“No, actually I don’t know. Let me remind you that Fun 4-Life in the only company of its kind in the world. For obvious reasons, the turnover rate here is virtually zero, Glont. In fact, a full-time position at Fun 4-Life is probably the most sought-after job in the world, so that whenever we have a new opening, literally billions of people apply. Most people would kill to work here. You’re one of the very lucky ones, Glont.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know all that. But I’m just bored of having fun and chilling out all the time. I mean, I dunno, aren’t there any documents around here that need be filed maybe? Some servers to migrate? Some data that needs to be entered in a, er, database? Aren’t there like some TPS reports that need to be made? Some machinery that needs operating or fixing? Some fucking coal that needs mining? Some shit that needs shoveling maybe?”
“No, no, no. There’s nothing like that to do around here. If you don’t mind me asking, how are things at home?”
“Not so bad, I guess.”
“You’re still living with your nuthouse-bugshit insane mother, right?”
“Yeah. Someone’s gotta take care of her and my nephews.”
“You mean those two freaks? They’re not even your real nephews. Glont, I think your real problem is that weird, old house you live in. You’re forty years old, man. You should get your own place. You’re lonely. You need to make some friends, get a girlfriend. Why, I bet your dick’s drier than a dead Mexican armadillo’s ass. Maybe you should start thinking about getting married and starting a family of your own, huh? But as long as you continue living at that, that freakhouse, you’ll never make a friend in this town or meet a good woman. You do want friends, don’t ya, Glont? You want to get yourself a wife one of these days, right?”
“Hey, thanks for your concern, Marty, but my life outside of Fun 4-Life is really none of your business.”
“Did Lance invite you to his Halloween party this year?”
Glont didn’t respond. Lance Montgomery was Fun 4-Life’s director of finance. Glont and Lance had attended grade school and high school together. Lance had always been the most popular guy in school—star quarterback, prom king, most likely to succeed, the whole nine. He and his jock buddies had pantsed Glont in the hallways of Selohssa High and locked him in lockers more times than Glont cared to remember. Lance had once forced Glont to eat a dried-out white dog turd on the playground in eighth grade. To this day, the dude still liked to brag about how he could barely fit himself into a BigBoy Size XXL condom, the largest condom in the world. In fact, he always made sure to have a BigBoy XXL on his person should the topic ever come up, and he was more than willing to whip out his unwieldy hose, stroke it to hardness, and demonstrate how a fully unrolled, footlong, three-inch wide BigBoy XXL barely contained him.
Lance threw a Halloween party every year at his mansion on the affluent north side of Selohssa—it was one of the biggest parties in town. He always invited everyone at the office.
Everyone except Glont.
Marty interrupted the silence with, “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
“Look, I don’t give a shit about Lance or his stupid Halloween party! And I care even less about the opinions of a grown man who dresses up like an infant every day. Hey, if you don’t like my attitude, Marty, just fire me already...you, you, fat, perverted blob. Otherwise, I’d like to get back to washing the goddamn windows.”
Marty bellowed hearty laughter. “You know I can’t fire you for something as minor as not doing your job and calling me names. Well, maybe not today, at least. But sometime in the future? Who knows? Maybe the higher-ups will eventually get sick of all your I-wish-I-had-a-real-job nonsense and green-light me canning your ass. I don’t really care either way. I did my part by having this little talk with you. To be perfectly honest, I just wanted someone to play seesaw with. Hee-hee. You can go now.”
Without giving Marty any warning, Glont quickly dismounted the seesaw, causing the man to drop hard onto the floor. Glont made for the door.
“Ouch! You asshole!” Marty yelled as he rolled off the plank onto his side, wincing as he rubbed his big diapered butt with both hands. “Fucker! Oh, hey. When you get back to your cube, Glont, tell that bouncing clown it’s time for him to change my poopy diaper, will ya?”
“Aw, fuck you, Marty! Go tell him yourself,” Glont said as he slammed the door behind him.
