</p> <figure class="article-thumb tright show-info-icon" style="width: 250px">
<figcaption> <p class="caption">Artist rendition of the Pumpkin Slasher.</p> </figcaption></figure><p>It happened again tonight.
</p><p>13 found in a cornfield... dead. But what raises concern about these victims in how their bodies have been found. They all fall in line with a great number of murders that have recently been turning up, but the sheer number of victims in this single incident was like no other case. Never have so many people been found dead in one spot; every one of them carefully dissected in the most painfully excruciating ways possible, possibly while they were still taking breaths.
</p><p>While suspects are still few and far between, rumblings between the detectives on scene could easily be heard. They speak of not a psychopathic man, but a mere child. A child that only months ago wasn't even considered a threat. But since his disappearance, more and more people have been meeting fates that even a seasoned horror author would fall ill upon seeing.
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<hr><p>5 Months Earlier
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<hr><p>"Mrs. Stevenson, can I have a word with you?"
</p><p>~~
</p><p>Jack Stevenson has just turned 13 years old. Jack is overall a pretty normal child, given the circumstances. He enjoys playing video games, hates school, and loves to spend time with his mom. His mother is his whole world. They have been close his entire life, as his father had left home when Jack was only three. It had always been him and his mother, until a couple years ago at least.
</p><p>Two years back, Sandy Stevenson had met a seemingly nice and loving man by the name of Charlie. They hit it off almost as soon as they met, and have been together since. Charlie seemed like the perfect man to have around. He seemed to like Jack and he always cared for Sandy, making sure she was always happy. But, with every seemingly good quality Charlie had, he always had a problem that seemed to overshadow it. He was a severe alcoholic. To make things worse, he was also rather abusive when he drank enough. For a long time, he would not lay a hand on either Jack or Sandy, but his verbal abuse was no less damaging. Jack often caught the greater share of it. Only recently has Charlie become physically abusive, but he has only hit Jack. He would never do it in front of Sandy, and he would often be clever enough to not leave evidence of what he had done to Jack, so Jack's cries for help were always met with disbelief.
</p><p>Since Jack's mother was in denial about what was happening to her son, he had nowhere to turn when he was sad or scared. He wanted nothing more than to have a close friend that he could go to in his times of need, but he was often the kind who was made fun of at school, and the number of kids willing to even talk to him was scarce.
</p><p>Late one night, Jack was outside catching fireflies in the dark. He was having fun and was keeping his mind off of things... at least until he heard the all too familiar rumble of that dreaded station wagon driving up the driveway. He tried ducking behind a nearby tree to stay out of the headlights as he watched Charlie pull in. As the door to the vehicle swung open, bottles upon bottles of beer rolled quickly out from the floorboards to the ground. Charlie stood up out of the car, kicking his way through the odorous pile of glass bottles. Jack was watching the brute chug down his last bottle when he heard his name spoken softly. He looked around to see who called him, but nobody was around. Only a single pumpkin was behind him; the only pumpkin to grow this year. He turned back around, but almost instantly heard the voice again. This time, it told him to throw a rock. Jack knew it would be a bad idea, but as if he was in an unbreakable trance, he looked to his feet to see a small sized stone just in front of him. As he looked to the rock, he heard the voice a third time.
</p><p>"He deserves it, you know that."
</p><p>Jack couldn't help himself. He bent down and picked up the stone. He carefully took aim at the boozed up drunk who was now looking inside his bottle for any drops of alcohol. He threw as hard as he could, the rock in a direct crash course with Charlie's face. As the stone left Jack's hand, he came out of his trance and instantly realized what he had just done. Before he could look up to take in the damage that he had caused, he felt himself being lifted off the ground. His attacker now had him pinned against the tree and he now spotted Charlie's balled up fist plumetting towards him. As the fist hit him in the gut, he felt the wind being pushed out of his lungs. Charlie let go of him and let Jack fall to the ground, clenching his stomach, fighting for air. The last thing Jack saw was a steel-toed boot rushing towards his head, and then only blackness and silence.
