Halloween (10 page)

The trick-or-treaters were in full bloom. The children had poured out of their homes simultaneously, as if on some signal unheard by grown-ups. Laurie stood on the sidewalk outside her house, one eye cocked for Annie's red two-door hardtop, and watched the procession of pirates, clowns, cowboys, witches, skeletons, ballerinas, policemen, firemen, doctors, nurses, and soldiers that trooped up and down the block in clusters of four or five, methodically working the streets with their ever-fattening mass-produced orange-and-black shopping bags.

What touched her most deeply was the realization that these children were free and safe to roam the streets unhindered, unworried by the bullies and muggers and purse snatchers that lay in wait in the shadows of New York or Chicago or the other big cities. Oh, one or two knots of children were accompanied by an adult, but this was for traffic supervision, not protection against crime. The littlest ones tended to cross streets without looking at this dusky hour, where the all-but-settled sun glinted with a brightness equal to the orange jack-o'-lanterns that rested on porch railings or in windows in every house. Oh, one did read in the newspapers every year about some mad person who hated children and injected poison into apples or concealed razor blades in trick-or-treat candy. But that wasn't why the occasional parent could be seen tagging along with a pack of beggar-children, looking foolish in grownup clothes or even more foolish in costume. No, there was no danger to the child who walked the sundown streets of Haddonfield.

At least not, Laurie pondered, from without. But from within? Was it not possible that among these dozens of gaily cavorting children there was one capable of a crime so heinous it made the gorge rise in your throat just to think about it? It would be ridiculous, laughable, had it not been so fifteen years ago this very night. They said he had on a clown costume, Laurie said, scanning the little revelers for a clown costume. She found four in the space of a minute. That one of them could produce a knife and ventilate her entrails was a thought far more horrifying than the thought of the same knife wielded by some city cutthroat, from whom you at least expected it. Laurie flashed for a second on Judith Myers and tried to put herself in Judy's place as the boy with the rosy cheeks and fawn eyes exposed the blade of his butcher knife and began to advance on her. It's a joke, you can stop now, Laurie heard herself telling her own imaginary kid brother. But the kid brother didn't stop, and when he brought the blade up and then down that first time, just before that point penetrated your flesh, you knew something about evil that had been forgotten for centuries, maybe millennia.

You knew in that instant that everything you had been brought up to believe, everything you had counted on for security, everything you took for granted as normal, all of it was a lie of such enormity that if you could live for another hundred years, let alone another five seconds, you could never fully grasp it. In that instant of frozen time between the downward thrust of the child's arm and the searing agony of his blade plunging hotly into your body, your mind took stock of everything that had meant comfort to you; the television set and the air conditioner, the late-model car with three hundred horsepower and rack-and-pinion steering and disc brakes, the refrigerator-freezer that made ice cubes, the electric range that signaled you when your roast was ready, your gas heater that flicked on automatically when the temperature in your home dropped below sixty-five degrees, the happy house and loving parents and terrific teachers and great friends, you surveyed them all and they were lies, lies, for when it came to shielding your belly from this crazed six-year-old's right hand, these comforts were as thin as the silk panties that shielded it now, for all the protection they rendered.

"
Trick or treat!
"

Laurie clutched her stomach involuntarily. "Get away from me!" she screamed.

The children's eyes rounded, and they backed away several steps.

Laurie caught her breath and laughed sheepishly. "Oh, I'm sorry, you snuck up on me. This is my house, here. Go up to the door, my mother has some goodies for you."

Get a grip on yourself
, Laurie said to herself as the children traipsed up to her front door.

Annie's car whipped around the corner and screeched to a stop. Laurie walked around to the passenger side and got in. She sniffed the air. "Do you have to smoke that stuff when you drive?"

"Well, excuuuuuuse me!"

"Look, I'm no prude, but there
are
kids all over the place tonight, so drive carefully, huh?"

"Yes, Mommy," Annie said, pulling away from the curb with exaggerated caution."Where are we going?"

