Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 37, No. 13, Mid-December 1992

Many Are the Traps of the Crafty by Robert Wm. Klein

“It’s Devil’s Night tonight, Pops,” Crazy Joe said to me at the edge of Hobb’s Woods where he sometimes slept. “Don’t let the devil burn your house down tonight.”

Crazy Joe still wore the red toboggan cap and scarf I’d given him the week before when the temperature had unseasonably plunged to freezing. I’d half expected him to have pawned them by now for the price of a bottle of Mad Dog.

“Devil’s Night or not, it’s gonna be cold tonight, Joe,” I said. “Why don’t you head for the shelter downtown?”

“I found me a shelter, Pops, and it ain’t downtown,” Crazy Joe said, casting an eye back at the woods. “Nice warm shelter. Nice warm. But I gotta watch out for the devil tonight. Don’t want him to catch me.”

“We don’t want the devil to catch any of us,” I said.

I read a lot of poetry. It fills the hours better than watching the trash they show on television nowadays. My favorite poets are the old dependables — Tennyson, Poe, Longfellow. None of this modern junk that eschews rhyme, meter, and meaning. Give me the old masters every time. They touch upon the truths of life.

Tennyson, for instance. He sums up my longings for Muriel exactly: “But O, for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still!”

It’s been ten years since Muriel died. She was my wife, a true helpmate and a comfort to me.

It sounds callous, but I miss her most in the mornings when I’m preparing for my paper route. Muriel would always be up and waiting for me at four o’clock in the morning when I’d return home from the pickup site with stacks of the day’s Herald-Trumpet still smelling of fresh ink and pulp paper. She’d have the coffee brewed and poured, and she’d help me roll the papers and pack them into my double-pouched carrier bag. And then, like a squire assisting his armor-burdened knight, she’d help me lift that fully-laden carrier bag up over my head and onto my shoulders. Unlike the medieval squire, she’d kiss me on the cheek as I set out the door to walk my route and throw my papers.

Nowadays, I have a Mr. Coffee machine that gurgles and brews my coffee while I’m at the pickup site, and I roll and pack my papers alone. I fill the carrier bag as it sits upon the kitchen counter and then I crouch down, stick my head through the yoke, and wriggle the bag into place on my shoulders. Sometimes I can even avoid knocking over the coffee cup or the chair while putting the bag on. I just don’t have the strength to lift it by myself. The awkwardness of it all makes me feel like a contortionist, but at my age I should be proud of my flexibility.

I’ll be seventy-three years old at the end of the year.

I don’t need the paper route, mind you. That is, I don’t need the money it brings in. I just enjoy the work. It gives me a sense of discipline and makes me feel useful. Every day, seven days a week, I wake up at three thirty so I can go out and throw my papers. My alarm clock, a trusty wind-up model with a luminous face and a loud tick, is set for three thirty-five, but I never need it. I’m used to the early hours. I’ve risen at this hour for almost thirty years now.

Of course, in the beginning we needed the money, Muriel and I. The factory had closed and the handyman’s job just didn’t cut it with the bills. We had three kids in high school and two in grade school — all of them eating like horses — and we had a mortgage to meet. So, rather than have Muriel go out to work, I took a second job in the early mornings throwing papers for the Herald-Trumpet.

I know, it was old fashioned of us — chauvinistic of me, say my daughters — for Muriel to stay home, but that’s the way we were in those days. Mothers stayed home with their kids, fathers worked, married couples stayed married, and kids were a helluva lot happier and healthier. Not like today. Today we live in the age of the two-career family, the age of the neglected child.

In the afternoons, when I get too restless to read, I take long walks through the neighborhood, as if my route in the mornings isn’t enough exercise for an old bird like me. It’s like walking through a ghost town — empty houses, deserted driveways, a burglar’s paradise. Mommies and daddies are at work, the kids are at school or daycare, and Fido is chasing his tail in the back yard. The only traffic in the street — hell, the only sign of human life — is the postman shuttling his jeep from mailbox to mailbox; you can hear his approach from blocks away, and if you listen closely, you can hear the clockwork clink-clunk, clink-clunk of the mailboxes opening and shutting.

It’s a different world today.

I try not to think about it because it makes me blue, but the paper route and the poetry are really all I have left now. Muriel is gone, my kids and the grandkids have all moved out of state — except for my fool son Francis — and I retired long ago from the handyman’s job.

My kids all say I should retire from the Herald-Trumpet, too.

