Bumps In The Night

Bumps In The Night

It was Halloween in the little town of Wayne Bridge, New Hampshire. Spiderman; The Wicked Witch of the West; Dracula wearing a cape, with plastic fangs in his mouth; The Grim Reaper in a hooded black robe and a very realistic skull mask, carrying a sickle; Wonder Woman; and Batman were out trick-or-treating. All the costumed children had orange plastic pumpkins to stash their swag in. They were accompanied by a man named Hank Gillette, who taught English at the town’s prep school, Saybrook Academy He wore old-fashioned golf knickers, a red, white, and blue Argyle sweater-vest, and a Donald Trump mask. He was Batman’s and Wonder Woman’s father, and before he set off, his wife Linette, a philosophy instructor at the University of New Hampshire, told him his costume gave her the creeps. “Nobody wants to think about Trump any more,” she said. “Not even the Republicans.”
“Come on, honey,” he said. “Trump’s still the Boogeyman. The Proud Boys and the rest of those knuckleheads are still raising hell, and the Republicans are trying to start a second Civil War.”
“The Feddermans are Republicans,” Linette pointed out.
“So we won’t stop at their house. Stop worrying! The kids are really stoked up!”
“All right. Just be careful.”
“Of course I will.”
“Don’t let Sally eat any candy before you get her home and we can make sure it’s all right. Marcie Tillman told me last Halloween that some sicko put dog biscuits in her daughter’s goodie bag.”
“Don’t the Tillmans have a dog?”
“Yes, but so what?”
“So the dog got a treat instead of their daughter.”
“You’re hopeless.”
“Hopelessly Happy Hank, that’s me. Oh, wait a minute- I need a bar of soap!”

“What for?”

“To soap the windows of meanies who ask for a trick instead of giving the kids treats.”

She ducked into the downstairs bathroom and came out with a bar of Dove.  “I hope you don’t need it,” she said.
“Me, too. But Halloween brings out the nasty in some people,” Hank said, putting the soap in a side pocket of his knickers. “Come on, gang, let’s get going before other kids get all the goodies!”
The sun was down, but a bloated gibbous moon was rising in the east, as orange as the children’s pumpkins. The trees had dropped their leaves, and the wind swirled them into the air like bats.
“Oh, it’s a spooky night, all right!” Hank said. “The graves are empty, and the ghosts are moaning!”
“Cut it out, Dad,” said Wonder Woman. “That’s just the wind.”
“Are you sure? It sounds like someone groaning, ‘Whooo aahhre yooou?’” Spiderman giggled a little nervously, and Wonder Woman said, “Don’t worry, Evan. My Dad’s just being silly.” But she drew her sword, just in case.
Spiderman said, “That won’t do any good. Your sword’s fake, Sally.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t have any spider sense, Evan.”
“But I do,” said Hank, “and I sense that on Halloween, anything can happen. Fake swords can become real, Spiderman can climb up and down walls, Dracula can turn into a bat, and the Wicked Witch of the West can fly on her broomstick.”
“Flying broomsticks are in Harry Potter,” said Dracula.
“They’re in The Wizard of Oz, too,” the Witch said.
“Are not.”
“Are too!”
“The Witch is right, Count,” said Hank. “You ought to take some time off from biting people in the neck and read The Wizard of Oz. There are all kinds of weird critters in it.”
“Like what?”
“Well, a tin man, for example, and a talking scarecrow.”
“What’s a scarecrow?”
“Read the book and find out. I’m sure the town library has a copy. OK, goblins and ghosties, here’s something grisly we can chant as we march along: ‘A bucket full of big black bug’s blood!’”
“Eeeww!” said the Witch. “That’s icky!”
“Hey, you’re the Wicked Witch! You love icky! You do icky! Let me hear you cackle!”
“Yee-ee, hee, hee!” went the Witch in a creaky voice.
“Fantabulous! Now, all of you, repeat after me: a bucket full of big black bug’s blood.”
