Introduction
Ideally, I’d
have had the idea for this story in time for Halloween, but I just plain didn’t.
What follows
isn’t a ghost story, exactly, but I hope it can give you a little chill. All characters, situations, cultural
traditions, observations, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions are
fictitious, coincidental, accidental, or are used fictitiously.
One Halloween Night
Robert’s
first batch of Trick-or-Treaters came at around 7:30: a bug, a robot, and a witch. A trio of parents hung back in the darkness
beyond the span of the porch light. A
few minutes later, the second Trick-or-Treater, a very small kid dressed as a sunflower,
was solo except for his mom, standing six feet back and prompting him: “Say ‘Trick or Treat!’ Remember to say ‘Trick or Treat!’” Robert held the candy bowl at the kid’s level
and the kid finally mumbled the magic words and took a fun-size Snickers. “Say ‘thank you!’” the mom reminded him. The kid seemed paralyzed by the push-and-pull
of free candy on the one hand, and a terribly frightening social engagement on
the other.
Robert
fondly remembered his own kids’ first Halloween, when he too prompted them—at
every house—to say “Trick or Treat.” He
could relate to this mom: somehow, a kid
just standing there waiting for his candy was violating a social contract. The words were important, and of course the
gratitude. Robert chuckled remembering
the first time he’d prompted little Amanda to say thank you: he’d nudged her and whispered, “What are you
forgetting?” Amanda looked back to the
homeowner and said, “Oh, yeah … can I get something for my dad, too?”
The girls
were older now, almost too old for Trick-or-Treating and certainly too old for
a parental escort. Robert fretted about
the possible danger in this nighttime tradition. Why did Amanda have to go as a raven? Could she possibly have chosen a less visible
costume, what with drunk drivers all over the road? And little Sarah was so sociable, she chatted
up everyone who answered the door … which was just fine in their own little
neighborhood, but these days it seemed like she wouldn’t need to stray too far
to encounter that over-friendly whacko who might (gasp!) invite her in.
Of course,
as much as Robert worried, he also kicked himself for being so paranoid. He’d always had an overactive imagination,
and it didn’t help that he was lately consumed by a growing addiction to true
crime novels. For the last six weeks,
walking Sarah to school and back, he’d
been watching the painstaking construction of a haunted house a few blocks
away, which was so elaborate they practically needed a building permit. Why go to so much trouble? Surely he wouldn’t have been so suspicious if
he hadn’t read The Lovely Bones, in
which a psychopath builds an elaborate underground clubhouse and lures in an
innocent teen, correctly supposing that her curiosity would overcome her
parents’ admonishment about talking to strangers.
The next
wave of kids were perfectly behaved:
they remembered the Trick-or-Treat,
the thank-you, and even wished him a happy Halloween. Robert was charmed, but also slightly
relieved, for he couldn’t help but evaluate Trick-or-Treaters, with his entire
opinion of humanity hanging in the balance of the kids’ behavior. One year he left his post for about ten
minutes to have a drink with the neighbors, leaving the candy bowl on the porch
with a sign reading, “Please take just one.”
When he got home, the entire bowl was already empty, some little lardy
scofflaw obviously having dumped the whole thing into his bag. This offended Robert inordinately, as did
kids who grabbed a whole handful of candy when he held out his bowl.
The next time
the doorbell rang it was a duo of pre-teens in inscrutable costumes. Dark lords of some sort, Robert guessed. They didn’t say anything at first and then
one elbowed the other, who said, “Trick or Treat, Trick or Treat, give me
something good to eat,” and then, in a barely audible mumble, “Or smell my
feet.” Robert wanted to say, “Look, if
you’re going to play that card, you have to step up and do it right. Own the
insult. Look me in the eye and say,
‘Trick or Treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat.’ Don’t tack the ‘smell my feet’ part on at the
end. Now let’s try it again.” Instead he just held out the bowl.
Of course, as
a kid Robert hadn’t had the verve to say those words at all, as much as he and
his brothers dared each other. When it
came down to it, they were all craven, and this manifested in unfailing
politeness. That is, until they became
full teenagers. The last year Robert had
trick-or-treated, he wore this giant foam monster head his brother had made,
and he could barely see out of it, which (it turned out) made him a sitting
duck for a candy mugger. The jerk had pretended
to admire young Robert’s costume, and then grabbed his whole candy bag—a haul
representing over two hours of hustling from house to house—and ran. The rest of the night, Robert had been driven
around at high speed in the back of his brothers’ friend’s Jeep, looking for
the thief so they could avenge the crime and get Robert back his candy. Futile as this was, it felt like turning the
page from childish rituals to manly acts of courage.
“How many
can we take?” the next kids asked. Robert
replied, “Just one … I’m running low.”
He was pleased that the kids were polite enough to ask. Following this there was a lull, and Robert was
able to wolf down some of his dinner before the doorbell rang again.