“Are you still out walking in the cold and the dark?” Chrissie says whenever she calls. “C’mon, Dad, you’re getting too old for that stuff. Why don’t you move down to Florida? You know you can stay with Jack and me and the kids.”

Well, I’m not moving to Florida. Muriel and I moved here when we first married fifty years ago, and this is my home and I intend to be buried by Muriel’s side. And as long as I can walk and throw papers and not get so senile I forget the addresses I’ll keep my route, thank you.

So then Chrissie will call Francis and remind him to drop by often and keep an eye on me. As if Francis is capable of watching over anything other than his plants and his computers. I’m the one who keeps an eye on him.

Even Slattery, my district manager, has hinted I should quit.

“Don’t you think it’s time to slow down, Pops?” he asked me one morning at the pickup site.

“You want me to quit, Bingo?” I said, using the nickname he went by as a teenager when I trained him on his first paper route. “Have my customers been complaining? Have I been missing houses, not meeting my six o’clock delivery deadline?”

“No, Pops, no. I’m just thinking of you.” Bingo got my route shortened. A lot less walking for me now, as well as less money. “Just thinking of you, Pops.”

But like I said, I don’t keep the route because of the money.

You see, there’s something invigorating about walking in the dark of the pre-dawn hours. It makes me feel close to the neighborhood. I walk right up to the front doors of the sleeping households — it’s a point of honor for me that all my customers receive their Herald-Trumpet on the porch, within easy reach, not on the lawns or in the bushes — and I feel an affinity for the slumbering inhabitants. I recognize their cars, and I know when they have visitors and when they’re on vacation. I check the growth of their children by the evolution of the toys left in the front yards — tricycles and beachballs give way to bicycles and basketballs, and finally one day there’s an extra car on the driveway and I know the kids have grown up. I see houses improved upon, rebuilt and repainted. I see houses deteriorate, too, shedding their good looks and their dignity like an old friend succumbing to Alzheimer’s. People move away, people die, new folks arrive to replace them. It’s an eternal cycle.

I’m witness to the cycles of nature as well.

I watch the changing of the seasons, the waxing and waning of the moon, the slow shifting of stars in their celestial positions. I’ve walked in the oven-dry heat of droughts when even the night air doesn’t cool. I’ve seen the first snowfalls of the year delicately drifting to earth, winking in the halos of street lights, and I’ve watched the trees bud out in springtime like a green slow-motion explosion. I’ve slipped on ice in the winter and on wet leaves in the fall. I’ve thrown my papers in blizzards and in downpours. Back in August I even saw a meteor shower over the city; for about ten seconds the sky was streaked with white lights like Lucifer falling, streaks marking the descent and death of outer space visitors. They seemed so close I thought I heard them hitting the ground in Hobb’s Woods. And on clear mornings, when I’ve thrown my last paper and my carrier bag is reduced to a feather’s weight, I’ve strolled back home as the sun, still below the horizon, transforms the eastern sky into a cathedral window with tints of rose and pink.

I still almost expect Muriel to be waiting for me at home, with a second cup of coffee in her hand and a hot breakfast of bacon, eggs, and oatmeal sitting on my plate at the table. But the house is empty, always empty, so I pour my own coffee and fix myself a bowl of bran flakes. On cold mornings I warm the milk before I add it to the cereal.

Crazy Joe disappeared as quickly as he had appeared, swallowed up by the shadows of Hobb’s Woods. Joe was one of the few people I would meet in the mornings. He wasn’t a customer, obviously, and sometimes I wouldn’t see him for months at a time. Other times he could be a nuisance, like an over-friendly dog, following me for blocks. On those days I’d put him to work, let him carry some of my papers for me. Then I’d slip him a couple of bucks. He was a sad case.

As I continued my route, I puzzled over why Crazy Joe would prefer sleeping outdoors on nights like this when at a shelter he could depend upon three hots and a cot.

So tonight is Devil’s Night, I thought as I twisted an arm around to grab a paper from my back pouch. October thirtieth, the night before Halloween. The Eve of All Hallows Eve, so to speak. This is the night firemen dread, the night teenagers and arsonists set fires to derelict buildings. This bizarre “tradition” — another sad sign of our times — seems to have originated in Detroit, but isn’t limited to that burg. Even in our small city authorities have had to battle more suspicious fires on this night than at any other time of the year.

The only thing that might keep the arsonists at bay was the record cold spell, said the very issue of the Herald-Trumpet I was throwing that morning. The freezing temperatures and light snows might serve some purpose other than to make me uncomfortable, I thought as I tried to work the stiffness out of my fingers.

