Toil & Trouble

by Hannah Johnson

  “You should stop by. Scare the shit out of some little munchkins.”

  “Maybe I will,” Heather says. She glances over her shoulder, throwing the hint of a smile Cora’s way, and then walks out the door.

  Cora just kinda sits there. For, like, awhile.

  She blames the shiny hair. It’s uniquely transfixing.

  +

  And then, at last, the day is upon them.

  “Just think,” Howie says soothingly, putting a plate of pancakes in front of Arthur. They’re deformed beasts of pancakes, because Howie made them, but at least they are full of blueberries. (Howie prefers to fill them with chocolate chips, but Arthur is morally opposed.) “By this time tomorrow, it’ll be all over.”

  “And Annie Fabray may very well have the ammunition to destroy us,” Arthur replies bleakly. He pours a modest pool of maple syrup on the corner of his plate, then dips the corner of a piece of pancake into it.

  Howie will never understand the level of food-related restraint that this guy accomplishes on the regular.

  “Well, yeah,” he says, dousing his pancakes thoroughly in syrup. Like a normal person (who, okay, probably has a lot of cavities). “But look on the bright side. We could also be the proud recipients of five out of five pincushions!”

  The whole pincushions-instead-of-stars rating sounds impressively stupid when you actually talk about it out loud.

  “Remind me again why I’ve chosen to fight this battle,” Arthur says.

  “Why do any of us do the things we do? Here. Eat this bacon.”

  “Is it turkey bacon?”

  “No,” Howie admits.

  “Good,” Arthur says savagely, and goes right to town on it.

  Damn. Haunted House Day Arthur gets real.

  +

  All day, people are calling the store and dropping by to double check the time for the haunted house.

  Sometimes, those people have very tiny children in tow.

  Howie, Arthur, Cora, and Kristy watch as a smiling mother leads her three adorable triplets back outside after very cheerily promising to show up at seven p.m. sharp.

  “Aw shit,” Cora says after a long, sad silence. “Adorable triplets? Who even has those?”

  “Does anyone else feel like a hideous monster?” Howie asks.

  “We need to do something,” Kristy says. “We can’t just traumatize all these kids!”

  “You’re telling me!” Howie says. “I don’t want to be the person who leads those poor little triplets into the chainsaw murder biz because they find me so dazzling that they can never come up with a superior role model.”

  “Well, I think we all know that’s not going to happen,” Arthur says.

  “Uh, first: It could happen; I’m very charismatic with a chainsaw, probably,” Howie replies defensively. “Second: I have an idea.”

  +

  And thus, the divide between upstairs and downstairs is born. Like on that one show that Mom and Amber—and only Mom and Amber—like to watch.

  Upstairs, they transform Arthur’s office into an adorable orange-toned haven for gentle Halloween revelries. There are coloring books! Three Halloween themed gingerbread house-making kits! Enough chairs for one rousing game of musical chairs! A costume contest with enough categories for everyone to win a makeshift construction paper medal! (Kristy is, it comes as no surprise, really good at coming up with myriad ways to praise people.) Bobbing for apples! If they actually get around to buying apples, that is. And candy—a magnificent bounty of candy.

  Downstairs, who even knows.

  Since Tyler Fabray didn’t actually provide any ideas for activities, they finally come to the conclusion that they should make the kids weave through the aisles like a maze. If they make it out the other end, they get a bag full of candy and a twenty-percent-off coupon for any store purchase. (Not much of a thrill for the kids, maybe, but Arthur figures it might appeal to the parental demographic.)

  The lights will be off, the fog machine will be fogging, and there will be monsters lurking at every turn, just waiting to freak peeps out.

  “Ideally,” Arthur says, “to the extent where someone pees their pants. Tyler’s suggestion,” he adds, off everybody’s less-than-enchanted looks. “Not mine.”

  He consults the clipboard holding the list of Tyler’s demands.

  “We still need blood, guts, and vomit,” he reports.

  “Do we, though?” says Howie.

  “We could cut you open and use yours,” Cora says sweetly. “You’d probably vomit from shock.”

  “It might be less painful than this evening,” Arthur says.

  +

  By five o’clock, all of the aisles have strips of gauze hanging at both ends, from ceiling to floor. In order to actually walk through the aisles, you have to push your way through the gauzey bits first.

  Howie can’t help thinking that it just looks like the real poor man’s alternative to a bead curtain.

