In The Mind's Eye

"Pumpkinhead" (a children's goodnight story)

Once upon a time there was a very good boy.  His name was Andrew.  He lived in a small house in the woods.  Just behind the house was a very dark, squishy, scary swamp.

Everyone who was older and wiser than Andrew told him there was nothing to be afraid of in that swamp.

But Andrew didn't believe them.  It wasn't a nothing he heard every night, just after the sun went down and he had gone to bed, alone, without his Mom or Dad. There was something not very good in that swamp.

And one night he found out.  It was a night that seemed like most other nights that summer.  Except that night he felt a little different.  That night he felt a damp chill in the air.  And the birds stopped their noises earlier, before the sun had settled behind the trees.  And the frogs had stopped their peeping and chirping before he closed his eyes.  And that night Andrew shivered a lot, because he was sure something special was going to happen.

It began to happen just at that time when Andrew closed his eyes, the time when he always got a little confused about whether he was asleep or still awake.  He could still hear the stillness in the house and in the swamp, but he couldn't feel his fingers or his toes and he couldn't make his arms and legs move.  Just at that time it happened.

He heard a voice.

"Andrew," it said.  "Andrew, I'm  here to show you something."

Andrew closed his eyes and squeezed hard to make the voice have a person.  He wanted it to be his Dad.

"Andrew," it said again.  "I'm here for you."

This time Andrew opened his eyes and, in the shadows just over in the corner where the curtains of his windows folded and waved in the night breezes, he saw it.  A huge pumpkin with crooked sticks for legs and and arms and toothpicks for fingers smiled at him with huge, green teeth and squinty yellow eyes.  It was very ugly.

"I'm afraid," said Andrew.

"Why?" it asked.

Then it began to move from the shadows towards Andrew's bed.  And then Andrew could see how ugly it really was.  The thing really was a pumpkin, and it was a pumpkin that was all head, and the head was also the body.  Then from its top a kind of slime was dripping or sliding down over the triangles that were its eyes.  But its smile was real and soft, the kind that Andrew always liked to see, the kind he always saw on Dad's face when he came home from work and saw Andrew playing in his room or in the yard.  The pumpkin had that kind of a smile.  But it sure was ugly, because it was through those sicky, green teeth.

"Why are you afraid?" it asked again.  "Has something happened to scare you?"

"I'm afraid of you," said Andrew, but he felt a little silly because the pumpkin head had been so friendly, and he was still safe in his bed in his room.

"Don't be afraid of me, Andrew.  They've sent me to show you the swamp.  We want you to feel better about us."

Andrew shivered quickly and threw the covers over his head. There was nothing in the swamp he wanted to see or to know about.  And who were "they" and "us" anyway?

"We're the noises and things in the swamp," said the pumpkin head.

Andrew jumped and sat up in his bed and looked kind of silly and scary himself with the bed covers draped there over his head like some ghost on Halloween.

"How did you know what I was thinking?" he asked.

"We all do. We know that you think the swamp's not a very good place.  That's why I'm here.  To help you know that it's really not like that at all.  We have to tell you."  Then the pumpkin head looked a little sad.  "Your Mom and Dad don't seem to know that you're afraid.  You haven't told them."