A thin layer of snow clung to the lawns I walked across. Except for its brilliant whiteness, it might have been just a heavy frost. I remembered to use the sidewalk to reach Mrs. Irena’s porch; she objected to my tracking up the snow in her yard each year. I try to cater to my customers’ whims. Like the Gilhooleys: they want their paper delivered to their back door. It’s out of my way, but I do it. And like I said, all my customers get their papers “porched.” If you do a job, do it right; that’s the one lesson I hope I taught my kids well.

I reached the end of Azalea Street. My route had been changed over Labor Day weekend, a fairly routine situation — routes are always being merged, divided, or adjusted. My next street was now Dahlia, and the fastest way there was to cut through Hobb’s Woods along one of its footpaths. I flicked on my flashlight and entered the woods.

The woods were larger when I was younger, but over the past twenty years new housing developments have encroached upon the trees and shrunk the forest to a strip of land about one mile long and a quarter-mile wide. I remember taking the kids into the woods when they were little to hunt for mushrooms. I guess that’s how Francis first started his fungus collection. Hobb’s Woods has always been a breeding ground for lichen and fungus and all kinds of fuzz that grows on rocks and trees — something about the damp and the dark, Francis says.

Last time Chrissie and Jack were here I took the grandkids into the woods. They didn’t like it. Gave ’em the creeps. I hadn’t been in the woods for years myself, and the funny thing is, it gave me the creeps, too.

Especially the house in the woods.

I’d never noticed the house before, hot in all the years I’ve lived here. It was a small house, more of a one story cabin really, and I guess it was easy to miss back when the woods were bigger. Perhaps it was at one time a hunters’ lodge of some kind, although I don’t remember much hunting ever done in Hobb’s Woods.

I discovered the house Labor Day weekend, the first time I cut through the woods. I’ll admit it startled me that morning. I didn’t expect anything to be there, and the house just loomed up like a dark blot in the middle of a clearing about twelve yards to the right of the footpath. I’m used to seeing new homes and shopping centers sprout up like mushrooms, seemingly overnight, on long-vacant lots, but this house was apparently an ancient structure, gray and crumbling, with its windows and door boarded up.

I played my flashlight over the house that first morning, but an odd reluctance, a feeling of something’s being wrong, kept me from exploring further. I had my papers to throw, I told myself. Dahlia was my last street, and then I could sit down to breakfast.

But that afternoon, in the daylight of my customary walk, I found myself — unintentionally, I believed — at the edge of Hobb’s Woods. Even then, at summer’s end, the woods smelled dank. I walked by some of the neighborhood children who were enjoying their last weekend before school, playing cowboys and Indians — or maybe astronauts and aliens — among the trees by the street, where the crosshatching of foliage wasn’t heavy enough to block out all the sun.

The clearing in which the house sat was hidden by heavy growth until you came right upon it. It was an odd clearing — round and devoid of vegetation, almost like a fairy ring. There weren’t any discernible property lines around the building, just that circular clearing. The house squatted in the exact center of the circle, an ugly pile of rotten-looking wood. “House” was perhaps too elegant a word for it; it was really a shotgun shack that couldn’t have had more than three or four rooms to it. Its roof sagged in, its sides bulged out; it looked as if it had dropped from the sky. A child might have expected the striped legs of the Wicked Witch of the East to be sticking out from under its foundations.

The house gave off a mouldering smell, like leather that’s lain in the damp for too long. The boards across the windows and the single door in front that was the only entrance to the building seemed as ancient and gray as the wood of the walls. The nails were encrusted with rust the color of dried blood. I pressed my hand against the wall; it gave beneath the pressure, releasing a small cloud of dust. I withdrew my hand and wiped it on my coat. It was amazing that the house was still standing; it seemed more a growth of soft vegetative matter than a manmade structure. But then wood is vegetative matter, isn’t it? And this wood was crumbling back into the earth of its origins.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” I said aloud as I kicked a corner of the foundation and left a gouge in the wall.

The place gave me the creeps, but at least, I thought, having examined it in daylight, I wouldn’t be bothered walking past it in the dark each morning.

The kids were still playing on the edge of the woods as I headed home. “Hansel, Gretel, where are you?” one child called out to two others, and I smiled to think that not all the fairy tales of old had been replaced by Star Wars and Ninja Turtles.

It also occurred to me it was a good thing the house was nailed shut. For some reason it reminded me of a derelict refrigerator with its door chained shut to prevent children from locking themselves into it.