Wonder Woman began: “A bucket full of blig back blug’s bud!”
“See? It’s not so easy, because it’s magic. Try again.”
After several more false starts, the kids got it right, and the little procession marched along repeating the magic charm.
“A bucket full of big black bug’s blood! A bucket full of big black bug’s blood! A bucket full of big black bug’s blood!” they shouted. The only kid who kept silent was Death. Hank realized he couldn’t place him. Or her. New to the neighborhood, maybe. A little taller than the others.
They skipped the Feddermans’ Tudor house and stopped at the Danforths’ tall, gaunt Gothic Revival place, where jack o’ lanterns with snaggle teeth and scowling eyes glowed in the two front windows. Elderly Nell Danforth, wearing a witch’s hat, opened the door and admired the kids’ getups, although Death’s startled her a little. She doled out candy bars and Oreo cookies. Hank thanked her, and she said, “I’m so glad the kids in our town still like to go trick-or-treating on Halloween, instead of watching horror movies on tv.”
“Hey, Nell, you don’t get any goodies with tv horror movies.”
“True enough. It’s all about the loot!” She laughed. “Love your costume. You’re certainly the scariest monster on the loose tonight,”
“I’m not a monster,” Hank said, in Trump’s whiny Queens accent. “I’m the Chosen One!”
“The Second Coming of the Father of Lies!” said Nell. “Now I’m truly terrified!”
“You should be. I’m back to punish everyone who didn’t believe in me!”
Nell shook her head. “Not funny, Hank. Trump’s gone, thank God, but his followers are still doing terrible things.”
“That’s just what Linette told me,” Hank said.
“She’s right. The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers are trying to start a second Civil War. And the Republicans are all for it.”
“Oh, come on, Nell, things aren’t that bad. Biden’s in the White House, and the Democrats control the Congress.”
“Well, I only hope Biden develops some gumption. So far he’s just trying to reach a consensus with the GOP, and McConnell will never let that happen.”
“Moscow Mitch doesn’t have as much power as he thinks he does. He’s just a bad-tempered puppet, like Mister Bluster on the old Howdy Doody show.”
Nell laughed. “You’re not old enough to remember the Howdy Doody Show.”
“No, but they rerun it on You Tube, and my kids watch it.”
“I don’t,” Wonder Woman said. “It’s stupid.”
“You’re stupid,” said Batman. “The Howdy Doody Show is great! I like the Flub-a-Dub!”
“That’s because you’re a Flub-a-Dub yourself, Artie,” Wonder Woman retorted.
“Oh, shut up, Becky!”
“Settle down, both of you,” Hank said, “or I’ll eat all your candy.”
“You don’t eat candy, Dad,” said Batman.
“Of course I do. I live on candy! I’m the Candyman!”
“You are not!” said Dracula. “The Candyman’s black!”
“I’m wearing a mask. How do you know I’m not black?”
“Because you’re Mr. Gillette!”
“Are you sure Mr. Gillette isn’t black?”
Dracula said, “Of course I am. There aren’t any black people in the Wayne Bridge.”
“The Cabreras are black,” said Spiderman.
“No they’re not!” Dracula retorted. “They’re brown!”
Nell sighed. “Looks like we have a bunch of little white supremacists here,” she said.
“Whoa, hold on, Nell. The kids just know people come in different colors. They didn’t say some colors are better than others.”
“No, you’re right. I’ve just been watching too much news about racism. Racist cops, racist politicians, racist homeowners who call the cops because there’s a black man with a camera in their neighborhood.”
“Donald Trump. The disease that keeps on sickening.”
“Trump was the symptom, not the disease,” Nell said. “The racist plague was already out of control, like Covid, by the time he took advantage of it.”
“Well, the country’s under new management now, Covid’s on the way out, and things are changing.”
“You’re a cock-eyed optimist, Hank Gillette,” said Nell, smiling.
