“What happened then?” I asked. I had been there, but I didn't remember it at all the way that Harry was telling it.
“Oh, Kalbfleish was out of the hospital in three months,” Harry said, “though of course he would be scarred forever from the burns. His wife died from the combination of drowning and burning to death. We felt bad about it for a while. But by the time the next Halloween rolled around, we were ready for another go. Kalbfleish had another wife by then, and they were primed for another go too.”
The door chimes were ringing downstairs. “I'll go,” said Mary Mondo. She took candy from the candy bowl and floated down. There was the sound of the front door opening and of little voices like birds twittering ‘Trick or treat’. Then someone cried ‘Awk!’ in a more mature voice, and then there was a sound ‘Klunk’. After a while the front door was heard to close again, and Mary Mondo came back upstairs. “That lady fainted and klunked her head on the door-stone,” Mary said. “Seeing me didn't bother the kids, but it sent the lady into a faint. Why do ladies faint when they see ghosts? I don't faint when I see people.”
“Is she all right, Mary?” Barnaby Sheen asked. All this was at Barnaby's house.
“No, of course she isn't all right,” Mary said. “The way she klunked her head on that door-stone, I bet she never does get all right.”
“I remember one Halloween,” said George Drakos, “when Bittle McLittle, the smallest man in the world, was playing in the vaudeville at the old Orpheum Theatre. We had made friends with Bittle and he went around with us that night. They weren't having the vaudeville that evening: they were having a triple bill of silent movie ghost pictures. “My cousin Zoe Archikos (she was very blonde and very precocious for nine years old) was with us that night, and she carried Bittle McLittle wrapped up in a blanket like a baby. She went up to the Paldeen house and banged on the door. And Mr. Paldeen opened the door. He was a funny man with a harelip, and a voice that went with it.
“ ‘Oh go away, kids,’ he said in that harelippy way. ‘I don't want any trouble with you.’
“ ‘This is your chile that I have in my arms,’ Zoe said in her brassy way, ‘and these are my six lawyers. Now pay off or we will have you on a patality suit.’
“ ‘Paternity suit,’ Bittle McLittle the child in her arms corrected her.
“ ‘What is it Peter?’ Mrs. Paldeen called from inside.
“ ‘Oh, it's just that brassy little Archikos girl with some nonsense about a paternity suit,’ Mr. Paldeen hairlipped to his wife inside. But the wife came to the door all in a turmoil.
“ ‘Oh, Peter Paldeen, whatever have you done?’ she wanted to know. ‘Zoe, are you sure that Peter is the father of your child? Can you prove it?’
“ ‘Oh sure, I think so,’ Zoe said.
“ ‘Certainly we can prove it,’ said Bittle McLittle the child in Zoe's arms, and he said it in a harelippy voice. (Bittle was a mimic: all those people in vaudeville learned to mimic all kind of voices and to play the different instruments in the orchestra too, if necessary.)
‘Would I sound just like him if he weren't my father?’
“ ‘Oh, what a terrible thing!’ Mrs. Paldeen wrung her voice. ‘Peter, that little baby talks just like you. That proves he's your son. Oh, what do you what us to do, Zoe?’
“ ‘Pay, pay, pay!’ Zoe cried righteously. ‘Money, money. Eight dollars. There are eight of us here.’
“ ‘Eight dollars!’ Peter Paldeen moaned. ‘I work all week for eight dollars. Oh, oh, what have I done to deserve this?’
“ ‘You know what you've done, Peter,’ Mrs. Paldeen said angrily. ‘There's no other way. Think of the disgrace. Pay, Peter, pay!’
“Mr. Paldeen went into the house and came back with the money.
He gave a dollar to each of us, to Zoe, to Bittle McLittle in her arms, to Harry O'Donovan, to Barnaby Sheen, to John Penandrew, to Cris Benedetti, to Laff, and to me. It had worked.
“ ‘Hey, wait a minute,’ Peter Paldeen harelipped a little bit too late. ‘Wait a broomcorn-cutting min—’
“ ‘Scramble!’ Bittle McLittle howled, and not in a hairlippy voice. Zoe threw him and he hit running, and we were all running off in eight different directions.