I’d meant to replace the batteries in my flashlight, which had been growing dim lately. But by now I’d been cutting through Hobb’s Woods for almost two months and the footpath was as familiar to me as the sidewalks on either side of the woods.

But the familiarity didn’t make walking past the house in the woods any easier. I always felt like I was walking past a graveyard. And I can’t whistle to save my life. Some mornings I could swear the house was breathing. Its walls seemed to expand and contract ever so slightly as I passed; I could almost hear it wheezing.

The footpath is wide enough so I can walk along the middle without branches and brambles tugging at me or my carrier bag. But the path narrows just before it reaches the clearing, and I always blunder into a low-lying branch at that point.

That morning the branch knocked my flashlight out of my hand, breaking whatever tenuous link there was between batteries and bulb. No amount of rattling would make it work for me.

But the woods weren’t as dark as I’d expected. The path before me seemed illuminated by a faint glow, almost a phosphorescence. The glow came from the clearing ahead. I stepped forward. The house looked different. The glow, which was steady but dim, came from within it. The front door was open.

“What the devil...?”

Now how long had that door been open, I wondered. Surely, I’d have noticed before this morning. Was the house inhabited? I could just make out some of the house’s interior — a chair slid up under a table, a mirror on the wall, some kind of camp bed or cot in a corner, and all suffused with a light that was not electrical. It was a cold light that reminded me of the face on my alarm clock.

I didn’t venture off the footpath. The reach of the house’s light did not extend beyond the clearing that encircled it, and for some reason I didn’t want to step within that enchanted fairy ring.

I must have stood gaping several minutes before I realized that of course the house was inhabited. Some hobo or tramp was holed up in there, with a kerosene lantern no doubt. Of course. Could this be the shelter Crazy Joe had referred to a few minutes ago?

“Hey, Joe,” I called in a wavering voice. “That you, Joe?”

Only silence answered me.

On a cold morning like this, even that wretched house would look warm and inviting to a homeless person. Especially if it were furnished, no matter how sparsely.

Warmth. The very word reminded me that I was shivering. The temperature was near freezing, and I felt it bad if I didn’t keep moving. My circulation isn’t what it used to be: the older I get, the worse the cold affects me. My hands and feet were numb and heavy. A warm place to sit and stretch would be most welcome now, I thought.

No sooner did I think that than a wave of warm air hit me in the face. I shed one glove and held up a bare hand. Sure enough, a warm breeze was blowing from the circle — from the house at the center of the circle — like hot air from a heating vent.

“Well, I’ll be...” I addressed the house: “Is my wish your command? What else can you do for me?”

But I had no time to stop or step into the house. Not even to warm up. My customers were expecting their papers. Duty first. I fumbled my glove back on and turned to leave.

That’s when I smelled it.

Funny thing about our sense of smell. It’s probably the most acute yet underrated of our five senses. Scientists say we can distinguish hundreds of different odors, some almost subliminal, and all capable of triggering intense, all-but-forgotten memories and of setting off long chains of vivid thoughts.

It was a simple smell, a homey, comfortable smell that wafted with the warm air from the house. The smell of oatmeal.

Oatmeal... and the images it evoked came instantaneously. Milk and sugar, cinnamon and maple syrup. Muriel at the stove, frying bacon and eggs. Sky-blue bowls full of hot, creamy cereal and side dishes of strawberries in season. The kids banging about in the bathroom upstairs or sitting at the breakfast table, chattering and fighting over the funny pages, Muriel shooing them off to catch the schoolbus. The two of us alone for a few stolen moments of love before I have to go to work. The kids grown up, Muriel and I lingering over our second or third cup of coffee, the radio turned low to a classical station, the sun peeking through the kitchen curtains. Muriel and I. Muriel. Oh, sweet God in heaven, how I miss that woman!

I was halfway across the clearing before I roused myself from my reveries. I was almost to the door of the house. I saw myself in the mirror on the wall inside: an old man, wrapped and bundled like a papoose against the cold, stooped under the weight of a double pouch hanging in front and back, looking like a turtle and feeling like a pregnant woman with a backpack. An absurd figure, an old guy who should never risk taking himself too seriously. The mirror didn’t show the tears in my eyes.

“ ‘Tears, idle tears,’ ” I murmured under my breath. “ ‘Thinking of the days that are no more.’ ”

I walked away. A sigh, almost of disappointment, rose from behind me. Just the wind in the trees.

In another two minutes I was on the sidewalks of Dahlia Street, throwing my papers under the impersonal gaze of the street lights.

“Devil’s Night, indeed,” I said out loud to a dark-colored cat as it bounded out of my way.

