We Should Have Left Well Enough Alone

by Ronald Malfi

  Given all this, it came as no surprise that my dad had me invite Oliver trick-or-treating on Halloween. I spent the afternoon assembling my werewolf costume, epoxying fake fur to my face and also to the flesh-toned T-shirt I planned to wear beneath a tattered flannel shirt. I had just finished coloring the tip of my nose black with a grease pencil when my mom called from the front hall to tell me Cyn had just arrived.

  “Oh,” my mother fawned over us both. “You two look fantastic! Let me get my camera.”

  Cyn was done up as Dracula, her face powdered white, rivulets of dried blood leaking from the corners of her mouth. Her dark hair was pulled back into a long braid, which she tucked down into the collar of her black satin cape, forming an impressive widow’s peak at the center of her forehead. When my mom returned with the camera, Cyn popped in her plastic vampire teeth and growled as the flash went off.

  We handed out candy to some of the younger kids while we waited for Jeremy to show up. When it started to get dark, I went into the kitchen and called his house. The phone rang and rang and no one answered. Irritated, I hung up. When I turned around, there was a terrible face framed in the center of the kitchen window—a peeling green zombie face. I cried out then relaxed as, on the other side of the glass, Jeremy broke out in bawdy laughter. He ran around to the front of the house and came swooping in through the front door, nearly trampling some little kids coming up the walkway in the process.

  “That was priceless!” he howled. His face was done up in a base of green paint upon which he had affixed bits of rubbery latex that, when glimpsed through a window, looked remarkably like real loose-hanging flesh. “You should have seen your face! Oh my God!”

  “Hilarious,” I said.

  Cyn poked her head over the half-wall that overlooked the foyer. “We gonna go or what?” she said around the plastic vampire fangs.

  “Yeah,” I said, grabbing the freshly washed pillowcase my mother had slung over the back of one of the kitchen chairs. “But we gotta stop next door first.”

  “Oh, no,” Jeremy groaned, his ghoulish face suddenly going slack. “Don’t tell me that little faggot is coming with us.”

  “My dad’s making me.”

  “What horseshit.”

  “We don’t have to hang out with him all night,” I said. “He’ll probably get tired early on and head back home. Then we can do whatever we want.”

  “You get more candy if you go to the door with less people,” he hypothesized.

  “You can go by yourself,” Cyn said cheerily from over the half-wall, and Jeremy gave her the finger.

  “Hey,” growled my dad, passing through the hallway and catching the gesture. “Be nice, Jer.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Ganelin.”

  “And be nice to that kid next door.”

  “We will, Dad,” I promised him, and hurried out of the house with my friends.

  Next door, the three of us stood on the porch while I knocked. Jeremy took out his trick-or-treat bag and held it open. When I glanced at him, he shrugged and said, “What? Might as well make the most of it, right?”

  The door opened and Eric Toomey’s plastic smile greeted us. He held a Tupperware bowl in one arm. “Oh. Is that you, Brian? With all the fuzz on your face?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I guess you’re here for Oliver, huh?”

  I nodded.

  Eric Toomey turned and shouted into the house for Oliver. Then he faced back around, noticed Jeremy standing there with his trick-or-treat sack held open, and pulled a handful of pennies and toothbrushes out of the Tupperware bowl. He dropped the items into Jeremy’s sack just as a shape moved in the gloominess of the hallway behind him.

  “Oh,” said Eric Toomey, stepping aside. “Your friends are here, Oliver.”

  Oliver was dressed as a ghost. A single white sheet covered his body, with two holes punched out for eyes. Along the sides of the costume I noticed strips of reflective material, like the kind you see on construction workers’ vests. June Toomey had probably pasted them onto the sheet to ensure Oliver wouldn’t get hit by a car. Oliver shuffled forward, thumped one shoulder against the frame of the door, and ultimately needed to be guided out onto the porch by Eric Toomey. “Okay,” Eric Toomey said, that plastic smile never leaving his face. “You kids have fun, and be careful.” He closed the door on us.

  “Can you see in that thing?” I asked.

  From beneath the sheet, Oliver shrugged his narrow shoulders.

