hwango

Five years had passed since Townford had last held what had once been their annual pumpkin-growing contest. Apparently, five years was long enough for the recollections of the last contest to fade from much of the public memory, because when signs went up announcing that it had returned no outraged mob stormed the town hall, there was no mass exodus of terrified residents, and the local undertaker did not start conducting interviews to hire extra staff. However, one man with a longer memory than most did start constructing a bomb shelter.

Isaac had only lived in Townford for four years, and so he had no idea what he was getting into when he decided to participate. Near the end of May Isaac cleared out some space in the sunniest corner of his small garden and planted a dozen pumpkin seeds. Alice, his wife, thought it would be a nice little project to keep him busy during the lazy summer months, and so she wished him luck, told him that she believed in him, and then left him to his own devices.

About two weeks later, Isaac was inspecting his first few seedlings when he heard his next door neighbor, Lyle, call his name. He looked up to see Lyle peeking over the low wooden fence that separated their properties.

"So, pumpkins, eh? You planning to enter the contest then?" Lyle asked. Isaac replied that he was. "Mind if I ask what your strategy is?"

Isaac blinked in confusion. "Um…try to grow the best pumpkin?" he replied.

"They judge size, color, shape, and smoothness of the skin, you know. Then they calculate your final score based on all four criteria. A lot of folks try for size and let the others slide, hoping to make up the difference with sheer bulk. How about you?"

"Oh. I had no idea it was so complicated. I was just going to grow a few and then submit the one that seemed the best. I suppose I assumed bigger was better. I guess I ought to have read the rules more carefully," Isaac said. To his surprise, Lyle laughed. Seeing Isaac's hurt and confused expression, Lyle was quick to apologize.

"I'm sorry, I just assumed you knew, since you were entering. There aren't any rules. Well, you can't sabotage someone else's plants, but as far as your own entry goes you can do whatever you damned well please. As long as you cut the thing off a vine that grew on your property, pretty much anything goes."

Isaac felt he must be missing something. "What sort of things do people do, then?" he asked. Lyle just laughed again and said he didn't want to spoil the surprise.

In early July, Isaac got his first hint that he might be out of his depth. He had decided to go for a morning run through town, mostly for the exercise and because it was such a beautiful morning, but with the ulterior motive of seeing how his competitors' plants were doing.

He caught a glimpse of Mr. Moreau carefully collecting pollen samples from each of the blossoms on his plants, placing each one in its own glass vial. Isaac frowned as he considered that he'd planned to let bees do all of the pollinating on his plants. Apparently Moreau wasn't going to leave things to chance with his crop. That seemed a bit extreme to Isaac at the time. He quickly discovered that he'd have to drastically adjust his idea of what constituted "extreme."

At Mr. Whateley's house he found that the man's entire garden was concealed under a huge tent covered with eerie symbols. Isaac heard low, guttural chanting in a language he didn't recognize coming from inside.

Isaac spotted Mr. Crowley snipping a blossom off one of his plants, which seemed harmless enough until he saw the man shake his head and then admonish the rest of the blossoms that if they didn't do better the same would happen to them.

Mr. Frank's plants seemed to fall into two extreme categories – about half of them were missing leaves or were cut off at various lengths, while the rest were huge and looked magnificent. Only when Isaac got a closer look did he see that the vibrant, healthy plants appeared to have been stitched together from the pieces of several different plants.

All throughout the town he found more of the same. Isaac was grateful to see that many of the gardens weren't nearly so sinister, and featured such harmless tactics as incense, ethereal chanting, circles of stones or crystals, and/or rows of plants meticulously shaped according to the principles of feng shui. But there were plenty more gardens at the other end of the spectrum. He shuddered whenever he passed a garden that smelled like blood, or that had a horribly-stained altar standing near it, or was sealed in a glass dome marked with stickers indicating a radiation hazard, biohazard, or both. Until that day, Isaac had never seen a Geiger counter used as a garden tool. Now he'd seen it at least three times.

Most disturbing of all was that the more Isaac wanted to recoil in horror from a garden, the more the plants within it were flourishing. By the time Isaac returned home he was thoroughly depressed, and tempted to just pull up his plants and be done with it. He plodded disconsolately into his kitchen and found Alice sleepily pouring herself a bowl of cereal.

"Well, hello," she said, yawning. "How was your spying expedition?" she said with a smile, and then saw the look on his face. "Oh, honey, I'm just teasing."

"No, no, it's not that. It's just…well, I think I'm out of my league. Although what's really depressing is that I didn't even know there was a league like that to be in, but I don't think I want to be in it anyway."

Alice stared at him for a moment. "Isaac, it's 7:00 AM and I haven't had any coffee yet, so you're going to have to make a little bit more sense if you want to have a conversation."

Isaac tried to explain what he'd seen. At first, Alice was understandably skeptical. Eventually what convinced her was how depressed he was about the whole thing.

"I don't think I want to do this anymore," Isaac said.

"Nonsense! You think you can't win this thing just because you didn't sacrifice a goat to your pumpkin plants?" she said.

