asakiyume | Halloween, 1998

Much about this story is true. The two neighborhoods are real, the children are real (though their names have been changed), and the party was, in fact, real. Not quite as described, but real.

These days we live in a neighborhood that is the Halloween destination of children from all over town because its relatively closely packed houses makes it possible to collect a lot of candy in a short time. In an evening, we typically receive 400 kids; we start storing up candy in September.

But it wasn’t this way at our old house. Our old house was in a more rundown, relaxed, idiosyncratic part of town without a heavy concentration of kids going trick-or-treating. We only spent one Halloween in that house, but it was an interesting one.

I took out all the kids— eight-year-old Darius, seven-year old Diana, and five-year-old Tranquility, plus Diana’s friend Collette, and baby Gabriel in the backpack. It was quite dark, the sort of darkness that swallows you up and makes you feel like a disembodied spirit as you walk along. Many houses didn’t have lights on; we didn’t go to them. We went to the houses of all the other kids at the bus stop, but that wasn’t very many houses. The candy bags were looking rather pathetic. So we set off down a side road. In one direction, that took us to the house of the guy with the llamas and the “air mail” mailbox stuck up on a 20-foot pole. In the other direction, it took us to the house with bluebird boxes for sale and the house with the sign that says “German shepherd crossing.”

The house with the sign is set back from the road and down a slope. As we walked down its driveway, we could hear music, which was encouraging. We didn’t know who lived here, but maybe it would be college kids having a Halloween party, and if so, maybe they’d be generous with candy.

We ended up walking all the way around to the back of the house, where sliding glass doors were open, even though it was a chilly evening. A party was definitely in progress inside. No one seemed to notice us when we came up and tapped on the glass. We ended up wandering in.

There were a good number of people inside, and tables decorated with not only jack-o-lanterns, but hollowed-out and carved turnips, apples, and squashes. Leaves had blown in from outside and were all over the floor. There were quite a few German shepherds around, too, watching everything with their golden eyes. They looked rather more wolflike than the German shepherds I’ve known. Really quite wolflike.

Diana tugged at my sleeve.

“Look mom, foxes!” she said. I jumped. There was a fox under one of the tables, another sitting on an old couch, and another resting its chin on the paws of one of the wolves. German shepherds, I mean.

“I didn’t think foxes got along with dogs,” I muttered.

“Those are wolves,” said Diana.

“I didn’t think foxes got along with wolves either,” I said. “I think maybe we should go. This is their private party, and they seem too, uh, busy to think about giving you guys treats. And I don’t think it’s legal to have wolves and foxes as pets. Let’s go.”

“Don’t go—you haven’t had anything to eat, or anything to drink,” said a man, putting his arm over my shoulder (patting Gabriel on the head in the process) and leading me to one of the tables. There were some plastic bowls filled with pretzels and potato chips, but what caught my eye were the large leaves—white oak and red oak leaves as large as platters, and on them wizened wild grapes and feral apples and shaggy-mane mushrooms. A squirrel darted across the table to where acorns were laid out on a catalpa leaf, grabbed one, and disappeared down the leg of the table. There was a squeal as the fox from the next table over dispatched it and began its own feast.

“Aw, poor squirrel,” said Darius, who had already helped himself to some of the pretzels. Then, seeing another squirrel poking its head over the glass doors’ metal runway, he grabbed a couple of acorns and went back over. He extended his hand and waited for the squirrel to take an acorn.

“Look what I have; look what she made me!” exclaimed Tranquility. To my surprise, she was now perched on the shoulders of a woman whose clothes you could hardly see, because the woman had wrapped herself in masses of virginia creeper vines, still with some tattered scarlet leaves. Tranquility was holding up a single tulip poplar leaf into which holes had been torn for eyes. The twin peaks of the leaf made ears: it was a cat mask.

“Water or cider?” said the man who had led me to the table, and turning to answer, I saw he wasn’t talking to me at all: he had lifted Gabriel out of the backpack and was holding him easily in one arm.

“Hey, hey, excuse me, but I think I should--” I began, but Gabriel’s laughter interrupted. The man had just dripped brown liquid from a mussel shell into Gabriel’s mouth, and Gabriel clearly approved.

“So the little one likes our host’s cider,” said the man. “But you should try the water. Best water of the year—we drew it directly from where the stars were reflected thickest, before clouds came up. It’s filled with goodness. Have some; you’ll never feel the same again.”