</p><p>Jack woke up two days later. As he took in his surroundings, he realized he was in his own hospital room. He turned his head slightly, only to be met with a shooting pain going down his neck and into his chest. He reared back, trying to let out a cry of pain, only to find that his mouth had been wired shut. As he felt around his face, he couldn't help but start to freak out. What had happened to him? As he struggled to find answers, he heard a familiar and calming voice. He turned his head slightly the opposite way to see his mother's smiling face looking back to him. She noticed his confused look and proceeded to explain his situation.
</p><p>"I'm glad you are awake honey, I was so worried. Charlie told me everything that happened when we rushed you in to the emergency room. He said that when he got home, you were climbing the tree, and that something startled you and you fell out, hitting yourself very hard on the way down. But don't worry, we are here for you."
</p><p>Jack took those last few words very seriously, and looked around the room more. His confusion turned to horror as he spotted Charlie standing in the other corner of the room, glaring at him. Jack tried to speak up and tell his mother what had actually happened, but he just couldn't. His jaw was shut tight, and so he was silenced for the time being. AS he scanned the room more, he noticed a medical chart hanging on the wall. As he looked over the list the best he could, he gathered most of what was wrong. He has two broken ribs, a broken nose, multiple shattered teeth, his jaw was displaced, and he had a severe concussion.
</p><p>Weeks later, Jack finally got to come home, but his jaw was still wired shut. He felt betrayed by his mother for believing Charlie the entire time, and he felt scared to even be in his own home. Where before he would always run to play his games for explore outside, his mother only now would see him sitting in the garden for hours at a time, not moving an inch. Days of this went by before she realized he was staring at the pumpkin. Any time that he would come back inside, she began to notice that his behavior began to become rather strange. He had recently begun to pick up a bit of a nervous twitch, as well as constantly digging at the wires holding his mouth shut. Sandy began to really worry when she sat and watched him dig at the wires until he began to bleed one day. She couldn't believe what she was seeing. Her precious son had gone from sharing his days with her, to sharing his days with a pumpkin and mutilating his own body. Not being able to take anymore, Sandy contacted a child psychologist for Jack.
</p><p>His first visit came quickly. As he still couldn't speak, the doctor asked Jack to write his answers down on paper, but Jack refused to say a word. His second and third visit came and went, still nothing had been said. Finally, on the fourth visit, Jack took up the pen and begun to scribble words onto the paper. When he set it down, what was written gave the doctor chills. "Only he can hear me... only he cares... he will take care of me... he can see the real me"
</p><p>For a few more visits, the doctor got only one writing each time, but each one was different. On the final session, the doctor got a message that stuck with him.
</p><p>"He knows who you are... he knows your secrets... never turn your back to the dark"
</p><p>The doctor let Jack out of his office and asked him to sit in the waiting room. He turned to sandy and began to speak.
</p><p>"Mrs. Stevenson, can I have a word with you?"
</p><p>Sandy walked into his office and he shut the door. He looked at her with regret as he knew this would not settle well with her. He proceeded to explain to her that Jack was being diagnosed with a form of multiple personality disorder, but the disturbing part is that a new personality is attempting to take over completely. He had never seen anything quite like this before and was pretty dumbfounded himself. His only idea was to send Jack home and wait to see how things played out over the following weeks.
</p><p>Later that night, Sandy got an idea to try and cheer Jack up. When he was little, she set out a tub with a very strong clothing dye and they took turns tye-dyeing shirts. What better way to cheer him up than to do something he loved as a kid? She stopped at the store and picked up some orange dye and a good sized tub. When she got home, she went in and filled the tub up with the dye. She accidentally dipped her elbow in the dye when she bent over the tub, and no amount of scrubbing at the orange color could get it out. It near permanently colored her elbow orange. Deciding to worry about it later, she called in Jack and Charlie so that they could do it as a family. As they both came shuffling into the room, she realized that she had forgotten something important... shirts to dye.
</p><p>"Okay you two, I am going to run to the store and pick up some white shirts. When I get back, we can tye-dye them! It will be fun, I promise!"
