Suckers. Part 9

But this year there would be no trick-or-treating for Theresa and Kyle, which meant I lost my ten percent cut for checking the candy. I'd tried desperately to convince Helen that they'd be safe under my "adult" supervision, but the neighborhood mothers had made up their mind, and it was stupid safe alternatives for everyone. So Theresa and her friends sat in the living room accusing each other of liking certain boys, while Kyle and I hid upstairs watching Blood, Blood, Blood! on television.

Kyle was five and probably too young to be watching the movie, but I felt an exception could be made because a) it was Halloween, and b) Helen wasn't home. She was working at the hospital, leaving me alone to deal with the second-grade girls, who were behaving themselves surprisingly well.

"UMMMMMMMMMM!!!" they shouted as one. "Theresa likes Eric! Theresa likes Eric!"

"Do you know this Eric guy?" I asked Kyle.

"Uh-huh."

"Does he work hard? Will he provide for your sister in the manner to which she's become accustomed?"

"He can burp songs," Kyle explained.

"Good songs?"

"I heard him do 'My Country Tis of Thee.'"

"Cool, your sister's dating a patriot," I exclaimed, nodding my approval.

"He got in trouble and the bus driver said not to do it anymore and he said if he did it again he was gonna get a misconduct slip."

"Yes, well, Abraham Lincoln's bus driver tried to give him misconduct slips, too."

The doorbell rang, and a dozen seven year-old girls shrieked in unrestrained terror. "I'd better go get that in case it's Mr. Boogedy-Bones," I told Kyle. "Do you want another c.o.ke?"

Kyle nodded.

"And what do we tell your mother you drank tonight?"

"Milk."

"What kind of milk?"

"Skim milk."

"Good boy." I ruffled his hair just to annoy him, then hurried down the stairs and answered the door as Theresa and her friends scrambled around like electrified whackos trying to find hiding spots.

"RRRRrrraaaahhhhHHHHH!!!" said the Wolf Man.

"AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!" replied the second grade girls.

"Hi, Roger," I said.

My best friend Roger took off his mask, grinning. "Hiya, Andrew. I thought I'd see if you needed some moral support in your darkest hour."

"Actually, it's going pretty well. Kyle and I were upstairs watching a movie, c'mon and join us."

"Hi, Uncle Roger!" said Theresa, waving from behind her Britney Spears costume, sans b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"Hi, Theresa. Have you started bobbing for apples yet?"

"We can't do that anymore. Daddy chipped his tooth last year and Kyle almost drowned."

"I told him not to inhale," I said in my own defense.

"Bunch of lightweights in this place," Roger remarked. "I hope you've at least got some decent apple cider."

"We've got pumpkin pie punch!" Theresa announced.

Roger looked at me. "Pumpkin pie punch?"

"Helen accidentally invented it last night. Don't drink any."

"I shan't."

I went to the kitchen and got three c.o.kes out of the refrigerator. After telling the girls to continue behaving themselves, thus fulfilling my duty as a responsible adult, Roger and I went back upstairs into my bedroom.

"Daddy, you missed a person melting," Kyle informed me.

"Did you hear that?" I asked Roger. "A human being melts and I miss it, all because of you."

"Happy Halloween, Kyle!" said Roger, putting his Wolf Man mask back on. "RRRRRrrrrrrraaaaaarrrrrrRRRRRRR!!!"

"If you're good I'll let you take Uncle Roger for a walk later," I said. "Maybe we can find him some dog biscuits."

Roger went "RrraaarrRRRR" again and lumbered toward my innocent child, arms outstretched. Since the eyeholes in the mask weren't all they could be, he smacked into the bed, earning himself an explosion of laughter from Kyle.

"Not exactly Lon Chaney, Jr., are you?" I asked.

Roger pulled off his mask and rubbed his s.h.i.+n. "That really hurt."

"Do you need to go to the vet?"

"Ha-ha. Hey, Kyle, why don't you ask your dad where babies come from?"

"Daddy, where do-?"

"All right, all right, let's just watch the movie," I said. "There may be more meltings in store!"

After the bittersweet conclusion, where a few people died, we went back downstairs. The girls were seated in a circle, all the lights out except for a pair of flashlights, and screamed as one when we entered the living room. It took a few minutes to translate the shrieks and giggles, but we figured out that they were telling ghost stories.

"Have any of you heard about the Taywood house?" asked Roger.

A couple more minutes of screaming and giggling indicated that no, they had not. I had, and in fact was the one who told Roger about it, so I sat on the couch and waited for him to completely mess up the story.

Roger motioned for two of the girls to scoot over and make room, and then joined the circle. He took one of the flashlights and s.h.i.+ned it up into his face, which was supposed to make him look eerie but really just made it look like he had a light-up nose. "Most ghost stories take place hundreds of years ago, but not this one," he said in a spooky voice. "The Taywood house was built a mere five years ago, by a man named Jarvis Taywood."

It was four years ago, and the man's name was Jervis, but Roger at least had the basic concept right.

"Jarvis was a crazy old man, and less than a month after he finished the house, he killed himself. n.o.body knows why he did it, but he jumped into some molten plastic at a chair manufacturing company. All they ever found were his shoes, sitting by the vat of plastic, with a suicide note tucked inside. It's said that whenever you sit on a plastic chair, you may just be sitting on old Jarvis."

That statement received several squeals of delight and disgust. It was, in fact, the truth (or, more likely, just the correct version of a complete lie), though if I'd been telling the story I would've changed it to a chocolate manufacturing company, so that I could end it with "And you may have eaten him TONIGHT!"