The sun broke through the haze that afternoon, nudging the temperature up a bit, so I walked back to Hobb’s Woods to see the house again. Water was dripping from trees and eaves, and the few patches of snow to escape the sun’s rays lay in shadows and declivities.

I jumped when I saw the house. The front door was not open; not only was it closed but it was boarded up, exactly as it had always been boarded up. I walked right up to the door and pulled at the boards. They were soft and crumbly, like the rest of the house, but they held. And they were the same gray boards, crisscrossed and attached with the same rusted nails, as had always been there. I peeked through a chink in the boards at one of the windows. The house was empty, with not a stick of furniture anywhere.

Had I been hallucinating that morning? Surely, I’d seen the door open, I’d seen a light on and furniture inside, I’d felt heat and smelt oatmeal cooking. Or was it all a dream? Is this senility? Second childhood? No, not senility, I told myself. Not for me. I’d always been too sharp for such an end. There must be some other explanation.

I fixed a light dinner for myself that evening, topped off with a hot toddy heavy with whisky, and went to bed early.

The weatherman was right. It snowed again that night, and the thermometer dipped to twenty-eight. The roads were encased in ice when I got up, and it was a slow drive to the pickup site for my papers.

“It’s too icy for you to be walking out there, Pops,” Bingo said to me. “Why don’t you drive your route, throw the papers from your car?”

“Can’t porch the papers from the car. My throwing arm’s not what it used to be. I’ll be okay, Bingo. I’m a tough bird.”

“Just thinking of you, Pops.”

I slipped and slid all over the sidewalks that morning, but luckily kept my balance. I remembered not to disturb Mrs. Irena’s snow, and I successfully navigated to the Gilhooleys’ back door. Getting too old? Ridiculous! I was as strong and as stable as ever.

When I reached the end of Azalea Street, I realized I still hadn’t fixed my flashlight. I debated whether to cut through Hobb’s Woods or to take the long way around to Dahlia. The cold decided for me. I took the shortcut.

The woods — powdered, iced, and glittering — possessed an unearthly beauty that I tried to ignore as I stepped quickly along the path. I kept my eyes firmly focused on the ground.

The snow reflected the light from the house well before I came upon it. In spite of my resolve to not look, to just walk on by, I turned my head.

The front door was open. The light inside the house shone brighter than yesterday and the warmth radiating from within seemed stronger. What’s more, the furniture beyond the front door had changed in the past twenty-four hours. It looked less rundown, better kept. The table was similar to the one in my own kitchen and several chairs now kept sentry around it. Both the mirror on the wall and the bed in the corner appeared bigger, more ornate.

There were a number of smells now riding on the currents of warm air — oatmeal, coffee, bacon and eggs. And I heard a sound, faint and indistinct, from within the house — a sizzling, scraping sound, like food being fried and flipped in a pan. I thought of Muriel cooking my breakfast.

From where I stood on the footpath, the front door offered a very narrow view of the house’s interior. I thought if I were only a little closer I could get a better look inside. I could peek around the door to the right and the left. I could see who was in there, who was cooking at that unseen stove.

I approached the front door. I noticed the circular clearing was free of snow. Why is that, I wondered. The heat, that’s why. It was so warm within the clearing. I knew it would be even warmer in the house. Maybe I’d be able to take the chill off my bones inside. Maybe I could even get something to eat. Something warm. Something tasty. Something...

I stepped on something. Something soft. I recoiled and glanced down. It was a red toboggan cap.

The one I’d given to Crazy Joe.

Lying not far from the cap, unfurled like a shed snakeskin, was the scarf I’d given him. And beyond that, a brown jacket, frayed and mended just like the one Joe wore. And just before the front door, a pair of old work boots lay discarded on their sides.

I stumbled back to the footpath. Those were Joe’s clothes scattered all over the clearing. Like he’d pulled them off and thrown them aside. Just doffed them like a summertime bather about to take a dip. Ripped his clothes off in freezing weather before entering that house, that house that should be abandoned but isn’t.

I ran out of the woods. Behind me a door slammed and something sighed in frustration. My breath steamed from my mouth like exhaust from an old engine. On Dahlia Street I calmed down enough to throw the last of my papers. Duty first. And then I called the police from a phone booth.

I had to make it sound plausible. I didn’t want them to think I was a crank or a nut case. I identified myself, told them I was a newspaper carrier, and said I thought someone was in the deserted house in Hobb’s Woods. Maybe a squatter. I said I saw lights on and clothing strewn about. I didn’t say anything about the heat or the open door or about Crazy Joe.