"The usual. Just a cruise around town to see who's hanging out, and with whom. Then on to our babysitting assignments. Barf. And you ask if I have to smoke," she said, groping around her purse and removing a clumsily rolled joint in canary yellow paper. At a stop sign she lit it, pulling on it with a hissing intake of air and offering it to Laurie.

Grass never did much for Laurie, and she didn't expect it to do much this time, but it was the social thing to do, so she dragged on it the way she'd been taught. She must have hit a hot spot in the joint, or perhaps it was a particularly rough weed, because she started to cough uncontrollably.

Annie took the joint back. "You'll never make a good dope addict," she said, hitting it again.

They drove casually in the general direction of town, Laurie holding in her lap the pumpkin she'd brought for Tommy Doyle. They passed a few friends, nobody special, so they honked and waved and drove on.

"You still spooked?" Annie asked her friend.

"I wasn't spooked."

"Lies."

"I saw someone standing in Mr. Riddle's backyard, that's all."

"Probably Mr. Riddle."

"He was watching me."

"Mr. Riddle was watching you?" Annie gave that three-note giggle she always seemed to utter when she was getting high. "Laurie, Mr. Riddle is eighty-seven."

"He can still watch."

"That's probably all he can do." Annie looked in her rearview mirror before hanging a left, and casually noted the same station wagon she'd shouted at after school. It was about fifty yards behind her. It was probably nothing, and not wanting to alarm Laurie more than the poor girl was already alarmed, Annie decided to say nothing. But she wondered who this El Creepo was. If you're trying to meet a couple of chicks, this sure wasn't the way to do it. And if you're some kind of pervert, tailing chicks through the streets of a small town is about as subtle as throwing a bomb into a police station.

She checked the rearview mirror again and he was gone. Too bad. Now she'd never know. But she had a thought by association, and she uttered it. "Have you ever worn a mask?"

"Huh?"

"When you wear a mask, like at Halloween? But I mean a really good one that disguises your face so that people really don't know who you are?"

"What about it?" Laurie's brow wrinkled as she waited for the punch line.

"I was just thinking, you can say or do anything from behind that mask, because people don't know who you are."

"It's like the
Alexandria Quartet
," said Laurie. "Lawrence Durrell?"

"I never read that."

"I'm sure," Laurie teased. "Somewhere in one of those novels Durrell describes the terrible things that happen on carnival night because people wear masks. Murders, rapes, people hiding behind the anonymity to take advantage of each other . . ."

"Oh, goody, can I get a student discount on a ticket to Alexandria?"

"Be serious, Annie, you're the one who started this conversation."

"Sorry. But see, that's just what I mean. The idea of not being responsible for anything I do because I'm wearing a mask—it's kind of arousing."

"For you, maybe. But then, you find everything arousing."

"Oh, well, that's the kind of girl I'm. Maybe you ought to put on a mask and let some of your inhibitions out, do something mad. It's Halloween, what better time to raise a little hell? I'll bet that deep down in you there's a fiend who'd push little old ladies in front of cars if you thought you could get away with it."

"Never!" Laurie gasped. Then, pausing a beat as a sly smile spread over her face, "Little old men, maybe, but never little old ladies."

They burst into gales of laughter.

"What's the pumpkin for?" Annie said, tapping the object in her friend's lap.

"I brought it for Tommy. I figured that making a jack-o'-lantern would keep him occupied."

"I always said you'd make a fabulous girl scout."

"Thanks."

"For that matter, I might as well be a girl scout myself tonight," she sighed.

"Because you got shot down, you mean," Laurie said.

"Yeah. I guess we'll make popcorn and watch
Doctor Dementia
. Six straight hours of horror movies. Little Lindsey Wallace won't know what hit her."

"Better horror movies than the real thing," said Laurie wistfully.

Annie's brows furrowed. "Now, what is that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing, just some morbid thoughts I've been having today."

Annie offered her friend the half-smoked joint. "You'd better take a great big hit of this thing, honey. It's a sure cure for the morbids."

Laurie pushed it away. "Annie, do you ever think about, well, evil?"

"Uh-oh, it's serious time."

Laurie held her peace, forcing Annie to reflect.

