was getting damn hard these days to be an 'Avenger' with so many houses now having those wretched doorbell cameras or other security stuff. This village was one of the best in the area on account of the number of new housing developments scattered everywhere, while the local council's inefficient street lighting lagged far behind.
Why a local radio station had dubbed him the 'Pumpkin Avenger' was beyond his understanding. He wasn't avenging the silly things; he was smashing their stupid carved faces into orange-coloured pulp, but that's what they'd called him, and now the whole area was on the lookout for him. He glanced at his watch. Three in the morning. That's what they’d forced him to do. Two years ago, he'd been able to slip out at a respectable time, but now… He had to be dressed, washed, shaved, and waiting at the church stop bus stop in a couple of hours. No wonder he yawned all day at work and had almost given that old woman double the cash she wanted to withdraw last week.
Arthur was tempted to call it a night as he glanced at his watch again, 3.10 am, but he had one more port of call in this village, and, to his mind, a singularly appropriate one. 'Witches Cottage' was a place he'd never heard of until young Janice, the trainee sent down from the Regional Office, mentioned it. The girl had gone with her boyfriend to view the rumoured heinous display, which hadn't surprised him. The girl might be an Oxford University honours graduate, apparently destined for higher things, assuming those much higher up had no objection to nose rings, eyebrow piercings and enough tattoos to fill an art gallery!
Her boyfriend wasn't much better, and he was a practising solicitor! Arthur shook his head disapprovingly as he retrieved his moped and pushed it quietly along the road to the narrow turn-off leading towards the woods. Janice had said it was a well-known Halloween attraction — a creepy, run-down ruin supposedly cursed that locals avoided. However, there was nothing to see when they arrived. Some years, the place was supposed to have a fantastic display of bones, skulls, and all the rest; other years, nothing. She'd been disappointed; this year must have been a nothing year unless they'd been too early. Worth checking, though, he’d decided.
His younger colleague, the painted lady, as he'd mentally dubbed her, hadn't been wrong. The narrow, winding track was distinctly creepy, especially at three—whatever it was now in the damn morning—but the cottage shape was visible against the darker trees, up ahead and to the left. He tapped his pocket, feeling the heavy, reassuring shape of his hammer. It could crack fake skulls just as well as caved pumpkin heads.
However, there was nothing, not a single skull, pumpkin or anything else. If it was the right place, the building looked old, mossy, ancient, with weathered stones and a low thatched roof. Strange—it didn't look run-down or ruined, more like an aged survivor from a much earlier era. A sinister version of those quaint buildings you saw in picture books or on chocolate boxes, etc. Nothing there, though, to….but what was that? He decided to risk his torch, a low-beam Chinese thing he'd bought on eBay. One quick flash, he thumbed the switch forward…and what was that? Certainly not a bone!
A bar of chocolate! He frowned, moved forward, and over there…another bar of chocolate. Odd! Arthur bent and picked up the first one, milk chocolate from a well-known brand. He shuffled forward and picked up a similarly wrapped bar, fruit and nut this time. Odd.
By the time he'd quietly tiptoed away from the front door, along the side of the building and partway along the rear wall, he had no less than thirteen assorted bars in his hand and pockets. Varying from 95g to 200g, his banker's mind neatly categorised them. Arthur had a sweet tooth along with a mouth full of dental fillings and crowns to prove it. He'd just decided to head home when… well, he wasn't quite sure because it happened so fast, but it seemed the ground opened under him!
His left ankle hurt, but that wasn't what bothered him as he shone his feeble torch around. Arthur had been looking for bones and skulls and now found them. They were all around him, along with other horrible things, strange furniture, implements and cages that looked like they belonged in the dungeon torture chamber of a medieval castle. A sound came from above, then something heavy crashed down, scattering smashed glass and metal and making him jump back. It was his moped, and then the large, dim square of faint light high above vanished with a dull clunk.
He whirled around at a rattling sound, and a rectangular iron grill slid back, set high in the heavy iron-studded old door behind him. A wrinkled, age-spotted hand held up an old-fashioned oil lantern, and a pair of watery, red eyes, surrounded by long strands of matted white hair, looked intently at him.
"What’s he look like, Cissie? Is he a good one?” an aged female voice cackled from somewhere. “Is he a keeper?”
The eyes surveyed him for a second, then the face broke into an evil smile. “Oh yes, Vi, he’s a keeper. Give him a few days without fodder to weaken a bit, and then we’ll have us some fun!”
“Wot about the chocolate? I like chocolate. I reckoned he were for keeping, so I cancelled the spell and set the house back again. It’s got all our chocolate though,” a third ancient female voice joined in plaintively.
“Oh, hush, Bessie. Fun and nibbles is more important than chocolate. Asides, it won’t do it no good if it eats it because there baint no water in there. Give it a few days and then we’ll play. See if it can last as long as the last one”.
“Hope it’s got a bigger todger tween its legs than the last un we catched had!”
“Oh, hush yer self, Cissie, yer silly bitch. Who was it that cut that last one off in his prime anyways to nibble on afore I got tired of riding it!”
“I got sick of chewin on bony fingers even if’n it didn’t need em!”
All three voices cackled with evil laughter, then the grill screeched shut as his torch battery also decided to call it a night! Maybe the radio station had got it right. Perhaps those harmless Pumpkins would be avenged!