"Anyway," Roger continued, "his family lived in the house for another year, but every once in a while they would hear weird noises. Only at night, never during the day. Creaking footsteps on the staircase. Whispering. And none of them could explain it, but the whole family felt like Jarvis was still there, watching them. Always watching."

The girls had fallen silent. "About six months after Jarvis died, the oldest daughter couldn't take it anymore, so she ran away and was never seen again. At least...not alive. They did find her body. She'd drowned in a small pond, which at its very center wasn't even deep enough to come up to her waist. And she'd left her shoes by the edge. There was no note inside, but one can only wonder if Jarvis was somehow responsible for his daughter's death."

Dead silence. The temptation to shout "BOO!" was overwhelming, but I didn't want to ruin Roger's show.

"One night, exactly one year after Jarvis killed himself, his wife heard the soft footsteps. They were coming up the stairs. Like she always did, she pulled the blankets up over her head and waited for them to go away. They were getting closer...closer...until she heard them in her very room."

Roger's flashlight began to flicker, so he tapped it against his palm until the beam was steady again. "They stopped. She could feel something watching her. And then she heard the whisper, 'Dorothy...Dorothy...I still love you...'"

"Like in The Wizard of Oz?" asked Becky, one of Theresa's more annoying friends.

"No, not like in The Wizard of Oz," said Roger without missing a beat, "It was Dorothy Taywood, who lay on her bed, blankets above her head, listening to the ghostly voice whisper her name. The voice that sounded just like her dead husband. The whispering stopped, and finally she worked up the courage to peek over the blankets, just...a...bit..."

Roger looked at each girl in the circle in turn. "And there, standing at the foot of her bed, was her husband."

"Were his guts hanging out?" Becky inquired.

"They might have been. I wasn't there. But she squeezed her eyes shut because she was so terrified, and when she opened them again, he was gone. She immediately woke up her kids, at least those who were still alive, and they spent the rest of the night in a hotel. They never came back to the Taywood house.

"It took them a while to sell it, but finally another family moved in. They heard the same footsteps in the middle of the night. Once they even thought they heard screaming. And there were other things, too. Books would vanish and mysteriously reappear. They called the newspaper, and a couple of reporters from the Chamber Chronicle spent a week in the house, but nothing happened during that time...at least, that's what they said. The rumors, and I believe them, are that they were just too frightened to print the truth."

I continued to withstand the "BOO!" urge, which required almost superhuman strength at this point.

"Shortly after that, in the middle of the night, the father woke up...and there was the ghost of Jarvis, standing right there in the doorway. But instead of hiding under the blankets, the father got up and went after it. He ran down the stairs, but there was no sign of the ghost...it had vanished. Vanished into the netherworld. They moved out the next day.

"They sold the Taywood house to a man who lived by himself. Six months later, he disappeared. They don't know what happened to him. They never found a note, they never found a body...but they did find his shoes, lying on the staircase. And since then, n.o.body has lived there. The house is empty...vacant, except for the ghost of Jarvis Taywood...silent except for his footsteps on the stairs...except for certain nights, dark nights, when the neighbors swear they can hear whispering...and screaming..."

"BOO!" I shouted.

Several of the girls shot me dirty looks. Theresa put her finger to her lips and shushed me. Ashamed, I stared at the floor and was silent.

"So remember, girls, never go near the Taywood house. Jarvis still haunts it to this day...and he might just follow you home."

"BOO!" said Kyle. The girls shrieked in terror and then burst into delighted laughter. Roger handed the flashlight back to Becky and got to his feet.

"Is that all true, Uncle Roger?" asked Theresa.

"There's only one way to find out," Roger told her.

I smacked him in the shoulder before he could pursue that line of thinking any further. But not hard enough.

A couple hours later, all of the girls had been claimed by their parents except Becky. We sat in the living room, watching Kill Or You're Dead, or possibly the sequel.

"I think we should go explore the Taywood house," said Roger.

"Shut up, Roger," I suggested.

"No, really! It would be fun."

"So would running through the Chamber Police Department wearing nothing but gummi worms, and yet I haven't given in to temptation."

"Where's your sense of adventure?" Roger asked.

I put my arm around Kyle. "Son, this is what's known as peer pressure. When you get older, bad kids will try to get you to smoke and use bad words and chew this nasty black goopy stuff that makes you spit, and your job is to tell them no. Got it?"

"Got it," said Kyle. He looked over at Roger. "No."

"Good boy."

Roger chuckled and sat back to watch the rest of the movie. About fifteen minutes later, Becky's mother showed up, wearing a witch costume with fluorescent warts.

"Sorry I'm late," she said. "Did you have a good time, Becky?"

Becky nodded. "Can we go to the Taywood house, Mommy?"

"You mean..." she took a moment to let out a maniacal cackle, "...the haunted Taywood house?"

"Yes!"

"Of course not."

Becky pointed accusingly at Roger and I. "They're going!"

"No, we're not," I insisted. "I fought the peer pressure. I just said no."

"No," said Kyle.

"Good boy."

"I think you two should go," said Mrs. Becky's Mother. "It would be fun. I'll watch the kids in the van while you explore."

I sighed. "Aren't we a little old for this?"

Roger gave me a condescending stare. "Aren't you the one who spent all of last Thursday night building Death Soldiers out of salt.w.a.ter taffy?"

"Don't bring my Death Soldiers into this."

"C'mon, where's your Halloween spirit?"

"Kyle, tell Uncle Roger and Becky's mom what you say to peer pressure."

"Yes!" said Kyle with a huge grin.

"The child has spoken," Becky's mom announced.