“ ‘How come a little baby like that could talk at all?’ Mrs. Paldeen was keening. ‘Why were you so stupid as to pay the money? Peter, how come a little baby like that was smoking a cigar?’
“ ‘How come a little baby like that can run like that?’ Peter Paldeen panted somewhere behind us. But he couldn't run in eight directions, and he couldn't catch any of us at all. Ah, they just don't make Halloweens like that any more.”
The door chimes rang downstairs. “I'll go,” said Mary Mondo. She took bubble gum from the bubble gum bowl and floated down. There was the sound of the front door opening and of little voices like crickets twittering ‘Trick or treat’. Then someone cried ‘Awk!’ in a more womanly voice. After that there was a ‘Klunk’ sound. A little later the front door was heard to close again, and Mary Mondo came back upstairs. “That lady fainted and klunked her head on the door-stone just like the first one did,” Mary Mondo said. “How come I scare the ladies when I don't scare the little kids?”
“Is she all right, Mary?” Barnaby Sheen asked.
“No, of course she isn't all right. How is anybody going to be all right after a klunk like that? I hope nobody slips on the blood she got on the door-stone.”
“No, they don't make them like they used to,” Barnaby said. “I remember one Halloween when the old Orcutt streetcar still ran down St. Louis Street. It ended at Orcutt Park on the lake, and there was a turn-around there. One of the car-men lived in a shanty in the park. He would drive the last run at night and the first run in the morning, and he would leave the streetcar all night on the turn-around.” Austro was doing his weekly Rocky McCrocky comic strip episode with hammer and chisel on light grey slatestone. He filled the incisions with black pigment or graphite, and clear and striking pictures were the result. He would split the light grey slatestone very thin as he finished each panel, and it made almost perfect episode pictures. It was in such form that Austro gave the continuing Rocky McCrocky drama to the young people of the neighborhood and of the world.
“On this side of the park, before you got to the turn-around, there were some stately mansions on the lake shore,” Barnaby continued with his story. “One of the most stately belonged to the Dumbarton family. Mr. Dumbarton was from France. He was a millionaire. He owned one of the refineries out by Sand Springs. But he was a swishy dude: my own father used to say that about him. So we'd fix that swishy dude!
“We had a couple of frogs, those iron rail-clamps made to switch cars from one track to another where there isn't a regular switching place. We picked a high place about a hundred feet from the turnaround, and we fastened the frogs to the track there. Then we went to the streetcar, put the trolley up to the trolley-wire, got in the car, and started it up. We got up all the speed we could going up the rise. We hit the frogs and we derailed, and we went downhill on that new pavement that they had there. We had it all figured perfectly. We even had measured that concrete ramp going up to the Dumbarton front porch, the one they made for Mr. Dumbarton's grandmother to go up in her wheelchair on. It was wider than it needed to be for a wheelchair to go on. It was just exactly wide enough for a streetcar to go on if we hit it just right.”
Below and outside, a monkey howled and sobbed in withering agony and resounded its degradation in the hellish jungle. (There was not, in actual fact, any hellish jungle down there, though the yard between Sheen's where we were and Benedetti's was pretty shaggy.) The monkey gave its wrenching howling and sobbing in the terrifying outdoors, and also in the terrifying personal interiors. It may have been a ghost monkey.
“Monkeys had Halloween before people did,” Austro said. “Really, that's true. If they didn't kill so many of each other on every Halloween the world would be overrun with them now.”
“We rolled dow
n that hill faster and faster,” Barnaby recounted, “and we stomped on that trolley-bell ‘Clang! Clang! Clang!’ Oh, I wish they still made trolley-bells like that! There wasn't any way to steer that streetcar when it wasn't on tracks, but it steered itself. The street turned sharply there, but the driveway of the Dumbartons was in a straight line. We went up that driveway with the sparks flying from the iron wheels on the concrete, up the ramp onto the front porch or veranda, down the whole length of the porch (Clang! Clang! Clang!) and clear through a wall at the end.
“And through the wall was the Master Chamber of the Dumbartons' house. That Master Chamber was probably the biggest bedroom in town, but it was a little bit crowded with a full-sized streetcar right in the middle of it. And we kept clanging that trolley-bell. A trolley-bell sounds quite a bit louder when the streetcar is inside a bedroom.
