“And you miss that?”
“Yeah I do.” Bryan felt defensive about it. “I liked being the guy on the other side of the door. First, my dad did it, and I suppose his dad did it, and then it was my turn. You know, it’s like tradition, something that gets handed down from generation to generation.”
“Well,” said Sherri, “I’m sure that America’s manufacturers of cheap candy would like you to think so.”
“But it was.” Nothing she could say would throw him off track now. “It was a neat thing, and it’s all over now. You had your bowl of candy by the door, and the doorbell would ring and you’d open it and there would be these little clowns and ghosts you know, that their moms had cut up an old bed sheet to turn ’em into and they would have these sacks that were already so full of candy that they could barely lug them around, and you’d throw in a couple pieces more, and they’d run away because they wanted to get to the next house, and all the other houses down the street. And right behind them, at the front door, there’d be a little hobo and a little ballerina —“
“Ballerina?” Sherri raised an eyebrow, as she buttoned her blouse. “Little girls don’t dress up in ballerina costumes anymore. You’d be more likely to get a little female brain surgeon or account executive, complete with cell phone, on your doorstep these days. And there aren’t any more hoboes, either; if you want to be politically correct, you gotta call them ‘homeless’ or ‘hygiene-impaired’ or something like that.”
“I don’t have to call them anything,” said Bryan, “since little kids don’t dress up like that for Hallowe’en anymore. Nobody’s come around here trick-or-treating for years. First, there weren’t as many as before, not the way it was when I was a kid, and then there were less and less of them, and then there were hardly any at all. Maybe you got one or two, the whole night. And now there aren’t any. It’s over.”
“I’m sure kids still go trick-or-treating somewhere.”
“Well, they don’t around here, and that’s it as far as I’m concerned.”
“You’ll get over it.” Sherri tucked the blouse’s tails into her jeans. “Someday.”
“No, I won’t.” He shook his head. “That’s a promise.”
+ + +
On the way home from the airport, Bryan swung by the local Safeway. He needed a couple packs of the big brown-paper yard bags, to rake up and stuff all the dead leaves into, that covered the house’s front and back yards like an orange-and-yellow tide. All along the street that he and Sherri lived on, the rain-darkened trees stood plucked and skeletal.
He had thrown some other things into the shopping cart as well, soup and a loaf of French bread, and some deli meats, to hold him over until Sherri got back on Tuesday morning. On the way to the cash registers Brian stopped at the huge display of Hallowe’en candy bags mounded up beneath a grinning cardboard Frankenstein and Dracula. The point of the display had eluded him, except to the degree that it gave adults an excuse for stocking up on junk that they would just wind up eating themselves. He stood looking at the brightly colored bags for a couple of minutes as though having trouble deciding which to choose. Then he picked up a couple—without even seeing what kind they were — and threw them in with the rest of the things in the cart.
+ + +
The candy sat almost completely forgotten, even before he had clicked on the 11:00 P.M. news. The voices of the newscasters floated through the empty house as he fixed himself a sandwich and brought it out to the living room. By the front door, he had set up one of the folding trays and placed on it the bowl with the candy dumped into it had been hours ago, when it had first started getting dark outside. All the candy was still in the bowl, untouched.
In the middle of the sports segment, the doorbell rang.
That woke him up. He had fallen asleep even before the sports guy on the screen had started rattling off the college football scores. Blinking, he punched the remote’s mute button and set the dish with the sandwich crumbs on the table beside the over-stuffed chair. In his stocking feet, he got up and went to the door.
Nobody was outside. Or at least nobody that he could see. Bryan stood at the edge of the doorstep looking into the night. Beyond the circle of light from the porch, the yard sloped to the sidewalk and the street beyond were all sealed in darkness.
Something rustled in the bushes at the side of the house. For a moment, his heart ticked a fraction of a second faster not from fear, rather the thought that maybe some of the kids from down the block had actually gotten motivated to do a few Halloween pranks. There was always hope.
“Pret-ty spooky,” pronounced Bryan in his deepest, sepulchral voice. “I hope there’s nothing too ghastly out here . . .”
