Peter Peter
Peter Perry was something of an oddity. Known around town as yet another one of those quirky old men that seem to delight in being eccentric, he was always ready with a crooked smile, and some outrageous story to amuse the children who passed by his house on their way to the rest of their lives. He kept a bowl of candy overflowing with tasty delights for any child who was brave enough to accept them.
They were all attracted to his yearly array of gigantic pumpkins, which grew in profusion in his back yard. There was something about strolling through the pumpkin patch that appealed to youthful imaginations, and Mr. Perry was always happy to oblige. At Halloween he would decorate the pumpkin patch with bales of hay and scarecrows, and parents would allow their children to play together in his yard, considering him harmless, if a bit peculiar.
He was alone now, and the rumor was that his wife had left him, running away with an encyclopedia salesman. No one could say for sure. Now after thirty years, the townsfolk had finally accepted his apparent wish to remain a bachelor, tending his garden and adding local color to an otherwise dull and lifeless town. No one ever connected him to the missing children, or for that matter even perceived any pattern to the unusually large number of runaways over the years.
Peter had been a handyman for his entire adult life, mending broken fences or painting houses and barns if the price was right. He also dabbled in poetry, entertaining the children with famous rhymes, which he would sometimes alter for their amusement. He was sixty, and having judiciously saved his pennies, he had retired from the menial life. He was now able to concentrate more on his yard, and on the children who ventured into it.
A well, which had been dry for some time sat placidly in the corner of the lot, a reminder of earlier days. Fearing the worst, he had filled it with rocks and soil so that it no longer posed a danger. Sometimes he would go out and sit on the rim, humming his wife's favorite song, and almost wishing he could see her again. But then again, she had never really been happy. His mother had been right to warn him about her. He missed his mother most of all, not that he could remember much of his childhood. When he tried to, it would make him angry for some reason, and he would have to relieve his rage by doing other things that he preferred not to think about.
It was on a particularly warm evening in October that his life took a turn for the worse. He was sitting in a rocking chair on his screened in back porch, lost in thought about the direction his life had taken. Halloween was several days away, and he had been adding the finishing touches to the pumpkin patch. He wanted this year's display to be something special. He was just noticing how the whirr of the cicadas seemed extraordinarily strident, when their racket ceased abruptly, replaced with a haunting sing-song voice that sounded vaguely familiar.
"Peter, Peter pumpkin breeder
Had a wife but couldn't please her
Is it true? I'll never tell
Although I knew him very well
Did she leave or did he beat her
Lock her up, refuse to feed her?
She screamed in terror as she fell
That night he threw her down the well"
At the mention of his name he had stopped his rocking, and come swiftly to his feet. It was difficult to tell whether the voice had been a child's or that of a woman. The second verse had made the blood rush to his face, and flinging open the screen door, he raced around the corner of the house only to find that there was no one in sight.
It wasn't until later that night that he had realized it had been thirty years to the day since he had seen his wife. She had been such a tramp, flaunting herself in front of him, and walking around the house wearing next to nothing. She knew how he felt about having physical relations. She obviously never had any respect for herself, or him for that matter. Who could blame him for what he'd done on that night so long ago?
He slept little on that long hot evening, at first thinking about the eerie voice that recited poetry, then dismissing it as his overactive imagination. The rest of the night was spent thinking of the children who frequented his garden. He admired their innocence, but pitied them for their futures that were sure to be filled with disgusting little habits.
Peter awoke in the morning determined to put the strangeness of the previous evening out of his mind. After attending to the weeding, he pulled the makings of a scarecrow out from the crawl space, and arranged it to the best advantage. He scattered hay and placed a couple of cardboard cutout ghost figures along the perimeter of the fence for effect. At the end of the day he was nearly exhausted, so he sat once again in the failing light in his rocker on the back porch, sipping deeply from a glass of iced tea.
The voice when it came jolted him from his reverie, although somehow he had been expecting it. This time however, the speaker was definitely younger, making the words even crueler and hurtful to him as they were uttered.
"Peter Perry, quite contrary
How does your Garden grow?
With scattered bones, and mournful moans
Dead bodies in a row
Was your wife the only one
Who felt the fatal blow?
What's buried deep beneath the loam?
What makes your pumpkins grow?"
"Who's out there?" He was standing now, shaking from a combination of fear and anger. "You'd better hope I don't catch you!"
Peter had vacant lots on both sides of his house, so he was pretty sure no one else had heard the voice of the little girl as she recited the verse, accusing him of who knows what unspeakable acts. Mother would have known how to deal with this, he thought with annoyance. Peter stepped down off of the back porch and walked through the pumpkin patch, searching for the source of the taunting which had come from that direction.
"Show your face you nasty little witch. I'll show you first hand what's buried in the yard."
As if answering his request, a child floated out of the darkness toward him. Dressed in filthy rags, her feet hovered several inches above the ground, except for her toes which dragged behind, dislodging clumps of soil at her passing. When she got closer he could see that her eyes were sunken deep in her face, shadowed in their depths with only a faint whiteness showing at their core. Her body was decayed and a stench arose from her flesh as she stopped in front of him and opened her mouth, allowing several bloated flies to crawl out over her lips. Terrified, he stepped back and tripped over the vines at his feet. He looked up in horror as she turned her head to one side, exposing purple bruises on her neck. Bile rose to burn his tongue as she turned her face back towards him.
"Why?" Her voice was high pitched and pleading as she vanished slowly like dissipating smoke.
The sun rose slowly in the east, evaporating the dew that had accumulated on Peter as he lay tangled in his vines, wakening slowly to a world of unreality. He raised himself up on one elbow, then transferred his weight and sat with his head down in the rising mist. A clod of dirt clung to his left check, and when he reached up to brush it off, several dead flies fell from his hair. Stifling a scream, he rose to his feet and scrambled quickly into the house.
It was Halloween. In the past this would have been his busiest day of the year, preparing for the influx of children, and savoring the anticipation of the night's events. Instead, he hastily fashioned a sign that gave the excuse of illness, asking that his house be passed by. He hung the sign on his front gate, then retreated once more into the interior of his house, unsure of what he should do next.
When evening fell, children came to his gate and read the sign, disappointed that they would have to skip Mr. Perry's house, but eager to continue their rounds as they left. Peter cowered in the darkness on his knees, peering over the lower edge of the screen at the back yard, and fearing that he would be visited once again.
This time, there was more than one voice, and as he watched them emerge from the pumpkin patch, his eyes widened and his breath caught in his throat. He remembered their faces as the ones he had covered with dirt, and they came with a terrible vengeance, chanting as one.
"Sing a song of murder
Hear the children cry
Lure them with candy
Then choke them til they die
Thirteen souls were taken
And now it's time to tell
Eternity is waiting
In everlasting Hell"
They found him two days later wandering mindlessly in a cornfield some distance away. The police were summoned along with the paramedics because of the strange and rhythmic poems he continued to recite as he stared wide-eyed into space. Within the week, twelve bodies were recovered from the pumpkin patch, and the well was excavated, revealing the desiccated bones of Peter Perry's former wife.
No one had suspected that such an evil man lived in their midst, and for the detectives in charge of the case, it was the first time in memory that a suspect had confessed by means of poetry.