MY
FAVORITE HALLOWEEN STORY
By
Jack Ketchum
When Halloween, 1970 rolled around I
was twenty-four years old and still very much a hippie and crashing with my
friend John Wexo in sunny Laguna Beach, California.
(Remember crashing?)
I have notes on this so it’s easy to
recall. That night I got the notion that
what we should do was to reverse the order of things trick-or-treat-wise. So Paula and John and I went out and bought
fresh-cut flowers and salted mixed nuts and bagged the nuts in plastic-wrap
along with thin-cut strips of typed paper (remember typing?) on which we’d
written quotes from Camus and Abbie Hoffman and Mark Twain and a bunch of other
people. Myself included. Sort of a home-made fortune-cookie type
thing.
Then we put on masks -- mine was a
da-glo skeleton -- and went door-to-door handing out the flowers and the nuts.
Wouldn't accept a thing.
We pretty much upset everybody one
way or another. John is six-two and that
sure didn’t help any. But mostly we
upset them in good ways. Most
were smiling by the time we left and some even seemed touched by the
gesture. One old woman, whose husband
almost closed the door on us when we first told him we were there to give
him something, actually blessed us.
Teenagers goofed on the whole thing.
Only one guy seemed really scared.
And he was bigger than John.
But the best thing was that on three
occasions children answered the door, truly astounded by this weird adult
departure from the rules and delighted by it.
One boy’s eyes went wide as we handed him his flower and when he said
thank you, all three of us had the feeling that as he closed the door, that
little fella was thinking about it.
Hard. That he’d remember it.
We went home and drank hot hard
cider and listened to the Song of the Humpbacked Whale.
Haunting.
Piece originally published by in Chizmar and Morrish's OCTOBER DREAMS
Jack Ketchum is a fucking legend in my mind. He is responsible for the scariest book I have ever read, Off Season, the most gruesome book I have ever read The Girl Next Door, and one of the all time best books I have read Red. Pick these up now. http://www.jackketchum.net/
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