Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 63, No. 11 & 12, November/December 2018

The Week before November by Max Gersh

Have you ever heard a Halloween parade? It went up our suburban street, slow and almost stately, the only sound coming from three drums at the front beating a slow, high-pitched rhythm, high-pitched because the drums were those tall, cylindrical ones hipsters used to tap on. Jimmy Boggs, who was the neighborhood stockbroker, was in the lead. The air was cool, the Sunday afternoon still bright with sunlight slanting between the frame houses. I didn’t recognize the man behind Jimmy on the left. Gary Becker, the second-grade teacher, was on the right. They led a string of a hundred or so neighbors, mostly kids in costume with just enough adults to supervise street crossings. As they got closer I heard the children’s excited piping and the occasional parental admonition. I had been napping on the porch — reading a book, I told myself, but mostly napping.

“The drums are new,” my wife said. The sound had brought her out. She waved to somebody, said to me, “It’s a nice tradition, nice for the kids.”

“We’ll burn a witch at dusk,” I promised.

“These witches are too little. Suzie Cockins is wearing the same costume as last year.”

“How can you tell who it is?” I had been too lazy to get up and stare. I could see what I could see between the rails on the porch.

“Because Fred Cockins is holding her hand.”

Halloween was two days away, but the parade was always on a Sunday, always during daylight because not everybody drove down these tree-lined straightaways with kids in mind, unless maybe they were hoping to flatten the skinhead brothers who lived two blocks south. It wouldn’t have hurt anyone if the Copple boys were left tied in the middle of a dark crossroads. I thought about truck routes where the sixteen-wheelers might blast through and never know the public service they had performed, glanced at my wife, wondering if she could be talked into bringing me a drink.

Twenty minutes later, after I had gotten myself a glass of plonk-du-Rhone and a sweater, I had set the book aside when Jimmy Boggs came back down the street, sans drum. “The djembes belong to the Beckers,” he said. He had come up on the porch when he sniffed alcohol. “Something about Mrs. Becker’s artsy past.”

“Do you want a glass of wine?”

“Bourbon would be okay.”

I got him a square glass of bourbon with one ice cube, which he could take or leave. “Your kids are grown,” I said, “nice of you to take the time to lead the parade.”

By grown I meant they were in their middle teens.

Jimmy shrugged. “I’m a neighborly sort of guy.”

“Hand out business cards?”

“Only to well-heeled adults. Seriously, it’s a nice tradition, the parade.”

Pretty much what my wife had said. I wondered if they were canoodling when my back was turned. Problem was, since I’d retired it was seldom turned.

“Becker says he wants this to be the neighborhood’s best Halloween ever,” Jimmy said. “He’s got big plans for Tuesday at the school. Pastor Merton has some ideas for slipping a little religion into the curriculum, after hours when nobody’s looking.” He grinned. Jimmy specialized in doing things when nobody was looking. I thought about my wife again: Anne. She was probably five years older than him. Would that matter?

“It isn’t a Christian holiday,” I said. “Halloween is pagan right down to its Wiccan roots.” If I’d wanted to be pedantic, which I had half a mind to be, I’d have amended the statement to note that Wicca was a recent invention. I decided I’d wait till Jimmy stole my line and said something about Wicca at Tuesday evening’s party, then spring my shabby little trap.

He finished his drink quickly, the way I’d wanted it to be finished, and seeing nothing else he wanted he went on his way. I sat for a while and thought I should have taken a whack at raking leaves, though there were still bushels of them on the maple out back. They would wait. So instead I thought about my favorite New Yorker cartoon, from way back, that showed a rounded suburban fellow raking a mound of leaves up to the base of a tree where a woman is tied. Wife, sister, housekeeper? The nosy neighbor from down the block?

