A Werewolf Halloween
Halloween
Red
It was that time of the year again and we were out in force for what could prove to be the greatest year of candy gathering yet for the children of Essex Drive. Unfortunately I had waited until the last moment to get my costume together so I had just thrown a bunch of stuff together at the last second. My friends thankfully had a great idea. "We can just glue some of the fur left over from my gorilla costume last year to our hands and face and go as werewolves!"
"Eddy! That's lame!" Matt said and tossed the huge bag of fake gorilla hair back at Eddy.
"Got any better Ideas!?" Eddy said defensively.
When no response was forthcoming we started to get to work gluing the fur to our hands and faces. After a while we pretty much looked like werewolves for the most part, or hairy hobos if you saw us from a distance. "Hurry guys! I wanna get all the good houses before it gets dark!" I said and grabbed my black trash bag that I hopped would be full by the nights end.
It was about 6:00 when we started our rounds and there was still a little light, but by nine I was pretty thankful that there were street lamps on Essex Drive. The houses so far had been pretty picky due to the earliness of the evening, but now they were more willing to give. Most of the tots had already been out and about and we had spent the majority of our time crashing a party at Lindsey Bakers house. Her parents always made a great haunted house out of their garage and if you were lucky you could get all the way through it to the back yard and enjoy the company of Lindsey and a couple of her cute friends. After about thirty minutes of flirting though we said goodbye and decided to hit the big candy houses on our street. There were the Duggers, who always gave out a whole chocolate bar, Mrs. Miller, who usually doled out hand fulls of lollipops, The Wilsons and their mountain of nerd boxes, and lastly the old Furgor House where Mr. Furgor lived. Mr. Furgor always gave out candy bars, Mr. Furgor also gave out something much neater. Most kids were scared stiff of the old hoot, but we brave three were the appointed children charged with the task of getting candy from Mr. Furgor. For six years Mr. Furgor had been giving us more candy bars than we could even think about eating in one night. In addition to the candy Mr. Furgor also usually invited us in to enjoy a cup of hot coco too. But neither candy nor coco was the real reason we ring his dreaded door bell each Halloween. No, the real reason is that he always helps us make our costumes that much better. Then we got out and scare the other kids stiff with our newly improved costumes. I never understood why or how, but that one extra thing Mr. Furgor gives us just seems to make the costume a million times scarier.
"Good evening boys" Mr. Furgor said as we rang his door bell at ten o'clock sharp.
"Grrrr! We're werewolves Mr. Furgor!" We all said at the same time.
"Ohhoho! My! How frightening! Why I haven't seen something this scary since I saw three real... well... since ever! Ahahaha!"
"Sorry we don't look better" I apologized, "we kinda threw these together at the last minute"
"No worries my boys no worries. I have just the thing for the aspiring werewolf!" Mr. Furgor said and led us into his house. There were already three cups full of steaming hot coco arranged at a table in the huge dining room where Mr. Furgor must eat every day. Everything seemed just the same as it had every other year I had come since I was six years old and my dad had come in too. Now all our parents knew we stopped in with Mr. Furgor and we had their permission to do so as long as we were on our best behavior. Now at age 16 I was always amazed at how it seemed like Mr. Furgor never aged and how his house never changed. After we had sat and drank our coco Mr. Furgor emerged from the dark interior of his house carrying three small boxes. "How was the coco, boys?"
"Excellent!" we said as he handed a box to each of us.
"Now boys, I realize that you're getting pretty old to be trick or treating, but I hope that doesn't ever stop you from doing it. I'd be out there myself if these old bones allowed it and in the future I might need someone to help me pass out all the candy bars I buy for this holiday. Why just the other day I was chatting with your parents and they all said you boys were a bit too old for this. So for this reason I decided to give you a special part of your costume" He said and handed us all a box. "Open it up... see... yes they're werewolf teeth just for you boys."
