Time of goblins, ghosts, and ghouls
Haunted hours when Satan rules...

The lines of a long forgotten Halloween poem drifted through his mind like seeds of despair, and he paused in his dictation. Before his desk his secretary looked up cautiously.

"Mr. Clark, is something wrong?"

Time of shrieking horrors at night
Of icy talons dipped in fright...

He didn't hear her. Hand in hand with his son, he relived the night of a year before when they had gone trick-or treating from house to house. First, the Murdocks, then the Swansons.

Monster time when shadows creep
Changelings crawling from the deep,
Time to run and try to hide
From moon-bright demons fiery-eyed...

"Mr. Clark?" Her voice was insistent now, becoming alarmed. With an effort he forced the words from his mind and rose.

"That's it for today, Jane," he said. "I believe I'll... I believe I'll be going home early."

# # #

How many times could he go over it in his mind, turning it this way, that way, looking for an answer that had eluded him before? How many times had he trod the same path of pain and despair, haunted by a memory?

He pressed the accelerator, braked at a light. Green, go. Red, stop. Yellow, caution.

But he had been cautious, he reminded himself, fighting back tears that would force him to pull off the road. After seven years of trying to have a child and two more of endlessly making the rounds of adoption agencies, Nora had miraculously conceived. Despite his grief, a smile flickered as he remembered. The day she had told him she was pregnant, he had felt reborn. They had felt so happy.

Then came the nine months of planning. Going to the doctor, painting the baby's room – formerly his den – a bright shade of lemon. Waiting, fearing, waiting some more until...

He had been born.

A beautiful, healthy boy.

They had picked the names months before. Daniel, after his father, Susan after her closest aunt. And when Danny came home, he had cooed and smiled at them in his bassinet, looking like he was sired by royalty. Laughing, their love for each other renewed, he and Nora had held each other. They had been so happy...

Yellow for caution.

But he – both of them – had been cautious as Daniel grew up tall and straight and the most beautiful child imaginable. Already, at seven, his teachers were pronouncing him precocious and gifted. Together they had watched him grow, unable to believe that they, an infertile couple in their late thirties, could have created such a child. Yes, they had been very careful to see that he was healthy and never hurt, that no cool winds ever brushed his hair or that he caught even the ghost of a cold. And their love and constant vigilance had been rewarded. For not once had Daniel ever had an illness. Not once had anything ever gone wrong.

Until last Halloween, three hundred and sixty-five days ago, when he had taken his son about the neighborhood asking for candy.

# # #

He had been parked in the driveway for five minutes without knowing it, reliving that night.

Nora had spent two days making Daniel's costume, a replica of Malvolio the Three-Eyed Mutant. He had been popular on Saturday morning television last year and Daniel's favorite hero...

He forced the memory away and left the car. At the door he hesitated, knowing it would do little good to ring. Nora seldom answered the bell anymore even when he leaned on it. The last of her friends had given up trying to see her months ago.

He sighed and let himself in.

The door shut behind him and he gazed at the gray rooms. A sepulcher, that's what it was. A mausoleum haunted by his fair-haired son in a Malvolio costume.

The house seemed to be waiting for something. Stale, dust-laden air prickled his nostrils. Subliminal echoes resounded the chant only he could hear. All your fault. All your fault.

"Nora!"

His voice reverberated, not even disturbing Boober, their lethargic terrier, that lay near the stairs. Like shouting in a graveyard, he thought, while listening to the blood pulse feebly in his ears.

He started up the stairs, deliberately not touching the long, slippery banister that Danny had loved to slide on. Nora had repeatedly told him not to, afraid he might get hurt.

The landing now.

Again, he listened. From the room at the front of the house a sound came, the clink of glass. He headed toward it.

Through the half-open door he saw his wife propped up in bed, an almost empty gin bottle lying beside her. As he watched, she raised a glass to her lips.

He swallowed, nudged the door open.

She watched him blankly as he entered and sat down beside her on the mattress.

"Nora."

Her lips curled in a mockery of a smile and she lifted her glass. "Welcome to the party, Tom! I thought I'd get started without you."

"Party?"

