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SOMETHING WICKED

COME, DO YOU HEAR IT? The wind—murmuring in the eaves, scouring the bare trees. How it howls, almost musical, a harmony of old moans. The house seems to breathe, an invalid. Leave your scary movie marathon; this is better than TV. Leave the lights out. The blue glow follows you down the hall. Go to the window in the unused room, the cold seeping through the glass. The moon is risen, caught in nodding branches. The image holds you, black trunks backlit, one silver ray fallen across the deck, beckoning. It’s a romance, this invitation to lunacy (lycanthropy, a dance with the vampire), elemental yet forbidden, tempting, something remembered in the blood.

Don’t you ever wonder?

Don’t you want to know?

Come then, come with us, out into the night. Come now, America the lovesick, America the timid, the blessed, the educated, come stalk the dark backroads and stand outside the bright houses, calm as murderers in the yard, quiet as deer. Come, you slumberers, you lumps, arise from your legion of sleep and fly over the wild woods. Come, all you dreamers, all you zombies, all you monsters. What are you doing anyway, paying the bills, washing the dishes, waiting for the doorbell? Come on, take your keys, leave the bowl of candy on the porch, put on the suffocating mask of someone else and breathe. Be someone you don’t love so much, for once. Listen: like the children, we only have one night.

It’ll be fun, trust me. We’re not going to get caught.

So come, friends, strangers, lovers, neighbors. Come out of your den with the big-screen TV, come out of your warm house and into the cool night. Smell the wet leaves crushed to mush on the driveway, a stale mix of dust and coriander in the wind. It’s the best time of year up here, the only season you want from us, our pastoral past—witch hunts and woodsmoke, the quaintly named dead in mossy churchyards. Never mind that it’s all gone, the white picket fences easy-to-clean vinyl, the friendship quilts stitched in the Dominican, this is still a new England, gardengreen, veined with black rivers and massacres.

Keep coming, past the last square of sidewalk, past the new developments and their sparse lawns, past the stripmalls with the Friendly’s and the Chili’s and the Gap, the CVS and the Starbucks and the Blockbuster, the KFC and the Chinese, their signs dying comets in the night, traffic signals blinking. Come back through Stagecoach Lane and Blueberry Way and Old Mill Place, solving the labyrinth of raised ranches where the last kids (too old but not wanting to grow up just yet) spill from minivans like commandos, charging across lawns for the front door, their bags rattling. The candy is serious here, full-sized Hershey bars and double Reese’s Cups. No, there’s no time to stop, no need. That’s in the past, the happy childhood we all should have had, did have, half missed, didn’t appreciate. Keep your mask on. Say something now, it would give us all away. We’re past that, the grinning pumpkins left behind, the stoops and warm windows, the reaching streetlights. Out here there’s nothing but muddy creeks and marshland, stone fences guarding back pasture gone wild. Here you can still get lost if you want to.