Inspired by - 22. Chapter 22 - Harold and Louise

I watch them stroll down the street like they do every year. The times have changed and so have the costumes. Once there clowns, hobos, ghosts, and princesses with crowns made of tin foil, then they were homemade costumes the kids wore and their parents went parading around with them. Now the nights belong to Dora the Explorer, Transformers, and the odd Darth Vader or Yoda as the kids go from house to house trick-or-treating, in their store bought costumes, mostly by themselves.

“Why do you do this to yourself, Harold?” Louise asks as she watches them walk past our place.

“What else have got to do?”

“I’m not sure, but this depresses you.”

Louise sighed loudly. She always sighs at this time of the year. I think part of it is where we live. It isn’t a happy place our home, but we don’t have much choice at this point.

I remember last year there was a giant pumpkin at the end of the drive. Robbie had spent the morning carving a really complex face on it and put a little light in it that flickered. The light surprised me, but there isn’t much they can’t create these days.

The little kids were ending their time on the streets. It was almost some unspoken agreement, when you watched all the younger ones just sort of suddenly turn and go home. I often wondered if they had all been precondition. It was usually around 8 p.m. that this happened. Then the night belonged to the teenagers and the adults.

It was in that magic time when the small kids headed home with a bag of candy, hyper from the excitement, talking happily about the hauls they had made and the older teens and adults taking hold of the streets that the creatures came out. I called them the holiday monsters because it was only this one night a year that they showed up. They had always called this night All Hallows Eve, a night when the doorways between the living and dead were open. What they didn’t know was the doors to a hell dimension were opened and these little monsters came crawling out to play.

How do I describe this plague of monsters? I wish I could say they were all alike but they weren’t really. Some were barely knee high but others were nearly chest tall. They were like a demented artist had gotten a hold of a blank canvas and these creatures stepped off the painting when they were done. They were darkness, some had tails that came to points like a spear, others had horns that twisted and curled like a goats but were sharp enough to cut the atoms in the air. Some had no eyes, others huge fangs. The only things they had in common were the facts that they loved trouble and they all would vanish at the stroke of midnight.

Ever want to be scared? All you have to do is watch one of these little suckers crawl up and into a human body. Trust me watching as they crawl and slide into the mouth of their host is a scary thing to behold. The host just sort of gets a glazed look to them and they begin to work on causing massive trouble in a short period of time. I’d seen them take over kids and adults, begin fights, slash tires, and act like what they were, horrible little monsters. Then just as the clock strikes midnight the creatures flee the bodies they’ve taken over and melt back away for a year. The destruction left is horrible to behold but usually it is just property damage. Only once did they actual kill anyone, well actually two people, but they hadn’t done that again.

“I don’t understand why you watch them and walk between them, every Halloween!” Louise stood with her hands on her hips staring me down. “Do you want them to try and hurt you worse?”

“Louise, how much worse can they make it?”

“I don’t know, “ she began her voice fading to a whisper on the wind.

“Well, I am just going to make sure they don’t do it again.”

“How? How do you plan to stop them, Harold?”

That was the thing. I just didn’t know how to stop them. However, roaming past them kept them from getting cruel. I couldn’t seem to stop the small damage but when they seemed to get riled up just being near them, well, they slowed down and their host’s seemed to come forward. All I had to do was keep the worst of them from acting out till midnight.

This year it looks like two kids missed the message. A brother and sister from the way they walked together hadn’t gotten home before the monsters got out. The brother was wearing the clothing of a hobo, something I hadn’t seen in years. His face was smeared with dirt, and he had a long stick with his Halloween bag on it. Looking at him I figured he might be seven or eight, but he couldn’t have been much older. Stumbling along side of him was cute little girl in a white dress with cardboard angel wings on it.

“Tony, I wanna go home. I’m tired!” She stopped walking and pouted looking at him.

“We’re going home, Sal. I just sort of got lost.” He tried to sound brave but I could hear the panic in his voice from here. “I’m sure I’ll find something that looks familiar soon, okay?”

Just where the hell was their parents? Who would let two little kids go out alone? I mean the Holiday Monsters weren’t the only sort of monsters out tonight.

“I know what you’re thinking, Harold.” Louise stood alongside me watching the kids as they slow trudged down the street toward a dead end.

“Well?”

“Alright. I couldn’t stand it if something happened to them. They are far too young.”

So that night, Tony and Sally ended up having two guardians with them all the way home. Poor kids had gotten separated from the group they had been traveling with to trick or treat. While the rest had gone north on Wilson after the last house, the kids had been late getting their treats and thought they were with same group when they went south. Soon they had moved beyond where they knew they were. The whole trip home Louise and Harold kept the kids between them. A number of times people started toward the kids, growling, screaming, totally terrifying the kids till they cowered in fear, but Harold and Louise would also scream and yell back at the people until they turned, leaving the kids alone.

The kids finally began to notice where they were and began to hurry toward home.

“See, they are going to make it, Louise,” Harold said happily as the kids began to run.

“Sally, come on. There is the house. Mom is going to be so mad cause we are late.”

“But we were lost,” Sally said starting to sniffle. “All those mean people kept yelling at us.”

“Shh. If Mom thinks there was trouble we might get into more trouble.”

Harold and Louise looked at each other. Is this what it was like for kids today?

The kids had barely hit the edge of the sidewalk when their front door swung open and a tall woman came running out to grab them both.

“Oh thank god. Mrs. Robb said you two disappeared when they went and turned somewhere along the way. She had to call in extra parents and they were looking for you two. Are you both okay?”

“Yes, Mom,” Tony said trying to pretend like he was old enough to take care of them.

“Yup, cause when we got scared they stayed with us, right Tony?”

“Who did, Sally?” Their mother looked out into the empty streets trying to find out who Sally was talking about.

“Mom, it was only me and Sally.”

Sally stared at her brother and then pointed at Harold and Louise.

“But Mom, they made the mean people who were yelling at us go away.”

Harold and Louise looked at each other in surprise.

Cradling her daughter in her arms, she carefully led her children into the house.

“She … she seen us,” Louise gasped.

“Well, what do you know?”

“Harold, she seen us! Do you realize what this means?”

“It means she got home safe to her mother. Come on, dear, time to go back home.”

“But, Harold, what about her?”

“Honey, we did what we could. We saved two innocent lives tonight. Come on, time to home.”

Louise shook her head and grabbed Harold’s arm. It would be a bit of a walk to get back to the cemetery and then they could watch Robbie clean up the graves from those brave enough to party there. They really should look into getting a house, but Louise was never one for keeping house and Harold liked to be able to roam when he wanted to. Oh well, they could figure it all out next year.