“ ‘Sancta Agatha!’ Mrs. Dumbarton cried out in her fine voice as she sat up in bed.
“ ‘Ora pro nobis!’ Mr. Dumbarton cried out in an even finer voice, and he sat up in bed too. And ‘Clang! Clang! Clang!’ went that trolley-bell. John Penandrew was the boy stomping on the bell. The Dumbartons, waking up like that, thought that the trolley-bell was a church bell back in France.
“They begin to ring the church bells at midnight there, when Halloween is over with and All Saints Day begins. And they begin to chant that Litany of the Saints. You know, though, that swishy dude Dumbarton caught on real fast. I never saw a man comprehend a streetcar in the middle of his bedroom so fast. And I never saw a two-handed creature collar six kids as quick as he did. And he seemed to have hands left over to—”
“Ah, they don't make Halloweens like that any more!” we all breathed together.
The door chimes rang downstairs. “I'll go,” said Mary Mondo. She took balloons from the balloon bowl. Then she said, “I'd better take a pillow and put it on that door-stone so the ladies won't klunk their heads so hard. May a sander-effect ghost-trap get me if I don't put a pillow there.” She floated downstairs, carrying a little pillow and quite a few balloons, blowing some of them up as she went. It was easy to see how Mary would startle people who weren't used to her. She hadn't any body at all. When she did things with her hands, such as handing out candy or balloons, then her hands did make an appearance, but it was a false appearance. When she spoke, there was mouth and throat and movement to be seen, but they were illusion. When she grinned, there was an appearance of everted lips and of red tract tissue all through her. Mary Mondo had a very visceral grin. It was hard to understand how she could be so carnal a person when she hadn't any body to be carnal with.
Below there was the sound of the front door opening and of little voices like pert mice squeaking ‘Trick or treat’. Then someone cried ‘Awk!’ in a young-wifey voice. After that there was a curious modified sound, like a ‘Klunk’ wrapped in feathers. Mary Mondo had got the pillow onto the door-stone in time.
There was the sound of the front door closing again. Mary Mondo came back upstairs. “That's likely all the little kids there will be tonight,” she said. “By the sander-effect ghost-trap itself, I hope there won't be a certain two or three big kids.”
“I hope Paracelsus doesn't come,” said that big, not-so-very-lifelike, sawdust-filled doll on the sofa, the doll that was really the undead body of Loretta Sheen.
The pet monkey that belonged to the O'Briens was howling and gibbering and squalling outside. It was infested with a cloud of ghost-monkeys that always came on this night.
“Austro, did you have Halloweens on the Guna slopes when you were a boy?” Doctor George Drakos asked. The Guna slopes were in Ethiopia, in Africa. That was where Austro came from. “Certainly we had Halloweens,” Austro said, banging loudly with hammer and chisel as he constructed the Rocky McCrocky comic strip. “Carrock! We invented them. We first, after the monkeys, that is. Where do you think are to be found the great originals of your weak imitations you have been telling about? We made grotesque sapiens heads out of big gourds and burned bee-wax or aphid-wax candles in them. We would climb around and ring the doorbells at the porticos of the different caves, and we—”
“Wait, wait, wait!” Harry O'Donovan objected. “Don't tell us that the Australopithecines had doorbells!”
“Sure we did, Harry,” Austro maintained. “Sure they were real ones, Cris. Sure they were electric ones, George. Did you think we had kerosene doorbells? Well hell, Barnaby, we used lead-sulphuric-acid batteries: that's a lot easier than winding those little transformers. Why, Laff, we got the sulphur for the acid from our own Guna slopes. The best deposits in Africa are still there.”
“Let's not interrupt Austro, guys,” Barnaby interrupted him. “It makes him loquacious. Believe me, he always has answers. If you read his weekly Rocky McCrocky comic strip as the neighborhood kids do you would know those answers.”
“But sometimes we failed to ring the doorbells,” Austro said. “Certain wise-guy caveholders would remove the push-buttons that night and paint the holes to look just like push-buttons. When we pressed our finger there, it would go all the way into the hole. Then a pair of sharp rock-scissors on the inside would make short work of the finger, short work by a joint or two. See!”
Austro held up his index finger that was minus a joint. He had told quite a few stories about that missing finger-joint, though. I myself doubted that he had lost it by poking it through a hole that was painted to look like a push-button.
“If the caveholder opened the front door, we jumped aside onto a higher ledge,” Austro said, “for we had it fixed that the rock-sill would fall off and the caveholder would fall off too when he stepped out. Some of those caves were very high and the cave owners would be killed. Some of them were only medium high and the cave owners would only be maimed. Carrock, I hope those two or three big kids don't come around tonight!” Austro gave a shiver.
“You're surely not afraid of all the big kids in the world, are you?” Barnaby asked.
“There's two or three big kids I might be afraid of,” Austro said. “I might be afraid of them just this one night of the year. But sometimes the caveholder wouldn't open the door itself. The rich ones had peepholes built into their doors. Watch out then if a peephole opened. Don't put your eye too close to it to see inside. You will look a mamba snake right in the eye if you do, and he will savage the face clear off you. I hate mambas. Oh, I hope the door chimes don't ring again tonight. It might be them. Or I hope it rings soon, then, to have it over with.”
“I hope it isn't Paracelsus,” said the sawdusty Loretta Sheen.
“Yes, the sapiens people call him Paracelsus,” Austro said with a shiver. “He is the most feared of the double-people who appear on this year-night to exact payment. He's the magician with the white beard. He might come as a young boy, a boy you know well. But he will be wearing a long white beard with thongs that pretend to tie it onto his face. But it will not be a false beard: the boy will have grown a real white beard especially for this night. It is the thongs that are false in pretending to tie the beard onto the face. Then this magician with the white beard will pour a bowl of clotted blood of the Kiboko over the head of the victim. And then the victim will be changed into a—ah, ah, ah—” But Austro was shaking badly.
“Into a what, Austro?” Harry O'Donovan asked.
“Don't make me say it,” Austro begged. “It's too terrible. Ah, let me tell you about the Halloween night we put the rhinoceros up on top of chimney rock. It was a ten ton rhinoceros and was up two hundred feet high. It was nervous and complaining, and its feet kept slipping and showering rocks down. All the notable people had their houses right around the foot of chimney rock, and there was no telling which house the rhinoceros would smash or which people it would kill when it fell. By next morning daylight the situation was even more fearsome than by night. Ah, I'm afraid they will come tonight and I will be the victim. And the others of them are at least as fearful as the magician with the white beard. They will turn the victim into a—ah, ah, ah—”
Austro was scared.
“Well, why don't the menaces ring the chimes then!” Barnaby demanded. “Nothing is more wearisome than waiting for doom to crack, than waiting for lightning to strike, than waiting for the trumpet to sound, than waiting for the last knock on the last door, than waiting for the final bell to ring.”
“Sometimes the bearded magician will have an evil consort,” Austro said, full of fright. “Sometimes there will even be a third of these demons. Then the victim is done and doesn't have a chance.”
“I'm afraid of Paracelsus the Magician,” Mary Mondo said, “but I'm even more afraid of Morgana. If she comes, it's just all over with.”
“Just what is it that these spooks can do to you, kids?” Cris Benedetti asked.
“They can give one the monkey wrench,” Austro said skittishly. “There is nothing worse than that.”
We whooped and jeered at this, and Austro looked startled.
“Oh, I don't mean the tool that you call the monkey wrench,” he said then. “What I mean is made out of air and not of iron. It follows you and it enters you. It finds that little monkey that is in you, and it wrenches it sidewise. There's no other way to say it. You don't get more monkey or less monkey in you when this happens. You get your monkey wrenched, twisted, and that will change you into something else. The worst is when it changes one into a sapi— Oh, no, no, I mustn't refer to that. Let's talk about something else. There was the Halloween night when we had cut almost through the grapevine that the mayor of our community used to swing into his cave on. He had to swing into his cave over a chasm a thousand feet deep. Our mayor was a fat man, and when he took the end of the grapevine from its moorings he couldn't see the cut in it which was high above his head. He started to swing across the chasm. Then, just as he got to the middle, it broke and—”
“What is the sapi, Austro?” Harry O'Donovan asked.
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 209