***
Glont grew bored with washing windows after a few hours. He was hungry, too, so he went to the cafeteria, got himself a heaping bowl of the gourmet spaghetti and meatballs they were serving that day. Back at his cube, Glont cracked open a tallboy of Coors Light, switched on the webcam that recorded his “work activities,” and proceeded to devour his spaghetti and meatballs like a pig at a trough. While he was stuffing his face, an update popped up on his monitor inviting anyone who was interested to save some of their spaghetti and meatballs, knead it into a greasy mush, and then jerk off with the stuff. Doing so was would earn you a bonus of $100.
Eh, why not? Glont thought. He figured he might as well earn some extra cash in between his episodes of workplace rebellion.
When Amanda appeared at his cube entrance to knock on the hard edge of the wall to get his attention, Glont stood before his TV screen, which glowed brightly with a quicksand fetish porn video, his pants bunched around his ankles, his face slathered with marinara, breathing heavily as he thrust himself in and out of a big, greasy glob of mashed spaghetti and meatballs that he struggled to keep from oozing out of his hands. Startled by Amanda’s knock, Glont jumped, whirled around to face her, the tasty mush splattering all over the floor. Mortified, he doubled over and covered his nakedness with his sullied hands, but not before Amanda got a good gander of his towering, throbbing, rock-hard, sauce-dripping 4.2 inches.
Amanda immediately pulled an oops face and averted her gaze to the ceiling. “Sorry. I can come back later if it’s not a good time.” Blushing, she turned to walk away.
“No, wait,” Glont said as he quickly pulled up his pants. “It’s as good a time as any. What is it, Amanda?”
“I was just wondering if you’re going to Lance’s Halloween party.”
Glont frowned, fixed Amanda with a leery eye. “Did Marty put you up to this?”
“Put me up to what?” Amanda asked innocently enough.
“Ah, never mind. No, I’m not going to Lance’s party. He never invites me.”
“Would you like to go with me?”
“I told you—I’m not invited.”
“But I am. And the invitation said I can bring one guest.”
Glont shook his head. “Thanks, Amanda. But even if wanted to go, I couldn’t. I have to take my ’phews reverse trick-or-treating tomorrow night.”
Amanda arched an eyebrow in bemusement.
“Oh, sorry. I forgot you’re new in town. I’m guessing you haven’t heard about my ’phews and the whole reverse trick-or-treating thing yet.”
“Your…’phews? Reverse trick-or-treating? No, I don’t think I have.”
“’Phews as in nephews. Reverse trick-or-treating is going door to door on Halloween to give people candy instead of them giving candy to you. Anyway, the whole thing’s kind of a long, sad story that I don’t really feel like getting into right now. Maybe some other time we could—”
That’s when the idea hit him. For many years now, the chore of taking Glont’s nephews reverse trick-or-treating had fallen on his shoulders. Back in the day, his mother had sometimes accompanied them, but the osteoarthritis, bubonic plague, and leprosy eventually got so bad that she could barely walk, even with the help of a cane or walker. But last summer, Glont had bought his mom a new mobility scooter for her birthday. He realized he could probably get out of reverse trick-or-treating duty if he had a real, honest-to-goodness date on Halloween. With her new scooter, his mother could totally take them! And surely she would be so ecstatic about his date—it had been many years—that she’d gladly offer to take the boys out for him.
And maybe Marty was right. Maybe it was high time Glont started getting out of his depressing house and began tending to his own emotional, psychological, physical, and social needs instead of always putting the wellness of his fucked-up family before his own.
Plus Amanda was cool. And nice. And hawt.
“Hey, you know what?” he said. “On second thought, sure—I’ll go to Lance’s party with you.”
As a smile played on Amanda’s full lips, a sugary-sweet drop of certified organic coconut milk leaked from the exquisite nipple of her mouth-watering left, um, coconut. Not because she was pregnant or because she’d recently given birth (because she hadn’t), but because she was very horny for Glont. Because that’s what happens sometimes when a woman gets really horny.
Right?
No?
Whatever.
