It was the week before Halloween. And it was totally my fault. I'd been screwing around with the radio, hardly paying attention to the road. As I looked up from the dashboard the guy walking along the road realized that I was headed straight towards him.

He wheeled around to face me -- a squat figure in a leering pumpkin mask. I jammed the brake down to the floor, but the car was moving much too fast.

The noise was sickening but, I later saw, the hood of the car was barely dented where I'd hit him. I still have trouble believing the rest.

I stepped from the car shaking, feeling like I'd just been punched hard up under the ribs. The figure of a woman stood over him, her arms raised above her shoulders, her hands clutching at the locks of hair that hung around her masked face. She wailed in thin, breathless jags. The man was moving his arms as if trying to rise, but in a weak, broken way.

The thing is, I thought that she'd been wearing a mask. And then I saw that the eyes were moving. Not clicking open and shut like something on hinges. Not like that at all.

Blinking like the eyes of a living thing.

I stumbled backwards against the open car door, staring at the caved-in side of the man-thing's head. Wet orange pulp and clumps of seeds the color of bone had leaked out onto the wet asphalt. The movement of its arms had slowed.

I panicked then. I scrambled back into the driver's seat of the still-running car, backed up and gunned past them without looking back. I drove and drove, and finally stopped to get sick. I drove more slowly then, to the police station, and told them what had happened.

I counted my change, walked a line and pissed in a cup. I waited. The investigating officer radioed back that he'd found nothing but a smashed pumpkin in the road and some tire marks. I waited for several hours more. There was some talk of having me fined for filing a false police report, and some more talk about having me sent to county hospital for evaluation. An hour or so before dawn they sent me home.

I've been having this recurring nightmare lately. My hair begins to itch and when I try to scratch it, my scalp comes out in clumps beneath my fingernails. The flesh beneath is cold and ridged, and as orange as an October sunset.

Photo copyright ron.richardson. View it on Flickr.