Toil & Trouble: A Know Not Why Halloween (Mis)adventure (8 page)

“Good,” Arthur says savagely, and goes right to town
on it.

Damn. Haunted House Day Arthur gets
real
.

+

All day, people are calling the store and dropping by
to double check the time for the haunted house.

Sometimes, those people have very tiny children in
tow.

Howie, Arthur, Cora, and Kristy watch as a smiling
mother leads her three adorable triplets back outside after very
cheerily promising to show up at seven p.m. sharp.

“Aw shit,” Cora says after a long, sad silence.
“Adorable triplets? Who even has those?”

“Does anyone else feel like a hideous monster?” Howie
asks.

“We need to do something,” Kristy says. “We can’t
just traumatize all these kids!”

“You’re telling me!” Howie says. “I don’t want to be
the person who leads those poor little triplets into the chainsaw
murder biz because they find me so dazzling that they can never
come up with a superior role model.”

“Well, I think we all know that’s not going to
happen,” Arthur says.

“Uh, first: It could happen; I’m very charismatic
with a chainsaw, probably,” Howie replies defensively. “Second: I
have an idea.”

+

And thus, the divide between upstairs and downstairs
is born. Like on that one show that Mom and Amber—and
only
Mom and Amber—like to watch.

Upstairs, they transform Arthur’s office into an
adorable orange-toned haven for gentle Halloween revelries. There
are coloring books! Three Halloween themed gingerbread house-making
kits! Enough chairs for one rousing game of musical chairs! A
costume contest with enough categories for everyone to win a
makeshift construction paper medal! (Kristy is, it comes as no
surprise, really good at coming up with myriad ways to praise
people.) Bobbing for apples! If they actually get around to buying
apples, that is. And candy—a magnificent bounty of candy.

Downstairs, who even knows.

Since Tyler Fabray didn’t actually provide any ideas
for activities, they finally come to the conclusion that they
should make the kids weave through the aisles like a maze. If they
make it out the other end, they get a bag full of candy and a
twenty-percent-off coupon for any store purchase. (Not much of a
thrill for the kids, maybe, but Arthur figures it might appeal to
the parental demographic.)

The lights will be off, the fog machine will be
fogging, and there will be monsters lurking at every turn, just
waiting to freak peeps out.

“Ideally,” Arthur says, “to the extent where someone
pees their pants. Tyler’s suggestion,” he adds, off everybody’s
less-than-enchanted looks. “Not mine.”

He consults the clipboard holding the list of Tyler’s
demands.

“We still need blood, guts, and vomit,” he
reports.

“
Do
we, though?” says Howie.

“We could cut you open and use yours,” Cora says
sweetly. “You’d probably vomit from shock.”

“It might be less painful than this evening,” Arthur
says.

+

By five o’clock, all of the aisles have strips of
gauze hanging at both ends, from ceiling to floor. In order to
actually walk through the aisles, you have to push your way through
the gauzey bits first.

Howie can’t help thinking that it just looks like the
real poor man’s alternative to a bead curtain.

“In the dark, it’ll be creepy,” Cora swears, lovingly
sticking little plastic spiders into the gauze.

Arthur comes in, back from his panic run to the
grocery store. Out of his canvas bag, he pulls ... a bag of apples,
a bottle of ketchup, and a line of link sausages.

“Bobbing for apples, for upstairs,” he says, of the
apples. Then he points to the ketchup and sausages. “Blood and
guts, for downstairs.”

Kristy wrinkles her nose. “What are we supposed to do
with the sausages?”

“I don’t know. Just scatter them around? No ketchup
on the carpet, please.”

“I think wasting sausages is against my religion,”
Howie says.

“Arthur,” Cora says coyly, “would you say Howie knows
how to worship a sausage?”

“Don’t be crass,” Arthur replies, “and yes.”

Howie punches the air victoriously.

