The Best Halloween Ever (6 page)

It also wasn’t Albert or Stewart or Joanne or Maxine or me, so we didn’t hang around there—wherever “there” was. Joanne was right. Everything seemed different with all the lights out and no way to tell one room from another.

“But who
was
it?” Louella said as we picked our way down the dark hall, bumping into what we hoped was each other, “and where
is
Howard’s stroller?”

I didn’t know who “it” was, but I did know that we’d better find Howard’s stroller in a hurry, or I would have to help Louella carry him, and Howard was a lump.

We headed for voices, because we weren’t the only people temporarily lost in Woodrow Wilson School. Everywhere there were kids and parents hollering for other kids and parents—”Jolene! … Gloria! … Wayne, where are you? … Boyd Liggett, you come here to me by the office!”— and Mr. Crabtree was yelling, “Lights! Lights!” as if just yelling about them would turn them on somehow.

We did see a little flicker of light, way at the end of the hall. “Like a flashlight!” Boomer said. “Austin Hubbard had a flashlight because he’s a floor lamp. Hey Austin!” he called. “Wait up!”

But the light bobbed up and down and back and forth, and then went out.

Maybe Austin didn’t hear us, I thought. Or maybe it wasn’t Austin. Maybe it was … Who? or What?

Something brushed against my head—one of the cardboard bats?—and then Louella squealed, “O-o-o-h! There goes Howard!”

Of course he didn’t go far, and he didn’t seem to mind being dropped on the floor, but I had to feel around a little bit so I wouldn’t pick him up by one leg or something … and by accident I grabbed Joanne, who also squealed.

“It’s me!” I said. “It’s just me.”

“How am I supposed to know that?” she groaned. “You could be anybody … or anything. I’m going to sit down on the floor and stay right here till the lights come on. But somebody has to stay with me.”

I had the perfect person—Howard—but before I could hand him off to Joanne, we heard somebody yelling, above all the other noise.

“It’s alive! The whole cauldron is alive with worms!” The somebody was my mother.

W
hen we got to her, Mother had calmed down. By now some people had flashlights so I could see that her witch hat was bent in the middle and hanging down over her face. She looked a little cross-eyed, especially up close when she hugged me.

“It isn’t worms,” she said. “At least, it isn’t all worms. I think it’s
some
worms and a lot of cold spaghetti. I don’t know how it all got into the boiling cauldron… . Boiling cauldron, hah! Boiling with squirmy worms!

Anyway,” she went on, “I only left for a minute, to see if I could find you and Charlie, and when I came back … ughgh!”

“I thought you were in charge of the Mystery Maze,” I said.

“Not after some cat showed up and all but tore the whole thing down—scratching and squalling and leaving its fur everywhere … and not even its own fur. Somebody had painted it black, for Halloween, I guess.”

She leaned closer. “Goodness, I wish they would get the lights back on. I can’t quite see who’s with you.”

“Well,” I said, “Howard’s with me, and Louella, Boomer, and Maxine … “

“Not Charlie?” Mother said. “Or Cecil? Have you seen them … him … it?”

She was pretty upset, so I just said yes, which wasn’t really a lie, because I had seen “it”—the lion costume.

Then Mother said I should go get them, since I knew where they were.

“They may not still be there,” I said.

“Oh, they won’t go roaming around in the dark,” she said, “especially not in a slipcover and a floor mop.”

“You don’t know where they are,” Louella said as we left.

This was true, but I knew where the slipcover and floor mop were—in the downstairs hall by the teachers’ room, which is where we all went, leaving my mother to deal with her wormy spaghetti.

By now our eyes had begun to adjust to the darkness, but … “Even so,” Joanne said, “everything is too spooky.”

The hall to the teachers’ room was more than spooky. It was deserted.

“That’s because there’s nothing special set up here,” Stewart said. “No Haunted Hall or Monster’s Mansion … just the teachers’ room. I’ve never been in the teachers’ room,” he added. “What do they keep in there?”

“Kids,” I said, “according to Imogene Herdman.”

That was what Imogene told Charlie—that if kids went in the teachers’ room they never got out again. “The teachers keep them in there,” Imogene said, “with little bowls of water and old bologna sandwiches.”

“Come on,” Stewart said. “What do they do in there?”

“Ask Leroy,” Louella said. “According to him they hang out, watch TV, drink beer, order in pizza. I don’t know what they do. I’ve never been in there.”