Chapter 2
C onstruction of its original foundation dating way back to 1640, the Lamont family ancestral home was one of the oldest surviving timber-frame houses in Pennsylvania. The now run-down, sunken, haunted-looking edifice sat at the end of Dapperdog Lane, a narrow, dead end side street tucked away in the working-class south side of town. When Glont arrived home that night, he found his mother, Ruth Lamont—known affectionately as Ma Ruth around the Lamont household—rocking in her rocker and watching TV in the living room in a haze of blue-gray cigarette smoke.
“Hey, Ma. Guess what?”
“I got me a date on Halloween!” his mother squealed. She wrung her bony hands, her tawny dentures framed in a broad thin-lipped smile.
Glont’s eyes shot open. “What?”
“I said I got me a date on Halloween.”
“But…but that’s impossible. You haven’t been out on a date in like fifty years. I’m the one who has a date on Halloween.”
Ma Ruth jerked her head back in surprise. “What? Ya yankin’ my chain, boy? Why, you haven’t had a date in twenty years. Who in Samhain do ya got a date with?”
“Her name is Amanda. I work with her. We’re going to Lance Montgomery’s Halloween party.”
“Oh, Glont! Aah’m so glad to hear yer talkin’ to girls again! But you go ahead and tell that nice girl she’ll have to take a rain check, m’kay? ’Cause yer old ma has herself a date that night. Aah’m gonna need ya to take the boys out for reverse trick-or-treat.”
“Now wait a minute. How come your date is more important than mine? I mean, you do want to have grandkids one of these days, right, Ma?”
“Sorry, son. But my fifty-year dry spell trumps yer twenty-year dry spell. Why, I haven’t been out with a feller since your father ran out on us when he left me for that quicksand porn actress he got smitten with—that quicksand-sinkin’ little slut!—so this is very important to me. Old Crub and I are gonna have ourselves a grand ol’ time.”
“Old Crub! Please don’t tell me you’re going out with Old Crub.”
“I most certainly am. Old Crub’s as fine a gentleman bachelor as any in this town.”
“Gentleman? That guy’s the town drunk and the village idiot, Ma! He lives in the friggin’ sewers! He’s filthy, homeless, diseased, and nuthouse-bugshit insane. Not only that, but he served fifty years in prison for butchering his wife and five kids with an axe and cannibalizing their bodies. And he’s a goddamn ghoul and necrophiliac to boot! Old Crub’s been caught having sex with dead bodies in the cemetery and eating them on dozens of occasions. Not only that, but he’s a racist, Ma! Old Crub’s a registered Nazi and former treasurer for the KKK. Shit, the dude still dresses in blackface most days!”
“No one’s perfect, Glont. Judge not, lest ye be judged, boy! And it’s not like there’s hordes of male suiters linin’ up outside our front door these days to see me, is there? Plus, I’ve always wanted to make love to a black man.”
Glont made a loud, smacking facepalm. “Ma, you do know that blackface is not the same thing as being black, right?”
“Aw, don’t split hairs on me, son. It’s close enough! I’ll take what I can git. It’s not so easy gettin’ dates when yer ninety years old and the only gal in town sufferin’ from both bubonic plague and leprosy.”
Glont shook his head in dismay. “Well, what the hell is Old Crub gonna do—pick you up on his damn skateboard? That guy doesn’t have a car.”
“Aah’m gonna pick ’im up on my scooter. Gonna need ya to hitch Tom Two’s wagon to the back so Old Crub has a place to sit.”
Glont shook his head in vexation. “Ma, I’m sick of taking Tom Two and The Membrane reverse trick-or-treating every year.”
“Hey, you watch yer mouth!” Ma Ruth said in a stern but lowered voice as she turned to eye the open doorway that communicated with the main hall, beyond which was a staircase leading up to the second floor. “They might hear you.”
“Can’t someone else take them reverse trick-or-treating for once?”
“And who, other than you and me, is gonna take ’em, huh?”
Glont sighed. His mother was right. He knew there was no one else. The rest of the town hated Tom Two and The Membrane. In fact, the town’s communal hatred of them was precisely the reason why Tom Two and The Membrane had to go reverse trick-or-treating every Halloween.