  We walked down the lawn and filed in among the other trick-or-treaters on Luther Avenue. Jeremy turned his sack upside down and emptied the pennies and toothbrushes into the gutter. “Those fuckin’ whackos,” he mused. “Seriously? Fuckin’ toothbrushes?”

  I gave him a quick kick to the shin and a look that told him to keep his voice down.

  “Hey,” Jeremy said, turning to Oliver, who bumbled along the sidewalk like a drunk. “Your foster parents are real cuckoos, you know that?”

  Oliver turned his head and stared at Jeremy through the two holes in the sheet. He didn’t say a word.

  “Come on,” Cyn said before we reached the intersection. “Let’s start here. Mrs. Gisondi always gives out those supersize candy bars.”

  We hurried up the walk toward the Gisondi house, Oliver bringing up the rear. By the time Mrs. Gisondi answered the door and dropped a jumbo Mr. Goodbar into each of our bags, Oliver had just joined us on the stoop. He fumbled around beneath his sheet while Mrs. Gisondi smiled patiently at us. Finally, Oliver’s small white hands appeared from beneath the hem of the sheet, holding open a plastic Ziploc bag.

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Gisdoni, dropping a jumbo Mr. Goodbar into Oliver’s bag. “That’ll fill up quickly.”

  The four of us hit the remaining houses along Luther Avenue, then hooked a right at the intersection onto Watchtower Street. Dusk had darkened the sky and the cool, crisp air was redolent with the smell of chimney smoke. Witches and trolls cackled as they passed us on the opposite side of the street. One house had a cauldron spewing clouds of dry ice on the porch, and a few of the neighbors had propped up fake tombstones in their front yards. At the Miners’ house, prerecorded ghost-sounds issued out of hidden speakers. A troupe of ballerinas stared at us as we marshaled up Watchtower.

  “Hey,” Jeremy said, elbowing me in the ribs. “Check this out.” He handed me a Tootsie Roll that looked just slightly thicker than normal.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Jeremy laughed. “I wrapped up cat turds in old Tootsie Roll wrappers!”

  “Gross!” I chucked the wrapped turd over a hedgerow decorated in orange pumpkin lights.

  “Hey, Oliver,” Jeremy called over to the walking white sheet. “You want a Tootsie Roll?”

  Cyn and I laughed. Oliver stopped walking, his tattered sneakers sliding to a stop along a patch of wet black leaves. Those two eyeholes again fell on Jeremy.

  “Ooh,” Cyn crooned. “Cripple fight…”

  “Shut up,” Jeremy said, chucking another turd-wrapped-Tootsie at her. “Come on, Ollie. I’m just busting your balls.”

  Oliver said nothing. He didn’t move.

  “Dude, let’s go,” Jeremy groaned.

  I nudged Oliver’s shoulder. “Come on, man. There’s more houses to hit.”

  Those two little eyeholes fell on me. Then Oliver faced forward again and continued down the street with us.

  By the time we reached Chestnut Street, it was coming on full dark, and Oliver was showing no signs of tiring. Even when his Ziploc bag filled up, which didn’t take long, he continued going house-to-house with us. At one point, when he stopped to lace up his sneakers, Jeremy and Cyn gathered around me. In a hushed voice, Jeremy said, “Let’s ditch the freak.”

  “We can’t ditch him,” I said. “My dad’ll kill me.”

  “Well, he won’t kill me.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But if you leave me alone with him, I’ll kill you.”

  “Let’s pretend we’re tired and we’re all going home f
or the night,” Cyn suggested. She had a lollipop in her mouth. “When he goes home, we can all go back out.”

  “But he’ll follow me home,” I said. “And by the time I walk all the way there and then back out here, I’ll miss all the good houses.”

  “Well, we gotta do something,” Jeremy said, picking some of the dried latex off his face.

  I looked back over at Oliver, who had apparently stepped in someone’s discarded chewing gum. He kept lifting his foot higher and higher off the ground, the gum stuck to its sole stretching like a tendon.

  “I’ve got an idea,” I said. “If we scare him enough, he might go home on his own.”

  “How do we do that?” Jeremy said, bringing the piece of latex to his nose and sniffing it.

  “We take him to the house on Cottage Lane,” I said.