No answer came, not even suppressed, giggling laughter.
“All right. I’ll make you a deal.” He spoke louder, words fading without echo into the dark. “Don’t do anything that I can’t wash off with the hose, and you can have all the candy you want. I’m pretty well stocked at the moment.”
Still no answer.
A thread of worry laced through his thoughts. Knowing the local kids, that should have sealed the deal for them. He stepped away from the door into the cool night air, moving toward the bushes. A probing nudge with his foot sent one of the neighborhood’s cats, a disreputable silver tabby with a torn ear, fleeing across the lawn’s dead leaves and disappearing as though it had been discovered in some desperate act of sabotage.
That didn’t explain the doorbell, though. As a general rule, cats couldn’t reach that high. Bryan closed the door and returned to the couch, leaving the television muted.
Less than a minute passed, and he knew somebody was still out there; he could hear the person, whoever it was, creeping stealthily around the corner of the house.
Again, the doorbell rang. This time, he took with him the iron poker from beside the fireplace.
“Trick or treat.”
With his hand on the inside knob, he looked out at the figure standing on the doorstep. “Little late for this sort of thing, isn’t it?” He dryly spoke the admonishment. “Do your parents know you’re still out?”
“No,” said Sherri from behind a green, warted and hook-nosed witch’s mask. “I put a spell on them. Frogs don’t look at the clock.”
The drizzling rain had stopped a while ago. Moonlight, falling past fragmented clouds, silvered the empty wet street. “I thought,” said Bryan, “that you were supposed to be in Milwaukee by now.” He set the poker down in the corner beside the door.
“That’s somebody else you’re talking about.” A few last drops of rain spotted the shoulders of the black cloak the witch wore. “While she’s away, I’m here on an errand of occult importance.”
“Really?” Bryan raised an eyebrow. “Sounds heavy. Are you a good witch or a bad witch?”
“All depends, pal.”
“On what?”
The grinning green mask didn’t change expression as the witch shrugged. “On your definition of good and bad. When I’m a good witch, I’m very, very good; but when I’m a bad witch, I’m even better.”
“Har har. I’ve heard that one before.”
“Well, maybe I’ll just have to show you.” The black cloak rustled and parted. “How’s that for starters?”
“Not bad.” Seeing his wife stark naked, except for a pair of black pumps with three-inch heels, was always a pleasure.
The dark backdrop of the cloak made her skin seem luminous, as though lit from within. “That’s the kind of thing that could bring witchcraft back into style.”
“It’s never gone out,” said the witch with Sherri’s voice. “Give a witch a little privacy, and I’ll show you.”
Bryan reached beside the door and turned off the porch light. “How’s that?”
“You won’t be sorry.” The witch knelt down in front of him. “That’s a promise.”
He could still hear the television murmuring from somewhere far behind him, as though the house’s living room had been picked up and relocated to another time zone. The little noises of the night outside, an almost imperceptible wind sighing past leafless branches, seemed realer and closer to him. He rested his hands on the witch’s bare shoulders and tilted his head back. From underneath his partially lowered eyelids, he could see that the cloak had slipped away and lay in an even darker shape around her like the petals of a night-blooming flower. Her nakedness was the center of that blossom.
A grinning face looked up at him. The green mask lay on the folds of the cloak, where the witch had tossed it. Now, the mask’s eyes were empty and just as dark, no longer colored blue the way Sherri’s eyes were.
The night air touched the base of his stomach as the witch undid the fly of his trousers. Her hands rounded Bryan’s hips on either side, fingers sliding first beneath the waistband and then the elastic of Bryan’s shorts. The sharper edges of her fingernails drew a line down the exact center of each buttock, as she used the lower edges of her wrists to drag down his clothing.
Once past his butt, his trousers and under shorts fell easily past his knees, landing around his ankles. On the front porch, now lit only by moonlight and a few bright points of stars, the witch drew her right hand back, with her other hand still holding from behind and pulling him closer to herself. She slid her hand between his legs, palm upward, cupping the blood-hot and tightening sac of his flesh.
“Does that feel good?” The teasing laughter ebbed from her voice leaving only a whisper.
