Trick or Treat

Mother died in late August. I was still cleaning up her house in October. Sometimes I wonder how different my life might be today if I had just hired someone to clean out the mess and pack up that house for me.

It’s sober work for the only child of an only child to clear out a house, memories lifting from objects like choking dust. All the physical traces of bad memories in that house needed to be boxed and carted away. Or trashed. It felt so good throwing away things from my unhappy childhood. I wondered how mother had lived alone all those years after my father fled. I had only been four at the time. I never saw him again.

Mother never remarried. She taught elementary school when she was well.
I had spent more than half of the years of my childhood and adolescence bouncing around between the homes of various distant relations. These are the years I remember as years of thunder and lighting, years in which my mother crashed frequently and was hospitalized for her fragile mental state. I knew my second cousins better than I knew my own mother. If I speak the homely truth. When I fill out resumes, I joke that that I need an extra sheet of paper to list all the schools I attended. Somehow I managed to overcome my feelings of inadequacy, the feeling I was just some“waif girl,” and made a few goods friends wherever I went. I try to fight against this feeling of reticence that I know is my natural disposition, this tendency to withdraw. I hate to admit that I hold my mother in my mind as a counterexample. She was largely a hermit. I don’t want to end up like her.

Some family members try to blame mother’s mental illness on the “Trick or Treater.” Every year, on Trick or Treat night, a man would knock at the front door of our house, long after the candy-gathering had ended. He’d knock and sometimes ring the doorbell and then vanish into the night. Some people would say that she was hallucinating, that there was no such creep, but I knew he was real. I saw him. I’d only ever catch a glimpse of him. By the time I hit the porch light, he’d be out in the shadows of the hedgerow in our front yard or standing in the middle of the street, staring at the house. I would beg mother to call the police, but she always refused. It was harrowing. I rarely slept on that night each year. As I got older, on Trick or Treat night I would fall asleep clutching a butcher’s knife. Perhaps poor mother did the same.

I found mother’s diary under her pillow. I hadn’t known she had kept one. Then I found other diaries in a drawer with her lingerie. She hadn’t kept one every year but there were at least a dozen of them. I found myself going to the entries written around Halloween. They were deeply disturbing.

“Trick or Treat last night. Gave him her school photograph again this year,” mother had written in her severe penmanship. I saw the year on the entry and calculated that I had been twelve at the time. “Seemed to satisfy him,” she went on. “He lingered about twenty minutes in the yard.”

I felt the chill of violation. Had this woman given the creep that haunted our house a photograph of….me? My own mother. Feeding a predator who lurked around the house where I was sleeping?!

I looked at the other diary entries and every year she talked about giving “him” various tokens, usually my school photograph, but also mementos like drawings I had done or poems I had written. It was unbelievable. I had hated my mother at various times in my life, but not like I hated her now. I began to think it was a miracle that I had never been abducted by this man. And I began to wonder if I had ever really had a clue about how sick my mother actually was.

As I was reading these diaries, I heard the laughter of children in the street. I realized with a goddamn it must be Trick or Treat night in the borough. I made my way to the front door to make sure the porch light was off. I had no candy and I was in no mood. Then I wondered if he might actually still be alive. The old creep. I hadn’t checked the last diary. The one under the pillow. I took it in my hands and paged through to the entry that began “Trick or Treat.” This was just last year.

“What will he do next year, when I am gone?” she wrote in a scrawl. Her teacher’s penmanship had degenerated to chicken scratch. “This is the last time. I’m glad it’s over. Finally. I’m sorry. But what good is that word to anyone?”

I closed the front door of my mother’s house after one last glance at the dark street where jack-o’-lanterns glowed here and there before happy little houses. Where little monsters and superheroes, princesses and witches, robots and frog-faces, went giggling from one skeleton-decorated door to the next. I locked the door and pulled all the curtains in the living room. Then I lay down on the couch and drifted off to sleep. It just came over me, a depression. The diaries had taken me right down. I needed a reset. It was okay to lie down on the couch and just vanish. Nobody was expecting me anywhere. Nobody in the world.

The horrible knocking woke me. I had no idea what time it was, but knew it must be late night. I reached for my bag on the carpet next to the couch. I curled my fingers around the little SIG Sauer that I hated having to carry on me. I had the concealed carry permit. After living alone for a few years, I had one bad experience with a stalker and that was enough. That was when I acquired this pistol and went through the training to be sure I knew exactly how to use it.

I waited and listened. Sitting bolt upright. I knew the door was locked. I found my cell phone with my other hand and dialed 911, but did not touch the phone icon and actually make the call. But I wanted it ready to connect. I heard my breathing. The old terror was back. It was like I was sixteen again, clutching that butcher knife. Only this pistol was much better than any knife.