Back home, I chased my breakfast of bran flakes with a shot of whisky.

And then I pulled Muriel’s Bible off the shelf. I don’t know why — to find some words of encouragement or comfort maybe, or maybe just to hold something that Muriel once held, to feel a little closer to her.

I’m not a very religious man. My people were rock-ribbed Protestants, but Muriel was a Catholic, so I converted when we married. We raised the kids Catholic, but I never much took to it; couldn’t see the use of all that ritual. That was always Muriel’s big disappointment with me. I guess I haven’t been to church since her funeral.

I opened the Bible at random to Ecclesiasticus, one of the books not in the King James version. A phrase jumped out at me: “Many are the traps of the crafty.”

It reminded me of something I read about the war in Afghanistan, about booby traps the Soviet soldiers left in the hills and villages, bombs made to look like toys so children would pick them up.

After sunup I called the police again to ask about the results of my report. I spoke to a pleasant sergeant who explained that yes, the responding officers had found some clothes in front of the house, but no, the house showed no signs of habitation or entry. In fact, the door and windows were boarded up. But thank you anyway for your concern. “We depend on alert citizens like yourself, sir,” he said.

It was easy to resist another daylight visit to Hobb’s Woods. Instead, I drove to my son Francis’s house. As I’ve said, Francis is supposed to be keeping an eye on me, so I occasionally pay him a visit so he can fulfill his filial duty.

Francis might charitably be called the family eccentric. He works out of his home as some kind of computer consultant and his place is littered with all kinds of electronics, but his real love is botany. He has an attached greenhouse that he keeps hot and steamy where he raises tropical plants, and a basement that he keeps dark and damp where he raises fungi and mushrooms. Two different circles of hell is how I categorize them.

“Dad! What a surprise. C’mon in. Join me for lunch.”

“That depends, Francis. What are you serving?”

“Uh, well, hummus and alfalfa sprouts on pita bread, but I think I can throw together a can of soup and a ham on rye for you, Dad.”

He also served some home-brewed beer that wasn’t half bad. He’s clever, Francis is. He just lacks common sense.

We didn’t talk much — I find it hard to talk about more than generalities with my adult children — but Francis sensed something was troubling me.

“What’s the matter, Dad?”

“I’m an old man, son. ‘Twilight and evening bell. And after that the dark!’ ”

“Still reading Tennyson, I see. You always were an autodidact, Dad.”

“Don’t call me dirty names, Francis.”

“Go on, you old faker. You can’t fool me with any of that innocent yokel stuff. You’re a well-read man. A self-educated man. You and Mom raised all of us to have a great respect for education.

“Now get up and come with me, Dad. I’ve got some new specimens in the greenhouse to show you. Don’t roll your eyes like that. This will take your mind off your melancholia.”

Francis was wrong. All those fleshy orchids dripping in the steam of his greenhouse just reminded me of that soft, mouldering pile in the woods. I declined a similar tour of the basement. The correspondences of lichen to Hobb’s Woods would be even stronger there. Even the phosphorescence of some of the moss would be too similar to that light in the house.

“Look, Dad. Over here.” Francis indicated a small potted plant consisting of half a dozen green stems, each topped with a spike-lipped, hinged leaf colored red on the inside. “Ever see one of these?”

“Only in horror movies.”

“Ah, so you recognize it,” Francis said. “Dionaea muscipula. The Venus flytrap.”

“Nasty-looking thing.” The red leaf-traps made me think of the hell’s mouth in medieval mystery plays.

“It’s all a part of nature,” Francis said. “The plant appears to offer the fly what it wants — a little nectar, a little nourishment, some bright color — but it’s really a trap. It really is like a horror movie.”

The cold and the snow kept the Halloween trick-or-treaters to a minimum that evening. Only two groups of costumed kids rang my bell. I snacked on the leftover candy before turning in, and maybe it was the unaccustomed sweets that kept me awake most of the night. When sleep came, it was disturbed by chaotic dreams, dreams of mushrooms shaped like Venus flytraps. I dreamt of Muriel standing in Francis’s greenhouse and of Crazy Joe running, not away from some unknown peril but toward it, tearing his clothes off as he ran. I dreamt of meteors and of a witch’s house made of gingerbread and of bombs disguised as toys.

I fumbled the papers a good deal the next morning as I rolled them in the kitchen. A late-breaking news item was boxed on the Herald-Trumpet’s front page, two or three paragraphs about a pair of kids who didn’t return from trick-or-treating last night. At deadline time a search party had been organized.