"Sure!" She hiccuped. "It's Danny's anniversary. He's one-year-old dead today." Her head wobbled toward him and her eyes, covered with a lustrous sheen, betrayed her amusement. "Isn't that right, Tom? A year ago today you took him out for Halloween. His going-out celebration, as it were."

He smothered a groan. After a year, the change in his wife was devastating. Sallow skin, dark-rimmed eyes, hair that hadn't been washed in weeks. She had lost over twenty pounds and the room smelled of old sweat and a woman who had long since given up.

"Nora..."

"Here's to many bright anniv... anniversaries to come, dear. Many more death holidays to celebrate." She lay back on the pillow, watching him with starved eyes. "Aren't you going to join me, Tom? A toast to the old druid god Samhain on this, his day of the dead. How perfect it would be. After all, you took him out."

Why don't you come out and say it? he thought. Go ahead, say it's my fault Daniel's dead. If I had been watching more closely, been more careful, it would never have happened. Daniel would still...

"Tom." A tear slid down her cheek to the pillow. "What happened?"

There was a pleading tone in the question, as if she wanted more than the answer, his blessing for her own catharsis. His pulse quickened. Maybe there was still a chance for them if she could find that release, forgive him, and want to live again... But the question reaffirmed itself through her, and he realized that the answer was all she searched for, that and that alone.

"Tom, you were with him."

"Honey, I don't know." He hesitated. "Look, we went through this a hundred times before. We contacted the police, answered their questions. They investigated and – he just disappeared, Nora."

She blinked, and for the first time in months something like caring entered his wife's expression. "But he couldn't have, Tom. Little boys just don't vanish into goddamn thin air. I keep thinking there's something we've missed. That if you just... if you went over it once more." She sat up and wiped her face with trembling hands. "Please tell me what you did again."

Her obsession was morbid, yet her speaking of it was the first sign of anything in so long that he felt encouraged. If they could solidify, at last, the reality of the loss, then maybe they could salvage what was left in their relationship. Things they had before Daniel was born. Maybe she would even listen to him and see a psychiatrist, stop drinking.

"All right," he said, loving her in spite of the pain he would feel in retelling it once again. "You remember you dressed him up as Malvolio the Three-Eyed Mutant?"

She laughed, half crying at the same time. "Yes, that weird program he watched on Saturday morning. It reminded me of old Kraft specials. I thought it was outrageous, but since Daniel liked it..."

He nodded, remembering her at the sewing machine, fashioning a monster of cloth. "Anyway, as you know, he and I left about seven and headed up the street toward Mulberry. First we went to the Murdocks, then the Swansons, the Lopezes –"

"The Myers," she picked up smoothly. "And the Donellis – the husband works in the shipyard, I think. Then you crossed Mulberry and stopped at the Tuckers, the Presswoods, the Olsons, and..." She stopped.

"Yes." He closed his eyes and began reciting the account he had given her so many times during the first months after the tragedy. Unsuspecting, with Danny swinging his plastic pumpkin container, he had come to the ninth house, where the Halls lived. In less than an hour it had turned completely dark, and the cries of kids up and down the street had acquired a disembodied quality, as if they might be any distance away, from a few feet to infinity. A pint-sized witch had passed them clutching a skull half filled with candy, followed by parents at least a dozen years younger than he. Grinning, grateful that at his age he had finally become a father, he had proudly watched his son run up the walk toward the giant pumpkin glowing before the Halls' front door. Daniel had vanished behind a vine-covered trellis that the path curved around just before it reached the door, and for some reason he hadn't seen him emerge from behind it. Minutes later, after calling Daniel's name several times, he had investigated, only to find...

Something thumped the bed, halting his litany. He opened his eyes.

"Oh, my God."

On the blanket sat the orange plastic pumpkin he had found on the walk behind the Halls' trellis. In its bottom lay the pitiful assortment of candy Daniel had collected that night. Fruit Tarts, Hershey Kisses, a Butterfinger.

"You found this," Nora said, her eyes blazing at him. "It was all that was left."

He felt he was going to choke. "Where... where did you –"

"The police gave it to me after they ran their tests," she said. "I asked them to."

