Dean R. Koontz - The Black Pumpkin

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 102.48KB 9 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

THE BLACK PUMPKIN By Dean R. Koontz 1 THE PUMPKINS WERE CREEPY, BUT THE

MAN WHO CARVED THEM WAS far stranger than his creations. He appeared to have

baked for ages in the California sun, until all the juices had been cooked out

of his flesh. He was stringy, bony, and leather skinned. His head resembled a

squash, not pleasingly round like a pumpkin, yet not shaped like an ordinary

head, either: slightly narrower at the top and wider at the chin than was

natural. His amber eyes glowed with a sullen, smoky, weak - but dangerous -

light. Tommy Sutzmann was uneasy the moment that he saw the old pumpkin

carver. He told himself that he was foolish, overreacting again. He had a

tendency to be alarmed by the mildest signs of anger in others, to panic at

the first vague perception of a threat. Some families taught their

twelve-year-old boys honesty, integrity, decency, and faith in God. By their

actions, however, Tommy's parents and his brother, Frank, had taught him to be

cautious, suspicious, and even paranoid. In the best of times, his mother and

father treated him as an outsider; in the worst of times, they enjoyed

punishing him as a means of releasing their anger and frustration at the rest

of the world. To Frank, Tommy was simply - and always - a target.

Consequently, deep and abiding uneasiness was Tommy Sutzmann's natural

condition. Every December this vacant lot was full of Christmas trees, and

during the summer, itinerant merchants used the space to exhibit DayGlo

stuffed animals or paintings on velvet. As Halloween approached, the half-acre

property, tucked between a supermarket and a bank on the outskirts of Santa

Ana, was an orange montage of pumpkins: all sizes and shapes, lined in rows

and stacked in neat low pyramids and tumbled in piles, maybe two thousand of

them, three thousand, the raw material of pies and jack-o'-lanterns. The

carver was in a back corner of the lot, sitting on a tube-metal chair. The

vinyl-upholstered pads on the back and seat of the chair were darkly mottled,

webbed with cracks - not unlike the carver's face. He sat with a pumpkin on

his lap, whittling with a sharp knife and other tools that lay on the dusty

ground beside him. Tommy Sutzmann did not remember crossing the field of

pumpkins. He recalled getting out of the car as soon as his father had parked

at the curb - and the next thing he knew, he was in the back of the lot just a

few feet from the strange sculptor. A score of finished jack-o'-lanterns

were propped atop mounds of other pumpkins. This artist did not merely hack

crude eye holes and mouths. He carefully cut the skin and the rind of the

squash in layers, producing features with great definition and surprising

subtlety. He also used paint to give each creation its own demonic

personality: Four cans, each containing a brush, stood on the ground beside

his chair - red, white, green, and black. The jack-o'-lanterns grinned and

frowned and scowled and leered. They seemed to be staring at Tommy. Every one

of them. Their mouths were agape, little pointy teeth bared. None had the

blunt, goofy dental work of ordinary jack-o'-lanterns. Some were equipped with

long fangs. Staring, staring. And Tommy had the peculiar feeling that they

could see him. When he looked up from the pumpkins, he discovered that the

old man was also watching him intently. Those amber eyes, full of smoky light,

seemed to brighten as they held Tommy's own gaze. "Would you like one of my

pumpkins?" the carver asked. In his cold, dry voice, each word was as crisp as

October leaves wind-blown along a stone walk. Tommy could not speak. He

tried to say, No, sir, thank you, no, but the words stuck in his throat as if

he were trying to swallow the cloying pulp of a pumpkin. "Pick a favorite,"

the carver said, gesturing with one withered hand toward his gallery of

grotesques - but never taking his eyes off Tommy. "No, uh ... no, thank

you." Tommy was dismayed to hear that his voice had a tremor and a slightly

shrill edge. What's wrong with me? he wondered. Why am I hyping myself into

a fit like this? He's just an old guy who carves pumpkins. "Is it the price

you're worried about?" the carver asked. "No." "Because you pay the man

out front for the pumpkin, same price as any other on the lot, and you just

give me whatever you feel my work is worth." When he smiled, every aspect

of his squash-shaped head changed. Not for the better. The day was mild.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Dean R. Koontz - The Black Pumpkin.pdf

共9页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Dean R. Koontz - The Black Pumpkin

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: