Suckers - Jack Kilborn [19]
“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 breasts.
“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 Cokes 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 shin. “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 shined 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. Nobody 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