The rapid thumping of light footsteps descended the creaky staircase, as of those made by a small child, prompting Glont to turn toward their source. And who should appear in the doorway a beat later?
Why it was none other than Tom Two himself!
Chapter 3
Y ou know the iconic screaming figure in Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream? Well, imagine if that figure fathered a tiny little son—a sort of Mini-Me (or Mini-Scream, as it were)—and you basically had Tom Two. Standing only three feet tall, Tom Two had the same sort of hairless, oversized, upside-down, pear-shaped head as the famous screamer, the same elongated, askew, horror-stricken face, and the same lipless oval of an aghast mouth. He even wore a sooty, robe-like garment that was quite similar to the one depicted in the painting, if not an exact copy.
In fact, but for the sombrero that sat perpetually on his head—the hat was bigger than him, the back of its broad brim always dragging on the floor behind him like the train of a wedding gown—Tom Two was the spitting image of Munch’s screaming figure, albeit in miniature and just a tad bit chubbier.
As far as anyone knew, Tom Two had always lived in the 350-year-old Lamont ancestral home, though no one knew where he came from originally. Yet each successive generation of Lamonts had always taken care of him as if he were one of their own, though they were careful to keep him from leaving the property lest he terrify the children of the neighborhood, Halloween night being the exception.
Nearly forty years ago, Glont’s grandmother took Tom Two to visit the family doctor for a checkup, seeing as how nobody knew when the little fellow had last—if ever—seen a doctor. In the examination room, the understandably apprehensive doctor called in a few of his colleagues to join him. Owing to this strange little being’s odd physiognomy and their inability to determine his age, the docs took a great interest in Tom Two. Regarding their many questions, Tom Two himself was little help as he was mute as a maggot. And while he certainly could have communicated with the doctors via sign language and even rudimentary writing and drawing, Tom Two played dumb with them. He answered most of their questions with a befuddled shoulder shrug.
Ultimately, the docs’ interest in Tom Two led to a carload of suited CIA agents visiting the Lamont house a few weeks later, at which time they grabbed the little fellow and spirited him away to a hidden government research facility. After running an untold number of tests on Tom Two, including an advanced radiocarbon dating test that worked on living things, the astonished researchers determined that, in absolute defiance to all known laws of physics, not only was Tom Two exactly two years old, but he was constantly two years old—i.e., all the cells in his body refused to age one millisecond beyond two years.
So while Tom Two’s physiological age was always exactly two years old, no one had any way
of knowing how old he “really” was—i.e., how old he was in the timeline of the rest of the universe. As such, he could have been born or created eons ago for all anyone knew. And barring any sort of fatal injury, the whole perpetually-two-years-old thing basically made him immortal.
Though the white coats studied Tom Two for years, his little body refused to reveal any of its secrets: all attempts to understand the time-defying mechanics of his strange cells and all efforts to duplicate those mechanics in the laboratory failed miserably. And again, even if Tom Two had had something of interest to tell his inquisitors, he played dumb for the entirety of his confinement.
So, after five years of Tom Two getting poked and prodded in that research facility-cum-prison, a government car finally pulled up to the Lamont residence one afternoon to drop the poor little bastard off. Turned out that despite Tom Two’s singularly extraordinary nature, there was simply nothing the scientists could learn from him.
The conclusion of the government’s final peer-reviewed report on Tom Two—a report made public—read thusly:
“Conclusion: We must therefore assume that Tom Two is some sort of fucking weird-ass, witchcraft- or voodoo-spawned ABOMINATION OF NATURE! WTF!!!!! Now get his creepy little ass outta here already!!! And while you’re up, go pour me a stiff drink!”
***
After he appeared in the doorway, Tom Two raced over to Glont, latched onto his leg. The little dude was shaking.
“Double T!” Glont said, looking down at Tom Two and laying a hand on his sombrero-crowned head. “What’s wrong, my man?”
“They was watchin’ skeery movies again upstairs,” Ma Ruth said.
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