The Ninth

The dock stretched out into the mist like a black tongue, slick and gleaming with rot. I had brought both a flashlight and a headlamp, but they betrayed me from the first. The beam wavered, sputtered, then died into useless sparks. The headlamp flickered once, then went dark as if choked by the air itself. I shook them, cursed them, but it didn’t matter. The fog devoured their glow.

The only light came from the pumpkins.

The first stood alone, crooked grin lit with a dull, steady fire. Not a flame — no flicker, no smoke — just a flat orange glow that breathed across the boards. I leaned close, peering into its hollow eyes. That was when I heard it:

A splash.

Heavy, violent, as though something vast had broken the surface just beside me. I spun toward the sound, my heart slamming against my ribs, but the water showed nothing. The surface lay still. The ripples had already died.

I moved on.

Two pumpkins came next, side by side, their faces angled toward each other as if sharing some private joke. I stepped between them, uneasy, my boots thudding against the slick boards. And then it came:

Two splashes.

One after the other, quick and sure, right where the dock vanished into the black. My breath caught. I swept the dark water with my fading lamp, but it stuttered and died before touching the surface. Nothing. Only the carved faces watching me pass, their grins wider now, crueler.

At the third, the sound came louder, closer. My skin prickled. A fourth followed, then a fifth. Always the splash, always just beyond sight, and always the pumpkins grinning, their faint light carrying me farther into the mist.

By the time I reached the sixth, my nerves had worn thin. My legs trembled. My hands shook so badly I could barely keep them at my sides. The splashes, the steady glow, the way the air thickened with each step — I couldn’t take more. I turned, meaning to go back the way I had come.

But the dock was gone.

No — not gone. The planks were there, but they were swallowed in black. The fog pressed tight, a wall of wet smoke, so thick I could see no farther than a single step. And worse — the light was gone. Every pumpkin I had passed, every faint grin that had carried me forward, was extinguished. Not dimmed. Not dying. Simply gone.

I froze. My chest heaved, sucking in air that felt too heavy to breathe. I turned my head, searching for even the closest one — the pumpkin I had passed only seconds ago. It should have been there, glowing faintly, close enough for me to touch. But there was nothing. Empty boards. Blank fog.

The silence cut deeper than the splashes had. No light. No sound. No way back. Only the black pressing against me, closing tighter, answering to some cold will I couldn’t see.

I felt it then — not in my ears, not in my eyes, but in my bones. The power in the fog was deliberate. It was not weather, not chance. It had decided. And it wanted me forward.

The seventh leered at me with jagged teeth, and as I passed it the water beneath my feet throbbed with a sound too heavy to be natural. The eighth waited alone at the end. Its light was darker, heavier, pulsing like a breath. And then the water stirred. Not a splash this time — something more. A swell. The dock lifted slightly beneath me. My stomach lurched.

Something was rising.

It broke the surface with a slow, dragging force. Long arms gripped the boards, thin and trembling, slick with weeds and rot. Shoulders hunched, ribs glistened white through torn flesh. Water poured from the thing’s chest as it heaved itself upward, dripping, stinking. And last — the head.

A pumpkin. Its grin stretched impossibly wide, its hollow eyes glowing, fixed on me. The ninth.

I spun to run, but the fog surged with me, thick as stone, blinding. My boots pounded the planks, the dock shaking beneath each frantic step. Behind me, the thing crawled, dragged, then ran, its wet limbs slamming the boards with a thunder that rattled my teeth.

And then the planks ended.

My foot struck nothing. I pitched forward. As I fell, a cold hand seized my back and shoved. I plunged into the water.

The cold tore the air from my lungs. My eyes opened in the dark, and there they were — the others. Eight bodies drifting, headless, pale limbs floating in silence. Their mouths gaped wide, releasing streams of bubbles that sounded almost like laughter.

I fought, kicked, clawed for the surface, but the hand pressed me down, deeper, harder. My vision narrowed, dimmed, until above me I saw only the dock.

And there, glowing through the fog, was another pumpkin.

It was mine. My face, carved into a grin, its hollow eyes burning bright as the laughter rose. The ninth had been chosen.