Dunc's Halloween (2 page)

Dunc was in midhurdle over a plastic flamingo in the back of Mrs. Rigletti's yard when he heard the howl again.

It was closer than it had been the first time.

Much closer.

Again the howl sounded, rattling the few remaining leaves in Mrs. Rigletti's ash tree.

Amos had frozen next to a tall hedge, and Dunc took a step to be near him.

“I'm not really happy about this,” Amos whispered.

Dunc nodded, started to say something, then stopped.

Footsteps padded on the opposite side of the hedge—big footsteps. They seemed to echo.

“Dunc, you don't suppose this is somebody playing a joke, do you?”

A huge muzzle came around the end of the hedge, snorting twin jets of steam from the nostrils. Then a head, and yellow-green eyes that looked directly at and through Amos and Dunc. The lips lifted to show a seemingly endless row of daggerlike teeth, and it took Dunc a full second to realize that the eyes were looking
down
on them. Whatever it was, the thing was enormous—a scabby, furry, growling house.

Amos nodded, smiling. “Sure. Look—you can see the line where the rubber mask ends. Right there, in back of the drool. It's all a—”

He pointed with a finger and very nearly lost it. In a spray of saliva the teeth swirled and went for the hand. But at the same time Dunc grabbed Amos by the collar and jerked him backward, and the fangs missed and took off about a two-foot section of hedge as neat as a gas-powered trimmer.

“—joke.”

By the second step, Dunc was running, dragging Amos backward.

Time hung for half a second, two. Dunc and Amos were moving. Amos's legs caught up with him and his body wheeled, but his head was still facing back at the monster.

The beast spat bits of the Riglettis' hedge, dropped to all fours, and tore after the boys.

Dunc dug hard with his left foot, feinted to the right, then leaned and angled left, ducking down to dive beneath the hedge. Amos had been looking back, watching the thing gain on them, but when he turned, Dunc was suddenly not there.

“Dunc!”

“Ummph.…” Dunc scrabbled through to the other side. “Come left. Hard!”

But it was too late. Amos was already past the point where Dunc had dived. He smelled breath on his neck, hot breath, worse than anchovy-pizza breath. Amos threw another quick look over his shoulder and found himself looking down a throat as big as a tunnel.

He hung a right so fast, it threw the monster off.

“I'll come around.” Amos snatched a pink plastic flamingo out of the ground as he passed through the Riglettis' garden and tried to use it as a sword. The monster bit its head off.

“Dunc, help me!” He was angling back around to the hedge where Dunc was waiting by the hole that went through to the other side.

“Dive! When you get here, dive, and I'll grab you!”

Amos took two more giant leaps, shoved the pink flamingo back once more, heard a crunch, and dived for the hole.

And almost made it.

He came in at a slight angle. Because he was off to the side, his front half went through clean, but he jammed at the waist for half a second, his knees wedged in and his butt jammed up in the air.

A perfect target.

The fangs came down in a drooling arc, opened and bared, then slammed shut like a vise, and half of Amos would have been
gone, but once more Dunc grabbed him by the collar and jerked him. The teeth all but missed—one fang caught the fleshy part of his rear end and made a small rip through Amos's jeans and cut a little scratch. Like a cork in a bottle, Amos popped through.

“Now!” Dunc snapped. “Now
move
!”

He dragged Amos to his feet as the monster's head came slamming into the hole. It was approximately twenty feet to the Riglettis' backyard ash tree, and Dunc made it in one leap, with Amos flying behind him like a rag.

“Climb!” Dunc screamed, grabbing a limb. “It's our only chance.…”

Amos caught the same limb, and they hit the tree like cats chased by dogs.

Even then it wouldn't have worked. It was too close. What saved them was that the beast became stuck momentarily in the hole, couldn't get through, and had to pull out and go around the hedge.

As it was, Amos barely escaped getting another wound in the same place. He heard the jaws snap shut and broke all existing
records for tree-climbing by using Dunc's back as a ladder.

Twelve feet up, there was a cross limb, and the boys sat on it, peering down.

“What do you suppose it is?” Amos asked. He had to scoot sideways to avoid sitting where his butt was scratched. “It sort of looks like a dog.”

“If you could cross a dog with a crocodile, maybe.” Dunc shook his head. “And then it would have to be a very big dog and a very big crocodile.”

The beast leaped up at them and the boys jumped, but it missed them by half a foot. Amos was still holding the tattered bits of the plastic flamingo—he'd forgotten to drop it—and he swiped at the monster with the end of it.

For a moment it stood, its head cocked sideways, peering up at them with yellow-green eyes, a low growl rumbling in its throat.

“The eyes,” Dunc said. “Isn't there something familiar about them?”

Amos stared down, then shook his head.
“I don't see anything there I recognize—or want to recognize.”

Again it jumped up at them, and again it was half a foot short. Its claws shredded tree bark on the way down, and this time it lowered to a crouch, growled up at them once more, and with a loping gait disappeared off into the darkness along the hedge and between the houses.

“Gone,” Dunc said. “I think it's gone.”

Neither boy moved.

“Yup.” Amos nodded. “I think you might be right. It's gone.”

No movement.

“I guess we could get down,” Dunc said.

“Yeah, I guess we could.”

Still no movement.

Mrs. Rigletti came out at seven the next morning, just after daylight, to empty her cat box. She was surprised to see Dunc and Amos sitting in the ash tree in her back yard.

“Good morning, Mrs. Rigletti,” Amos greeted her. “How are you this morning?”

