Andy's Shorts to GA Prompts - 35. Prompt #178 - A Hallowe'en Prompt

It had been a cold end to October, and the ground was covered in snow. Jason had just gotten back from trick or treating with his three children and his neighbour’s youngest two sons.

Since it was nearly ten o’clock, Jason sent the kids to get ready for bed. They were planning on sleeping together in the living room, so Jason gathered up some pillows, sleeping bags and a huge blanket for everyone to snuggle under.

As soon as the kids returned wearing their pyjamas, Alex said, “Tell us a story Daddy.”

“OK. You kids get comfy, and I’ll begin.”

The five children climbed inside their sleeping bags, and then shuffled around a little so that they could sleep closer together.

“This happened back when I was around your age, maybe a couple of years older. It was All Hallows Eve in the late 1980s, and I had gone out trick or treating for the first time with a couple of my friends. They were different times, and although we were only about nine or ten, we were allowed to go out on our own.

“We stayed within about a half mile radius of home, but that meant that there were still over a thousand homes for us to hit; especially since at the time, we lived not far from a large council estate.”

“What do you mean ‘they were different times’?”

“Well, Alex, it was felt to be safer for children to be out on their own, without being under constant supervision by an adult. Besides, where we grew up, everybody knew everybody. Our parents knew that if there were a serious problem, any one of our neighbours would offer to help out. But, back to the story.”

“So, I’d gone dressed up as the devil. My best friend, Karl, was dressed up as a skeleton, Sarah was a witch, and Suzannah was dressed as a fairy. We had only knocked on about twenty doors, and our pumpkin pails were already brimming. We had sherbet flying saucers, cola cubes, acid drops, aniseed balls, black jacks, candy vampire teeth, white chocolate mice, and Suzannah and Sarah each had a candy necklace.”

“Sorry to interrupt Dad, but what’s a candy necklace?”

“Well James, they were little pieces of candy that had been threaded onto a thin piece of elastic, so that you could wear it like a real bracelet or necklace.” This elicited a giggle from the kids as they tried to imagine why anyone would want to wear candy.

Then Jason’s youngest boy quite innocently said, “You mean like the elastic on a thong?”

“And when have you seen a thong, Peter?” Jason asked.

“When we went swimming with the school last week. There was this lady who was wearing a red thong, and the elastic was right up her ar-”

“Don’t you dare finish that sentence young man!”

“Sorry Dad.”

“That’s all right. Anyway, back to the story. So we reached the end of our street, and we started down the next street over. There were a few homes that were in total darkness, so we didn’t even bother knocking on their doors. We got about half way down the street, when we saw one of the homes was decorated and everything. This family was clearly into the whole day, as they had cobwebs and spiders stuck on their door, there were a couple of jack o’lanterns in the garden, there was a skeleton that had been painted with fluorescent paint so it was glowing, and there were numerous bats that had been stuck on the windows. Well, we thought we’d hit the mother lode.

“So we put on our best Hallowe’en faces, ran up to the door, and rang the doorbell. The door creaked slowly open, but there was nobody standing there to greet us. We figured that since they were clearly so into the event, they must have worked out a way of automatically opening their front door, so that they could add to our experience of the night.

“We heard a lady’s voice call out to us and asked us to come in. We excitedly crossed the threshold, and as we looked around at the inside of the house, our hearts started beating faster. The lady who lived there, had really gone to town. There were cobwebs all over the place, the hallway lights were turned off, bats were dangling from the ceiling, and the way was lit by a series of small jack o’lanterns. There were plastic spiders scattered about on the surface of tables, chairs and the banisters of the staircase, and there was the sound of ghosts wailing and the sounds of rattling chains. We thought she had set up some kind of cassette recording of these noises and was now playing them over a speaker system.

“Her voice called to us again. ‘Come to the room at the back and collect your treats, kiddies’. The voice sounded distant, and we thought she was using some kind of special effect to pull it off. We slowly walked through the cobwebby and dusty hallway, making our way to the room at the back of the ground floor.

“We knocked on the door and were invited in. Our jaws hit the floor when we saw all of the bowls of sweets scattered around the room. There must have been twenty bowls overflowing with every kind of sweet we had ever heard of; and even a few sweets we had never heard of before. There was over a dozen small jack o’lanterns in this room providing the light, and the cobweb and dust theme had been extended into this room as well. Suzannah squealed and yelled over to me saying ‘Look Jason, a whole bowl full of fruit salad chews’. I was more in love with the gobstoppers that had been made to look like eyeballs, Karl was looking at the bowl of liquorice whips like a kid who had just seen Santa Claus, and Sarah was in love with the giant cola bottles.

“It actually took us almost thirty seconds to realise that we were alone in this room, but again we assumed the homeowner had simply set up some kind of speaker system, and that she was actually in another room, but just wanted to add to the spookiness of our visit.

“We were drooling over the thought of scrumming ourselves stupid on so much sweet stuff, but we weren’t greedy kids and so just took a few sweets from a couple of the bowls. We all yelled out our thanks for the sweets, complimented the homeowner on how spooky the whole place was and that it was the best place we had visited that night.

“We continued on and visited about another forty homes, before we had finished the loop and ended up back at my home. The four of us eagerly told my dad about the entire evening, and said the best place we stopped off at was the house the next street over. We told him about how it was decorated, and what it was like inside.

“He asked us which house number it was, and when we told him it was number twenty, he told us that it couldn’t be; but we told him that we were sure that it was definitely number twenty. He told us that number twenty had been vacant for the past ten years, that nobody had ever bought the place after the previous owner had died one Hallowe’en night.

“We told Dad that we’d take him, and show him that he was wrong. So we walked around the corner to the house. We walked to number twenty and found out that Dad was right; the house was in total darkness, with a large ‘For Sale’ sign in the garden; there was no sign of the jack o’lanterns and the glowing skeleton. When we looked through the letter box the whole place was dark, as the numerous jack o’lanterns that had decorated the hallways were also gone.

“After we got back home, we were more than a little spooked, but felt that getting some sweets inside us would make us feel better. That was until we discovered that the sweets we had collected in that house were gone.”

Jason got up, turned out the lights and as he left the room he said, “Sleep well kids.”

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