The girl (or boy) held a grocery bag weighted with goodies, half of which, if statistics compiled the previous year held, were tainted with rat poison, razors, or finely ground glass. From the tone of the question, Futzy’s TV notoriety had sunk a deep set of roots into at least one little mind in Corundum.
“Yes, I am,” he admitted.
“You could use this,” said the kid, reaching into his bag and drawing out a wrapped lollipop, which thrust up from a skeletal hand: a scepter, a sucker, a challenge.
Futzy took it. “Thank you,” he said.
“You need to put it in your mouf, Futzy.”
That was what TV fame did for you. It gave everybody the right to call you by your first name. Even some upstart brat.
Adora’s hand tensed on his arm.
“I’ll have it later,” said Futzy.
“No, now,” said the child, its moon-white chin bobbing beneath a stiff mask edge. “I want to watch you suck on it. I need to see the stick pokin’ outa your lips.”
“Don’t,” cautioned Adora.
But he had to.
There was no urgency, no brattiness, in the kid. If Futzy held firm, he would probably shrug and pass on.
It was simply a matter of mood.
The ritual that was unfolding before him made the space where they stood feel charmed, blessed, and strangely… safe.
Futzy patted his wife’s hand. He undid the brown twist of paper, eyed the amber glisten of a moonlit sphere of candy, and popped it into his mouth.
Hard ball roofing his palate.
Root beer.
Was there another flavor? Some toxin being released? Beginning its lethal work?
Futzy didn’t think so.
He slurped it out and said, “Mmmm.” Then, “Thank you, my good man.”
“I’m a girl!” objected the trick-or-treater with puffed-up annoyance and went her way, her bag brushing noisily against her bone-suit.
“So you are,” said Futzy, craning about to watch her painted hipbones fluoresce on down the sidewalk.
“Are you okay?” asked Adora, alarmed.
“Yes,” he said. “Want a lick?”
She thought a second, then shook her head as if ashamed of her decision.
Futzy popped it back in.
Root beer.
He observed the older boys and girls, his former charges. There on the lawn of the Bleak residence, they were learning a critical lesson in solemnity and sobriety, one that no school could teach. When they were done, they huddled around Gerber’s remains for a good long while, letting their candles burn down.
Before long, Claude and Jonquil would arrive with the implements they needed for Delia Gaskin’s comeuppance. Then all of them would proceed, in a different mood entirely, to the town cemetery.
Futzy felt the eagerness building.
In himself and in everyone present.
Delia Gaskin checked her face in the hall mirror at Brest and Trilby’s house, where she had pretty much taken up residence.
Funny how you could kill people, going right straight counter to the law, and still appear as normal as everyone else. Even Wigwag hadn’t seen a change in her, loving her without reserve right up to the day she’d brought him to the vet and had him put down; but then dogs were just that way.
One thing was clear: There weren’t no God. And there weren’t no voice of conscience neither. All of that was part and parcel of the contrived guilt society heaped on your head and jabbed into your mind, hoping to corral your nastier impulses.
I’m a pretty little number when I get gussied up, thought Delia, indulging in a moment’s preen. All spiffed up for the delight of Brest and Trilby. She would turn them way the fuck on.
And they her.
Glancing one last time at her suit-no lint, no dandruff, lookin’ fine-Delia ventured out into the night.
The evening before, when her lovers returned from Claude’s house without Pill, they’d told her the little girl was doing fine. Tweed and Dexter Poindexter, the young fools who had escaped the blade on prom night, had begged to have Pill sleep over so they could take her out tonight for trick-or-treating.
Though Delia’s bedmates begged off sex, they made her hot with plans to meet them this evening near the crypt Bix Donner was immured in for some steamy lobeplay.
The graveyard lay less than a mile from their house. Delia saw no need to drive. Besides, it was a beautiful night to watch the starlight spill across square after square of sidewalk, her heels hard and sharp as she walked.
Monsters and goblins parted to let her pass.
Delia gave cheery hi-there’s to clusters of them. She exchanged good-natured grins with moms and dads holding some apparition’s little hand.
One foolish vampire, out all by himself, she swatted with sufficient force that he rose nearly a foot into the air. The solitary tyke’s glow-in-the-dark fangs flew out of his mouth and skittered across the pavement, as did his candy, his apples, and his coins. He ran off bawling into the night.
That’d teach the little dummy a lesson in safety, thought Delia. She ought to have dragged the little shit behind a bush and broken his neck. Up out of the flesh-twist of his throat would his final breath have struggled, his blanched makeup a deathmask ready-made.
But Delia had sex on her mind.
When that was so, little else mattered.
She reached the end of Pine Street, went one block north to Maple, and turned west.
A hundred yards ahead lay the entrance to the cemetery. The long swung locked metal gate kept cars out, but night visitors on foot could easily and legally sidestep it.
Her old flame, Kitty Buttweiler, was buried in the far corner of the cemetery. Kitty was no doubt resting easier since the night Delia had avenged her death.
It had been the right thing to do.
Of that she was certain.
But it was good that Bix’s crypt lay farther south, in a different part of the grounds.
As Delia approached it, she marveled anew at the upkeep Corundum put into its cemetery: Tall dark oaks lofting like dancers into the night sky. Immaculately kept lawns. Fat gravestones huddled close together. All of it attested to the town’s wealth and neighborliness.
She didn’t notice the wisps of… could it be fog?… until they began to curl about her ankles.
Odd.
The night air felt on the edge of nippy.
But fog, even the slightest lick of it, seemed not quite right.
For the first time in ages, Delia tasted fear, a cold thumb on the back of her neck that sent shivers up into her brain and down along her spine.
But then Brest appeared, Trilby too, around a corner of the crypt.
Brest blew her a kiss.
Delia waved and swept forward. The low white fog now definitely lingered longer, claiming more ground. It coiled in cable-thick wisps that appeared, absurdly, to seep from the crypt itself.
Dry ice, came the recognition.
And the next: I’ve got to get out of here.
Then the fog darkened up from behind the markers. Only it wasn’t fog.
It was heads and torsos.
As if by prearranged signal they emerged, and Delia backed into arms, arms that enfolded her and rushed her forward.
Her feet left the ground.
She fell back and up, secured from falling, abruptly horizontal, the stars going by overhead, imperfections underfoot making the way unsteady.
Her limbs were caught in vises.
As she craned about, Delia recognized the faces of those that carried her.
Students. Faculty. Fellow staffers. They refused to meet her eyes. Their faces grim-set, they ignored her protests.
Delia twisted and strained.
To no avail.
It was like her frustration when her older brother locked her in whatever wrestling grip he liked back when she was eight.
“No!” she cried. Deaf ears. “Please!”
The principal and mousy Miss Phipps joined Brest and Trilby. Futzy made a gesture and the mass of people swung around the crypt.