Halloween

Chapter 6

The trick-or-treaters were in full bloom. The children had poured out of their homes simultaneously, as if on some signal unheard by grown-ups. Laurie stood on the sidewalk outside her house, one eye cocked for Annie's red two-door hardtop, and watched to procession of pirates, clowns, cowboys, witches skeletons, ballerinas, policemen, firemen, doctors, nurses, and soldiers that trooped up and down the block in clusters of four or five, methodically working the streets with their ever-fattening mass-produced orange-and-black shopping bags.

What touched her most deeply was the realization that these children were free and safe to roam the streets unhindered, unworried by the bullies and muggers and purse snatchers that lay in wait in the shadows of New York or Chicago or the other big cities. Oh, one or two knots of children were accompanied by an adult, but this was for traffic supervision, not protection against crime. The littlest ones tended to cross streets without looking at this dusky hour, where the all-but-settled sun glinted with a brightness equal to the orange jack-o'-lanterns that rested on porch railings or in windows in every house. Oh, one did read in the newspapers every year about some mad person who hated children and injected poison into apples or concealed razor blades in trick-or-treat candy.

But that wasn't why the occasional parent could be seen tagging along with a pack of beggar children, looking foolish in grown-up clothes or even more foolish in costume. No, there was no danger to the child who walked the sundown streets of Haddon- field. At least not, Laurie pondered, from without. But from within? Was it not possible that among these dozens of gaily cavorting children there was one capable of a crime so heinous it made the gorge rise in your throat just to think about it? It would be ridiculous, laughable, had it not been so fifteen years ago this very night. They said he had on a clown costume, Laurie said, scanning the little revelers for a clown costume. She found four in the space of a minute. That one of them could produce a knife and ventilate her entrails was a thought far more horrifying than the thought of the same knife wielded by some city cutthroat, from whom you at least expected it. Laurie flashed for a second on Judith Myers and tried to put herself in Judy's place as the boy with the rosy cheeks and fawn eyes exposed the blade of his butcher knife and began to advance on her. It's a joke, you can stop now, Laurie heard herself telling her own imaginary kid brother. But the kid brother didn't stop, and when he brought the blade up and then down that first time, just before that point penetrated your flesh, you knew something about evil that had been forgotten for centuries, maybe millennia. 

You knew in that instant that everything you had been brought up to believe, everything you had counted on for security, everything you took for granted as normal, all of it was a lie of such enormity that if you could live for another hundred years, let alone another five seconds, you could never fully grasp it. In that instant of frozen time between the downward thrust of the child's arm and the searing agony of his blade plunging hotly into your body, your mind took stock of everything that had meant comfort to you; the television set and the air conditioner, the late-model car with three hundred horsepower and rack-and-pinion steering and disc brakes, the refrigerator-freezer that made ice cubes, the electric range that signaled you when your roast was ready, your gas heater that flicked on automatically when the temperature in your home dropped below sixty-five degrees, the happy house and loving parents and terrific teachers and great friends, you surveyed them all and they were lies, lies, for when it came to shielding your belly from this crazed six-year- old's right hand, these comforts were as thin as the silk panties that shielded it now, for all the protection they rendered.