"And you've kept it all this time under our bed? Nora, can't you realize how –"

"What, Tom?" she said. "Sick it is? You think I ought to be put away?" She raised the container by its handle and shook it so that the contents rattled. "Well, maybe so. But you're not going to convince me that some sick child molester took our boy and hacked him to pieces somewhere. If that had happened, they would have found some kind of evidence. And they didn't, Tom, not a shred of it!"

He looked at the pumpkin's grinning face, then at her. "You've got to listen to me. Daniel, no matter how much we loved him, is gone. He's dead and –"

"He's not dead, you careless bastard!" She screamed. "I carried him for nine months under my heart and if he were dead, I'd know!"

"Then what –"

"He's out there," she said, looking out the window. "I don't know how, but I do. He's somewhere in the shadows, hiding. Or... or maybe he climbed a tree and is laughing at us between the leaves. You know how Daniel liked to play tricks, Tom. He was always so full of... pranks. And I think if you'll just go out there tonight and retrace your route, you'll find him again. When you least expect it, you'll see him laughing before you just like he used to. And we'll all be together again."

Oh pity, Mother of God. He stared at her aghast, seeing a woman on the verge of madness. And he had thought it inconceivable that things could ever get worse.

"Nora," he faltered, "would you please –"

"Tonight, Tom," she said, placing the pumpkin in his hands. "You go out and find him and bring him back to me." She paused. "If you can't, don't bother to come back."

# # #

At one minute to seven, Tom Clark closed the front door and stood holding the pumpkin whose contents were probably as wormy as his son's remains, wherever they might be.

The obscene, unwanted thought filled him with rage and he turned back to the house. Don't you think I loved him too? he wanted to shout. Don't you think I've suffered as much as you have? Only I haven't given up. I've kept struggling.

But the memory of what she had been like before Daniel's disappearance kept him silent. He remembered her glossy chestnut hair and vivacious laughter. It was true what she had said about Daniel's sense of humor, which he had gotten directly from her, not him. It had been one of many reasons he had loved them so much.

He could never tell such a woman the truth, that her son had probably been seized by a fiend and killed after unthinkable perversions...

He faced the street again, crushed by his impossible errand. If he failed, as he must, she wouldn't want him back, but by that time it would hardly matter. He sensed that his failure would only complete the destruction of the woman he loved and that he would have to institutionalize her. He would be all alone then.

He started walking, a middle-aged man clutching a pumpkin with year-old candy in it. As on that night a year before, parents were already out with their children. He saw a boy Daniel had played with dart across the street in a skeleton suit and get sharply reprimanded by his father. A car whizzed by in the frosty air, horn blaring.

Time of goblins, ghosts, and ghouls
Haunted hours when Satan rules...

Kids passed him on the sidewalk as he neared the Murdocks, the first of the stops they had made that night. He saw a menagerie of children cluster around the front door, a splash of light in which Mr. Murdock labored to serve them all. With a series of whoops, two older boys spun and left, capes billowing as the other children followed them. The door closed.

He stood there in the darkness.

Then without knowing what he was doing, he walked to the door and climbed the steps. He knocked.

Footsteps, then a head appeared and the door opened.

Mr. Murdock looked at him and his mouth fell open. Clark raised the pumpkin.

"Trick or treat," he said.

Murdock looked at the pumpkin as if he had never seen one before. Behind him, his wife stopped as she crossed the living room and came forward.

"Why... Mr. Clark, what brings you here?"

He looked at her. "Trick or treat," he repeated.

Murdock still looked stunned, but into his wife's face there rushed a look of pity and compassion. Quickly she thrust her hand into her husband's bowl and dropped a dozen pieces of candy into the container. He thanked her and left.

"Mr. Clark!"

Halfway to the sidewalk, he turned. Beside her husband, Mrs. Murdock's face shone in the light, her eyes brimming with tears. "God bless you!" she called.

Their eyes followed him as he walked away.

Next came the Swansons, the Lopezes...

