Aaaiiieee by Jeffrey Thomas Read Free Book Online Page A

go alone. I put on a rubber monster mask (a cheapie; it was a balding old man with frizzy white hair—a mad scientist, very consciously chosen for the occasion), and took an orange plastic pumpkin to go trick-or-treating at the age of thirty-three.
    I even hit a few other houses on the way. “I am Edwin Phillips,” I proclaimed in a deep voice behind muffling rubber on the step of one house.
    “Oh, you’re terrible!” laughed my mother, a hand to her heart.
    As I turned onto the street at last, my heart actually began to beat with that old dread excitement, with the extra thrill of reliving a nostalgic memory. I felt foolishly jubilant in my mask, wet inside with my breath. I wondered where my old best friend Dicky Evans was, and wouldn’t it have been great if he and Ronny Hall and David Porter were with me now, daring each other to be the first to run up the walk and knock. Here with me now to witness, for the first time, someone actually answering our knocks. Some pleasant yuppie man or woman, and yet still my heart was deliciously pounding.
    As it was, I never made it to that newly painted black door to knock. The house was glowing, the yellow paint undiminished after all this time. Maybe it was one of Crazy Ed’s inventions, I now thought…and if so, it certainly would have changed the world, in its way, if he’d lived to market it. An enterprising person (myself? I thought) might scrape off a sample, have it analyzed and find a way of producing it somehow. Just a fantasy.
    The house was glowing, and I felt like I hadn’t seen it with Pammy in the day, hadn’t seen it since the last, long-ago Halloween I’d come up this street. A chilly gust of wind sent leaves scampering across the road and my sneakers, like yellow flakes of paint finally fallen from the house to blow away. I heard children laughing in the darkness ahead—ghostly echoes from my past.
    As I advanced along the street I saw the dark form of a man standing on the sidewalk directly in front of the Yellow House.
    There were three children on the step, and the door to the house was open, but away from me so that I couldn’t see who it was on the other side dropping things into their proffered pillow cases. My attention was torn back and forth from the man to the open door as I continued advancing. The man must be waiting for his children, I reasoned. If I had small children I’d want to accompany them just to be safe. So why did I keep looking back at him, away from the door?
    The door closed, the children turned and ran down the walk. Past the man. On to the next house. The man didn’t move.
    Now I was really looking at him. Straining to see detail. A lot of my nostalgic thrill went right out the window, and I had a strange impulse to just keep on walking past the man once I got to him, and not stop at the Yellow House.
    I was coming up on the man now, and I could discern that he was, as I had feared, quite an old-looking man.
    Then another strange impulse came to me. Despite my sudden anxiousness, I must talk to this old man. I must find out who he was.
    I saw him turn his head to watch the last of my approach, no doubt distracted by my scuffing of leaves. I felt guiltily intimidating, a grown man in a horror mask, but also safely hidden behind it. Anonymous, my true self shrouded.
    Luckily I didn’t have to begin a casual conversation. He started.
    “Little big for trick-or-treating, aren’t ya?”
    I came within a few paces of him. “Ah, I’m on my way to a masquerade party.” I was surprised that my voice was shaky, like when I’d first asked Pammy out.
    The old man glanced down into my plastic pumpkin. “Looks like you been trick-or-treating to me.”
    “Friends’ houses…as a joke,” I stammered. I was defensive, as if interrogated,  pulled over by a patrol car. “How about you? You trick-or-treating?”
    “Ha,” the old man laughed, “I could, with this mug, is that what you mean?”
    “Oh no…I didn’t mean that. We