Halloween would come and go in 1961, and we'd check out our candy hoard to see how many good pieces we'd gotten. Milky Ways and Clark Bars, Fifth Avenues and Three Musketeers. Good N' Plenty, Bonomo Turkish Taffy and Tootsie Rolls. Some people gave us apples, which didn't thrill us all too much, and I never understood the allure of candy corn at all. The real horror of Halloween, at least for me, was getting something with coconut in it. No Mounds Bars for me, if you please!
Yeah. Halloween was over, for most people anyway. Here in our little neighborhood we had a constant reminder of all things dark and spooky.
Just a few doors down on the other side of the street stood the house of Mrs. Price and her rarely seen son John-John.
Mrs. Price was weird. She was a retired English teacher who lived close to nature. So close to nature that it was difficult to distinguish her from the soil at times. Just past the Gerbers' and the Collin's houses her property cast a dark shadow. It was our Sleepy Hollow; a dense patch of woods on each side of the street, with Mrs. Price's house the grim centerpiece of it all. Grimy is the kindest thing you could say about it. It was obscured by the trees and the vines; you could see the front door and a bit of the porch, but that was about it. During the day you could safely walk by as long as you quickened your pace. Every once in a while Mrs. Price would appear as if coming right up out of the ground. She was just there in an old dirty dress and sweater, staring at you through the smudged-up lenses of her eyeglasses, her hair unkempt, her stockings dirty and torn. We were convinced she was a witch-Mark Gerber told us she was, and he should know, he lived closest to her.
You didn't knock on her door at Halloween. The lone 40 watt bulb did not invite you, and there never seemed to be any other lights on within the house. The old incandescent street lamp gave the house and woods an eerie glow, providing just enough light to get you past in the evening.
The sidewalk was crumbling and shattered; you couldn't roller skate through there even if you wanted to, and you rode your bike as fast as you could after dark; convinced that the Headless Horseman was waiting nearby.
We didn't see John-John Price very much, so he was even more mysterious, which gave rise to wilder tales about him. We were convinced that John-John roamed the streets at night, sickle in hand, in search of stray cats and dogs which he would kill and then behead, carrying his gruesome trophies back home. It was rumored that the woods behind their house were decorated with the skulls of the unfortunate animals that he had caught; that they were part of some weird Wican rituals they performed in the dead of night. If they weren't witches or sorcerers then they were Druids at least, and some sort of Stonehenge was cloaked behind the trees and the bushes and the vines.
In this world of H-bombs and nuclear missiles, how could there be anything scarier than the annihilation of the planet?
Well, I tell you my friends, it was right there, just a few doors down, heading into town, and the horror was our neighbor.
Be careful when the sun goes down!
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