Isaac tried not to flinch at her words. He had deliberately omitted some of the more dreadful things he'd seen and heard earlier that morning, and he wanted to leave intact her misconception that she was exaggerating.

"I think you're going to do great. Hey, from the sounds of things, your pumpkins might be the only ones in the whole town you'd be willing to make into a pie. That's got to count for something. I believe in you," Alice said.

"Okay, I'll stick it out. I guess I'd better go check on my plants, then. Hey, have you seen any bees in our yard?"

* * *
In the middle of September, the competition began to thin out.

Mr. Stroud accidentally trod on one of the arcane runes that encircled his garden, and the largest of his pumpkins instantly exploded into a cloud of unwholesome black smoke that enveloped his entire property. A few seconds later it dissipated, leaving behind nothing but the weirdly-scarred foundation of his house and a concrete bird bath.

One morning after a severe thunderstorm Mr. Frank was found lying in a deep groove in the mud next to his garden. He was suffering from several broken bones, and his largest and most spectacular pumpkin had disappeared. Those that remained all bore the same strange variations in color that the missing one had featured, with different shades of orange bordered by rough, stitching-shaped scars.

Other, less spectacular events accompanied others retiring from the contest. These included several fires, a few mysterious disappearances (of both pumpkins and of their growers), and even a few entrants just giving up under the relentless pressure to keep their pumpkins alive, or keep them from breaking loose, or, in more extreme cases, from eating them.

A month later, on a cool and crisp afternoon, it was time for the final judging.

"Now I remember why we gave up doing this," one of the judges whispered to the other two. They both nodded silently, unable to take their eyes off the display before them. The eye was drawn immediately to the pumpkin that radiated a soft orange light, but the others near it were little better. Sighing with resignation, the three began to inspect each entry. From his place near the end of the line, Isaac heard some of their comments over the general murmur of conversation.

"I'm not sure it quite counts as a pumpkin anymore, Mr. Moreau."

"Nonsense! Of course it's a pumpkin!"

"It just barked at me. And the stem is…wagging?"

"That just means it likes you."

The judges made some marks on their score sheets and moved on.

"Um…where is your pumpkin, Mr. Whateley?"

"It's right here, it's just naturally invisible. Here, just let me sprinkle some powder of Ibn Ghazi…and now I'll make the Voorish sign…"

"Ye gods!"

"Impressive, isn't it?"

"It's enormous! Though, in all fairness, I think we must give you a zero for the 'color' category, considering it clearly has none."

"Fair enough."

And so on. By the time the judges reached Isaac they all had the look of men who would be reluctant to go to sleep that night for fear of what they might see in their dreams.

"So, what have we here, then?" one of the judges said from what he obviously hoped was a safe distance. "I don't see any protective fencing, encasement, or restraints."

"No, sir, it's just a pumpkin," Isaac said.

Another of the judges leaned in a bit. "It does look remarkably like a normal pumpkin, doesn't it? How did you grow this?"

"In dirt. With water," said Isaac. "And fertilizer."

All three judges recoiled a bit. "What kind?" one of them said nervously.

"Just compost," said Isaac.

"Fascinating," said the judge who had not yet spoken. "You mean to tell me it's perfectly safe?"

Isaac shrugged. "I suppose if I dropped it on your foot it would hurt. But it's not going to bite you, grab you, or shoot lasers at you, if that's what you mean."

One of the judges unconsciously rubbed the scorched edges of the perfectly circular hole in his clipboard. "That's reassuring."

After making a few more notes the judges moved on, each of them with a smile of relief on his face. Their smiles crumbled quickly when they saw that the next entry was looking back at them with a single, lidless eye that seemed to made of flames.

"We are not doing this again next year," one of them muttered.

* * *

Alice was waiting on the front porch when Isaac pulled into the driveway. She had wanted to come to the judging, but Isaac had insisted that she stay home for her own safety. He had barely stepped out of the car when she called out to him.

"And? How did it go?" she asked.

Isaac smiled and held up his ribbon.

"Honorable Mention?! Are you kidding me?" she said, obviously disappointed on his behalf.

"Well, it's aggregate scoring, and one of the criteria is size. Lyle did warn me. Whateley won with that giant invisible monster of his." Isaac said, still smiling. Alice stepped down from the porch and met him halfway across the driveway.

"You seem happy – I take it you're glad you stuck it out?" she said.

"Oh, yes. Now I wish you'd been there for the award ceremony after all. First place was practically a footnote compared to them giving me my 'honorable mention.' They said something very moving about how 'truly honorable' I was, and that I brought 'dignity and restraint to an event that others had turned into a shameless circus of horror with their bargains with extraplanar forces.' I actually felt bad for Whateley."

"Aw, you big softy," she said, and kissed him. "So, what do you want to do now? Shall we celebrate your moral victory over corrupt horticulturists everywhere?" she said, and raised an eyebrow suggestively.

"Actually, I wanted to tell Lyle the good news, but then I'm all yours. Where is he, anyway?"

"Lyle? I think he's still in that bomb shelter he built over the summer."