Gary Becker was a thin guy in his forties with patchy ginger hair and an enthusiasm for his work as a teacher that I had never found convincing. He had mounds of apples surrounding cornstalks — which I thought made no familial sense — scattered around the floor of the gymnasium at the school where he taught second-graders to count with their fingers hidden under their desks and read with lips that moved invisibly in feats of ventriloquism — anything to fool the standardized tests. There were several shallow tubs of water that caused me to wonder where anyone could still find galvanized washtubs. A squarish space had been closed off, like a doctor’s examining room, by white sheets hung from clothes racks, with fishing rods stacked nearby and Crissy Becker waiting in a practical tweed skirt and sweater for her chance to duck inside the square and attach prizes to the clothespins at the end of the fishing lines that were cast over the top. Someone had gotten on a ladder to hang orange and black crepe bunting on the basketball stanchions at either end of the gym. The school had conscripted every student who could handle blunt scissors to cut pumpkins and Halloween cats from construction paper that could be stuck to the walls. There were tables set up with plastic-wrapped squares of cake that the PTA was offering for sale. Someone had brought a couple of bottles of nonfattening soft drinks.

Not much of a party, let alone the best one ever.

“Do you miss it here?” Lou Arnholt asked. My former vice principal, Lou was now top dog at the world’s least consequential dog show.

“Not for a second,” I said.

“But you and Anne never miss an event.”

“The school board asked me to spy on you.”

He pretended to brighten. “So they remember us?”

The Beckers had left their drums at home, which I thought was too bad. I had been imagining that sweet, high rhythm since Sunday afternoon, beckoning ghosts and witches and comic book characters to race across lawns at dusk and bring their treasure here where the moon showed through a high window like a benevolent magician.

“Are you going to tell your ghost story again?” Arnholt asked.

“Up to you, you’re the boss now.”

“I think you scared the five-year-olds last year.” He looked at me sideways. “Traumatized them.”

“Preparation for life,” I said, knowing the phrase didn’t mean anything, doubting that preparation was even possible. How could a five-year-old — or even a twelve-year-old — be prepared for life as a twenty-year-old, let alone as a sixty-year-old? My wife, who was almost forty-five, wasn’t prepared. Anne viewed sixty as a spent force.

“Seven o’clock,” Arnholt said. “Parents with little kids can leave by then if they want.”

It was always the same, not really a ghost story but a haunted house story I’d heard as a child myself. Six boys brave a haunted house, much like Mr. Fox’s house on Wimslow Lane, I would point out, and each boy dies, a year apart, on the anniversary of the visit, of — and here the voice gets deep and dramatic — “Stark... Staring... Madness.”

I looked across the gym. By seven o’clock it would be dark in the gym if Lou Arnholt turned the lights down. Just before I got to the end of the story, where the narrator is the last one left, I’d duck my head and streak my face with white phosphorescent paint, so when I raised my head they could see the meaning of Stark... Staring... Madness. Not much of a thrill, I knew, when they’d all probably caught glimpses of their big siblings or parents watching a TV soap opera about zombies. But once in a while I’d get a squeal from one of the more gullible kids. Then the lights would come on and we’d all have a laugh.

Anne, who had been wrapping cake squares, came over to me and said, “Not your ghost story again? People think you’re too fond of being spooky.”

“It’s seasonal. At Christmas I’m fond of being jolly.”

“It’s ridiculous, boys dying on the anniversary. And Mr. Fox can’t be crazy about having his house described as haunted.”

“Do I say haunted? I mean cursed. Bad things happened in that house. Let me tell you...”

Jimmy Boggs appeared, nodded to me. He said, “Hi, Anne.”

She said, “Jimmy.”

On a principal’s income I never had much cause to deal with stockbrokers. Retired, I had even less reason. Jimmy knew that, but he still came up wanting to be friendly.

“What are your kids doing?” I asked him.

“Party at the high school. What were you saying about bad things at the Fox house?”

“It was long before you moved in,” I said. “Gertie Fox and a man nobody knew were slaughtered there one night. As a matter of fact, it was close to Halloween.”

“What do you mean, nobody knew the man?”