“Did he mean that in the naughty fun way or the
breakfast way?” Cora muses.

“Either way,” Howie says, “this is a proud moment for
me.”

Cora laughs, then turns to Kristy to make sure she’s
in on the fun. For once, she isn’t.

“You okay, KQ?” Howie says.

“Just tired,” Kristy replies wistfully.

“When all this is over,” Howie says, slinging an arm
around her shoulders, “we’re gonna watch all the Channing Tatum
movies your heart could desire.”

“Even Dear John?” Kristy says, brightening a
little.

“Especially Dear John,” Howie says, and doesn’t even
grimace. True selflessness.

“Ma-gic Mike! Ma-gic Mike!” Cora chants.

“If you’re going to chant about stripper movies, can
you at least do it while you’re smearing ketchup all over the gauze
to make it look eerily bloodstained?” Arthur requests.

It’s hard to resist an order like that.

+

When they’re all done, they turn the lights off and
try out the strobe light.

True to Cora’s word, the gauze takes on a menacing,
ghostly vibe. Even though Howie
knows
the red stains are
from ketchup, well—knowing and feeling are two very different
things.

“It’s awful,” Kristy murmurs.

“And tomato-scented,” Cora observes.

“Which only makes it creepier,” Howie says.

“Well,” Arthur says, “that’s something.”

+

Next up: costumes.

Howie sticks with his jeans and t-shirt; he argues
that the very essence of a chainsaw murderer’s fearsomeness is that
he could be just like anyone else until you put that chainsaw in
his hand. Everyone is too grim-of-spirits to fight him on it.

Arthur looks sort of like the human embodiment of a
Mumford & Sons song. He’s wearing an old jacket with elbow
patches that Howie has always made fun of, and he looks very ready
to wander a long and dusty road and sing his weary heart’s song.
Or, well, Taylor’s weary heart’s song.

Cora is covered in a suit of shaggy fur and a
fur-meets-rubber werewolf mask which boasts a set of seriously
nasty bloody jaws. She, at least, seems right at home.

Kristy is, objectively speaking, a truly adorable
sexy mummy, but she doesn’t look happy about it.

Once they’ve all changed, Cora’s friend Nick—a guy
Howie once lovingly dubbed Tights McGee—comes to the store to do
their makeup. He’s got no tights in sight, and formidable mad
skills with a ... makeup brush thingie.

He gives Arthur the sickly pallor of a ghostly
troubadour, then paints little red dots all over Howie’s face.

“The blood splatter of your victims,” Nick explains.
He sounds
way
too chill with that idea.

“Is it okay if I just pretend they’re freckles?”
Howie says.

“Sure, Pippi Deathstocking.”

“Pippi Longstocking is creepy enough, like, just as
she is,” Howie says. “You don’t have to embellish.”

“God, I loved Pippi Longstocking when I was a kid,”
Cora says, grinning nostalgically.

“That does not surprise me,” says Arthur.

Nick doesn’t stop with the blood freckles. Nope. He
also attacks Howie’s eyeballs—well, okay, the area around them—with
eyeliner.

“So, uh, am I the David Bowie of chainsaw murderers?”
Howie asks.

“If you want your crazy eyes to be the last thing
your victim remembers, then you gotta make them stand out,” says
Nick, with the kind of simple authority that a guy can wield when
he’s earned the nickname Tights McGee.

Secretly, Howie doesn’t hate it.

Since Cora’s going to have her face all covered in
werewolf mask, she foregoes her chance for freaky makeup. Kristy
goes last, and basically comes out looking like a 1950s pinup girl.
Even though she is definitely the most non-hideous member of the
group, she still isn’t her usual chipper-as-a-human-puppy self.

“You guys are really mopey for a bunch of freaks
about to get their Halloween on,” Nick says. Apparently he is a
dude with the power to read the room.

