by Glen Huser
“Sounds like a fruitcake to me,” said Mr. Fergus.
“We do need a babysitter next month.” Mrs. Fergus looked at her boys, sighed and shook her head. “Millicent’s wedding, remember? And no one in the building will babysit here anymore.”
“I ain’t no baby,” Dwayne complained.
“No backlip.” Mr. Fergus made a threatening movement toward his belt buckle. “You two get to bed and you better not get out of bed if you know what’s good for you.”
With her gaze focused on the hall mirror, Mrs. Fergus ran a comb through her hair.
“I’m going to be sneakin’ back every ten minutes from the Murplesteins. If I catch you…” Mr. Fergus pointed a finger in the direction of the boys’ bedroom. “And Mrs. Griddle or whatever is goin’ to babysit you while me and your ma are at Auntie Millicent’s wedding. BABY-sit, you hear?”
An hour past midnight, all of the excitement over Halloween had faded away. There was just the smallest taste of it left, like the sweetness from a caramel. Children had fallen asleep, even those complaining of stomachaches.
Galina Lubinitsky still clutched her crayon, bits of it rubbing off onto her pillow. Mrs. Croop, hearing Hubert’s small snores, switched off his bedroom light. He could never go to sleep unless it was on. Papa Bellini sighed and shook his head as he pulled a blanket up tight to Angelo’s chin. Asleep, he did look like an angel. Benjamin Hooper’s model spaceships, hanging from his bedroom ceiling, twirled in a shaft of moonglow.
In Apartment 713, Carolina Giddle brewed a pot of tea.
“It will be ready in two shakes,” she announced to Herman Spiegelman as he unloaded a trolley with the last of her things. “Huckleberry peppermint, and I add just a splash of Southern Comfort. Especially good with one of my granghoula bars, which I think I have packed right there in that top box if you’ll hand it to me.”
“It’s been a long day.” Herman Spiegelman mopped his brow. He settled into a cane-back chair by the drop-leaf table Carolina Giddle was opening up. “They should pass a law against Halloween.”
“I would miss it like a good back tooth,” Carolina Giddle said. She added an extra splash from a bottle into the super’s tea. “There.” She handed it to him.
The caretaker took a deep, satisfying sip. “You come from a long ways?”
“Yes, I reckon it’s the longest trip Trinket and I’ve ever made, and I’ve had her for twenty-two years.”
“Trinket?”
“My car.”
“Trinket.” Herman Spiegelman tasted the word along with a bite of granghoula bar. “Never seen a vehicle quite so…” He stopped and searched for a word. “Decorated. And what brings you here?”
“I have friends…” Carolina Giddle paused and smiled as she slowly stirred some honey into her tea.
There was a sudden clanking from the radiator. And then what sounded like a clearing of a throat.
Cough. Cough.
“Oh, be quiet, you consarn whatever.” The caretaker settled his teacup carefully on the table, pulled a wrench from his overall pocket and delivered a blow that made the old radiator vibrate and ring.
The clanking and the coughing stopped.
Carolina Giddle’s eyebrows made little peaks, and she bit her lip. After Herman Spiegelman had finished his tea, collected his trolley and said goodnight, she went over and stood by the radiator. She gave it a gentle pat.
There was a cough again. So soft you could barely hear it. And the radiator gurgled contentedly for a minute or two.
“Hello, Grace,” Carolina Giddle whispered. “Don’t worry. It’s just me.”
TWO
The Bone Game
The twelfth of November was a Saturday. It was a warm fall day. There was just enough breeze to send the last poplar leaves skittering across the hills and hollows of the park.
Dwight and Dwayne spent all day in the park. There was plenty to do. They played Ante I Over the tea pavilion roof until their softball hit a gardener on the head and he chased them away. They dropped water bombs on joggers from a low-hanging branch on a chestnut tree.
But the most fun was hiding in a culvert close to where Hubert and Hetty Croop were collecting leaves for a school project.
Dwight and Dwayne knew how easy it was to frighten the living daylights out of the Croop kids. Their best prank had been scaring them with a fake rat. That still made them whoop with laughter. Dwight had taken Barkus’s favorite squeak-toy and tucked it inside an old moth-eaten fur muff he found in a garbage bin. While Dwight hid around a corner, Dwayne waited for Hubert and Hetty to get off the elevator on their way home from school.
“You guys seen that rat that’s been running loose on your floor?” Dwayne asked them.
“Rat!” Hubert clutched Hetty’s coat sleeve.
Then Dwight came out and ran at them, hollering and waving the squeaking piece of fur. “Help! It’s got me! It’s chewing off my arm!”
Hubert and Hetty ran away howling with fear, stumbling through the Exit door and down the fire escape.
To find Croop kids in the park by themselves was almost as good as finding dropped money.
Hetty was just reaching into the edge of the culvert to grab a red maple leaf when the boys let out roars that would have frightened a grizzly bear.