“Yup. He broke into song: ‘Ac-centuate the positive, e-liminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative, and steer clear of Mister In-Between!’”
“My Lord, I haven’t heard that song in ages! Don’t tell me you’re a Bing Crosby fan.”
“Sure I am. My father loved him – he had a lot of Crosby’s records, and I grew up listening to them. I liked Sinatra, too.”
“Ol’ Blue Eyes,” said Nell. “I adored him when I was a teenager.”
“Sometimes it’s hard to remember that there was pop music before rock and roll,” Hank said. “And now it looks like rock is being drowned out by rap and hip-hop. Which I hate, because the lyrics are stupid. So that makes me uncool, right, Artie?”
Batman said, “Well, you can be a dork sometimes, Dad. Like when you tell jokes.”
“What are you talking about? My jokes are way cool! Hey, Nell, what’s Irish and never comes indoors?”
“I’ll bite.”
“Paddy O’Furniture!”
“That’s just what I mean,” said Batman.
“Oh, Artie, don’t be so hard on your father,” Nell said. “I thought it was funny.”
“Funny peculiar,” Artie said.
“Arthur, that’s rude,” said Hank.
“No, it’s all right, Hank. The joke is a little peculiar. It might even offend Irish people.”
“Okay, okay, no more Paddy jokes. Can I tell a WASP joke?”
“If you must.”
“How many WASPs does it take to change a light bulb?”
“I give up,” said Nell.
“Two. One to call the electrician and the other to mix the martinis.”
Nell laughed. “Not bad,” she said.
“I got a million of ‘em,” said Hank. “If you see Mitch McConnell on tv and the sound is off, how can you tell if he’s lying?”
“I know that one,” Nell said. “If his lips are moving.”
“Phat!” said Hank.
“Nobody says phat any more,” Artie said.
“No? What do they say?”
“Gnarly.”
“I thought that meant bad.”
“That was last year. Come on, keep up, Dad!”
“Not possible. I quit, you’re it,” said Hank. “Bye, Nell. Happy Halloween.”
“Same to you,” Nell said. “Watch out for things that go bump in the night.”
The next place was the Cahners’ two-story Cape Cod. Black cats, lit from behind by candles, arched their backs in its mansard windows. Bob Cahners, a muscular, red-haired man wearing Groucho glasses, came to the door and handed out apples and peaches. “Thanks, Bob, this is great,” Hank said. “The kids’ parents would kill me if I brought them home with nothing but candy.”
“It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it,” Bob deadpanned.
Part of the Cahners’ wood-lot covered the acreage next to their house, so Hank started to lead the kids across the street. But he had to stop them abruptly to let some bozo on a Harley go blasting by, well over the speed limit. Damn jerk, Hank thought. He could have hit one of the kids. Some bikers were OK, but that guy had long gray hair with a red bandana tied around it, and a full gray beard to match, as if he were an old Hell’s Angel wanna-be. Suddenly a siren began to wail in the distance, and Hank pumped his fist in the air. “Yes!” he said. “Sheriff Scott rules! Lock the jerk up in the slammer for All Saints’ Day!”
“What’s All Saints’ Day?” the Wicked Witch asked. She was the youngest child, a girl named Lisa Bailey, and her hat was too big for her. It kept slipping down over her eyes, and she was getting tired of pushing it back up in place. She was also shivering: her witch’s tattery black costume was obviouisly too thin to keep her warm.
“Halloween is the night when the souls of the wicked dead ramp around scaring people, Lisa,” Hank said. “All Saints’ Day is when the souls of the good dead go to heaven.”
“I don’t want to be a dead,” Lisa whimpered, and began to cry.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart. You’re very much alive.” He took off his sweater-vest and wrapped it around her. “Better?”
She stopped crying and nodded.
“Good. I’ll take you home soon. We just have one more house to visit.”