  It was a crumbling old A-frame, partially sunken into the earth and surrounded by woods. Beyond the trees and in the dark distance, the lights of the Naval Academy’s communication towers pulsed red. The house had been vacant for the entirety of my lifetime, and it stood at the end of Cottage Lane in solitary confinement, cut off from the rest of the town. There were other houses on Cottage Lane, but they were huddled together closer to the newer developments at the bottom of the hill, separated from the crumbling old A-frame by several acres of black woods.

  The four of us hit some of these houses at the bottom of Cottage Lane before I suggested, in a tone that sounded admirably spontaneous, that we check out the old abandoned house farther up the hill. Jeremy and Cyn pretended like it was a great idea. The two black holes in Oliver’s sheet surveyed my friends before coming to rest on me.

  “You’ll love it,” I told Oliver as the four of us proceeded to walk up Cottage Lane, leaving the well-lighted houses and the cacophony of trick-or-treaters in our wake. “It’s creepy as hell.”

  “Like something from a horror movie,” Cyn added.

  “Tell him about the serial killer, Brian,” Jeremy said.

  “Oh, yeah. That’s right. See, a guy used to live there. Like, a hermit, you know? Kept to himself, didn’t have a wife. That sort of thing. Really weird.”

  “Weird like the Toomeys,” said Jeremy.

  “Quiet!” Cyn scolded him. “I want to hear this.”

  “Anyway,” I continued, “it was a few years ago, in the weeks just before Halloween, when some of the neighborhood kids started disappearing. No one knew where they went, or if they’d just decided to run away.”

  “Paul Torvall tried to run away when he shit his pants in school and got embarrassed,” Jeremy said, laughing to himself. “You guys remember that?”

  “I said be quiet,” Cyn reprimanded him again.

  Jeremy frowned. “Sorry. Go ahead, Brian.”

  “Well,” I said, moving in step with Oliver now, “kids kept disappearing all the way up to Halloween night. No one knew what the heck was going on, not even the cops. So all the worried parents and some of the cops started driving around the neighborhood, looking around to see if they could find clues as to what happened to all the kids. When one of the dads drove past the old house at the top of the hill, he noticed all these kids’ costumes and bags of candy lying around on the front porch and in the yard. So he got out of his car and went up to the house. It was mostly dark inside, but he looked in one of the windows. And that’s when he saw it.”

  Oliver sucked in an intake of breath and paused momentarily in his stride.

  “The guy was inside the house, and he had his whole dining-room table set like he was gonna have a big party,” I said. “Only instead of food on all the plates, there were all these kids’ heads. The killer had stuck Halloween candy in their eye sockets and in their mouths, too. The dad, he runs back to the car and gets the police. When the police show up, there’s like a shootout or something…and when they break into the house to apprehend the killer, they find that he’d escaped.”

  “Holy shit,” Jeremy said in a small voice.

  “Yeah,” I went on. “And they never did catch him.”

  “There it is,” Cyn said, and we all stopped in the middle of the street. The old house stood before us, blacker than a cave on the moon, slouching toward the earth as if terminally exhausted. Its windows were boarded up and there were great frilly hawks’ nests in the eaves. Beyond the trees, the red lights at the tops of the communication towers throbbed.

  “Pretty scary, huh?” I said.

  Oliver stared at the house…then turned toward me. I waited for him to speak but he didn’t. When he looked back at the house, I could hear his wheezy respiration once more.

  “I dare you,” I said, “to go inside.”

  Oliver’s sheeted head turned back around to face me. He shook his head furiously.

  “We all did it,” Jeremy said. “You gotta go right in the front door, straight through the house, and come out the back. That’s how we’ll know you’re brave.”

  “It would be the coolest ever,” Cyn added, flashing a rare smile that hinted at her burgeoning femininity.

  Oliver continued shaking his head.

  “If you’re too chicken,” I said, “that’s cool. But if you want to hang out with us, you gotta do it. Okay?”

  Oliver looked back up at the house. I could tell his hands were fidgeting beneath the sheet, and his breath was coming in exaggerated gasps now. The reflector strips on his costume glowed in the moonlight like lines on a highway. One pale white hand appeared beneath the hem of his sheet, but then slipped back beneath it.

  “We’ll wait here for you,” I told him.