“The police established that there had been a man. There were some bones. But the rest of him had been dissolved in a bathtub. Mrs. Fox’s body was intact, pretty much. But the man...” I shook my head. “That was what, thirty-five years ago? Long before the police had DNA to work with.”

“My God. I knew Lester Fox was a widower, but—”

Anne shook her head. “That story is as disgusting as Stark... Staring... Madness. And you told it to me the night you proposed, twenty years ago.” She glanced from me to Jimmy. “This guy thought a proposal should come with a ghoulish story. Can you believe it?”

“But what about Lester Fox?” Jimmy asked. “Didn’t the police investigate him?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Lester was in New York as usual that Monday and Tuesday, with dozens of people to vouch for him. He may have suspected Gertie was seeing someone. That was never clear. They were a young couple, hadn’t been married long. The killer or killers were never found.”

“Do you think he hired someone?”

“The police didn’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“If you were a killer for hire, would you take the time to dissolve one of your victims in a bathtub? The killer must have been there twelve, fifteen hours — at least those were the newspaper reports. The police followed up the way you would expect with a murder that looked personal. They tried to find someone in Gertie’s background, or Lester’s. They canvassed the neighbors. All to no avail. So do you blame me for mentioning the Fox house?”

“Good grief,” said Jimmy Boggs. “How could Lester keep living there?”

“As a shattered man,” I replied.

Anne said, “I hope you’re not going to tell that story tonight.”

I laughed. “Lou Arnholt would never let me back in.”

Kids started pouring in around dusk, orange and Day-Glo bags stuffed, half of the bags already handed off to parents. Connie Boggs came in with a handful of preschoolers. She ignored her husband Jimmy and joined Anne selling cake.

It seemed to me she ignored Jimmy pointedly, but it’s hard to tell what goes on with people.

I went over and asked Gary Becker where he had gotten the galvanized tubs. He told me they still had them at Wolverine Hardware.

“Not much demand for them except for floating apples,” Gary said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I told him.

“You don’t know what?”

“They could be handy. You never know until you need one.”

He accepted that as retiree wisdom, in other words, nonsense.

A little before seven, someone got the kids onto the bleachers and turned on a boom box that played a song about the bogeyman. Then Mrs. Wimblemeier and Mrs. Tatum, dressed up in skeleton costumes, lip-synched to “’T’aint No Sin to Take Off Your Skin and Dance Around in Your Bones.” I could tell that a few of the parents thought the bit about taking off your skin was suggestive. I sat back and wondered what Jimmy Boggs thought of it.

After the songs, Lou turned down the lights and I sat in a chair facing the bleachers and told about six boys dying on Halloween with their faces contorted into masks of Stark... Staring... Madness. I don’t know; it didn’t seem to scare anyone.

I hunted up Wallace Wimblemeier, who had been retired longer than I had, and he commiserated with me. Once you got Wallace talking he said whatever came to mind.

“Even the little ones are sophisticated today,” he said.

I steered us to the cake table.

“You really laid it on thick tonight about the Fox house,” Anne said. “You’re lucky if Mr. Fox doesn’t sue you.”

“I said a haunted house ‘much like Mr. Fox’s’.” I glanced at Wimblemeier. “For some reason I was thinking about that story tonight. Gertie Fox and all.”

He responded. “I remember her. She was Gertie something else originally. You dated her, didn’t you, when you were in your teens?” He grinned at Anne and wobbled off.

The party wound down. I chatted up Becker and Arnholt and watched as Jimmy Boggs said something to Anne that drew a vigorous headshake. Becker gave me one of the apple-bobbing tubs, and I carried it home as we walked comfortably through the night. The ghosts and ghoulies and young witches had all gone home. Some of their houses were dark. I glimpsed Jimmy Boggs and his wife a half block ahead of us, walking hand in hand.

I reached out with my free hand and took Anne’s.

Sometimes a good scary story does the job. Sometimes it doesn’t.