“Me, either,” Albert said. “I never got invited.”

“Albert,” I said, “nobody gets invited to the teachers’ room. Sometimes you get sent there with a note for someone, but even then they don’t let you in.”

“I got sent there once in the second grade,” Maxine said, “with a note for Mrs. Campbell. I didn’t even know who Mrs. Campbell was, and I was so nervous I got a nosebleed.” She stopped at the door. “I’m not even sure I want to go in there now.”

I didn’t know whether Maxine was scared—in case Imogene was right and there was something in the teachers’ room to be scared
of—
or whether she was just remembering her nosebleed and wondering if it would always happen when she went to the teachers’ room.

“There’s just tables and chairs,” Boomer reported from inside the room. “No TV or anything good. But there’s somebody in here-re… . “ His voice faded out, or down, or away.

“Sounds like he fell in a hole,” Louella said.

Then I remembered what Alice had told me about the teachers’ room. “I think he did,” I said.

As usual, Alice was right. There
was
a hole in the floor, and Boomer was at the bottom of the hole, along with “ … Danny and Junior and a lot of first-grade kids, and Charlie’s here… . “

“We’re in the boiler room,” Cecil chimed in, “but we took off our costume before we slid down, and left it … “

Slid down?

Suddenly the lights came on again and we could see the hole and, inside it, the missing kindergarten slide, and down at the bottom …

“What’s down there?” Albert said. “It looks like—”

“Candy!” Charlie whooped. “Halloween candy! The whole boiler room is full of Halloween candy. I th-th-think it’s … I think it’s … “ He was so excited, he was stuttering. “I think it’s all the candy in the world!”

T
hat’s what it looked like—wall-to-wall candy, big piles of candy, the floor covered with candy, all kinds, all colors, all wrapped—a giant trick-or-treat supply for the rest of your life.

Milk Duds, Sugar Babies, PEZ, Milky Way, Snickers, DumDums, 3 Musketeers, Hershey’s bars, Swedish Fish, Jujubes, KitKats, Twizzlers, Crunch bars, Twix, Tootsie Rolls, Mounds bars, Starbursts, Smartees, Reese’s Pieces, M&M’s, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, PayDay bars, Almond Joy, Baby Ruth, 5th Avenue,

Mr. Goodbar, Rolos, Butterfingers, Caramello, Candy Dots, Hershey’s Kisses, Skor bars, licorice whips, Heath bars, Raisinets, Mallo Cups, Charleston Chew, Chunkies, Clark bars, Krackel, Whoppers, Sugar Daddies, Oh Henry!, Bit-O-Honey, DoveBar, Goobers, Sno-Caps, Junior mints.

We had all come down the kindergarten slide—even Albert in his laundry basket and Louella holding Howard—so it was pretty crowded in the boiler room with all of us and all the missing kids.

Anybody who had pockets in their costume was stuffing them with candy and anybody who didn’t was welcome, Albert said, to borrow part of his laundry basket.

“That’s really nice of you, Albert,” I said. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Yes, I do,” he said. “If I took all the candy for myself, I’d have to go to fat camp again this summer.”

“I wish I had Howard’s stroller,” Louella said. “It has a big pocket at the back and we could fill it up.” She sighed. “I guess Pilgrims didn’t have pockets.”

“Neither do belly dancers,” I said, but I didn’t really care. It was almost enough just to
be
there in a sea of candy.

Of course you had to wonder where it all came from, but it was a lot easier to figure out where it
didn’t
come from, which would be the PTA or Mr. Crabtree or the mayor or—this was Charlie’s idea—some kind of Halloween tooth fairy.

I guess that sounded good to the first-graders, because when Mr. Crabtree showed up and yelled,
“Where did all this come from?”
Missy Reed told him that it came from the Halloween tooth fairy.

It’s a good thing Missy was a first-grader, and cute, because Mr. Crabtree’s ears turned red at the top the way they had when Ollie

Herdman wrote the dirty words on Rhoda Gallagher’s turtle.

This was a lot worse than that, though, and Mr. Crabtree’s ears were a lot redder. After all, Rhoda could just pick up her turtle and get it out of sight and then Mr. Crabtree could pretend that there wasn’t even any turtle in the first place with or without dirty words … but here were a lot of missing kids, and the missing kindergarten slide, and a room full of candy that had to be missing from somewhere, and Mr. Crabtree didn’t know how to explain it or who to blame.