The kids lived in my neighborhood.

All along my route I noticed lights on in houses and small groups of men and women coming and going. Conversations carried across the chilled air in staccato phrases and hushed whispers. Dogs barked, and cars skidded on the ice. Police cars were parked near Hobb’s Woods, and voices resounded among the trees. Never in all my years of paper-throwing had I seen such life in the neighborhood at that hour.

I wasn’t surprised when I came to the house in the clearing and found it as it was in daylight — closed, dark, and dead. Just an innocent, deserted house, boarded up and neglected.

The house had survival instincts, you see. It couldn’t show its true nature, no, not with the woods full of tramping, shouting search parties. It couldn’t work on a crowd, couldn’t risk the exposure. It only preyed on the helpless and the lonely — children and derelicts and old men — like a carnivore attracted by the thrashing of the sick and the wounded.

A piece of cloth lay on the ground in the fairy ring around the house. Part of a child’s Halloween costume.

My customers on Dahlia Street got their papers a little late that morning.

I hung around the house after I had shouted for the attention of the search parties. I watched as the cops and the volunteers converged from all directions into the clearing; watched as they examined the costume and scanned the grounds; watched as they easily broke down the rotted door to the house; watched as they entered and played their lights through its interior; watched as they emerged, pronouncing the house empty and uninhabited for years; watched as the crowds began a systematic search of the woods, fanning out from the clearing like beaters on an English hunt.

I hit the whisky bottle pretty heavily when I got home. I can’t take the cold any more. My hands were as stiff as an arthritic’s.

The cops came by later to interview me. After all, two mornings in a row I had reported discarded clothing in front of that house. I don’t know, maybe they suspected me in the children’s disappearance. I let ’em believe I was just an old guy with an eye for detail. A male Miss Marple.

I didn’t tell them what I really knew about the house, didn’t tell them what it really was. I didn’t want them to lock me up as a lunatic, a whisky-swilling loner who might be a threat to himself or to others.

I spent the rest of the day thumbing through Muriel’s books, books that had lain unopened for years. They were mostly religious books — devotionals, missals, lives of the saints.

I remembered it was All Saints Day. A Holy Day of Obligation for the Catholic Church. Muriel and I used to get the kids corralled and dressed up for Mass on such holy days, just like on Sundays. All Saints Day. All Hallows Day. A hollow day today. No one cares any more. Can there really be saints in a world where children are victimized by bombs and perverts and... powers of darkness?

Muriel’s a saint. Of that I was certain. What would she do in this situation? What would she say to me? Oh, God, how I missed her.

I poured the rest of the whisky down the kitchen sink and set the empty bottle on the counter. Then I staggered to bed and another night of bad dreams.

For the first time in years I didn’t wake up before my alarm clock went off. I’d forgotten how its bell sounded. It clattered like a tocsin.

On the way back from the pickup site I stopped at a twenty-four-hour gas station.

It was another bitter cold morning. The snow crackled beneath my boots. I walked my route slowly and carefully. I tossed my papers gingerly. I was carrying something extra along with the papers.

In Hobb’s Woods the bright lights and warm air and delicious aromas emanating from the house assailed me long before I reached the clearing.

It knew I was coming. It was ready for me. Today it would not let me pass. I knew too much.

The low-lying branch that always grabbed me almost knocked the ice cold whisky bottle out of my numbed hand.

I stepped in front of the clearing feeling like a gladiator marching into the Colosseum. Or like a martyr about to face the lions.

The house was glowing like a palace lit up for a ball. The heat in which it basked made the structure waver and dance before my eyes. Music came from within, classical music. I recognized a piece of Offenbach that was one of Muriel’s favorites. The smells were all a hodgepodge of breakfast and Christmas cookies and baby powder and champagne and a perfume Muriel used to wear when we first dated half a century ago, in the days when we used to...

“No, no, don’t think about it!” I said aloud, snapping my mind back to the job ahead of me.

The door to the house was open. Of course it was open. It had been broken down yesterday.

Inside the house, in the lights that glowed like the aurora borealis, I saw the interior of my own house. I saw my kitchen and, beyond it, my living room, not as they are today but as they were years ago when we first moved into the house. I saw the old Hot-point refrigerator, the gas range stove, the white cabinets and gray table on the black and white linoleum floor of the kitchen. In the living room images of TV programs from the fifties flickered across the screen of a clunky TV/stereo console, programs Muriel and I used to watch together on quiet nights after putting the kids to bed. And all the while Offenbach’s “Orpheus in the Underworld” reverberated from within.