He didn’t really know Andrew and Sarah Mellon. They had built their elaborate modernist house, with its cantilevered roof and picture windows, only the year before, and they kept to themselves. They’d thrown a New Year’s Eve bash, but none of the locals were invited. The cars parked in their driveway and along the road, which included a Mercedes, a BMW, and a Jaguar, all had Massachusetts or New York plates.
Hank took Lisa by the hand and led her up the walk to the front door, a massive slab of teak with a brushed-steel push-panel, like the entrance to a bank. The other kids followed. A dot of red light caught his eye, and he looked up to see a security camera mounted on the wall above the door. A male voice came out of a speaker grill to the left of the camera: “Who are you?”
“Go ahead, Lisa, be brave. You know what to say,” Hank whispered to the little girl. Her hat had slipped over her eyes again, and she pushed it back in place. “Trick or treat,” she said tremulously.
“Trick!” said the voice, so loudly that Lisa’s lower lip began to quiver, as if she were about to burst into tears again. Hank put his arm around her, and she hugged his leg.
“Is that you, Mr. Mellon?” Hank asked. The door swung open to reveal an obese man in a blue cashmere sweater. “Last time I checked,” said the man, walking onto his porch. He had a half-empty highball glass in his hand, and Hank could smell the whisky on his breath.
“Hi, I’m Hank Gillette. I live just up the street, and I’m taking my kids and some of their friends trick-or-treating, and…”
“No, shit, Sherlock,” said the man.
“Hey, come on, watch your language,” Hank said.
“I’ll say anything I want to.” The man’s voice had taken on a belligerent tone. “I’m on my own property, and technically, you and these brats are trespassing.”
“Let me guess: you’re a lawyer, right?”
“Damn straight. And I said I wanted a trick.”
“Look, never mind, Mr. Mellon. I’m sorry we disturbed you. We’ll get off your property.”
“You’re defaulting on your own proposal, buddy,” Mellon said harshly. “It was a choice between a trick or a treat. I’m not giving these little snot-noses any treats, so you have to play a trick on me. And since I make my living tricking tricksters, it better be a damn good one, or I’ll play a trick on you. BOO!”
Lisa screamed and jumped backwards. She lost her balance and fell down hard. Her witch’s hat fell off, and she began to cry. Appalled, Hank knelt and helped her sit up. He touched the back of her head gingerly, and was vastly relieved when no blood came off on his fingertips. “It’s O.K., sweetie,” he said. “You just got a little bonky on the conky. I’ll take you home, and your mom will make it all better.”
She stopped crying. “What’s a conky?” she asked. Not badly hurt after all, he thought. Thank God.
“It’s the round thing your hair grows on,” he said. Her tears had streaked her green face-paint.
“My hair grows on my head!”
“Of course it does,” he said, and put her hat back on. “It’d be pretty funny if it grew on your elbows.”
Lisa laughed. “You’re silly.”
“It’s better to be silly than mean,” Hank said.
“That man who yelled is mean,” said Lisa.
“Yes he is.”
“Why did he ask for a trick?”
“To confuse you,” Hank said. “Some people just like to spoil the fun for other people. They’re party-poopers.”
“He’s an old poop,” said Lisa, and giggled.
“He sure is. He stinks.”
“Flush him down the toilet!” Lisa said. Her giggle turned into a laugh. “Pee-yew, stinky poopy!”
“I think he’d clog up the toilet,” said a soft, dry voice. The Grim Reaper was standing next to Hank. His sickle was gone, and he’d grown taller. Much taller.
Lisa looked at him, wide-eyed. “Don’t be afraid, little one,” said the apparition. “I haven’t come for you. You have a long, happy life in front of you.”
“Good God,” Hank said. “Who are you supposed to be?”
“Nobody. Nothingness. Negation.”
“Would you please take off your mask? It scares the kids.”
“It’s not a mask,” Death said. Two red lights had appeared deep in the orbits of his skull, and they flicked from Hank’s face to Mellon’s. “You should have listened to your doctor and cut down on your drinking, Andrew. Your heart’s gotten sick of you.”