To his
surprise, there was no kid there, but an adult starting to walk away. Normally when Robert was slow to answer the
door, the kids would leave off ringing the doorbell and start knocking on the
door, sometimes two or three at once, and one time a kid accidentally tumbled
into the house when Robert opened the door.
Such impatience was understandable:
for kids fixated on hitting as many houses as they could, time passed
differently, with each moment of waiting seeming to stretch out toward
infinity. But here, since it was obvious
someone was home—given the porch light, the lights on in the house, and no
fewer than three lit jack-o-lanterns on the porch—any adult should have been
more patient. And where was this guy’s
kid?
The guy
smiled sheepishly. “My daughter ran
off,” he explained, before turning toward the sidewalk and calling, “Katie,
come back!” He paused for a moment and
said, “Oh well, I’ll get her something.”
This seemed perfectly reasonable, until he proceeded to grab a whole
handful of candy before walking off.
Robert was
perplexed. On the one hand,
parents—particularly in this earnest community—were always bending over
backward to do right by their children.
On the other hand, wasn’t the classic post-Trick-or-Treat dilemma all
about how to get all that candy—with its sinister corn syrup, hydrogenated oil,
artificial flavor, and PGPR—out of your kid’s hands? What parent would want to add extra candy to the stash?
Robert
almost shrugged it off, but then walked out onto the porch and watched the man
walking away. So far, the guy hadn’t
reunited with his daughter. And another
thing: he was carrying the candy
bag. What parent carries his kid’s candy
for her? And what kid would even allow
this? The guy was heading south and it
was a long block. Robert went inside and
phoned his friend Mark, who lived ten houses down.
* * *
Mark’s doorbell
was broken and he had a sign: “Please
knock loudly!” Kids took this to heart and
tended to pound the crap out of his door, especially because Mark was a bit
slow getting there. So when he thought
he heard a light knock, he wasn’t sure and stayed on the couch. The knock came again; he drained his beer and
went to the door. He’d have been
surprised to see only an adult walking away, except for the call he’d had from
Robert.
“Oh, there is someone home!” the guy said as he
turned around. He added sheepishly, “My
daughter ran off.” He looked toward the
sidewalk and called, “Katie! Come
back!” With a little shake of his head
he said, “Oh well,” and reached for Mark’s candy bowl.
“Wait,” Mark
said. “Before I give candy to my
Trick-or-Treaters I like to see their costumes.
Like, I won’t give candy to un-costumed teenagers.” He stepped out the door and escorted his
guest to the sidewalk. “Now, which kid
is your daughter?” The guy pointed at a
little girl halfway to the next house.
Mark called
out, quite loudly, “Hey Katie, you forgot something!” The girl did not turn around. She was dressed in a darling little Totoro
costume but had evidently found the fabric head stifling and had pushed it back
like a hood so it dangled down her back.
“Hey Totoro, you forgot something!” Mark yelled, and now the girl looked
back, confused. “Hey, is this your dad?”
Mark called out. The girl looked
stricken and ran ahead to an adult whose hand she grabbed. Her actual dad.
The guy with
the candy bag started to quickly walk away but Mark grabbed him by the
wrist. “What the hell is your problem?” Mark demanded. “Why can’t you go buy your own damn
candy?” He looked the guy up and
down. The guy wasn’t homeless or
anything. Good shoes. “What, are you like some kind of
kleptomaniac?” Mark continued. “You get
off on abusing people’s trust? You some
kind of sicko?” The guy just stood
there, frozen, his face stuck in a half-smile.
Was he enjoying this,
too? Or was this half-smile just a
manifestation of his abject awkwardness?
Now the guy
grasped the full murderous menace on Mark’s face and managed to wrestle free and
run for it, his candy bag slapping his leg as he went. Mark shook his head and went back into the
house.
What could
he do? Call the police? What would be the charge? Trick-or-Treating Without A Costume? Trick-or-Treating While Adult? Identity Theft? Impersonating a Parent? Unspecific Non-Sexual Perversity? There was no specific crime committed, and
yet his transgression was so very, very disturbing.
Mark phoned
Robert. “He’s headed back in your
direction, in a full run,” he said. “You
wanna go out and at least trip him or something?”
About the Type
This blog
post was set in Calibri, a typeface based on a sans-serif New Wave face used in
a variety of 1980s teen-coming-of-age novels.
Calibri was cut by Lawrence Spitspoon in Taos, New Mexico, and was
brought to Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, WA by a hitchhiker on his way
to a salmon-fishing job in Alaska in 2007.
Depending on
your web browser, its configuration, and your computer operating system, this
blog post may appear in Georgia, a typeface cut with a crude hunting knife into
the trunk of a Mongolian oak (quercus
mongolica) in Izborsk, Russia, in the early 1800s by Ivan Ivanovich Zakareishvili
in memory of Tsar Alexandar I. Georgia was first introduced to the web in
1997 when bundled with the Internet Explorer 4.0 supplemental font pack.
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