If there was a purpose in what he was doing, it was one he could not name. But he felt guided by some force as illusive and intangible as the wind that stirred the bare tips of dark trees. He hardly noticed the puzzled looks of children and parents in the street, felt no embarrassment at the shock of those who answered his knock and found him standing there either alone or surrounded by other children. Most of his neighbors knew of his tragedy and contributed their portions wonderingly to Daniel's container.

Only once, on the street, did someone speak to him. A fat man in a plaid crewneck and orange hunting jacket who Clark sensed had probably driven his children here from another neighborhood.

"Hey, Mister," he barked, his ruddy face grinning. "You some kind of nut? Case you haven't heard, you need a kid if you're gonna –"

Clark looked at him and the man's words withered in his throat. Without stopping he brushed by, the wind wailing around him.

Time of shrieking horrors at night
Of icy talons dipped in fright...

After visiting the Myers and Donellis, the poem a haunting whisper in his mind, he crossed Mulberry Street and marched to the Tuckers' two-story wooden frame house. There he repeated the ritual, accompanied by a four-year-old who rapped her pumpkin against his in protest. Clark ignored the frowning father on the sidewalk as he left.

The Presswoods, the Olsons...

He came at last to the house where it happened, standing in the same place he had stood before. It was even, he knew, within a few minutes of the same time, and he glanced down at his side as if to see Daniel. But no gory, three-eyed mask met his gaze. He was alone.

In the full dark no pumpkin gleamed. Mr. Hall had vowed never to celebrate Halloween again, and Clark knew from the man's recurrent expressions of sympathy how saddened he had been by what had happened in his front yard. But what had happened? The police had turned up no suspects or footprints, and he had driven or walked past Hall's house a hundred times since then, trying to relive the experience and discover some clue that had been overlooked.

Seeing the yard now, though, he realized how different it was. It was as if all the other times he had passed suddenly didn't count. It had to be another Halloween at the same time for him to see the yard he had seen then.

What had happened? He let himself slip back in time. He had waited here as Danny scampered up the curving walk. Some thirty, no forty feet away. He and his bucket had disappeared behind the six-foot trellis twenty feet from the door, never to appear again. It was almost like a hole leading into another reality had swallowed him.

A hole into another reality... He thought of Danny's costume and how grotesque he and Nora had thought it was. Yet Danny hadn't, had he? To him the hideous outfit possessed a Medusa-like beauty and he had believed in it.

He stiffened. Had he once believed, too? When he had dressed up as a cowboy and strapped cap pistols to his hips, hadn't he believed, at least a little? Hadn't there been a magic he had been unable to capture since?

Tonight across the country, parents and their children were observing an ancient miracle. But it was only the children, he realized, who truly believed in it. Adults had long since trailed their clouds of glory and sunk into a rationalistic skepticism of everything that could not be proved. They took their kids to Santa Claus but knew he was only an old man with a fake beard. They took them out on Halloween but knew there were no three-eyed mutants. For make-believe worlds of the imagination, grown-ups substituted religion with its orderly gods who guaranteed a final promotion. They had forgotten their original vision where reality was fluid and the land of Oz lay just across the street.

He felt a chill. What if Danny's excited belief in his disguise had projected him into a realm where "mind over matter" was the fundamental law? It sounded absurd, but thousands of kids disappeared every year. You saw their faces on milk cartons and pizza boxes, on buses and TV. Wasn't it at least conceivable that some of them had entered another dimension? That would explain why no evidence whatsoever had been turned up in his son's case.

He took a few steps up the walk. Crazy or not, if I believe it enough, become a child again, maybe I can bring him back.

As he approached the house, the moon emerged from behind a cloud, bathing the surroundings in an eerie sheen. Bushes acquired a spiny witchery of chiaroscuro in which nothing was quite what it seemed. A line from the poem returned to him.

Monster time when shadows creep...

He must believe! He had tried everything else, exhausted every avenue. Five feet from the trellis he stopped, listening to the wind moan.

"Danny," he said, "I don't know if you can hear me, but if you can, if you can, I want you to know that we both miss you. We miss you terribly. Your mother... Your mother's half out of her mind with grief and – and she sent me here to bring you home." He paused, realizing that Nora, who he had thought mad, had told him Danny was out here. If she believed, couldn't he?