Of course neither did anyone else. “Who to blame” had never been a problem at Woodrow Wilson School—when something happened you just looked around for a Herdman. But on Halloween night at Woodrow Wilson School there weren’t any Herdmans around.

Mr. Crabtree
could
have blamed Alice for the blackout, but by the time Alice lit herself up there were already kids missing and the boiler room was already full of candy.

When Mr. Crabtree cancelled the rest of the Halloween party—before anything else happened, he said—the PTA committee got stuck with fourteen dozen doughnuts, so they blamed Mr. Crabtree for that … and Mrs. Wendleken blamed the Ohio Light and Power Company for what she called Alice’s “brush with death,” but nobody else got blamed for anything.

The police chief took charge of the candy in case it turned out to be stolen, but he said he couldn’t haul it off to the police station, and Mr. Crabtree said he couldn’t leave it in the boiler room, so it all ended up where Halloween candy is supposed to end up—with the kids.

The manager of the supermarket said he would never stock that much candy. “You stock that much candy,” he said, “you’ll have stale candy.”

He was right, because that’s what we had—stale candy. But you can still count stale candy; you can make piles of stale candy and trade for your favorite kinds; you can eat stale candy if you want to and your mother lets you and you don’t have braces.

Stale isn’t very important at Halloween. What’s important at Halloween is amount—how many, how much—and we had more candy that Halloween than ever before … or ever again, probably.

Never again at Woodrow Wilson School, for sure. That’s what Mr. Crabtree said when the PTA committee wanted to store all the cardboard bats and fake cobwebs and witch hats and ghost sheets for next year.

“No next year!” he said. “Never again!”

This meant that we could go back to Halloween as usual, which was what we all really wanted in the first place.

“Why?” my mother said. “Why do you want to run all over the neighborhood in the dark, and try to keep your costume together, and hang on to your trick-or-treat sack and your flashlight, and then, on top of everything else, stay away from the Herdmans… . Why?”

“Yes,” Charlie said, after a second.

“Yes, what?” Mother said.

“All that … even the Herdmans.” He shrugged. “That’s what Halloween is supposed to be.”

Good for you, Charlie, I thought, to know that. After all, once you go down a slide into a room full of candy you might forget what an ordinary Halloween is like.

My father was still trying to get it all straight. “You went down a slide into the boiler room?” he said. “How did you happen to do that?”

“We just followed Boomer,” Charlie said.

>“In his gorilla suit,” Cecil added.

Only I knew it wasn’t Boomer.

T
here were several clues like that, but I guess Mr. Crabtree never could tie them all together, although he kept calling people into the office to ask what they saw or heard on Halloween night. He mostly asked the wrong people, though—teachers and PTA mothers and a bunch of random kids who honestly couldn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know.

“Just all the lights went out and you didn’t know where you were and there were a lot of strange noises and spooky stuff and then a whole ton of candy!” Some of those kids also said, “Great Halloween!”

Mrs. Wendleken had a lot to say, but it was all about Alice’s beautiful, but ruined, costume that never got to win a prize, and about the leftover doughnuts that were donated to the Welfare Department, “ … so you know who got them!”

Everybody knew who got them, because the Herdmans showed up with doughnuts every day for a week.

Mr. Crabtree finally quit trying to figure it out and moved on to Thanksgiving—although every now and then you would see him go down to the boiler room and poke around the corners and shake his head.

Danny Filus and Stewart Walker helped the janitor, Mr. Sprague, move the kindergarten slide back to the playground, although Mr. Sprague said he could have done it by himself. “Those boys could have moved it,” he said. “It wasn’t so heavy.”

Boomer’s grandmother’s fur coat turned up, along with my father’s wash-the-car pants, in the lost-and-found box with all the hats and mittens and ugly scarves. Nobody knew how they got there, but everybody recognized the gorilla and the scarecrow because they’d followed one or the other to the candy.

My mother checked out Charlie’s candy and divided it into okay, not-so-good, and break-your-teeth-off, and since she wasn’t the only mother who did this, everybody had a lot of leftover candy.

The fourth grade even went to Mr. Crabtree and offered to glue all the candy together in one big pile and set it up in Woodrow Wilson School as a sculpture.

Mr. Crabtree said, “No, thank you”— “He didn’t even look at the picture we drew of it,” Charlie said—but Miss Seaworthy gave the whole fourth grade extra credit for “creative thinking.”