Mellon dropped his highball, and the glass shattered. He clutched his chest and Death grabbed his arm with a bony hand. “Come along, now. Your time is up.”
Mellon wailed, “No! I’m not ready!”
“Oh, but you are!” the Reaper said. “You are rotten-ripe for my harvest! You’ve been ethically and morally dead ever since you seduced Sarah while representing her in divorce court, overcharged her, and then married her for her money. I’ve ripped hordes of crooked lawyers out of this world, but you’d make me raise my eyebrows, if I had any. Next to you, Roy Cohn was as principled as Thurgood Marshall.”
Mellon’s shoulders dropped. His jowly face sagged like a wet paper bag, and his mouth froze in a rictus of terror. His eyes bulged from their sockets, and his teeth chattered audibly. The Reaper led him off the porch and onto the sidewalk. He set off eastward, tugging the horrified man behind him. After half a dozen steps, they rose into the air, silhouetted against the swollen moon. “Hurry up, please, it’s time. Hurry up, please, it’s time,” said Death, and they disappeared.
Hank realized he had been holding his breath, afraid to make a sound, as the Reaper and the defunct shyster vanished into oblivion. He breathed deeply and exhaled. The night had grown sharply colder, and he could see his breath. The children had taken off their masks, and were staring in wonder at the moon. None of them were frightened, and little Lisa even giggled. “Bye-bye, old poopy-pants!” she said.
The other children laughed, and Hank said, “We sure won’t miss you!” He turned and started leading them back to their homes, marvelling at the way kids could accept the kind of extreme weirdness that baffled grownups. It took the willing suspension of disbelief to make it possible for adults to enjoy a play or a movie, but young children did it without conscious effort. That knack ought to be encouraged by elementary school teachers, but all too often it was stifled, because the teachers themselves lacked imagination. He reminded himself, not for the first time, to keep his mind open to hints of strangeness from his students, and to learn from them.
He and the kids put their masks back on and took up the bug’s blood chant again, and as they neared the Feddermans’ house, on impulse he steered them up to the front door. Lisa rang the doorbell, and Jake Fetterman, a beefy, balding, middle-aged man, opened the door.
“Trick or treat!” Lisa said. Jake was holding a bowl full of wrapped candy-bars and small boxes of Junior Mints, and he grinned at Hank. “Well, if it isn’t the Donald!” he said. “Boy, what a lying loser you turned out to be! Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me!”
Surprised, Hank took off his mask. “I thought you were a Republican,” he said.
“I was, but the Grand Old Party lost its grandeur for me when it picked a crooked, predatory, cheating scam-artist as its candidate. Mitch McConnell has a lot to answer for, Hank,”
“So you support Joe Biden?”
“Hell, no! He’s a damn socialist!”
“How about Kamala?”
“Oh, I think she’s playing the long game. She’s pragmatic, she’s tired of partisan chaos. She’ll try to lead the Donkey back to the middle of the road.”
“You could be right, Jake. It’d be nice to have a moderate in charge of the Untidy States of America.”
“We’re untidy, all right. Maybe she can spiff us up.”
“I hope so, anyway,” said Hank.
Jake gave each child a candy bar and a box of mints, and they thanked him without being prompted. “Happy Halloween!” he said. “Don’t let the goblins getcha!”
“They wouldn’t dare!” said Wonder Woman. “I’d snick ‘em with my sword!”
“Atta girl!” Jake said. “Teach those goblins who’s boss!”
After dropping Spiderman and the Witch off at their houses, Hank took Batman and Wonder Woman home. Supper was cooking, and Linette had made hot cocoa. They sat at the kitchen table sipping their cocoa, and Linette let Artie and Becky eat one candy-bar each. Then they had supper, and Linette took the kids upstairs, made sure they brushed their teeth, and tucked them into their beds. She asked them if they wanted a story, and Becky said, “We saw a story, Mom, like a show on TV. It was about the fat old poopy-pants and the skellington. It was really creepity!”