The box contained a fascinating set of teeth that looked almost real. They only took a second to figure out and when we got them on the teeth fitted so great that I hardly noticed them at all. In fact if they hadn't made me sound funny when I tried to talk around them I would have thought they weren't there. "Dee! Thanks Mishter Furger" Eddy said around his fangs.
"I'm honored to have had you three as friends. I look forward to your visits every year and I hope this isn't the last"
"Nosht at all Mishter Furger! We will come nexcht yer too!" I said as we were led to the door and the huge basket of bars.
"Now you boys be sure to give these out to all the little children you can find, ok?"
"Yesh Mishter Furger!" We said as we stepped back out into the cold.
"Oh, and don't leave those teeth in for too long! Like past midnight!"
An hour later the houses started to turn off their lights and we migrated back toward the haunted house at the Baker house. By the time we got there we had passed out about half the bars, but the rest were a bribe to get us in. Lindsey always let us in when we came up with a huge basket of chocolate that we were more than willing to share. This year would prove not to be much different and for the first time ever the party actually lasted till midnight. Everyone loved our costumes, as usual, and we even earned the nick name "the three werewolves" from Lindsey. By the time we stumbled out of the Baker's back yard we were more than a little high off chocolate and sugar. "That was great!" Eddy said as we stumbled down the road.
"Yea, I haven't had that much fun since that time my mom let us all stay up at my house till three in the morning!"
"You said it!" I sighed.
"Well I gotta go home" Eddy said, "See you guys tomorrow for candy exchange?"
"You bet. I wouldn't miss it for the world!" Matt said as he waved goodbye.
Matt and I walked home together because we lived beside one another. "That was a great party!" Matt said when we reached our houses, "Guess I'll meet you tomorrow?"
"Yea! See ya!" I said and waved good bye.
"So honey, did you get a lot of good candy?"
"Yes mom" I said as I brushed past my parents who were taking care of my baby brothers.
"Well that's good son" My dad said, "Try to keep it down ya? We just got Michael and Thomas to sleep"
"Yes sir" I said and drug my candy up the stairs to my room. My room was across the hall from my twin baby brother's room so I pretty much had to keep silent all night long. Thankfully though I owned enough headphones to play music just about as loud as I wanted to without the babies ever even knowing it was on. It took a while to get all the fake gorilla hair off my hands and face and even after that I had to shower to get the glue off. When I was as clean as possible and dressed for bed I had a startling realization; I no longer had the werewolf teeth in. In fact I could barely remember having them at all at the party. They must have fallen out somewhere between arriving at the party and leaving because I did remember joking to Eddy and Matt about how we all kept biting out tongues and drawing blood. I was crushed. This was my last Halloween and I had already lost the gift from Mr. Furgor. I knew I should go over to his house and apologize tomorrow, but I wasn't looking forward to it. Troubled by my thoughts of how I was going to apologize I drifted into a fitful sleep.
The Dream
Red?
There were still people about.
They were young adults and the smell of alcohol drifted from their clothes.
I wasn't interested in them though.
They were just another afterthought to me.
I drifted from yard to yard, avoiding the ones with bright lights watching out for pranksters, embracing the ones filled with shadows.
I eventually found myself in the Baker's yard.
The smell of people I should know stirred emotions within me.
Against my instincts I decided to approach the lighted garage in which a familiar smelling human girl was tearing large sheets of shiny blackness from the top of the garage.
"What a handsome doggy" The girl said when she spotted me, "Would you like a treat?"
She stooped over a box beside her and produced a crinkly packet from which she drew small beads that smelled most curious.
She offered a bead to me and I gingerly licked it from her open palm.
The explosion of flavor sent my mind reeling and for a split second another presence inside my head created a word for this thing; skittle.
The Call of my brothers distracted me from the human Girl and her strange food.
Like lightning I was off into the night again.
The dark surrounded me and I followed the sound of the call to my brothers.
They had found a rabbit to chase and were calling the hunt.
I found them in a nearby wooded glade behind the rows of human dens.
Something told us we only had so long to hunt.
So we began,
and what a hunt it was.