Strange Highways

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. Sunshine found its way through holes in the overcast, brightly illuminating some orange mounds of pumpkins while leaving others deep in cloud shadows. In spite of the warm weather, a chill gripped Tommy and would not release him.
     Leaning forward with the half-sculpted pumpkin in his lap, the carver said, "You just give me whatever amount you wish ... although I'm duty-bound to say that you get what you give."
     Another smile. Worse than the first one.
     Tommy said, "Uh ..."
     "You get what you give," the carver repeated.
     "No shit?" brother Frank said, stepping up to the row of leering jack-o'-lanterns. Evidently he had overheard everything. He was two years older than Tommy, muscular where Tommy was slight, with a self-confidence that Tommy had never known. Frank hefted the most macabre of all the old guy's creations. "So how much is this one?"
     The carver was reluctant to shift his gaze from Tommy to Frank, and Tommy was unable to break the contact first. In the man's eyes Tommy saw something he could not define or understand, something that filled his mind's eye with images of disfigured children, deformed creatures that he could not name, and dead things.
     "How much is this one, gramps?" Frank repeated.
     At last, the carver looked at Frank - and smiled. He lifted the half-carved pumpkin off his lap, put it on the ground, but did not get up. "As I said, you pay me what you wish, and you get what you give."
     Frank had chosen the most disturbing jack-o'-lantern in the eerie collection. It was big, not pleasingly round but lumpy and misshapen, narrower at the top than at the bottom, with ugly crusted nodules like ligneous fungus on a diseased oak tree. The old man had compounded the unsettling effect of the pumpkin's natural deformities by giving it an immense mouth with three upper and three lower fangs. Its nose was an irregular hole that made Tommy think of campfire tales about lepers. The slanted eyes were as large as lemons but were not cut all the way through the rind except for a pupil - an evil elliptical slit - in the center of each. The stem in the head was dark and knotted as Tommy imagined a cancerous growth might be. The maker of jack-o'-lanterns had painted this one black, letting the natural orange color blaze through in only a few places to create character lines around the eyes and mouth as well as to add emphasis to the tumorous growths.
     Frank was bound to like that pumpkin. His favorite movies were The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and all the Friday the 13th sagas of the mad, murderous Jason. When Tommy and Frank watched a movie of that kind on the