He went into the living-room where his mother was darning some socks, flung open the door suddenly and leaped in, arms raised to his shoulders, fingers extended like claws, and growling ferociously.
'My goodness,' said his mother, looking up, 'what on earth made you waste your money on a thing like that?'
'I thought it was rather good,' said Peter, not at all put out. 'Doesn't it look — well, real?'
'Well, it was your birthday money, so I suppose you could spend it how you liked,' said his mother placidly, returning to the socks. 'I don't know how you manage to get such large holes in these, I really don't. I think it must be the way you drag them on.'
'But doesn't it look just like a werewolf?' asked Peter, taking the mask off and examining it carefully.
'It would, I suppose, except there are no such things and never have been such things as werewolves. I think you've wasted your money on something which is of no real use,' his mother replied. 'The money would have been better spent on some new pairs of socks. Still, your Aunty Doreen did tell you to spend it on something to amuse you, so I suppose we can't expect everything.'
'The thing that's wrong with it is my hands,' said Peter. 'The face is all right, but the hands are wrong to go with it, don't you think?'
He put the mask on again and held his hands out for her to see the effect. She glanced at him briefly. 'Putting a mask on like that won't make your hands look different from a boy's,' she said. 'The only thing you could do is wear gloves, your woolly ones perhaps, to disguise them.'
Since she was taking no more notice of him, he went back upstairs, drew a pair of woolly gloves from a drawer in his dressing table, and tried the effect this time. Well, perhaps it wasn't all that bad. At least the gloves gave some kind of appearance of hairiness, but it was still not quite right. He tried combing the backs of the gloves, but that was no good at all. When he tried the claw effect, it was not half as good as when his nails were showing.
He still had some money left, so he went back to the joke shop, taking the mask with him.
'Have you got,' he asked, 'anything like hairy hands?'
The shopkeeper, being a bit of a joker himself, looked down at his hands and asked if they would do. Then he looked down at his feet behind the counter and as if in surprise announced that he hadn't got pigs' trotters, either.
'No, I mean,' explained Peter carefully, 'like I bought this werewolf mask, I wonder if you have a kind of hairy hand mask to go with it. You know, to make the whole thing look — well, more real?'
'Hairy, with sort of claws, you mean?' asked the shopkeeper, nodding. 'I might have. Hang on.'
He went along the shelves behind the counter, opened first one drawer then another, and at the third drawer extracted a transparent plastic bag which he placed on the counter.
'These do?' he asked.
Peter picked them up eagerly, and inspected the contents through the plastic. They looked about right.
'Can I try them on?' he asked.
'Sure.' The shopkeeper ripped open the bag and laid the hands out for him.
They were not like gloves, because they did not cover the hands all round, but merely lay on top and were fastened by a strap underneath and another round the wrist. Just the tips of the fingers fitted into sockets so that the rubber fingers would not dangle about uselessly. Peter tried them on.
'You can't expect a perfect fit,' the shopkeeper said, 'because of course they don't make them in different sizes. If they're too big, just tighten the strap underneath and pull the one that goes round your wrist up your arm a bit.'
He helped him to put them on. They were rather big, but with them pulled well up the hands and over his wrists they were not bad at all, Peter decided. He would have them, if he could afford them. They were just as good as the magnificent mask, they had what looked like real hair growing along the backs, really satisfying long claws with just enough red on the ends to look as if they had torn into somebody's flesh, and what was more the red was actually painted to look as if it were still wet.
'Try the effect of both the mask and the hands,' suggested the shopkeeper, pointing towards a mirror on the wall behind the door, so Peter did. That was much better, especially in the fairly dim light inside the shop. Absolutely terrifying, almost.
'Wrap them up for you?' asked the shopkeeper.
'No, I'll take them as they are,' said Peter.
'Pardon?' The mask was not adjusted quite correctly, so his voice had been rather muffled.
Peter straightened the mask round his face so that his mouth was in the right place. 'No thanks. How much?'
He paid the money and left the shop wearing his new possessions, because he just happened to have noticed Billy Fidler leaning against the pillar box outside, looking the other way.
He ran out of the shop, crept round the side of the pillar box then slowly reached out a hand to touch Billy on the shoulder. Billy turned, as he expected him to do.
'That's pretty good,' said Billy, standing up. He looked Peter over critically. 'I like the hands.' Then he peered closer. 'Oh — it's Peter.'
'What do you think of it, then?' asked Peter.
'Pretty good. I could only really tell who you were by the clothes. It needs to be darker, though. I mean, you don't expect to come across a werewolf in daylight, so it looks just like a horrible mask and a pair of hands just now. If it was dark, though, and you suddenly came at me, that would really give me a nasty turn, I can tell you. Can I try them on?'
Peter didn't mind showing off his new acquisitions, and in any case he wanted to find out if what Billy had said was true. When Billy put them on, he found that it was. They were very good indeed, very effective for what they were, money well spent. But it was still unfortunately true that in broad daylight, on the pavement outside a row of shops with a pillar box just next to them, the mask was just a mask, and the hands were obviously artificiaclass="underline" not at all bad, though.
'Try them out on her,' advised Peter, seeing Wendy Glover approaching with her mother. She was a girl at their school who always seemed to frighten quite easily.
Billy obediently popped behind the pillar box, and as Wendy and her mother drew level suddenly jumped out in front of them. Wendy's mother drew her daughter a little closer to her with disdain.
'Billy Fidler, I should think,' remarked Wendy primly to her mother as they continued along the pavement. She turned after they had walked a few paces. 'A bit silly, I think,' she said loudly.
'I tell you, it'd be a different story if it was dark,' said Billy firmly, taking the mask and the hands off again and giving them back to Peter. 'You try it, and see if I'm not right.'
Peter slipped the items into his pockets and went home, taking them upstairs and placing them carefully in the drawer of his dressing table, trying not to fold them and cause creases to develop in them.
It began to grow dark quite early that evening, so at the first opportunity Peter slipped off upstairs, stood in front of the mirror and tried the mask on again without switching on his bedroom light. In the dusk, it looked beautifully eerie. When he strapped the werewolf hands on to his own and then tried the effect in full, he almost managed to frighten himself, it looked so real that figure ready to leap out at him from the mirror.
Then he knew what was lacking, and ran downstairs into the kitchen, hurrying back up to his bedroom with a little pocket torch in his hands. This time he drew the curtains as well, and when the room was pitch black held the torch just underneath his chin and switched it on suddenly.
This time he really did jump in fright. In front of him was a monster, really horrible, writhing and drooling with just a hint of blood on the tips of its fangs and from its claws more blood shining in the light as if freshly drawn from a victim. He moved his left hand across his mouth as though trying to wipe it clean, and it was so realistic that he was glad to know that downstairs both of his parents were in the house.