  Oliver nodded…then slowly made his way up to the house. The porch was overgrown with weeds, the wooden planks themselves rotted and cracked. He managed the stairs with little difficulty, but then paused when he reached the front door. When he turned back around to face us, I waved him forward. He turned back to face the front door. He pressed his hands against it, pushing.

  “Shit,” Jeremy said beside me. “It might be locked.”

  But it wasn’t; apparently, even a pipsqueak like Oliver could manage to shove it open, if just several inches. A vertical strip of blackness seemed to ooze out. At that moment, I knew Oliver was going to chicken out, and we’d have to tote him along with us for the rest of the night…

  Oliver’s white sheet passed through the opening in the doorway, and went into the house. I glimpsed a final reflection of moonlight off his reflector strips before he was swallowed up by the darkness.

  “Wow,” Cyn said. “He did it.” She looked at me, her eyes comically wide in her white-powdered face. “I wouldn’t have done it.”

  “I’m gonna go around back and scare the shit out of him when he comes out,” Jeremy said, and before anyone could say another word to him, he was jogging around the side of the house.

  We waited.

  “That was a cool story,” Cyn said after a time.

  “Thanks.”

  “Did you, like, make that up as you went along?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Wow.”

  Crickets chirruped in the overgrown grass while the boomerang shape of bats arced across the face of the moon. A few blocks over, I heard the shrill, joyful cries of trick-or-treaters. They suddenly sounded very far away.

  Something like ten minutes later, Cyn said, “What’s taking so long?”

  I shook my head.

  “Maybe Jeremy’s with him?” she suggested, sounding hopeful.

  But at that moment, Jeremy appeared around the side of the house, his arms splayed out in a what gives? posture. “Where is he?” he asked as he joined us in the street.

  “Don’t know,” I said. “He didn’t come out the back?”

  “Would I be here asking you where he is if he came out the back?”

  “It’s an old house,” Cyn said. “Maybe he fell through some floorboards or something.”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” I said.

  “But still,” she said. There was panic rising in her voice now.
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br />   “Shit,” I said, chewing fake werewolf fur off my lower lip. I handed over my pillowcase full of candy to Cyn. “Hold this. I’ll go see.”

  “You’re going in there?” she said.

  I didn’t respond. Slowly, I approached the house. Up close, the floorboards of the porch looked even more dangerous than they had from the street. Some were missing, revealing dark slats of space at intervals across the porch. I avoided these spaces and went right up to the door, which still stood slightly ajar. A smell like the interior of an old barn wafted from the opening, and I instinctively wrinkled my nose. There are dead things in there. The thought hooked me out of nowhere and refused to let go. Dead animals…and maybe other things, too.

  “Oliver!” I called in through the open doorway. I could see nothing inside—just pitch blackness. “Hey, Oliver! Are you in there? Are you okay?”

  My voice echoed off the walls inside the house, but then faded to nothingness. I listened. Not a single sound came from within that house…

  I turned around, gripped by terrifying certainty that Jeremy and Cyn had fled, leaving me all alone. But there they were, standing together in the middle of the street, looking up at me. I hurried down off the porch and over to them, my heart strumming feverishly in my chest. “I called but he didn’t answer,” I said, frightening myself even more by the reedy, whiny quality of my voice. “I don’t know what happened.”

  “What do we do?” Cyn asked, her eyes volleying between Jeremy and me.

  “Maybe he’s messing around with us,” Jeremy said, though he did not sound convinced. “Like, maybe he’s in there hiding, waiting for us to come in so he can jump out and scare us.”

  It didn’t seem likely.

  “We need to go home and tell my dad,” I said finally.

  Jeremy’s eyebrows knitted together. “That’s a bad idea.”

  “You got a better one? You wanna go in there and look for him?”

  “No…”

  “Then we’ve got no other choice.” I snatched my pillowcase back from Cyn, who jumped at the suddenness of my action.

  The three of us headed straight for Luther Avenue, not stopping along the way, and cutting through people’s backyards when we knew the shortcuts. It was closing in on nine-thirty when we finally reached my house. The streets had grown empty at this deepening hour, and there were bits of candy strewn about the sidewalks and on people’s lawns. As I opened the front door, Jeremy said, “I’m not going in.”