Robert Alter - 100 Malicious Little Mysteries

“Well, they say things are very unpleasant in the States at Halloween nowadays. How gangs will break your windows or slash your tires if you don’t give them at least a dollar.”

I thought the custom simply encouraged hooliganism and I said so. “Anyhow, Halloween isn’t until tomorrow.”

Bambi looked put out at my unfriendliness about her national customs. “Good lord!” she said. “I’ve been giving away pennies for the Guy for the last month. I do think Guy Fawkes is just as peculiar. Fancy burning a human figure!”

I couldn’t see it that way, but I held my tongue. Tonight I resented Bambi; poor though she was personally, I envied her the affluence of her background. Besides, I had always wanted to travel myself.

I poured her another cup of tea, and she reverted to her show-business anecdotes. Then Ron, my husband, joined us, and we played dominoes with the gas money until eleven.

I was up at six the next morning, bringing Ron his tea and stoking up the boiler for the hot water. At 7:30 I went up to the ground floor for the milk. The milkman was just leaving.

“Curious decorations you have around here,” he said, gesturing at our front door. It certainly was odd. Nailed to the door was a doll’s hand. It had a rubber skin filled with cotton; the stuffing was coming out. It looked ugly and perverted.

“If I’d seen that in Brixton or Camden Town,” the man said, “you know what I would have thought? That someone was practicing voodoo. But you don’t get that sort of thing around here. Not in Gloucester Road, you don’t.”

I pulled the dirty thing off the door and chucked it into an open dustbin. “It’s all up and down the Gardens,” he continued. “Bits of a doll, nailed to the doors.”

Not being superstitious, I just shrugged and went upstairs to distribute the milk. Later, having got my son off to school, I began cleaning the flats and the halls.

I did not associate the mutilated doll with my small visitor of the previous evening until, Mrs. Adams having sent me out shopping, I saw the torso just being removed from Professor Newton’s door.

“Creepy, isn’t it?” I greeted him.

“It’s that wretched Halloween child who did it. Trick or treat indeed! Something disturbing about that family. Too much sibling rivalry is my diagnosis. I shall make a formal protest to the parents. Better yet, I shall write a letter to the Times, protesting about the importing of foreign customs — noxious foreign customs!” Having with some difficulty removed the nails, the Professor took the grisly souvenir into the house with him and indignantly slammed the door.

The head of the doll was impaled on the railings at the corner. There I found Lady Arthwaite studying it with interest. “I wonder what the poor thing has done to be decapitated,” she murmured to me as I passed. “Positively medieval, isn’t it? Or, to be precise, it’s — well, I haven’t seen a doll like that since before the war. The skin texture is so much more lifelike than this disgusting plastic you get nowadays. I would have liked one like it for my little granddaughter.”

But as it was chilly I could not wait around. Nevertheless, her homely words took something of the horror out of the incident. I did my shopping, and made Mrs. Adams’ lunch. I worked until it became dark, which was very early.

A storm was brewing. The sky was very dark and threatening. My son got home from school just in time, but I made him a nice cup of hot cocoa anyhow, in case the chill had entered his bones. He is a delicate boy.

The rain came pelting down just after five. Ron was drenched when he came in half an hour later. “Halloween,” he said. “I need a drink.” I mixed the whiskey and hot lemonade the way he liked it.

He sat crouching over the newly stoked boiler in his second-hand smoking jacket. I began preparing the dinner — chops, chips, and peas, with fruit salad and custard for dessert.

We began to eat. Suddenly the front doorbell sounded again. Muttering angrily, I climbed the stairs.

The little American stood there, dressed like a pirate this time.

“Trick or treat?” she said.

This time she had her baby brother in the push-chair.

At an hour after midnight, only a handful of people got off at the subway station that served the huge, sprawling, small-homes development called Sunny Hills. Harry, big and handsome and blustery, was by intention the last one out.

He had the cap, the glove, and the knife, well concealed under his coat. He was never without them, for he did not know just when his chance would come. Maybe tonight, maybe not for two or three weeks. It would come when he was able to walk past the night watchman’s shack without being seen.

Although Harry’s plans had been perfected for some time, he was smart enough not to push them. He’d stood Mary for three years, he could wait a little longer. Besides, she had a part-time job in a department store, and she handed him her pay envelope every week.

Mary did it meekly, pleased that they were finally building up a savings account. He’d always made good money, but he spent it all on himself. He had flash and style to him, although he hadn’t realized how exceptional he was in that respect until Velma moved in next door.

He never could understand why a woman like Velma had landed in Sunny Hills, where even the small, neat houses were so monotonously alike that you could hardly tell them apart. But she spoke vaguely of some trouble she’d been in, and he gathered that she’d been forced to quit her job in the night club where she’d had the hat-check concession.

From the moment they saw each other, they sparked like a pair of high tension wires, and neither of them had tried to resist. Shortly after the first crackle, Harry had managed to get himself transferred to the night shift so that he could see her during the day — without frustrating complications.

But it wasn’t satisfying. The nights were what depressed him, going back to the house where he no longer belonged, to the woman he didn’t want, the woman he had grown to hate.

“Kitten,” he had said to Velma once. “If something would only happen to her. If she could meet with an accident—”

“You could make it seem like an accident,” Velma had said in her low, torchy voice.

“If I do, you’re going to be part of it.”

“Well?”

“Maybe it would be smarter to try and get a divorce.”

“You’d have to pay alimony. There wouldn’t be much left.”

“You like money, don’t you?” he’d said. And her black eyes, lifting slowly, practically singed him.

After that, he began his preparations. He bought the roll of film and kept it at home — just in case. He always took the rear car of the subway and was the last one out. Also just in case. And he checked the subway schedule and found out that the night trains ran exactly fifteen minutes apart, and every evening he set his watch by the subway clock. Just in case.

Tonight was no different from the other nights. He came out of the subway exit and looked around to make sure that nobody had noticed him. Except for one cab, with the driver dozing over the steering wheel, the street was deserted.

He crossed the roadway and strode down the long block, and for the hundredth time he thought it over. He put his hand in his pocket and touched the knife. He’d found it in a public lavatory. There was no conceivable way of tracing it and no one except Mary had ever glimpsed it.

As he approached the night watchman’s booth he walked fast, the tempo of his pulse lifting. Then he was alongside the cubicle, and his heart gave a sharp, convulsive jerk. Mike Hogan wasn’t there. This was it — the one unbelievable chance.