Mrs. Rigletti stared a them for a full half
minute. Amos was still holding a scrap of her pink plastic flamingo, and her hedge looked as if a buzz saw had hit it.

Her mouth opened, closed, opened and closed again, and she turned back into the house, shaking her head.

She knew about Amos Binder, knew better than to ask questions.

.
3

Amos awakened just after noon with a funny, dried-out taste in his mouth, as if he'd been panting. After his mother and father had chewed him out for being gone all night and grounded him until sometime after he started shaving, he'd put iodine on the scratch on his rear end and crawled into bed for a nap.

He climbed out of bed and used the mirror over his dresser to examine the scratch again.

It was gone. Completely. There was an iodine stain there, but no scratch, no other
mark of any kind, and even the slight pain was gone.

“What—”

At that precise moment the phone rang.

Dunc had once tried to calm Amos about the phone ringing, tried to use logic to show Amos that it wasn't really necessary to go totally insane when the phone rang. And Amos had nodded and agreed, and the next time the phone rang he had been gone like a greyhound when a rabbit sped past. He simply couldn't help it. “I come from a bad gene pool,” he'd told Dunc. “Bad phone genes back there somewhere.”

Phones were located at four strategic points throughout the Binder home. They had started with one in the living room and one in the kitchen. But after Amos had destroyed the upstairs railing trying to get down by the second ring, his father had put two more phones upstairs, one by the bathroom door—because he thought Amos spent so much time in the bathroom—and one near the top of the stairway. All the phones had twenty-foot-long coiled cords to give Amos room to maneuver. In a family conference
Amos's mother—who had already been run over several times—had suggested putting phones every four feet along all the walls, but Amos's father had voted it down as too expensive. Amy, Amos's sister, had wanted to put a phone in the toilet and when he went for it “flush him away,” but nobody but Amos had taken her seriously.

Obeying instinct, Amos now made for the phone in the upstairs hall. He showed classic phone-answering form: arms and legs pumping, tongue out to the side, a little spit flying back. There was a good chance he would make it by that all-important second ring.

Or there
would
have been a good chance.

Except.

His sweat pants were still down around his ankles because he had been examining the scratch on his rear end.

He was moving forward at close to terminal velocity—or his top half was, but the bottom half couldn't keep up.

He started down.

One scrabbling, clawing hand caught the doorknob and opened the door, and he went
through, propelled forward by his tangled, driving legs.

He snagged the phone from the wall on the way past and looked up in horror to see that he was aimed at the open bathroom door—the bathroom was straight across from his room—and worse, at the toilet.

Headfirst.

He slammed the phone to his ear. “Hello …”

And was going to add: “… Melissa,” because he was certain it was she, but the speed with which he was pounding forward and down at the same time drove his head cleanly, perfectly into the toilet.

For a moment it seemed the toilet was going to win. Amos's arms and legs flailed, and the phone flew into the tub, then bounced back as the cord jerked it out into the hallway. In a spray of water Amos fought his way free, scrabbled back into the hallway on all fours, his sweat pants still down around his ankles, and he captured the phone once more.

“Amos—is that you?” Dunc's voice was on the other end.

“Dunc? I was sure it was Melissa.”

“I'm sorry. I should have known. How are you doing?”

Amos looked down at the water dripping, pulled his pants up, and stood. “About normal.”

“We need to get together.”

“I'm grounded. My folks are gone for the day, but I can't leave.”

“Grounded? Because a monster kept you in a tree all night?”

“Well …”

“Well what?”

“I didn't tell them about the monster. I thought it wouldn't be believable.”

Dunc sighed. “Amos—what did you tell your folks?”

“That we were kidnapped by Peruvian money-launderers who needed us to help count drug money.”

“And you thought they'd believe
that
?”

“It was all I could think of on short notice. It was better than my second choice—I was going to tell them we'd been kidnapped by a UFO and they held us for hours while they performed unspeakable surgery
through our navels with a long needle, trying to learn the secrets of the human race. I just couldn't work it into the conversation.”

Dunc snorted. “I don't blame them for grounding you.”

Amos shook his head and cleared the water out of his hair and eyes. “What did you mean when you said we have to get together?”

“I've been doing some research down at the library this morning, and I think we may have a problem.”

“You mean you got up this morning and went to the library?”

“No. I was up all night, remember? There's something we have to investigate.”

“I hate that.”

“Hate what?”

“When you say that—‘we have to investigate.' I always get in trouble when you say that.”

“Not always.”

“Always. Every single time. And it's going to happen again, I can feel it.”

Dunc ignored him. “When your folks
grounded you, did they say you couldn't have company?”

“Not exactly. Dad said I couldn't do anything that was fun for the rest of my life. But that doesn't count here—I'm sure this isn't going to be any fun.”

“I'll be right over.”

Dunc hung up before Amos could say another word, which was just as well because Amos had been about to tell him not to come.

Amos replaced the phone and moved downstairs. When Dunc said he would be right over, he meant it, and Amos was hungry. As a matter of fact, he felt as if he were starving.

I haven't eaten
, he thought,
since I was born. They don't make enough food
.

He moved to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.

“Leftovers.”

Leaning against the door, he polished off a pound of potato salad, half a meat loaf, and a full bowl of macaroni salad.

And he was still hungry.

In the meat tray there was a full pound
of hamburger, extra lean, that his mother was saving for spaghetti that night.

Amos stared at the meat.

Strange
, he thought,
how good it looks, lying there, all raw and fresh
. Little bits of blood in it were mixed with pieces of meat and fat, just ground up and waiting. Perfectly good bloody meat, just going to waste.