  “In the dark, it’ll be creepy,” Cora swears, lovingly sticking little plastic spiders into the gauze.

  Arthur comes in, back from his panic run to the grocery store. Out of his canvas bag, he pulls ... a bag of apples, a bottle of ketchup, and a line of link sausages.

  “Bobbing for apples, for upstairs,” he says, of the apples. Then he points to the ketchup and sausages. “Blood and guts, for downstairs.”

  Kristy wrinkles her nose. “What are we supposed to do with the sausages?”

  “I don’t know. Just scatter them around? No ketchup on the carpet, please.”

  “I think wasting sausages is against my religion,” Howie says.

  “Arthur,” Cora says coyly, “would you say Howie knows how to worship a sausage?”

  “Don’t be crass,” Arthur replies, “and yes.”

  Howie punches the air victoriously.

  “Did he mean that in the naughty fun way or the breakfast way?” Cora muses.

  “Either way,” Howie says, “this is a proud moment for me.”

  Cora laughs, then turns to Kristy to make sure she’s in on the fun. For once, she isn’t.

  “You okay, KQ?” Howie says.

  “Just tired,” Kristy replies wistfully.

  “When all this is over,” Howie says, slinging an arm around her shoulders, “we’re gonna watch all the Channing Tatum movies your heart could desire.”

  “Even Dear John?” Kristy says, brightening a little.

  “Especially Dear John,” Howie says, and doesn’t even grimace. True selflessness.

  “Ma-gic Mike! Ma-gic Mike!” Cora chants.

  “If you’re going to chant about stripper movies, can you at least do it while you’re smearing ketchup all over the gauze to make it look eerily bloodstained?” Arthur requests.

  It’s hard to resist an order like that.

  +

  When they’re all done, they turn the lights off and try out the strobe light.

  True to Cora’s word, the gauze takes on a menacing, ghostly vibe. Even though Howie knows the red stains are from ketchup, well—knowing and feeling are two very different things.

  “It’s awful,” Kristy murmurs.

  “And tomato-scented,” Cora observes.

  “Which only makes it creepier,” Howie says.

  “Well,” Arthur says, “that’s something.”

  +

  Next up: costumes.

  Howie sticks with his jeans and t-shirt; he argues that the very essence of a chainsaw murderer’s fearsomeness is that he could be just like anyone else until you put that chainsaw in his hand. Everyone is too grim-of-spirits to fight him on it.

  Arthur looks sort of like the human embodiment of a Mumford & Sons song. He’s wearing an old jacket with elbow patches that Howie has always made fun of, and he looks very ready to wander a long and dusty road and sing his weary heart’s song. Or, well, Taylor’s weary heart’s song.

  Cora is covered in a suit of shaggy fur and a fur-meets-rubber werewolf mask which boasts a set of serious
ly nasty bloody jaws. She, at least, seems right at home.

  Kristy is, objectively speaking, a truly adorable sexy mummy, but she doesn’t look happy about it.

  Once they’ve all changed, Cora’s friend Nick—a guy Howie once lovingly dubbed Tights McGee—comes to the store to do their makeup. He’s got no tights in sight, and formidable mad skills with a ... makeup brush thingie.

  He gives Arthur the sickly pallor of a ghostly troubadour, then paints little red dots all over Howie’s face.

  “The blood splatter of your victims,” Nick explains. He sounds way too chill with that idea.

  “Is it okay if I just pretend they’re freckles?” Howie says.

  “Sure, Pippi Deathstocking.”

  “Pippi Longstocking is creepy enough, like, just as she is,” Howie says. “You don’t have to embellish.”

  “God, I loved Pippi Longstocking when I was a kid,” Cora says, grinning nostalgically.

  “That does not surprise me,” says Arthur.

  Nick doesn’t stop with the blood freckles. Nope. He also attacks Howie’s eyeballs—well, okay, the area around them—with eyeliner.

  “So, uh, am I the David Bowie of chainsaw murderers?” Howie asks.

  “If you want your crazy eyes to be the last thing your victim remembers, then you gotta make them stand out,” says Nick, with the kind of simple authority that a guy can wield when he’s earned the nickname Tights McGee.

  Secretly, Howie doesn’t hate it.

  Since Cora’s going to have her face all covered in werewolf mask, she foregoes her chance for freaky makeup. Kristy goes last, and basically comes out looking like a 1950s pinup girl. Even though she is definitely the most non-hideous member of the group, she still isn’t her usual chipper-as-a-human-puppy self.

