The Festival of Samhain, otherwise known as Halloween Eve.

Anthea dressed baby Kayla for the costume party they were throwing that evening. Their friends, mostly parents from the Daycare Center with a sprinkling of young wealthy couples from the Country Club they belonged to, were invited to bring their babies and small children to the family-oriented party. The outside eves of the house had been decorated with orange Xmas-style lights to Marcus the place of the party. The lawn had been prepared with Styrofoam tombstones that stood before fresh, brown earth-colored six-foot long and three-foot wide mounds of fresh wood bark mulch. Outside speakers had been set up and the howls of wolves could be heard from a CD that was playing in a stereo in Marcus’s workshop.

Anthea and Marcus had worked very hard for months to prepare for the party. Ranks of nippled baby bottles of green-tinted baby formula stood in their enormous, restaurant-style refrigerator, while a huge, black, plastic caldron filled with blood-red fruit punch chilled by frozen dismembered “hands” molded in clean latex gloves and filled with grape juice. The addition of dry ice to the caldron made it appear to “boil” from the pseudo-flames of the flickering decorative red and yellow lights that simulated a fire underneath the caldron. On the black tablecothed table, there was a profusion of goodies for the kids and their parents. Candied apples on sticks that oozed gelatin candy “gummy” worms were gathered in a black-lace trimmed silver serving platter beside two large rectangular orange-colored Pyrex baking dishes that hosted a pair of grassless graveyards made from chocolate pudding with dirt made from crumbled Nabisco Chocolate Wafers and tombstones of imported German oblong cookies that had decorations of horsemen, sculptured faces and other Medieval themes baked into their surface. Red cinnamon–eyed “ghosts” of conical mounts of whipped cream “haunted” the graveyards. The centerpiece of the table was a gingerbread “Haunted House”. Platters of bone skull shaped shortbread cookies were on one side of the table and one the other were iced and highly decorated sugar cookies shaped like bats, cats, Halloween pumpkins and ghoulish faces. On the other side of the room, Marcus had set up an adult bar were he was prepared to serve Zombies, Bloody Marys’ and Mead as well as more traditional alcoholic drinks. The room itself had been decorated with Hollywood-style theatrical polymer cobwebs and from almost every high surface glowed a grinning, highly sculptured pumpkin that displayed a three-dimensional surface when illuminated with its internal yellow bug lamp.

Marcus had outdone himself and made Anthea proud by his ingenious creations. Earlier in the year, he had contracted with a hydroponic hot-house grower just outside of town to provide him with large pumpkins before the season began. His real genius became evident when Anthea discovered that he had purchased two old deep freezers and had mounted three temperature resistant, foam covered outdoor plywood platforms with vacuum fittings and monstrously-sized bell-jars in which to freeze-dry the pumpkins in his well appointed home workshop. A separate room temperature desiccating facility was constructed in his large, well-vented paint cabinet. Marcus had salvaged several freezer compressors from junked freezers and had, through the addition of appropriate valves and tubing, had engineered a multi-stage, hard vacuum pump worthy of a University laboratory from salvaged parts.

After taking delivery of the pumpkins, Marcus placed them in their mansion’s walk-in freezer for cold storage before they began to rot. He had feverishly worked for weeks with fine saws, whittling knives and delicate woodcarving gouges to make each pumpkin a three-dimensional sculpture which seemed to come to life when a light was place within the pumpkin. After each pumpkin sculpture was finished, it was placed in a freezer set to minimum temperature. After a few hours, a vacuum bell-jar was placed over it and the air in the jar was evacuated. Then the frozen pumpkin was left to desiccate in the hard vacuum for several days. When the freeze-dried pumpkin-sculpture was removed, the waterless shell had retained its shape, but was light as a feather in comparison to its former waterlogged weight. Then Marcus took the sculpture to his workshop’s paint cabinet and used a high pressure, one hundred psi oil sprayer to drive a coating of varnish deep into the cells of the pumpkin. Each coat took twenty-four hours to dry and the varnish treatment was repeated two more times. The outside was sealed with a low pressure sprayer with a satin-finish, polyurethane water-based varnish and left to dry for a week. When the pumpkin was finished, it was placed in a non-refrigerated bell jar and placed under a hard vacuum again to remove any taint of oil or turpentine vapors that remained. After twenty-four hours, the finished product was removed and boxed in a padded plastic container until Halloween rolled around. The result was a light sculpture constructed of pumpkin fibers that was impervious to insects, mold or fungal rot. The resin treatment of the varnish had driven the Asian and Brazilian tree resins through the porous, waterless, cellulose fibers of the melon to preserve them indefinitely. His masterpieces would live on for centuries. Indeed, as the years went by, his collection of timeless pumpkin sculptures became so large that their storage had to be relegated to a temperature-controlled storage facility.