Toil & Trouble Page 8

  Appropriate.

  Cora hustles on up to the front door and swings it open. The little bell on the door jingles out their doom.

  Outside, the sky is dark and cloudy. There’s the feeling of coming rain in the air.

  Cora lifts up her werewolf mask; now it’s more of a werewolf hat. An unsettling look. In creepy-ringmaster-at-the-circus tones, she announces, “Welcome, one and all, to Artie Kraft’s Arts ‘N Crafts’ ... Scarestravaganza! If you’re looking to have a delightful celebration of all things Halloweeny, cross the room and climb the stairs! If you’re ready to get so scared you pee a little,” she sneers, “stay downstairs.”

  There’s a collective antsy murmur from the parents at that. The children all laugh, but it’s a hushed laughter. A nervous laughter.

  “A maze awaits you,” Cora proclaims, sinister. “And at the end of it, infinite riches. But have you got the strength to make it that far? There’s only one way to find out. Come with me through this door, and into a land of your wildest nightmares.”

  Now there isn’t even nervous laughter. Just a bunch of kids, staring blankly at them.

  Not great.

  “One more thing,” Arthur says, stepping up next to Cora on a whim. “Everyone, make sure to wish Tyler Fabray a happy tenth birthday. The downstairs ... situation ... has been specifically designed according to Tyler’s specifications, with the blessing of his mother Annie Fabray. Don’t just thank us for what you are about to experience. Thank the Fabrays.”

  There’s a drawn out silence. Then the parents all start clapping riotously.

  Clearly they know who the arts ‘n crafts deity is in this town.

  Annie Fabray puts on a regal smile and waves, queenly.

  “Also, um,” Arthur adds, partly because it’s important and partly because some dark piece of his heart wants to overthrow her. “For anyone who might have an aversion to flashing lights, I highly recommend you go upstairs. Or ... home.”

  Everyone stares at him.

  Well, that kind of diffused the enthusiastic atmosphere.

  “Aw yeah!” Cora says, his rowdy saving grace. “It’s gonna get flashy up in here!!!”

  Tyler, apparently moved by this, shouts, “ARRRRRR!”, lifts his plastic sword, and runs to the front door.

  “Bold move calling out the Fabrays,” Cora mutters out of the corner of her mouth as Tyler and his followers rush past her into the store.

  “I had to,” Arthur mutters back. “I couldn’t let us go down in infamy.”

  He watches in relief as a number of children hustle upstairs with their parents. At least they’ll meet a better fate than those who choose to stay down here in the muck and the mire.

  Go, he thinks. Be free!

  Then he realizes that he has in fact become a sad and ridiculous person.

  Once the upstairs crowd has reached their destination, Kristy turns off the main lights and flicks on the strobe light.

  Immediately, the room is overtaken by a strange and wild energy.

  There are some shrieks of laughter from the kids, and Arthur is just beginning to think that this might go all right, when—

  “Aaaugh!” Tyler shouts. “I stepped on a chopped-off wiener!”

  Howie picks this very unfortunate moment to burst out from the beading aisle and wave the chainsaw, cackling menacingly.

  “LOOK OUT,” Tyler screams. “HE’S GOING TO CHAINSAW YOUR WIENER OFF.”

  “I am not, dude!” Howie says, offended.

  “Does he mean ‘hotdog,’ or ...?” Arthur asks, panicked.

  “He’s a ten year old boy,” Cora replies. “He does not mean hotdog.”

  “EW!” screeches a girl dressed like a pegasus.

  “They’re just intestines!” Arthur protests desperately.

  “They don’t look like intestines!” Tyler shouts. “They look! Like! WIENERS.”

  His surrounding friends all let out frenzied, Lord of The Flies-esque war cries.

  “No one has been castrated!” Arthur cries.

  “How did you not see that one coming, honestly?” Cora says to Arthur.

  Arthur considers quitting life, here and now.

  “They’re breakfast sausages,” Kristy says from where she stands behind the cash register, her voice ringing clearly through the room. “Be careful. The monsters that lurk within the maze love to eat breakfast ... almost as much as they love to eat children! And they don’t clean up after they eat.”

  Kind of odd, but she makes it work. Arthur feels desperately grateful.

  “Sweet!” one of the boys shouts. “Sexy mummy!”

  “Told you!” says Tyler.

  Kristy’s smile becomes very fixed.