“Uh, here,” Howie says, handing over his phone. “Take
our picture. I’ll send it to Amber. Let her know that she and Mitch
really need to up their costume game if they wanna roll with this
fierce crowd.”

As they pose, Howie is sort of at a loss with what to
do with this plastic chainsaw. He is just not good at communicating
an air of
I’LL FUCK YOU UP, LUMBERJACK STYLE
. He gets that
he is probably not supposed to wave the chainsaw around like it’s a
foam finger at a football game, but it’s hard not to. Surely some
chainsaw murderers must be jaunty folk, right?

Nick snaps the picture. Howie takes a look at it.

Wow. They are a ... non-enthusiastic bunch.

A few minutes after he sends it to her, Amber texts
back,
That is the saddest group of monsters I’ve ever seen. What
is Kristy supposed to be, a sexy roll of toilet paper? That doesn’t
really strike me as her style ...

Howie texts back an abridged version of the Saga of
Tyler Fabray and The Sexy Mummy.

Amber never answers.

You know it’s bad when even Amber can’t come up with
something elegantly disdainful to say.

+

At six o’clock, they run through their list of
assigned duties.

Kristy will stand guard at the cash register;
ideally, parents will be motivated to do a bit of light Halloweeny
shopping in the midst of the horror shows, although Howie is a
little doubtful as to how well that will go. Usually shopping
doesn’t happen in the dark. Unless you’re at Abercrombie.

Howie, Arthur, and Cora will wander the shelfy maze
of terror. So will Amber, Mitch, and Cliff, once they all get off
work and show up.

There’s a bit of a pickle when it comes to figuring
out who will take care of the upstairs shindig.

And so Howie does what every mighty and fearsome man
might do upon encountering an insurmountable obstacle:

He calls his mom for help.

He also shoots off a text to the only other person he
can think of who hasn’t already gotten roped into this pit of
crazy: Mitch’s gigantic Rabelaisian teddy bear of a roommate,
Rudy.

Desperate times, yo.

+

Mom hustles on over right away. Partly because she’s
an outstanding human being, and partly because Howie knows she is
just dying to witness all the idiocy. It is probably unhealthy to
be this delighted by watching your child make a fool of
himself.

Rudy opts for a more dramatic entrance.

Or maybe that’s just his natural thunder.

Upstairs in Arthur’s office, Howie can
hear
the ol’ Rudester on his way. The stairs shake with every one of his
godlike footsteps.

“Oh my,” Mom says, distracted from teasing Howie
about his super cool blood freckles.

Rudy stands in the doorway, towering over everyone,
dressed in a pretty splendid bat costume.

Not Batman.

Just a bat.

“’Sup,” he says.

“Thank you for coming at the last minute. Are you
sure you’re up for the task?” Arthur asks Rudy.

“No worries, sad hobo,” Rudy says, nonchalantly
waving his arms. His bat wing sleeves flutter. “Kids love me. We
get each other. We’re on the same level, see.”

“Well, I can believe that,” Arthur admits. “Er,
you’ll be keeping an eye on things with Howie’s mother Miranda,
then.”

“What up, Howbell’s mom,” Rudy says.

“What up, Mitch’s roommate,” Mom replies gamely.

“Ha ha! Nice one,” Rudy says. “You ready for
this?”

Mom nods, pretty epically. “Oh yeah.”

“Can you handle it?” Howie whispers, doing one last
mommy check before he heads downstairs. “What do you think?”

“I think it’s a good thing I’m with David,” Mom
replies deviously, “because otherwise you might have gotten a new
stepdaddy tonight.”

“You are a disgusting person,” Howie tells his
mother, with greatest love and respect, and then books it
downstairs.

+

At seven o’clock, the crowd has arrived.

Arthur looks out the window at them.

They all stand outside in the parking lot: at least
two dozen costumed-up kids and their parents. Tyler Fabray stands
in front of everyone, dressed like a pirate, exuding the sort of
swagger that suggests the store is his own personal ship.