</p><p>She grabbed her purse and ran out the door. Jack mozied over to the window and looked out to the garden, watching the pumpkin again. Charlie, seeing Jack stare at the plant, saw the situation as something to amuse himself.
</p><p>"Hey boy... you like pumpkins? You should love being orange then."
</p><p>Charlie grabbed Jack by the back of the neck and started pulling him towards the tub of dye. Jack struggled against him, but just wasn't strong enough. Charlie lowered Jack's head closer to the orange liquid until he was only inches away. With a single powerful push, he pushed Jack's face deep down into the dye. Instead of just pushing him in, Charlie was having too much fun, and decided to hold Jack's face down in the liquid. Jack, while also struggling to breath, felt a terrible burning in his eyes and throat. He tried screaming as loud as he could from the pain, but no sound could be heard from above. As his vision started to go dark and he felt the last of his breath escaping his lungs, something happened. Everything went black to him and he could hear the voice again. It told him that it was time...
</p><p>As he saw the bubbles slow down, Charlie lifted Jack's limp body up out of the dye. As he let go of the body, he jumped back. Jack's face had begun to be eaten off, leaving small burns and holes in the skin. His eyes had clouded over as if he was now completely blind. His upper lip was now only hanging on by a small strip of skin as the wires holding his jaw shut had begun to protrude outwards, ripping the skins itself. Charlie, expecting Jack to be dead, began to freak out. He didn't mean to kill him. How was he going to explain this to Sandy? As he went through in his head what he was going to say, he heard a deep, raspy voice come from Jack. The dye had burned his throat and vocal cords bad when he swallowed some of it, and his voice had almost completely changed. He now sounded as if air was escaping his lungs when he made noises, with only a slight bit of his original voice coming through. Expecting to hear cries of pain, Charlie was terrified when he heard Jack. Jack had begun to laugh. As time went on, his laughter became louder and more menacing.
</p><p>Jack lifted himself off the floor, revealing to Charlie the extent of the injuries. Jack's eyelids had holes burned into them, his bottom lip gushing blood at an alarming rate, the wire from his jaw now dangling from his cheek... punctured through. As charlie watched in terror, Jack grabbed hold of the wire and slowly pulled it through, slicing his skin from his mouth up his cheek, making half a smile. Charlie held back vomit as he gazed upon skin just barely holding on to Jack's face. His eyes widened and Jack spoke to him...
</p><p>"You should smile more Charlie. After all, you created this. You ignored him, you hurt him, you killed him. Only I could hear his cries, only I cared about his pain... I promised to take care of him... only I saw what he truly was..."
</p><p>Jack inched closer to Charlie, who was now frozen in fear.
</p><p>The front door to the house slowly opened up as Sandy came through the door with a bag of shirts, ready to dye. She called out to Jack to tell him she was home, expecting a welcome party to greet her. Instead, she looked to the floor to find red prints stained into the carpet. She sat her bag down and followed the trail. As she turned into the room where she had left the dye tub, she was greeted by a message written on the wall in blood.
</p><p>"You let him kill Jack, so I took him. You will live, but your punishment is knowing you killed your son"
</p><p>Terrified but confused, she ran to the window to see if she could find Jack. In the garden, next to the pumpkin, was a blood soaked body. Already crying, Sandy ran out the door as fast as she could. As she reached the garden, she found the body to be Charlie, who had been mutilated almost beyond recognition already. She was petrified, but she quickly spun around calling for Jack. After a police investigation later that night, pools of blood were found in a nearby field, but Jack was never found.
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<hr><hr><p>A police report has been filed for the bodies found in the cornfield and an investigation has been opened. The bodies had all been found in the same condition; Eyes had been manually torn out and mouths had been torn/cut open with the lips removed. The report had an extra description line stating that their faces resembled a Jack-O-Lanturn face, but that is not an official description.
</p><p>There were 13 bodies in all... 7 Carnies from a nearby carnival, 5 customers from said carnival, and a Mr. Rodger Stevenson, a local Psychiatrist.
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