“Very.” His hands had moved upward from her naked shoulders to the sides of her head, fingers running through the silk of her hair. “You know it does . . .”
“How about this?” The edges of her fingernails slid along his groin as she drew her hand back once more.
He said nothing; he couldn’t. Through his clenched teeth, he drew a deep breath, turning his head to one side. A couple of houses down the street, the last light in any of the windows disappeared. He and Sherri were alone out here, as though the entire world had gone to bed and fallen asleep.
Her words stopped for the moment as well, though her tongue still had more to say. Her hand settled around the base of his erect flesh, circling the rigid shaft and holding it tight. She didn’t need to lift it toward her parted lips; it seemed to strain of its accord toward that opening. Bryan could look down and see the fringe of her lashes against her cheeks, her eyes closed, her breath coming faster to match her pulse. The wet red tip of her tongue ran a couple of inches along the underside of the hard flesh that she grasped, then circled along the curved crest of its head.
“You see?” She had pulled away from him for a moment, while still holding on to him with one hand. “I do have occult powers . . .” She nuzzled the captive flesh with the side of her face, while gazing up at him through her lowered eyelashes. “Don’t I?”
“I knew that . . . already . . .”
“It gets better.”
He closed his eyes and felt the warm, wet sensation of her taking him inside her mouth. The underside of the shaft slid along the softly textured velvet of her tongue. The head, swollen and almost painful now, touched the roof of her mouth, just behind her teeth; the taut skin’s contact with those edges was like invisible electricity sparking through the clenched muscles of his buttocks and into the base of his spine. Between his shoulder blades and up into his skull, the hot charge rolled, blanking out every conscious thought.
Even with his eyes closed, he could see the night s stars and the shadowed horizon. Nothing spoke inside his head all words were gone but memory opened relentless. There had been another time when Sherri had taken him like this, deep inside her mouth, her skin and his exposed to the night. On a camping trip in the Sierras, far away and secluded from anyone else, with the dying embers of their fire the only illumination and warmth. And now as before, thinking was replaced with pure sensation and a jumble of images inside his head. He held her close against himself, his hands tangled now in her hair, feeling as if the earth’s equator had somehow shifted to the ground between her knees. The stars wheeled above his head, useless night clouds scattering behind the earth’s relentless forward motion, guided by the merest touch of his fingertips at the back of his wife’s neck.
Crazy things; but he didn’t care. She drew him farther into her mouth, the point of her tongue curling beneath the flesh thrusting toward her throat. Another image welled up into his mind that he recognized from before; not imagination, but memory, from when he had been a kid. He had wandered away from his family — they had been on vacation far from home—at a zoo that had seemed as big as a city, smelling of hot Californian sunshine beating down on dusty eucalyptus leaves. He had found himself at the enclosure for the Indian tigers, gazing across a concrete moat and into the gem-like golden eyes of the alpha male, draped regally along a stone ledge, its tail lazily thrashing the air. The tiger had gazed back at him in haughty supremacy until it had yawned and gathered itself to its feet, then dove with huge paws outstretched, the impact of its chest sending water surging up and beyond the basin’s limit, like some tidal surge . . .
The remembered image brought the contact between himself and Sherri perilously close to the finish from which he had been restraining himself, his buttocks clenched hard, enough to begin dully aching from the tension. She might not have complained if that had happenedit might even be what she wanted — but he didn’t want the action to stop. Not until other things happened, where he would be in control and she would be as helpless beneath a pleasuring onslaught as she had made him now.
He brought his hands down to her shoulders, but he didn’t need to push her away from himself. A small startled gasp escaped her and she jerked back as two beams of light quickly swept across her and Bryan.
The night’s darkness returned as quickly. With Sherri clinging around his legs, he looked out past the slop of the leaf-strewn yard and sidewalk; a car he didn’t recognize completed its turn in the cul-de-sac and continued on, down the way it had come. The sound of its engine disappeared somewhere beyond the silhouettes of unlit houses.
“Who did you think it was?” Bryan smiled as he stroked his wife’s hair. “Witch hunters?”