What happened next might not make sense, if I don’t confess to you that I had been drinking. I don’t usually overindulge. But as I read mother’s diaries, I had sought out her liquor cabinet and had been drinking a somewhat rancid vodka, cranberry juice, club soda mix. The cranberry juice was probably months old, but mother had frozen it. And I figured the wicked alcohol content would just sterilize everything. I had sampled some of her other liqueurs too. I had needed something to counteract those diaries, to soften the blow.

So maybe this is why I went to the door, gun in hand, and opened it.

Maybe that. And the hatred of years for the fear this creature had inflicted upon me and my mother. A woman and a girl alone. What sort of lowlife does that? I opened the door and there he stood. His mask was a simulation of decaying flesh. His clothes were the clothes of the grave.

“How dare you?!” I screamed quietly.

He stared at me. He said nothing.

There was only the outer screen door between us. Mother had died before the change from summer to autumn, when glass would replace that simple mesh. That was all that was between us. That outer door had been locked when I first entered the house. It hardly felt like safety. I made sure he saw the gun trained on him. There was only one light on in my mother’s living room but it was enough for him to see what was in my hand. Yet he did not flee. He was tall. He stared at me from his black eyes. Why did he seem so sad suddenly? I felt waves of sadness coming from him.

“What do you want?” I rasped.

I looked at my phone. Something stopped me from completing the call to 911.

“She’s dead, you know, right? The house is being sold. The next owners might just kill you the first time you show up. You might want to think about that.”

Nothing.

“You must be an old man under that mask. Your wife and kids must be very proud of you. Do they know you stalk old women and young girls?”

Nothing.

He tried the front door then. He tried to open the outer door. I felt a hot rush of adrenaline. I don’t want to think I unlocked the door because I wanted to use that pistol. But once he stepped across that threshold, I would have the legal right to discharge that weapon. Perfect legal right. I can’t tell you why I opened it. But I did, to my own horror. And he stepped into my mother’s living room. He moved like an old man. An ancient man. But the mask had a few patches of dark hair up top, not white hair. My finger tightened on the trigger. I backed away as he advanced into the house. I kept at least ten feet between us at all times.

“What the hell do you want?” came out from between my gritted teeth.

He walked to a photograph hanging on the living room wall. It was a photograph of my father and mother in their youth. I was a baby in the photo. My father held me in it. He stared at it, his back to me. I didn’t lower the gun or my guard for a second.

He reached out and stroked the photograph.

Then he turned suddenly and walked toward the kitchen. I ran halfway up the stairs to the second floor to get out of his way. He passed by me without a word and entered the kitchen. I ran back down the stairs and backed away from the kitchen’s entrance way. I watched as he went to the open basement door and presumably descended the rickety wooden stairs, down into the darkness of that unfinished room. But I couldn’t see from where I stood. I never heard the steps creak as they always do. So I wondered if it was a ruse and if he was waiting on the top step.

That’s when I realized I didn’t have it in me to shoot the man, no matter how much he might have deserved it. That’s when I dialed 911.

The borough police were there in five minutes.

They searched the house and there was no one. I saw the one female officer examining the alcohol by the couch. They asked about my mother’s recent death. I began to see a conclusion, a totally wrong conclusion, forming in her eyes. She whispered to her young male compadre and they suggested I might want to vacate the house. At least for tonight. They asked if I had someone who could pick me up. They suggested that I not drive.

I thought about telling them the history of the Trick or Treat Man, but I realized there was no police record. I would sound even crazier. So I said nothing.

I started entering info into an app to arrange a ride out of there, figuring I would retrieve my car the next day. The younger cop said he wanted to do one last basement check, just to be sure. I told him there was definitely no means of entry or exit from down there. Only the kitchen door at the top of the stairs. He asked twice. I told him twice. Surely he could see that for himself? I asked them where the hell the guy could have gone and was met with two blank stares.  I told him I hadn’t been down there but one time since my mother had died, for the most cursory of inspections. My mother told me she only threw unwanted junk down there. She hated the basement and always warned me about what she called “the mold hazard.”  So I avoided that potentially toxic room. I heard the officer descend those treacherous stairs again. About five minutes later, he came running back up the stairs, breathing heavily.

“Uh, we’re going to need to call this in,” he said, grimly.

“Call what in?” the other cop grimaced.

“There’s a note down there.” He looked at me with the strangest expression on his face. “Was your mother named Angeline?”

I nodded.

Over the next few days, my mother’s house was heavily trafficked. The borough police were soon joined by state police. And then the forensic specialists and excavators came. And God only knows who else.

And that’s how I learned my father never ran away at all.