Oh, yes. It had pulled out all the stops for me this morning. This morning it would snare me for sure.

I stepped into the fairy ring. I walked deliberately and steadily across the clearing toward the front door. I tightened my grip on the gasoline-filled whisky bottle in my right hand. With my left hand I retrieved the cigarette lighter from my pocket.

Helpless old man, am I? Doddering old fool? We’ll see who’s the stronger one here. We’ll see who the survivor is, you devil-spawned, murdering pile of...

“Michael! What are you doing?”

That voice! I stopped on the spot.

“Don’t be silly, Michael. Put that thing down and come here.”

My hands trembled. The lighter slipped from my grip and fell to the ground.

That voice. I hadn’t heard that voice in...

“Ten years, Michael. Ten years. I’ve missed you so. Come here, sweetheart.”

Muriel.

“Come to my arms, Michael.”

It was Muriel. Muriel standing in the doorway, smiling her shy sweet smile, her arms spread open for an embrace.

“Give me a hug, darling. It’s been so long.”

Muriel. Muriel greeting me again after all those years, all those lonely years.

“Don’t keep me waiting, Michael. What’s the matter with you? Come here.”

Muriel stood before me, as solid and as real as I was, and yet she was more than one Muriel. She was Muriel at every stage of our lives: Muriel as a sixteen-year-old, the night I first met her at the Holland High School dance, dressed in peach taffeta and with a bow in her hair...

I let the bottle fall with a soft clunk to the ground.

...Muriel on our wedding night, beautiful and alluring; Muriel pregnant with our first child; Muriel dressed for church, with the children in tow...

I took my first step toward her.

...Muriel at the Wilders’ New Year’s Eve party in ’63, the night she was giddy with champagne and we clutched each other at midnight like long-lost lovers...

I opened my arms and quickened my pace forward.

...Muriel on the beach, the year our adult children treated us to a surprise vacation in Hawaii; Muriel across the breakfast table, reading the paper and blowing on her coffee to cool it; Muriel old before her time, brave and dignified in spite of the pain of her final illness...

...Muriel as she lives in all of my memories.

“I love you, Michael. Please come to me, Michael. I love you.”

I was almost there.

“Please hurry, Michael. Please.”

I reached the door’s threshold. One more step and Muriel would be in my arms again. I felt her breath, sweet as apples, on my face.

“That’s right, Michael. Come to me. I love you. I want you.”

I placed my foot on the doorstep.

“I want you.”

A look of triumph flashed into her eves. A look of cunning.

“No,” I said. “No. You’re not Muriel. Muriel’s dead.”

I fell back, away from her and the house.

“You’re just my memories. Get away from me.”

“No, Michael! Don’t say that!” Her face collapsed in grief, as though I’d struck her. “Please, Michael!”

I tried to look away from her but couldn’t. I continued to stumble backwards. My carrier bag kept me off-balance. My foot kicked against something hard and round.

The bottle. The gasoline.

“Michael,” she pleaded. “Don’t do this to me!”

I dropped down into a crouch and picked up the bottle. I swept my hand across the ground, feeling for the lighter.

“Michael, no!” she sobbed.

I found the lighter and snatched it up.

“I beg you, Michael, please!” She was crying.

I dragged myself upright under the weight of the carrier bag. I brought the bottle and lighter together in front of me. I held the lighter under the fuse of rags stuffed into the bottleneck. I clicked the lighter.

It didn’t work.

“Michael! I love you!” she screamed.

I clicked the lighter again.

It sparked, but it didn’t take.

“Michael! Don’t!”

I clicked the lighter a third time. A yellow flame shot up from it. It caught onto the rag. The rag burst into flames.

“Michael!”

“Shut up!” I screamed. “You’re not Muriel!” I lifted the bottle behind me. “You’re not! You’re not!”

My throwing arm was still good after all.

I hurled the flaming bottle at the figure, in the doorway. The figure dissolved as the bottle arced through it. I heard glass smashing on the floor of the house, followed by a phoomph and a flash of light.

I turned and ran, ran like I was a kid again. The flames threw my shadow ahead of me, while behind me the house whistled and sighed and screamed as it died.

I cried all the way down Dahlia Street.

I went to church later that morning. It was All Souls Day. After Mass I lit three candles and said a prayer for three lost souls.

I didn’t need to say a prayer for Muriel. I know she’s in a better place and that I’ll be joining her someday.

Until that final reunion there’s no need for me to dwell in the past any more, because “the tender grace of a day that is dead will never come back to me.”

There’s only the future to think about.