  “Now—go forth into the maze!” she says.

  The kids consider it.

  “Is that blood?” Tyler asks, touching the gauze.

  “You scared?” one of his friends asks.

  “No!” Tyler exclaims indignantly.

  And with that very promising proclamation, they venture forth through the ketchupy gauze of doom.

  “Not off to a very good start, are we?” Annie Fabray mutters as she breezes by.

  Arthur gulps and goes to fetch his guitar.

  +

  This, Howie decides, is the worst.

  Everything is foggy, loud, and pulsating with hideous flashing light. Howie can hear Arthur’s mournful singing, but he can’t see him, which makes the whole “ghostly troubadour” thing more effective than Howie had anticipated.

  He lurks in the scrapbooking aisle, trying to decide the most intimidating way to wield a chainsaw ... while simultaneously making it clear that you don’t want to chainsaw anybody’s junk off.

  Honestly, with the lights flashing all crazy, it doesn’t take much to be creepy. He swooshes it experimentally through the air, pressing the little button that makes it go Rrrrrrrr!, and jumps. It’s fuckin’ creepy.

  At that moment, a hand clamps down on his shoulder.

  “SHIT!” Howie cries.

  “Where is he?” snarls—Amber??

  Amber as he’s never seen her before.

  “Uh,” Howie says, “what?”

  “That little misogynist in training. Where is he??”

  “What are you??” Howie asks, taking in the horrendous sight of her.

  Her dark hair is frizzed out and flying everywhere, like she stuck her finger into an electric socket on the way here. She’s wearing a white nightgown artfully splattered in what Howie hopes to God is more ketchup. That, coupled with the zombie makeup, makes for one freaky Amber.

  “Bertha Mason,” Amber proclaims. “Avenging angel of feminists everywhere. Straight out of the attic, and ready to school some little boys on objectification.”

  Mitch, also all zombied-of-face, grins. He is wearing a t-shirt that proudly proclaims in swirly puff-painted letters:

  DON’T BE A ROCHESTER.

  “Check it out.” Mitch jumps around, showing the back of the shirt.

  It says, FEMINISM! BOOYAH.

  “What does any of this even mean??” Howie is pretty sure his brain is going to start melting any second.

  “I thought it was pretty self-explanatory,” Mitch says. “The ‘boo’ is underlined ‘cause, ya know, Halloween.”

  “Nice touch,” Howie says to Mitch, “but you’re supposed to have brains all over your shirt, not ... feminism!”

  Mitch shrugs, all, What can ya do?

  Howie returns his attention to Amber. “I repeat: WHAT ARE YOU?”

  “Oh my God, Howie, when are you just going to read Jane Eyre already??” Amber cries. “I’ve been asking you to for the past ten years!!!!”

  “It’s on my to-do list!” Howie howls. (Like, it’s on his to-do list after ‘Write a rap about Henry David Thoreau’s glorious neckbeard,’ which comes in at about number 127, so it’s not a priority, but.)

  “I can’t believe you complied to this little jerk’s stupid demands about sexy mummies,” Amber fumes. “I’ve never seen Kr
isty this sad before. And I say that as the only person on earth who has ever been horrible enough to hurt her feelings!”

  “She said she was fine with it!”

  “Yeah, because she’s the nicest person ever! But shame on you, Howard!”

  “Hey! Shame on Arthur! He’s the one who decided to negotiate with a ten year old perv!”

  Unfortunately, Howie redirects Amber’s fury a little too effectively. “Where is Arthur???” she growls.

  “He’s singing creepy acoustic TSwizzle ballads! Amber, believe me, he is sad enough.”

  “His song choices gravitate worryingly toward pre-feminist-awakening-era Taylor!”

  “Yeah, well, it’s either that or Cora’s Halloween CD, which is The Monster Mash sixteen frickin’ times in a row! Now, can you just chase some kids around and pretend you want to eat their brains and not lecture them about feminism?”

  “No,” says Amber stoutly.

  “Great,” Howie says, frustrated.

  A group of kids wanders into the aisle, decked out in adorable kiddy costumes and gazing around like they’ve accidentally stepped into an R-rated movie they were so not ready for. Howie, who watched Hellraiser at the tender age of seven, remembers the feeling well.

  “Aaaaaaaaah!” they scream at the sight of Amber.

  “Aaaaaughhhhhh!!!!” Amber screams right back.

