"Can you see something?" Jimmy asked.
Donna nodded ever so slightly.
"What? What"s in there?"
She stepped back, lowered her arms and turned her back to the door and said very softly, "I think we"d better get out of here."
Peggy Pan groaned.
Jimmy muttered, "Oh, s.h.i.t."
I suddenly felt cold and shrively all over my body.
We let Donna take the lead. Staying close behind her, we quietly descended the porch stairs. At the bottom, I thought she might break into a run. She didn"t, though. She just walked slowly through the high weeds.
I glanced back at the porch a couple of times. It was still dark. n.o.body seemed to be coming after us.
Entering the shadows of some trees near the middle of the lawn, Donna almost disappeared. We all hurried toward her. In a hushed voice, Jimmy said, "What did you see?"
"Nothing, really," she said.
"Yes, you did," Peggy Pan insisted.
"No, I mean..." She stopped.
The four of us stood there in the darkness. Though we weren"t far from the sidewalk where Nick and the girls were waiting, a high clump of bushes blocked our view of them.
"Okay," Donna said. "Look, this is just between us. They ran off, so they"ve got no right to hear about it, okay?"
"Sure," I said.
Peggy Pan nodded.
Jimmy whispered, "They"ll never hear it from me."
"Okay," Donna said. "Here"s the thing. It was really dark in the house. I didn"t see anything at first. But then I could just barely make out a stairway. And something was on the stairway. Sitting on the stairs partway up, and it seemed to be staring straight at me."
"What was it?" Peggy Pan whispered.
"I"m not really sure, but I think it was a cat. A white cat."
"So?" Jimmy asked.
I felt a little letdown, myself.
"I think it was sitting on someone"s lap," she said.
"Oh, jeez."
Peggy Pan made a high-pitched whiny noise. Or maybe that was me.
"He was wearing dark clothes, I think. So I really couldn"t see him. Or her. All I could see was this darkness on the stairs."
"How do you know it was even there?" Jimmy asked.
"The cat was white."
"So?"
"Someone was petting it."
"Let"s get outta here," Jimmy said.
Donna nodded. "Remember, not a word to Nick or Alice or Olive. We"ll just say nothing happened."
We all agreed, and Donna led us through the trees. Out in the moonlight, we walked around the clump of bushes and found Nick and the girls waiting.
"So what happened?" Nick asked.
We shrugged and shook our heads. Donna said, "Nothing much. We knocked, but n.o.body was home."
Smirking, he said, "You mean Boo and his cats weren"t there?"
Donna grinned. "You didn"t believe that story, did you? It"s Halloween. I made it up."
Nick scowled. The ballerina fairy G.o.dmother princess looked very relieved, and Yoda or ET sighed through her mask.
"Good story," I said.
"Thanks, Matt," said Donna.
"Can we still trick-or-treat some more?" Peggy Pan asked.
Donna shrugged. "It"s getting pretty late. And we"re a long way from home."
"Please?" asked Peggy Pan.
Her little friends started jumping and yelling, "Please? Please-please-please? Oh, please? Pretty please?"
"How about you, Nick?"
"Sure, why not?"
"Guys?" she asked Jimmy and me.
"Yeah!"
"Sure!"
"Okay," Donna said. "We"ll go a little longer. Maybe just for a couple more blocks."
"Yayyy!"
The girls led the way, running up the sidewalk to the next house- a normal house- cutting across its front lawn and rushing up half a dozen stairs to its well-lighted porch. Nick chased them up the stairs. Jimmy and I hurried. By the time the door was opened by an elderly man with a tray of candy, Jimmy and I were also on the porch, Donna waiting at the foot of the stairs.
We were back to normal.
Almost.
We hurried from house to house, reached the end of the block, crossed the street, and went to the corner house on the next block. It was just after that house, when we met on the sidewalk and headed for the next house, that Donna, lagging behind, called out, "Hang on a minute, okay? Come on back."
So we all turned around. As we hurried toward the place where Donna was waiting on the sidewalk, she raised her hand, index finger extended, and poked the finger at each of us. Like a school bus driver counting heads before starting home from a field trip.
She finished.
"Seven," she said.
"That"s right," I said as I halted in front of her.
"Seven not including me," she said.
I whirled around and there was Jimmy the woebegone mummy dangling loose strips of sheet, some of which by now were trailing on the sidewalk. There was Nick the Jedi warrior with his light saber. And Peggy Pan and the ballerina fairy princess G.o.dmother and Yoda or ET and- bringing up the rear but only a few paces behind the girls- someone else.
He carried a grocery bag like any other trick-or-treater, but he was bigger than the girls, bigger than Nick, bigger than any of us. He wore a dark cowboy hat and a black raincoat and jeans. Underneath his hat was some sort of strange mask. I couldn"t tell what it was at first. When he got closer, though, I saw that it seemed to be made of red bandannas. It covered his entire head and neck. It had ragged round holes over his eyes, a slot over his mouth.
I had no idea where he"d come from.
I had no idea how long he"d been walking along with us, though certainly he"d shown up sometime after we"d left the dark old house.
Is that where he joined us? I wondered.
Speaking in his direction, Donna said, "I don"t think we know you." Though she sounded friendly and calm, I heard tension in her voice.
The stranger nodded but didn"t speak.
The girls, apparently noticing him for the first time, stepped away from him.
"Where"d you come from?"
He raised an arm. When he pointed, I saw that his hand was covered by a black leather glove.
He pointed behind us. In the direction of the dark old house... and lots of other places.
"Who are you?" Donna asked.
And he said, "Killer Joe."
Alice and Olive took another step away from him, but Peggy Pan stepped closer. "You aren"t gonna kill us are you?" she asked.
He shook his head.
"Cool costume," Jimmy said.
"Thanks," said Killer Joe.
"So who are you really?" Donna asked.
Killer Joe shrugged.
"How about taking off the mask?" she said.
He shook his head.
"Do we know you?" Jimmy asked.
Another shrug.
"You wanta come along trick-or-treating with us?" Peggy Pan asked.
He nodded. Yes.
Donna shook her head. No. "Not unless we know who you are." Her voice no longer sounded quite so calm or friendly. She was speaking more loudly than before. And breathing hard.
She"s scared.
And she wasn"t the only one.
"I"m sorry," she said, "but you"ll either have to let us see who you are or leave. Okay? We"ve got little kids here, and... and we don"t know who you are."
"He"s Killer Joe," Nick explained.
"We know," Jimmy said.
"But he"s all by himself," Peggy Pan said. "He shouldn"t have to go trick-or-treating all by himself." She stepped right up to him and took hold of a sleeve of his raincoat and tilted her head back.
"Peggy," Donna said. "Get away from him. Right now."
"No!"
Killer Joe shrugged, then gently pulled his arm out of Peggy"s grip and turned around and began to walk away very slowly, his head down.
And I suddenly figured this was some poor kid- a big and possibly somewhat weird kid, granted- but a kid nevertheless without any friends, trying his best to have fun on Halloween night, and now he was being shunned by us.
I actually got a tight feeling in my throat.
Peggy Pan, sounding desolate, called out, " "Bye, Killer Joe!"
Still walking away, head still down, he raised a hand to acknowledge the girl"s farewell.