Creepshow

Usually I carve a pumpkin for Halloween, and it’s glowing through a window of our darkened house when trick-or-treaters walk up our driveway and front steps to the screened-in front porch. Typically we drag down from the attic every plastic skull and paper skeleton we can find, and prop or hang them forebodingly on the porch swing, a pedestal table and other available surfaces.

Traditionally our front porch has lent itself well to the occasion, since—with its cobwebs, dead bugs, withered flowers, filthy plastic chairs, chipped paint and other indicators of manifest neglect—it has more closely resembled the entryway to the Munsters’ place at 1313 Mockingbird Lane than anything a suburban kid might expect to encounter in our pricey Bethesda zip code.

This year, however, we’d been on a vacation trip until the day before Halloween, and a social engagement that afternoon that had kept us away from the house until about 5 pm. Also, a month or two earlier we’d had the front porch painted, after about a decade’s worth of increasing shame over its appearance. The floor was so badly chipped by that point that the few times I vacuumed it each year, the bag quickly would fill with floor fragments. It had seemed only a matter of time until some barefoot neighbor kid soliciting funds for a school project would splinter his or her way to a huge lawsuit filed against us by litigious parents. Frankly, if we hadn’t cleared and tidied the porch for painting when we did, we might just as well have moved a rusty refrigerator and assorted hubcaps out there and hired a banjo player to complete the picture of utter indifference and dilapidation.

What I mean to say is, while our porch at last was fit for the eyes of polite society by this past Sunday night, it was considerably less ideal as a gateway to Halloween than it had been in past years. There not only was no glowing pumpkin in the window this time, but no cobwebs, no insect carcasses, no pealing porch swing perfect for the Crypt Keeper and a date. We’d hung a wreath of skulls on the front door and set a line of three wooden Jack-o-Lanterns on a low table, but that was about it. It isn’t like we get a ton of trick-or-treaters—generally between 30 and 50, most within a 90-minute window—but I felt like I was letting down those youngsters who are familiar enough with our house of planned and inadvertent horrors to have expected more from us. When the first group of kids arrived at around 6:45 and I opened the front door, I could see and hear in the distance eerie flashing lights and disturbing shrieks coming from a house on Wagner Lane. It made me feel rather like a wallflower at the Monster Mash.

At least we had good candy, and plenty of it, I consoled myself as I sat at the kitchen table. It overlooks the driveway, and I had the TV on AMC (American Movie Classics), which was showing the 1996 roadhouse-of-the-undead flick From Dusk Till Dawn. Before our vacation, Lynn had stocked up on multiple bags of Snickers, Reese’s, Milky Ways and Butterfingers. The kids who arrived periodically in groups of three or five over the first hour or so seemed pleased enough with the ambiance when I produced the candy basket and told them to take “a couple” of pieces. Which more often than not meant three or four, not that I balked.

But even the kids’ apparent satisfaction with their haul and the between-knocks distraction of the rampant gore and pixilated nudity on the TV screen (damn basic cable!) couldn’t keep me from feeling a bit like the Grinch who’d unduly sanitized Halloween. Until, that was, about 8 o’clock, when I opened the door to a trio of boys who were maybe eight or 10 years old. One was dressed as a pirate, another as a ninja and the third as Batman.

Each took several candy bars from my basket—I no longer was issuing instructions, as surplus inventory was assured at that point. They muttered their thanks and were turning to leave when Batman suddenly paused and squinted his eyes in my direction. At that point I’d returned the candy basket to its perch on the radiator beside the door, leaving my truncated-since-birth right arm entirely exposed, since I was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt. The transfixed Caped Crusader nudged Jack Sparrow and Ninja Man, then, pointing at me, said with a mixture of fear and disbelief, “It looks like your arm’s cut off!”

In retrospect, what I should have done at that moment was malevolently cackle, and perhaps order them to accompany me to the kitchen for similar amputations courtesy of my butcher’s knife. But in truth I was momentarily taken aback by the fright I now saw in all three kids’ faces, as they realized this wasn’t a gag and I really had no right hand. I managed to muster a disarming smile (OK, pun intended) and cajolingly assured them, “It’s a birth defect. No big deal.”

But Batman was not mollified. With his friends already hightailing it down the front steps, he left me with the parting exclamation “Eww!” before turning to join them.

I closed the door and returned to my post at the kitchen table, feeling a bit shaken as I numbly watched George Clooney and Juliette Lewis on the TV, subduing grotesque vampires with rifles and stakes fashioned from chair legs. But then, a few minutes later, I suddenly appreciated the true legacy and import of my doorway encounter. At that precise moment the undead were vaporizing before my eyes, as Clooney’s bullets brought vampire-killing daylight streaming into the seedy Mexican bar—deadly dusk having given way to sweet dawn.

I smiled, having at last realized that, far from having failed Halloween in some way, I’d actually succeeded in making it more terrifying, at least for one group of young boys. I’ve since made a mental note to keep a rubber knife by the door next year. By then, too, our housekeeping record suggests the porch will again look pretty damn scary.