Hetty screamed and Hubert yelped. Their leaves went flying as they raced for the park gate. Dwight and Dwayne burst out of the culvert and ran from tree to tree, hiding behind the trunks and roaring.
Once the Croops were out of sight, the twins lay on the leaf-spattered grass and held their sides, laughing.
They were still chuckling when they got home. With all the fun they’d been having, they’d forgotten that they were being left in the care of Carolina Giddle for the evening.
“What the… ” Dwight choked on the laugh that had gurgled up again as he opened the apartment door.
“Huh.” Dwayne shook his head.
Carolina Giddle perched on a stool in the kitchen. Her flyaway scarecrow hair was caught up with a clip that looked like a coiled silver snake. She wore a shirt that seemed to be covered with little black lizards with sequin eyes.
“How lovely to see you two again,” Carolina Giddle said in that special way she had of talking. As if she were dragging her words through honey. “Dee-wight and Dee-wayne, isn’t it?”
Dwayne glared. “We don’t need no babysitter.”
Mr. Fergus rubbed his thumb against his belt loop and gave them his don’t-mess-with-me look.
“You be good for Ms. Giddle.” Mrs. Fergus blew kisses at the boys as they headed out.
With their parents gone, the Fergus twins gave one another knowing looks. It was a silent signal to get busy with all of the tricks they’d played on babysitters over the years.
When Carolina Giddle dished tomato soup for their supper, Dwight quickly splashed a big dollop of Louisiana hot sauce into her bowl when her back was turned. Enough to send her screaming for water.
Carolina Giddle took a spoonful, then smiled and said, “I think I’ll just add a bit of hot sauce to mine.” She removed the cap, upended the bottle and said, “Mm…mm,” as it drizzled into her soup. “Where I come from, they say this will put curl into your hair! You boys care for some?”
As Carolina did up the dishes, the boys lured Barkus, their pet sheepdog, into a bathtub laced with the contents of a full bottle of bubble bath. Soon there were bubbles oozing down the hall from the bathroom.
But Carolina Giddle simply said, “Oh, my. I love to see boys and dogs clean as a Sunday-go-to-meeting shirt.”
She plugged in a fan and blew all of the bubbles back into the bathroom, where she opened a window. Clouds of soap bubbles drifted out into the night, and the boys took turns watching the surprised looks of passersby on the street below.
Meanwhile Carolina Giddle dried Barkus gently wi
th a huge towel, and he gave her several appreciative licks on her hand.
The twins were pretty tired by this time, so their attempt to stage a fight, complete with ketchup for fake blood, wasn’t really their best effort. Still, there was a good chance that Carolina Giddle might faint at the sight of so much blood. Or she might get hysterical and call an ambulance.
Instead, she dipped her finger into the blood, tasted it and said, “I think this could use some hot sauce, too.”
“I’m gonna watch a movie on TV,” Dwayne declared when she told them it was time to get ready for bed. He and Dwight flung themselves onto the couch in the living room and began fighting — for real this time — over the remote control.
And that’s when all the lights went off, and the TV died in the living room.
“Hey!” the twins shouted.
In the next minute Carolina Giddle stood silhouetted in the light from the kitchen door.
“Jumpin’ junebugs!” she said. “Looks like a couple of fuses have blown. But never mind, I’ll tell you a story instead.”
“That’s for babies,” Dwight grumbled.
“Well, you don’t need to listen, but I’m in the mood for telling. I think this dim light is what’s putting it in my mind. I’ll just get out my candles.”
She eased herself onto the other end of the couch.
“It’s a ghost story,” she added, lighting several tea candles and arranging them in a circle on an end table. She reached into her bag and drew out the cage with the tarantula in it. Chiquita looked up at the twins and seemed to wave one of her hairy arms in greeting.
“Chiquita hates to miss a good ghost story,” Carolina Giddle noted. “And, oh, yes. I nearly forgot. I’ve brought along a snack — some bone rattlers. They’re from a favorite recipe of my grandmother’s. She always had some on hand when I visited her for the holidays.”
“Bone rattlers?” The twins sometimes said the same thing at the same time, and this was one of those times.
Carolina Giddle fetched a plastic container out of her handbag, snapping the lid free. She pulled out some white items that looked like a skeleton’s finger bones. They glistened in the candlelight. A delicious smell of peppermint filled the air.
The boys watched as Carolina Giddle crunched into one of the treats and sighed between chews.
“Mmm-mmm, so deelish,” she said, picking a bit of peppermint out of her front teeth.
Dwight reached over and got a bone rattler for himself. He slipped a sliver of it into Chiquita’s cage.
“She’s not a vegetarian,” Carolina Giddle said. “But she does love the smell of peppermint.”
Dwayne’s fingers curled around a bone rattler, too, as he dropped the remote and leaned back against his brother.
