What I Got for Halloween

The first Halloween my mother ever went through my candy, I was ten. She never told me why. But I'd snuck down the stairs one night after bedtime and caught the tail end of the eleven o'clock news, and I knew exactly what she was hunting for. Needles. Razor blades. Poison. The whole gallery of horrors they swore were waiting in the candy bowl.

Part of me filed it away with all the other stories adults told to keep kids obedient. Ouija boards. Haunted houses. Alligators in the sewers. Backward messages hidden in rock records. I figured the tampered-candy panic was probably another one of those, the same flavor of grown-up fairy tale. But probably wasn't the same as definitely, and I couldn't be sure.

That year I had a sleepover with my three best friends. Chris, Sammy, and David. The October sun was hanging low and huge, fat and orange as a pumpkin, sinking into a smoky horizon while we headed out to trick-or-treat. Chris went as a vampire. Sammy was a werewolf. David was a zombie. And I was the clown from It — which, looking back, was the least scary thing I wore that night by a long shot.

At the end of the night, some older kids in masks tried to jump us for our candy. One of them was carrying a hatchet, and I can still see the edge of it catching the streetlight. We didn't discuss it. We didn't need to. We just looked at each other and nodded, and when Chris gave the signal we scattered in four different directions like we'd rehearsed it.

We regrouped on my porch, gasping for air, our hearts hammering hard enough to crack ribs. We were spooked, all of us, and the only thing we wanted was to get inside, lock the door, and put on some horror movies that didn't feel quite as terrifying as an actual teenager with an actual axe.

That's when I noticed it. A little gift bag sitting on our doorstep, tied shut with orange-and-black ribbon. None of us had seen it before. I picked it up, turning it over in my hands, and I was still holding it when we stepped through the front door and ran straight into my mother.

"Do you four have any idea what time it is?" she huffed. "Candy on the counter. Now."

We put on the full theatrical groaning routine, but honestly? None of us minded. A bright, warm house with adults in it was exactly where we wanted to be.

"That little one too," she said, nodding at the bag in my hands.

I'd almost forgotten I was holding it. I dumped everything out onto the kitchen table. Five pieces of candy in plain black wrappers. A little toy of a hooded figure gripping a bloody butcher knife. An old pocket watch, the hands frozen at one thirteen in the morning. And a View-Master — one of those plastic binocular viewers with the little click-to-advance photo reels inside.

My mother picked up each piece of candy and examined it carefully, checking for torn wrapping or pinholes, the way she'd done with all the rest of our haul.

"Can we have our candy back, puh-lease?" I groaned.

"Nope," my dad said, drifting past on his nightly pilgrimage from his home office to his armchair. "Because I'm going to eat it all." He snagged one of the strange black candies, peeled the wrapper off, and popped it in his mouth.

He didn't make it five steps before the wrapper slipped from his fingers. My father clutched at his throat. His face went purple.

"Honey?" My mother was on her feet in an instant. "Honey, are you alright?" Horrible choking sounds were coming out of him, wet and gurgling, and then — just as she reached him — the noises stopped.

"Yep," my dad said, grinning. "It's definitely poisoned."

My mother punched him in the arm so hard he yelped. He was still snickering when he went upstairs.

The rest of the evening played out like every sleepover we'd ever had. My parents went through their bedtime routines while the four of us rode a full-tilt sugar high in front of the TV. Chris, Sammy, and David never got tired of bad horror movies and worse special effects. But after a while I drifted away from the blue glow of the screen and started wandering the dark, quiet house, not entirely sure what I was looking for.

I stepped on the wrapper my dad had dropped. The outside was solid black, but the foil inside was printed with a single word: AM.

I shrugged it off, opened another piece of the black candy, and fiddled with the little knife-wielding toy. This wrapper said GET. Were they supposed to spell something if you lined them up? GETAM? AMGET? It didn't make any sense. I went back downstairs, where my friends were still laughing in their beanbag chairs and chucking popcorn at each other. They yelled at me when I flicked on a table lamp, but I didn't care — I was focused. I lifted the View-Master to my eyes.

Spook-o-Matic! read the first slide, next to a cute little cartoon ghost.

Click.

A cornfield ringed by forest. Black birds pecking at a scarecrow dangling from a lonely post. The scarecrow was backlit by a cloudy sky, but its stitched-together gray skin looked disturbingly lifelike.

Click.

