Along the way he notices small groups of teenagers soaping car windows and toilet papering ornamental trees and wonders briefly just how much time has passed since he had been one of them, commiting impulsive acts of reckless behavior on unsuspecting strangers. He thinks about a lot of things; his stressful job and his deteriorating home life and the overall malaise that he has been feeling, becoming angrier and angrier as he drives. He takes a left hand turn on a wide elm-lined boulevard and heads out of town, away from the brightly lit homes and decorated yards, filled with styrofoam headstones and inflatable witches riding inflatable brooms. He drives out towards the countryside on a dark and particularly gloomy road and after a couple of minutes descends into an empty stretch lined with dark thickets and swirling mist. Up ahead, through the fog he notices an older man standing inexplicably beside the road on the right hand side of the narrow, broken pavement.
Suddenly, his seething anger is replaced by a chilling and detached calm, an icy twitch that runs through him, making everything flat and one dimensional. Inside his ear, just loud enough to be perceptible a voice from inside, although not his own, says clearly,
"Hit him."
He feels the car drift slowly to the right as if on its own, can feel the cool laminate of the wheel passing softly through his big hands as he stares, eyes transfixed on the elderly man bent by the side of the road in the half light of the moon. Before he realizes what he has done he feels the thud of the impact as it travels across the car and through his body.
There is the squeal of tires desperately trying to undo what has already been done.
There is the unmistakable crunch of metal against something that is not, a sound of breaking glass, one sound on top of the other in quick succession so that there is only one sound, everything all at once.
The car comes to a stop in the center of the darkened road and regaining his senses he lifts his head slowly, dully, the taste of copper rising in his mouth and stares dumbly through the spiderwebbed windshield.
Behind him, out there in the mist, lies the crumpled form of someone, their pants knocked down around their knees, broken looking, motionless on the cold dark pavement.
In an instant he understands what has just happened, what he has done and what it will cost him. He is thinking about no one but himself, as usual, staring transfixed into the rearview mirror.
He thinks about what he will lose; his job, his wife, his home his freedom because of a sudden, stupid impulse.
And in that same instant he realizes that he can either accept his responsibility for what he has done, or he can do what he does next.
Leave.
He leaves not only the man in the road, dead or dying he doesn't even know, lying on a blind curve in the misty half light, he leaves everything else he has, his values, his every belief in what is right and what is wrong, his idea of heaven, of the good life he has known. For an instant he feels as if his spirit has actually departed, as if he has himself died on that road in the dark as he makes his choice and puts the car in gear and drives away.
Before the car has even begun to accelarate he notices a greasy smear on the shattered windshield and below that a waxy tendril and something else, something organic and slippery in the blue air, wedged tightly underneath the wiperblade. Something small, oval, and bone colored.
A pumpkin seed.
A single, slimy little pumpkin seed.
His head turns sharply as he stares back through the foggy distance at the crumpled form behind him and at the holes torn in the clothing where straw pokes through and the cresent wedges of shattered pumpkin where the head should have been, orange yellow fragments of a jack-o-lantern strewn across the hardtop where they came to rest.
The radiator ticks.
The mist swirls.
And in his head for the second time that night he hears a voice.
BOO!