“I bet it was,” Linette said. She kissed them both. “Good night, sleep tight, and don’t let the goblins bite.” Making sure their Mickey Mouse night-light was on, she left their bedroom and went back to the kitchen.
“How did it go?” she asked Hank. He hesitated. They had never lied to one another, or concealed anything they had done, but the evening had been so eerie he wondered if she would believe him when he described it. “Well, if I can’t tell the light of my life, who can I tell?” he said.
When he was finished, Linette looked at him steadily for so long he was afraid she was going to tell him he’d gone crazy. But finally she nodded. “So that nasty bastard Mellon went to the moon with the Grim Reaper, and the Feddermans turned out to be Kamala Harris fans. I guess you have to expect the unexpected on Halloween. And this was a specially surprising All Hallows Eve.”
“The most surprising thing, to me, was that when Death was leading Mellon up into the air, he said, ‘Hurry up, please, it’s time. Hurry up, please, it’s time.’”
“That rings a bell,” Linette said.
“It’s from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the part where the pub keeper is closing up for the night. It’s as if Death knew I had assigned the poem to my seniors last spring.”
“Well, if you posit that Death is some sort of conscious being, it follows that he or she knows everything that has ever happened. Or will happen.”
“Like God,” Hank said.
“Gods come and go, but Death is the ultimate reality.”
“No argument there, love. But some people worship death, like the devotés of Kali, in Hinduism, or the Aztecs, or even the Manson gang.”
“If you’re going down that road, how about any culture that ever started a war?”
“Wow. That takes us back to neolithic times.”
“Yeah,” said Linette. “The only thing humans like better than fighting is fucking.”
“Make love, not war,” Hank said.
“You’d have made a far-out hippie.”
“I doubt it. I dropped acid once in college, and it made me so
paranoid I was afraid to leave my room for two days. I even crapped in my pants.”
“No Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds?”
“More like the Boogeyman In The Corridor With An Axe.”
“Sounds like a game of Clue. But listen, you made a great suggestion a little while ago. Let’s get naked and jump in a pile!”
“Yippee!” said Hank. He kissed her deeply, and they went into the bedroom.
It had been awhile, and they began slowly, delighting in each others’ bodies and prolonging the sweet act until neither of them could put off its finale. They came together, the first time that had happened since Artie’s birth, and Linette couldn’t help crying out in ecstacy. Afterwards, they exchanged a final kiss, and she said, “I hope I didn’t wake up the kids.”
“Oh, yeah, the Freudian Primal Scene – the children see their parents screwing and become so neurotic that they have to go to a shrink twice a week for the rest of their lives.”
Linette laughed. “Nobody pays much attention to Freud’s theories any more. There’s a pill for whatever drives you nuts.”
“I’m not sure that’s an improvement,” Hank said.
“It’s cheaper, anyway,” said Linette. “Have I told you recently that I love you?”
“Yes, but tell me again. It makes me very happy.”
“I love you, Henry Emmett Gillette.”
“And I love you, Linette Patricia Parker.”
“Cool beans,” Linette said. “Maybe we ought to get married.”
“Nah. Let’s go on living in sin.”
“But what about the children?”
“They can live in sin with us. We’ll be the Wicked Wastrels of Wayne Bridge.”
“You have a weakness for awittewation.”
“And you’re so smart you make yourself sick.”
“I’ve never felt better in my life,” said Linette.
“Neither have I, my own true love.”
“Good night,” she said.
“Sweet dreams,” said Hank. He yawned and so did she. Soon her breathing became deep and regular, but Hank lay awake for awhile, thinking about the strange day. He couldn’t explain away Old Boney’s apparition and the uncanny demise of Andrew Mellon. All he could do was accept the fact that things had gone down which he didn’t understand and never would. A line from Hamlet ghosted into his mind: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” He whispered the line aloud, substituting “Hank” for “Horatio,” and repeated it like a mantra until he fell asleep.