  “You guys are really mopey for a bunch of freaks about to get their Halloween on,” Nick says. Apparently he is a dude with the power to read the room.

  “Uh, here,” Howie says, handing over his phone. “Take our picture. I’ll send it to Amber. Let her know that she and Mitch really need to up their costume game if they wanna roll with this fierce crowd.”

  As they pose, Howie is sort of at a loss with what to do with this plastic chainsaw. He is just not good at communicating an air of I’LL FUCK YOU UP, LUMBERJACK STYLE. He gets that he is probably not supposed to wave the chainsaw around like it’s a foam finger at a football game, but it’s hard not to. Surely some chainsaw murderers must be jaunty folk, right?

  Nick snaps the picture. Howie takes a look at it.

  Wow. They are a ... non-enthusiastic bunch.

  A few minutes after he sends it to her, Amber texts back, That is the saddest group of monsters I’ve ever seen. What is Kristy supposed to be, a sexy roll of toilet paper? That doesn’t really strike me as her style ...

  Howie texts back an abridged version of the Saga of Tyler Fabray and The Sexy Mummy.

  Amber never answers.

  You know it’s bad when even Amber can’t come up with something elegantly disdainful to say.

  +

  At six o’clock, they run through their list of assigned duties.

  Kristy will stand guard at the cash register; ideally, parents will be motivated to do a bit of light Halloweeny shopping in the midst of the horror shows, although Howie is a little doubtful as to how well that will go. Usually shopping doesn’t happen in the dark. Unless you’re at Abercrombie.

  Howie, Arthur, and Cora will wander the shelfy maze of terror. So will Amber, Mitch, and Cliff, once they all get off work and show up.

  There’s a bit of a pickle when it comes to figuring out who will take care of the upstairs shindig.

  And so Howie does what every mighty and fearsome man might do upon encountering an insurmountable obstacle:

  He calls his mom for help.

  He also shoots off a text to the only other person he can think of who hasn’t already gotten roped into this pit of crazy: Mitch’s gigantic Rabelaisian teddy bear of a roommate, Rudy.

  Desperate times, yo.

  +

  Mom hustles on over right away. Partly because she’s an outstanding human being, and partly because Howie knows she is just dying to witness all the idiocy. It is probably unhealthy to be this delighted by watching your child make a fool of himself.

  Rudy opts for a more dramatic entrance.

  Or maybe that’s just his natural thunder.

  Upstairs in Arthur’s office, Howie can hear the ol’ Rudester on his way. The stairs shake with every one of his godlike footsteps.

  “Oh my,” Mom says, distracted from teasing Howie about his super cool blood freckles.

  Rudy stands in the doorway, towering over everyone, dressed in a pretty splendid bat costume.

  Not Batman.

  Just a bat.

  “’Sup,” he says.

  “Thank you for coming at the last minute. Are you sure you’re up for the task?” Arthur asks Rudy.

  “No worries, sad hobo,” Rudy says, nonchalantly waving his arms. His bat wing sleeves flutter. “Kids love me. We get each other. We’re on the same level, see.”

  “Well, I can believe that,” Arthur admits. “Er, you’ll be keeping an eye on things with Howie’s mother Miranda, then.”

  “What up, Howbell’s mom,” Rudy says.

  “What up, Mitch’s roommate,” Mom replies gamely.

  “Ha ha! Nice one,” Rudy says. “You ready for this?”

  Mom nods, pretty epically. “Oh yeah.”

  “Can you handle it?” Howie whispers, doing one last mommy check before he heads downstairs. “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s a good thing I’m with David,” Mom replies deviously, “because otherwise you might have gotten a new stepdaddy tonight.”

  “You are a disgusting person,” Howie tells his mother, with greatest love and respect, and then books it downstairs.

  +

  At seven o’clock, the crowd has arrived.

  Arthur looks out the window at them.

  They all stand outside in the parking lot: at least two dozen costumed-up kids and their parents. Tyler Fabray stands in front of everyone, dressed like a pirate, exuding the sort of swagger that suggests the store is his own personal ship.

  Or something.

  Arthur isn’t currently in the mood to master metaphor.

  At the back of the crowd stands Annie Fabray, ominous as ever, dressed in perfectly normal clothes save for the pair of devil horns on her head.