An abandoned farmhouse in a rain-soaked field. The broken doorway gaped like an open mouth, and the mud smeared across the porch looked like something heavy had been dragged inside. Recently.

Click.

Some jack-o'-lanterns glowing on a porch. I got a weird prickling feeling that I'd seen those carved faces somewhere before. The street in the background looked familiar, too.

Click.

A crash snapped me out of it. Sammy was wrestling with Chris, who was bragging about knowing some inescapable wrestling hold. David booed and threw popcorn while I told them to keep it down. We giggled at our own pathetic attempts to be quiet, shoved all the furniture against the walls, and tried out wrestling moves we'd seen on TV until we were sweaty, exhausted, and mad at each other. Still nowhere near sleepy, we put A Nightmare on Elm Street on in the background and got serious about a game of Truth or Dare.

The gallons of Mountain Dew we'd been mainlining did their predictable thing, and before long Chris was tearing upstairs to hit the bathroom. On his way back down he grabbed a few handfuls of candy for each of us. I noticed he was chewing one of the strange black toffees.

"What's this line inside the wrapper?" he frowned. Then he picked up the Spook-o-Matic and gasped. "Dude — it's your house!"

I ripped the viewer out of his hands. He wasn't kidding. The latest slide looked like a blurry photograph of my own home, like it had been taken from the woods behind our backyard. In the twilight windows there were tiny black shapes that could easily have been my parents and me, a few nights earlier. The others crowded in to look, shoving and pushing, and somebody accidentally clicked forward.

A boy asleep in a dim second-story bedroom. I recognized the Terminator poster on the wall, the model planes hanging from the ceiling, the books scattered across the old school desk — because the room was mine, and the boy was me.

I hurled the Spook-o-Matic at the wall like it might bite me. David, who'd barely been paying attention to any of this, cleared his throat.

"Uh, guys…" He held up one of the black toffee wrappers. READY was printed on the silver foil.

I dug through the candy pile until I found the last black toffee and tore it open. COMING. Then I heard pounding — my own heart, I think — and laid the wrappers out in order. And I realized Chris's "line" was actually the letter I.

GET READY, I whispered out loud. I AM COMING.

"Ooooh, spooooky," David said, rolling his eyes. "I mean, I guess it is a pretty good prank though."

"The watch," I said, grabbing Sammy by the arm. "What time did the watch say?" Sammy couldn't remember. The clock on the wall read one eleven in the morning. I was hurrying toward the kitchen to hunt down the last piece of this puzzle when I heard movement on the back porch.

I pressed my back against the couch and tried to make my breathing quiet down. Something scraped against the glass door. I kicked on the patio light, flooding the porch with white.

The hooded figure in the pale mannequin mask was identical to the tiny toy sitting on our kitchen counter. The antique watch and the microwave clock both read one thirteen. The figure outside tilted its head at me. Then it picked up a brick and smashed straight through the glass door.

I ran downstairs screaming. I could hear commotion from my parents' bedroom, but I wasn't thinking about them — my animal brain was only screaming two things at me: RUN and HIDE.

Upstairs I could hear our family's belongings being thrown, hacked apart, shattered. Heavy adult footsteps thundered down the stairs while my friends scrambled to disappear behind doors and under furniture. It was hopeless. In the cramped basement there was nowhere to go. The hooded, masked figure kicked the TV screen in, plunging the room into darkness. We choked back tears and held our breath while we felt it stalking around us in the black, throwing furniture and laughing. Laughing and laughing and laughing.

That laughter didn't stop until police sirens wailed in the distance and my father finally kicked down the basement door, which the intruder had propped shut with a chair.

Slash marks raked the walls and furniture. Shattered dishes and picture frames carpeted the floor. The intruder had escaped through an unused air vent at the back of our basement crawlspace. The police told us later that our attacker could have been coming and going through that same vent any number of times before that night. Somehow — somehow — my family and my friends were all alive. Unharmed, anyway. Physically. Psychologically, some of us for life.

I don't like digging these memories up. But it's hard not to think about them when Halloween rolls around, especially now that I have kids of my own. This year they finally wore me down: I let them go trick-or-treating.

I insisted their mother go with them — armed — and they're out in public, so that part of the evening doesn't worry me much. What worries me is the little bag I found on my porch this afternoon, tied with black-and-orange ribbon.

I've just finished opening it. Unwrapped the black toffees inside. Laid out their message:

READY FOR ROUND 2?