I’m not sure when Abe first got obsessed with Halloween, but I knew about before we even started dating. I actually met him for the first time at a costume party. I was dressed as an apple. And by that I mean I wore a red dress and a green hat. I threw it together last minute since my friend was the one dragging me to the party. Abe was dressed up as a werewolf stuck between wolf and man. The amount of effort he put into his costume was remarkable. He even walked like a Halfling and howled at incoming party guests.
Something drew us together. Maybe it was our mutual hatred of candy corn or the way we could both down five beers without blinking. Whatever it was it led to a first date and within seven months we were engaged.
The thing I loved most about Abe was his ambition. He was a business major with plans on starting his own company. He would design and produce Halloween themed goods for haunted houses. He explained that more and more ordinary people were opening up their homes in the spirit of a good scare, and he wanted to support that by making unique and frightening products. Plus he dreamed of having his own haunted house someday. It wasn’t my cup of tea but I adored his passion.
We were married in May and pregnant by June. Abe decided to use his savings to buy us a nice little house right outside the city. The neighborhood was full of families and right next to an elementary school. Our neighbors to the left were Paul and Jake, a wonderful young couple who had two small children. We bonded with them right away. All seemed fine except for one thing.
Dirk.
Dirk lived to the right of us. He was a white man in his mid-fifties who took one look at our biracial family and nearly had a conniption. When he saw us walking or working in the yard he would give the Nazi salute and belly laugh, as if it were the funniest thing he’d ever done. It wasn’t just us he tortured. No one in the neighborhood liked him. He would leave his poor dog out in the rain all day, chained roughly to his porch. His wife was a small woman who endured a vast vocabulary of insults day and night. If a kid’s ball flew into his yard, he made a point to pick it up and carry it inside. It was almost like he tried to do everything possible to make himself hated.
But oddly, there was a one day exception to his cruelty. And that was Halloween.
Our first year in the neighborhood we got to experience Dirk’s Haunted House. Abe had been longingly planning one of his own, but it was simply out of our budget this year. So when we found out our loud-mouth racist neighbor had one, we were more than a little shocked. We were having coffee with Paul and Jake on a cold October day when we heard about the event.
“He does it every year,” Jake said, juggling their two-year-old and nearly spilling a teapot. “It’s his ‘thing’.”
“But do you…go?” Abe asked, confused.
“Of course!” Paul laughed. “It’s the one time a year when the man’s demeanor actually matches the occasion. Plus it’s genuinely scary in there! He must work on the props all year. And he never uses the same thing twice.”
“Paul and I were nervous to go at first,” Jake admitted, “But literally everyone in the neighborhood shows up. People even let their kids in there, and you know I wouldn’t let either of mine near his house. It’s just like…Halloween is his or something. He can be as evil as he wants and it just works.”
Abe and I were still a little scared (and not in the good way) of Dirk’s Haunted House. But we decided to go and at least judge for ourselves. We got to the door and Dirk’s wife was standing outside handing out tickets. She took one look at my pregnant belly and shook her head.
“Not for you,” she said in a shaky, off kilter tone.
“Why?”
“Too scary. Not want to risk the baby.” She handed Abe a ticket and shooed me with her fingers.