"I love you, son," he continued. "Please come back. We can go fishing again and I'll take you to those horror movies you like. They've got some really good ones now." It was getting better; he felt the magic quicken and he could almost sense Danny waiting there for him, just beyond the shadows as the moon was partially covered again.

"Danny," he whispered, "if you come back we can finish trick-or-treating. There are a lot of houses we haven't gone to yet..."

Suddenly it was gone. He had felt the magic fade, poisoned by doubt and adult awareness. Tears stung his eyes. He was just a middle-aged fool who had once been a father and who now was reduced to conjuring his long dead son by moonlight.

Something tugged the pumpkin and he started to look, but caught himself. "I've missed you, son," he said quickly, "missed the way you used to climb in bed with me in the morning when your mother was making breakfast. Do you remember?" Beside him the presence grew like a delicate bubble. Gently, not daring to hope, he continued. "Best of all, were Saturday morning breakfasts. They were really something, weren't they? The smell of bacon and waffles in the house and Boober barking, getting between our legs as we ran downstairs and –"

". . . begging at the table, making an A number one pest of himself," a child's voice interrupted. "I 'member once, dad, he gobbled half a stack of pancakes when we weren't looking!"

Clark's heart crashed against his ribs. Dad. "Yeah," his voice carried on somehow, "and your mother got so angry she chased Boober all around the house with a broom and finally realized what she was doing and broke out laughing." Tears ran down his face. Danny!

"How's Boober doin' now, dad?"

He turned, looking down at the little boy in a Malvolio the Three-Eyed Mutant costume. Nothing had ever seemed so beautiful to him.

"Why don't you come home and see for yourself, Danny?" he said softly. "He's really missed you."

"Can I come home, dad? I know you're probably mad at me for being away for so long, but I didn't mean to. When I ran up the walk something weird happened. I fell into this other place and I couldn't get back! I kept tryin' and tryin'. . ."

"You can tell us about it later, son." He raised his hand and touched the mask, thinking how happy Nora would be. It would be just like it used –

Suddenly his hand went cold.

His fingers trembled on the mask's imitation fur. He snatched his hand back.

"What's the matter, dad?"

He tried to speak, but the horror of the thought clamped his throat. What if –

"Dad, is something wrong?"

The wind was really blowing now. Slowly he raised his hand and forced it to peel back the mask, exposing the face that lay underneath.

His relief almost stunned him. Falling to his knees, he embraced his son and showered his face with kisses, whispering muffled endearments. After a moment Danny hugged him back.

"Oh, dad, it was fun there but after a while I got lonely. And I didn't know how to get back..."

He pulled away, wiping his eyes. "Danny, all that matters is that you are back. Believe me, your mother's going to be so..."

Brown eyes.

His breathing stopped, then struggled on. Was it possible? His son's eyes had been blue. Carefully, as if he were examining an exquisite piece of china, he tilted Danny's face toward him in the moonlight.

His eyes were brown.

For a moment he couldn't think. Mutant. Imitation. Illusions and delusions. Yes, Halloween was like that. You never knew what was going to happen, never knew when some monster would spring out at you without warning, or when you would be given a trick instead of a treat.

Changelings crawling from the deep...

From hell's deep, or did this boy come from another reality, a parallel world almost like his own? Clark didn't know. But did it really matter, he wondered, if Danny were a demon in disguise or one of an infinite number of Dannies from one of an infinite number of other realms?

Perhaps even now, his Danny, the one he had lost, was being reunited somewhere with a father who was almost, but not quite the same as himself. All he knew was that he could live with the deception. That was one thing, he thought, that adults gained as they grew down from childhood. They could be content with the approximation of a dream.

And his wife wouldn't care. He could already imagine her joy when he brought their son home.

Before him, Danny squirmed, his brown eyes reflecting a nervous doubt. "Dad, is everything okay? You're sure you ain't mad?"

Clark smiled and rose. After a long moment he handed the pumpkin to Danny.

"Of course not, kiddo," he said. "Come on, let's go home."