  “Gloria Steinem!!!” shouts Mitch with wild abandon.

  The kids turn and run out of the aisle in a frenzy of screeching.

  Howie decides there is no salvaging this, and moves the fuck along.

  He makes it out of the aisle just in time to see the front door swinging open.

  Great. Another innocent child to traumatize.

  But then—wait—the new arriver is definitely way too tall to be an innocent child.

  It’s Kristy’s boyfriend, Cliff.

  And he is not zombified like he was supposed to be. Oh no.

  Instead, he is dressed as what Howie can only describe as a sexy man mummy.

  The guy is wearing a pair of tightie whities and—unless Howie is mistaken—arm and leg bands cunningly crafted from toilet paper. It is, objectively speaking, terrible, but you gotta admire the guy for going shirtless on a cold cloudy night in October.

  “That’s right, I’m a sexy mummy for gender equality!” Cliff announces defiantly to the room at large. “Deal with it!”

  “Reddy! What are you doing?” Kristy gasps.

  “You won’t suffer alone, Kristybee!” Cliff cries.

  Arthur stops playing a truly harrowing version of “Mean” and runs to the front door.

  “No,” Arthur says. “Too strange. Go home and put some clothes on.”

  “Why are you naked?” one of the kids asks. “Tyler, you weren’t supposed to get a guy sexy mummy!”

  “I didn’t!” comes Tyler’s protesting shout from somewhere in the aisles.

  “I’m not naked,” Cliff says. “I’m a sexy mummy for gender equality. Why is it weird when I wear this, but you just expect her to dress this way?” He points rousingly at Kristy. “Yeah. That’s right. Search your souls, people!”

  Howie looks at the parents standing around. They’re all watching with totally baffled faces.

  Well. Some of the moms look pretty intrigued.

  But Annie Fabray is not among them. Her mouth has flattened into a thin, terrifying line of disapproval.

  “Go,” Arthur says. “Go, go, go. Thank you, the thought is truly inspiring, but please go—”

  Cliff throws one last yearning look Kristy’s way, then lets himself be pushed back out into the dark night.

  “Ewwww!” a boy dressed like Iron Man yells. “Sexy man mummy! Tyler likes man mummies!”

  “I do not!” comes Tyler’s voice from inside the maze.

  “Tyler is ga-ay!”

  “None of that, thank you!” Arthur snaps. “Into the maze.”

  “But it’s creepy in there—”

  “That’s the point! Go! Please! All of you! Either that, or you can go upstairs to the little kid party. I promise it’s very nice.”

  There’s a moment where all of the kids just stare at him in silence. Somehow, it makes it totally obvious that everyone wants to be upstairs at the little kid party.

  “We’re not babies,” one of the boys says.

  That seems to decide it. All of the kids head maze-ward.

  Howie presses the chainsaw button reluctantly.

  Rrrrr!

  +

  Not a single adult buys anything. Kristy can’t really blame them.

  All of the children have been wandering the aisle maze for maybe the past ten minutes. The parents stand awkwardly around the corners of the store. Annie Fabray just stands there in her devil horns. The strobe light makes her smirking face look truly demonic. Kristy wishes she had never even brought up her stupid blog.

  The room has gone completely silent, except for Arthur’s way-too-creepy version of “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” It’s supposed to be an anthem of triumph, not despair.

  Occasionally, a shriek of pure terror rises up from inside the aisles. Sometimes after this happens, a kid rushes out of the aisles and over to their parents, crying.

  This is the worst.

  Howie comes up next to her. “Okay, I can’t do this anymore. Making kids cry just isn’t as rewarding as I always thought it would be.”

  Kristy can tell he said it to make her laugh, but she can’t muster it.

  He goes serious. “Kristy. What are we gonna do? We—we gotta fix this, right?”

  "I told you,” Kristy says. It’s all she has the energy for. “I told you this would happen.”

  Howie keeps talking, but for once, she doesn’t quite feel like listening to him.

  She doesn’t feel like being here at all.

  And so she goes to the kitchen.

  She decides to have a cup of hot cocoa. Hot cocoa, she’s always believed, can make anything better.

  Even when the air is full of the bone-chilling sound of shrieking children.

  Kristy sighs, pulls her favorite mug from the cupboard (it’s covered in little smiling cows grazing in a field), and starts rummaging around the tea shelf for instant hot cocoa packets.

  Then she realizes that she’s not alone.