"Well, you know, daddy's a cop, and he's told me some things. I don't know if you'd call them evil, exactly, we don't get much of it around here. We don't get much of anything around here! But when he worked in Columbus? He saw some pretty heavy things go down: beatings, rapes, murders. Sounded evil enough to me. Anyway, I try not to think about stuff like that. Whenever I do, I switch the channel . . ."

"I wish I could turn my mind off as easily as you," Laurie lamented.

"It's easy when you don't have that much of a mind to begin with. Hey, talk about my father!" As the car bore around a gentle curving approach to town, they saw the sheriff's car parked outside Nichols's Hardware Store. The car's revolving red and blue lights and flashers illuminated the hardware, candy, and liquor stores adjoining it as darkness began to descend on Haddonfield. An alarm bell rang shrilly, and a knot of onlookers stared at Annie's father as he stood in front of the broken plate glass window examining the damage.

Annie and Laurie hastily rolled their windows down and waved their hands like frightened birds to chase the cloying smoke smell out of the car. Annie noticed the station wagon that had been following them peel off down Main Street as she pulled her car over to the curb. Lee Brackett brightened and ambled over to the ear. "Hi, Annie, Laurie."

"Hi, Dad. What happened?"

"Huh?" He pointed at the hardware store and Annie realized the man hadn't heard her over the clangor of the alarm bell. She repeated her question louder. "Someone broke into the hardware store. Probably kids."

"You blame everything on kids," Annie rejoined.

He shrugged. "The only things missing were some Halloween masks, rope, and a set of carving knives, as far as Mr. Nichols has been able to figure. What does that sound like to you, a middle management executive for IBM?"

Annie looked at her friend. "It's hard growing up with a cynic."

"Don't you have a babysitting job, sweet-heart?" her father shouted.

"What?"

"
l said, 'Don't you have a babysitting lob?' You're going to be late!
"

"He shouts too," Annie said, waving at her father. The girls rolled up their windows and laughed.

"Do you think he smelled anything?" Laurie asked, testing the air with her nostrils.

"My father? He's a good cop, but he's a lousy detective."

"I hope so. I'd hate for it to get back to my folks."

"Listen, Laurie, if your parents don't know you smoke grass, they probably haven't noticed you've grown boobs, either." She glanced sidelong at Laurie's chest. "I take that back. I'm not sure anybody's noticed you've grown boobs."

"Damn daughter's been smoking whoopee-weed again," Sheriff Brackett muttered to himself as he observed a dour-looking, bald man with a gray goatee stepping out of the crowd. The man wore a chocolate-colored suit beneath a rumpled trench coat.

"Sheriff? I'm Dr. Sam Loomis," the man shouted over the alarm.

"Lee Brackett," the sheriff said, looking at him critically. "We don't need a doctor. It's just a routine break-in."

"I'm not that kind of doctor. I'd like to talk with you, if I could."

"It may be a few minutes. I gotta stick around here."

"It's important." His eyes, sunken and slightly red-rimmed, appealed to Brackett like a hound's at the dinner table.

Brackett looked at his watch and shrugged. "Ten minutes?"

"I'll be here," Loomis said, turning just a moment too late to notice the station wagon he'd been hunting pull away after its occupant had stopped to observe him.

Brackett didn't see it either. He had heard the call come over the radio last night and this morning, and though nobody had fully explained who was supposed to be driving the liver-colored station wagon with the state emblem on the doors, he'd have chased it down routinely.

Loomis killed the ten minutes with a stroll down Main Street, looking indifferently into windows of stores and shops that were interchangeable with those of any town this size in the Midwest. There were a few signs of changing times, such as an organic health food shop, a bookstore with a surprisingly intellectual selection of titles in the window, and a coffee shop specializing in espresso, capuccino, and herb teas, a far cry from the usual Midwest coffee shop purveying the kind of diner fare that truckdrivers thrived on. But at least there was no head shop, as one commonly saw in the bigger midwestern towns and cities: no shop selling cigarette papers, pipes, coke spoons and the more exotic paraphernalia of the dope trade. Though Loomis knew that the kids used drugs in these towns, the town governments came down very hard on any overt display of drug cultures.