Fear itself

7

Dorie and Pender hit the hay early. It didn’t take Pender long to drop off-within twenty minutes he was bleating and blatting like a Sun Ra solo scored by John Cage.

No such luck for Dorie, not with her first airplane ride looming at seven-fifty in the A.M. It was funny, she mused, how she’d never really thought of herself as an aviophobe. Probably because flying was so easy to avoid. But fear of flying was one of those sneaky phobias. It’s not really a problem for me, you say: I don’t like to travel anyway. And you never think about what came first, the fear of the chicken or the fear of the egg.

Plenty of time to think about all that now, however. And the longer she lay there listening to Pender snore, the more unfair it seemed. Wasn’t this whole thing his idea in the first place? So how come he gets to sleep like an adenoidal baby while I lie here gnawing on my liver? She scooted over toward the warm center of the bed until she felt his hip warm and solid against hers.

“Hey, Pen? Pen, you awake?”

“Apparently.”

“Tell me about your house.”

“Hill. Woods. Canal. Bedrooms, lots of bedrooms. Pen sleep now.”

“I wouldn’t count on it. How come you have so many bedrooms if you live alone?”

Pender bowed to the inevitable. “Tinsman. The lockkeeper. He used to add another bedroom onto the end of the house every time his wife had another kid. She had seven.” A portentous pause-this was one of Pender’s set pieces. “Only six bedrooms were added on.” And another pause.

“How come?” Dorie rolled onto her side and pillowed both hands under her cheek the way she used to when she was a little girl-her daddy had been an excellent storyteller.

“The way the rangers tell it-every year they have a special Halloween program down at Great Falls: rangers in period costumes tell all the ghost stories and murder stories from the history of the canal, and they always end with Tinsman’s Lock. The way they tell it, the last kid wasn’t Tinsman’s. His wife had been having an affair with a redheaded mule driver from Rock Creek. They say the lockkeeper cut her throat, then drowned the seventh baby in the canal. Some people claim to have seen her ghost wandering up and down the banks in a bloodstained nightgown, searching for her redheaded baby.”

“Great, a ghost story,” said Dorie with a mock shudder that turned real at the end, as mock shudders often do. “Remember one thing, buster: I don’t sleep, you don’t sleep.”

Pender reached across his body with his good arm, and patted her shoulder. “You don’t have a thing to worry about. They say she only walks on Halloween night.”

“Pender.”

“What?”

“Halloween is this coming Sunday.”

“Is it really?” Wide-eyed and innocent; butter wouldn’t melt…, as his sister Ida would have said.

“Yeah-and you know what’s amazing? For the first time since I can remember, I don’t care-it doesn’t matter.”

“I remember you telling me Halloweens were always tough on you.”

“And Sunday ones were the worst. ’Cause if it fell on a Sunday, that’d be three days I’d have to hide out in my house with the curtains drawn. Couldn’t go shopping on Friday, because the store clerks might be in costumes with masks, on Saturday night people in masks might be coming and going from parties, and then of course the trick-or-treaters on Sunday.”

“No trick-or-treaters out where I live.”

“But don’t you see, it doesn’t matter anymore? I’d almost like to give it a try.”

“Ask and you shall receive. Pool, the Liaison Support secretary, she and her roommate always do Halloween up real big, costume party, haunted house and all. If you want me to take you, I have a standing invitation.”

“I’ll have to get back to you on that,” said Dorie. She suspected it was an idea that was going to seem less and less attractive, the closer to Sunday they got.