Guest post written by author Christopher Golden
Christopher Golden (he/him) is the New York Times bestselling and Bram Stoker award-winning author of Ararat, Snowblind, Dead Ringers, and Of Saints and Shadows, among many other novels. With Mike Mignola, he is the co-creator of two cult favorite comic book series, Baltimore and Joe Golem: Occult Detective. Golden is also the editor of such anthologies as Seize the Night, The New Dead, and Dark Cities, and the co-host of the popular podcast “Three Guys with Beards.” He lives in Massachusetts. His latest novel All Hallows releases on January 24th 2023 and follows neighborhood families and a mysterious, lurking evil on one Halloween day.
Was I eleven?
I don’t think so. At least not quite. Let’s say nine, then, though perhaps I’m erring on the side of vanity, not wanting to admit just how long I held on to the more gleefully childish parts of Halloween.
So, yes, nine.
Before I begin, though, you need to know about my mother’s hand. Or, rather, her lack of one. The left. From birth she has been forced to manage with what one might call a truncated version of a left hand, dealing both with the practical impact of that loss as well as the emotional. She lived a remarkable life. Though she became an attorney in her later years, in her youth she was a singer and performer whose efforts took her to Off-Broadway shows in New York.
In order to prevent audiences from being distracted by her handicap, she had one made for her. It was plastic and felt not unlike a turkey baster to the touch.
By the time I was nine—we all agreed on nine, did we not?—my mother had long since abandoned the stage. But the hand remained in my basement for me to discover it one early fall. It was a fascinating piece of equipment, particularly to one of my darkly mischievous mind set. Thus, that Halloween, when I put on my father’s torn black jacket that hung to my knees and pulled my Frankenstein’s Monster mask over my head, I also slipped that hand over my own . . .
Poor Mrs. Nye.
I lived in a suburban Massachusetts town twenty miles west of Boston, on a quiet, dead-end street with plenty of kids. My road was part of a warren of them that comprised a single, enormous middle-class neighborhood called Pheasant Hill.
Halloween on Pheasant Hill was truly something to behold. My brother and I took huge white pillowcases out before dark and began our rounds, filling up once, twice, even three times before finally settling down to fish through our booty and trade what we didn’t like for things we did. If I close my eyes now I can remember the bustle of garishly costumed children roving up and down the streets in small packs.
Cabbage Night, what we called the local night of mischief and misdemeanors the evening before Halloween, had just passed. And yet we had the unmitigated gall to approach the front doors of homes we had egged or soaped the windows of or toilet-papered the trees of not twenty four hours earlier.
One house, on the far end of Briarwood Road, offered cold sodas instead of candy, and at least one Halloween was hot enough for us to be sweating in our masks and costumes. I had a devil’s mask as well, but I think that came later, after the Frankenstein.
Of course there were sinister elements as well. The LaVolley mansion—which wasn’t much of a mansion at all, to be honest—had shattered windows and an overgrown lot and that was our haunted house, the one we all sprinted by when we had to pass it. If we dared go down that way at all on Halloween night.
We heard the whispers of razor-blades in apples and poison in candy. But we reasoned that a wrapper that wasn’t ripped meant the candy was safe to eat. My parents thought most of those stories were just urban myths, but the kids found such stories deliciously terrifying.
It didn’t matter. Halloween was a glorious night. The best night of the year. When cable television came in, I could go home from trick-or-treating and watch Halloween or Magic on HBO. Conveniently, one or the other always seemed to be on that night. There were others, of course, but those are the ones I remember best.
I got older, of course. Old enough, eventually, to bitterly accept that the solicitation of candy was reserved for younger children. And then older still.
But I never stopped loving Halloween. When they were small, I loved to take my children out trick-or-treating, which my wife felt was for the best—I was too dangerous to leave at home on Halloween night with my gore-drenched ghoul mask and lots of gullible little garishly-dressed neighbor kids to frighten.
Which brings me back to Mrs. Nye. What a sweet old woman she was.
I rang the bell, a group of other kids behind me. She came to the door and I was the one who yelled “trick or treat” the loudest. With a kindly smile she dropped a Zagnut and a Reese’s cup in my bag. I thanked her and thrust out my hand for her to shake.
My left hand.
She shook it, of course. It came off in her hand and I shouted as if I’d been injured and she shrieked in shock and terror and dropped it on the ground.
Mrs. Nye stared at me in horror.
And I liked it.
A lot.