“Or just have some ginger ale,” whispered a voice to my right. A frightened-looking young woman in a supermarket witch costume and bright red lipstick offered me a cup of straw-colored soda. “You maybe want to get out of here,” she whispered in an even quieter voice. “There’s candy for the kids by the door.”

“So sober,” said the man, shaking his head. “It’s no way to celebrate. Our host knows the virtues of the starlight water.” He looked across the room to where a young man dressed as a pirate was surrounded by more folk in leaves and vines. Even from across the room, I could see the pirate’s face was flushed, though his lips were very pale.

“We’re gonna have real music now, Jenny!” he called out to the young woman beside me. “Our friends are gonna play. Where’re Justin and Rose? Where’s Will? Hey guys, let’s go; let’s dance!” He pressed a button on the CD player, and Celine Dion stopped telling us that her heart would go on. Instead, from the leafy crowd came the sound of a drum and then two flutes, homemade creations that looked like they had only this morning been attached to trees. Perhaps they had been.

Whatever the properties of the water might be, the music was definitely intoxicating. Collette, who had been, I realized with a flare of panic, sitting astride one of the wolves, began clapping her hands to the beat. She got up and joined the guests, who now formed a circle around the perimeter of the room and started to dance. The wolf got up too and gamboled in and out among the dancers, crouching down like a dog begging to play, then jumping up and dashing about. I couldn’t see where the other wolves had gotten too, but I did see one of the foxes put its front paws on one of the tables and pull down a bowl of potato chips.

“Greedy guts,” said the woman who was balancing Tranquility on her shoulders, leaning down to scratch the fox under its chin. “You like that stuff?” Tranquility slipped off the woman’s shoulders and grabbed my hand.

“Let’s dance too,” she said. I pulled my arms out from the now-empty baby carrier. Where was Gabriel again? Oh yeah, with that man, who was up at the front of the dancers. The man raised his piece of shell to toast the host, and Gabriel raised both his arms in imitation, a little tow-headed master of ceremonies.

So Tranquility and I joined in the dance. We danced round and round the room, until I could feel sweat running down my sides, and at that point the dance spilled out through the open doors and onto the frosty lawn, and it was a relief to feel that cold air, a relief and a spur. More dancing!

At some point someone grabbed my hand and pulled me out from the circle. It was Jenny. “Don’t you have to get your kids home?” she said. She wasn’t whispering now, but it was hard to hear her over the flutes and the drums, and I itched to get back to dancing.

“I suppose so, soon, yeah,” I said. “Maybe in a few minutes.”

“Go now. Look, I gave your oldest the whole candy basket. You don’t want to stay. They’re going to dance away, and they’ll take whoever they can with them. They’ve got Tommy already, for sure; I don’t think there’s any way he’ll listen to me now, not after that water. Stupid Tommy. He gets up this morning and hollers out at the hills, ‘Inviting all wild things to our party this evening! Come one and all! Bring drinks!’ And then this happens.”

She looked miserable. Glancing past her, I saw that the circle of dancers had moved further down the back lawn. Much more and they’d be in the woods.

“Want me to get the girls?” asked Darius. He had a squirrel perched on his shoulder now.

“I guess,” I said. I understood what Jenny was saying; she was right; she was definitely right, but . . . I watched Darius pull first Tranquility and then Diana and Collette from the circle. There was still Gabriel to retrieve. I crossed the lawn, approached the man who was holding Gabriel. The man was wearing a crown of oak leaves now—had he been before, and I hadn’t seen? So were the other dancers, so was Tommy. The man wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t notice me until I let the dance pull me in again. Then he smiled at me.

“Can you dance all through the night?” he asked. Yes, I thought, I can dance any piney path, any leaf-strewn way you choose to dance along. But what I said was, “I have to take Gabriel home.” I reached for him, but the man hugged Gabriel to his chest.

“Why? You’ve got four there, you need this one too? Let us have him.”

I pulled Gabriel out of his arms, and Gabriel began to wail. The dancers continued on their way, unconcerned. The man paused a moment.

“Crying—why do you people do it so much? And if you let me have him, he’d never cry again.” He shrugged and turned back to the dance. The first dancers were already into the woods, the foxes and wolves weaving in and out among them.

“Let’s get on home,” I said to the kids. “I have no idea what time it is.”

I meant to go back to that house the next day and ask Jenny whether Tommy really was gone for good or whether he made it home in the morning, but I never did. I kept my eye out for missing-persons stories, too, but didn’t notice any, so to this day, I don’t know how that part of the story ended.