I faintly saw an especially immense pumpkin, and saw as I parked my bike that it was the only one carved. Of course even then I was far away. I signaled to my friends to see this huge jack-o-lantern, lighted despite the rain, and even without a top.
We started racing and running and sprinting toward the pumpkin, across the Tjaden Pumpkin "orchard." Within an hour of awkward silence, we all reached the pumpkin. The rain had stopped, and it must have been 4:30. Finally I broke out laughing, barely able to squeak out, "I'd like to see a pie as big as that!" We climbed through the carved eyes and mouth and saw thousands of people, but the weirdest thing about that was that they had no hands and they had no feet. As I stepped close to them, I knew it was a trick. But before I could stop myself and my friends, we stepped upon a trap door, and fell, fell, fell.
I fell for about ten minutes when I hit my head on something, as well as a floor under me. I couldn't see what I hit my head on, because my eyes were adjusting from the long, dark fall.
When they were finally adjusted, I could see that I had fallen to a room in the top of the Tjaden Mansion. As I turned around, I noticed there was a room full with a huge TV playing the Republican National Convention from 1872. "But how?" Before I could finish my sentence, behind me came a clatter and a splat and other noises. Without turning around, I took a pocketknife out and opened the blade when my friends asked me what I was doing and I noticed it was just them and the noise was hitting the floor.
I told them, "So let me get this straight. We found a giant pumpkin with thousands of people with no hands or feet inside, fell through a trap door in the bottom, and landed at the highest castle in the Tjaden Mansion so we could watch the RNC from 1872 on TV, in a time when TV had another 80 years to be invented."
Then, one of my friends pointed. "Also that." I looked behind me and saw THAT. It was tall with matted black hair all over it and its knuckles. It had slumping posture and looked vaguely familiar. "It's a gorilla," we all yelled in unison. And then it hit us, "A gorilla?" we all looked confused, then ran until we noticed it wasn't following us, which was a while because everyone thought it would go after us.
We were going to go back if it hadn't been late, but we noticed a door labeled 'Cheese Hats' and I wanted to see that. "One last thing, I said," I opened the door and found this was no room full of edible sports hats.
It was instead another room with a gorilla, a TV playing the Republican National Convention 1872, and a hole in the ceiling that led to a giant pumpkin. The only change was that there was a ladder clumsily left on the floor.
Somehow, running straight through the halls of the Tjaden mansion had led us back where we started again. So I picked up the ladder silently and nodded to my friends. They knew what I meant. I propped it up against a wall and we all climbed through.
We came out through the pumpkin, not even noticing the limbless "ghosts" were not there. We ran back toward our bikes and rode straight home. We found it strange that when we got back, the clock said 3:30 instead of 5 o'clock.
We never talked of that day for 30 years, and when we returned, we noticed even stranger things have happened since that fateful afternoon.