The tea lights flickered in the dark room. Everything was quiet as a grave, except for the sound of the boys crunching their treats, and Carolina Giddle began.
Some ghost stories are old as a Chattahoochee levee and others can spring up — why, even yesterday. I heard this one a couple of years ago. It was told to me by an old woman who lived on a little island in the swamp country on the edge of town, just back of the Chattahoochee River.
Seems there were two boys. Jimmy Joe and Oren lived no more than a hop, skip and a holler from the old woman. Those boys — I think they were about nine years old — were up to constant devilment. Especially whenever there was a full moon.
The boys had been watching TV news and had heard about a running shoe washing up on a beach someplace hundreds of miles away. A single running shoe with bones from a human foot in it, and no way of telling where they might have come from.
Wouldn’t it be a good joke, the boys thought, to get hold of an old running shoe and put some bones in it and leave it on the levee right where someone would be bound to find it.
Where would they get the bones, they wondered. Maybe coyote bones or buzzard bones from the swamp?
But Jimmy Joe had a better idea. His daddy was a caretaker at the medical school downtown on the green. It was easy enough for him to go with his father one of the nights he was at work.
There were a couple of skeletons out in the laboratories, but Jimmy Joe was lucky enough to find one stored away in a closet — yes, sometimes there is a skeleton in a closet — and he guessed this was one nobody would be looking at for some time.
So he snipped the wires holding that foot to the leg bone and made off with it.
Sure enough, a fisherman found the running shoe and took it to the police station. The TV and newspapers got all excited. They became even more excited when a forensic expert informed them the bones were about a hundred years old.
Although they lived on different streets running down to the levee, Oren and Jimmy Joe liked to meet up in the wee small hours of the morning when the world was sleeping and they should have been, too. It was as easy as falling off a log for them to slip out of their upstairs bedroom windows and shinny down a drainpipe or a tree. Sometimes they ran from street to street ringing doorbells. Sometimes they hid behind fences making horrible noises like cats fighting, until people woke up and threw things at them. Sometimes they rambled through the park in the middle of town, chucking stones at the trash barrels or tying the playground swings in knots.
A couple of nights after they put the skeleton’s foot in a running shoe, the boys arranged to meet at the edge of the park across from the medical school. Jimmy Joe’s daddy had finished his janitor work hours earlier, and all of the lights were off.
Or so it seemed.
Oren was sprawled against a trunk of one of those big old park trees, laughing as he showed Jimmy Joe a clipping from the morning newspaper featuring the shoe and the ankle joint sticking out of it.
But Jimmy Joe wasn’t laughing. He clutched Oren’s arm and pointed to the medical school. The boys could see a dim light in one of the upper-floor windows. Then the light was in the next window along the hallway. And then the next one, moving from room to room.
“What in tarnation…” Oren’s voice croaked like an old frog in the swamp.
The light disappeared. Then it reappeared at a window on the lower floor, and another window, moving toward the front door.
Just then a cloud covered the moon and everything was suddenly as dark as the inside of a gunny sack. The boys held their breath. They wanted to run, but something kept them there. They were frozen with fear. But they also wanted to see what the moonlight would reveal once that cloud drifted by.
What they saw was the light appearing at the top of the stairs outside the front door of the medical school. It was a candle. And it was held in a bony hand by a skeleton.
When the skeleton moved, it had an odd, lopsided gait, as if one of its legs was shorter than the other. The candlelight wobbled as the skeleton struggled awkwardly down the steps.
And then the boys heard a voice that was like nothing they had ever heard before. It was kind of scratchy, like a gate that hasn’t been oiled, and gritty, like a rock being dragged along a cement sidewalk. And old-sounding, like Oren’s great-grandfather just before he died.
“My foot,” the skeleton moaned in that horrible voice, but softly, as if it were coaxing something from a bit of cottonwood fluff. “Give me back my foot.”
Jimmy Joe grabbed hold of Oren, and Oren hung on to Jimmy Joe. Both of them were so frightened they couldn’t move. The skeleton was slowly coming closer, and it was like its empty eye sockets could see them.
The boys scrambled to their feet and began running as fast as their own running shoes would carry them. You might have thought they would have raced home. But to do that, they would have had to run past the skeleton.
Instead, they ran in the other direction.
No matter how fast they ran, whenever they glanced back they could see the skeleton, still holding a flickering candle, hard on their heels. In fact
, it was getting closer and closer.
“FOOT,” the skeleton moaned in a voice that was louder and even more horrible sounding. “GIVE ME BACK MY FOOT!”
Soon they were smack dab in the middle of that big swamp that circled around the town. They splashed through some slough water and scrambled up a bank that was all tangled with cypress and willow roots.
Jimmy Joe looked back. The candlelight in the skeleton’s bony hand was so close now that it seemed to blind him.
“GIVE ME BACK MY FOOT!” the skeleton called out in a voice so loud and awful that it sent owls flapping from their perches and coyotes yipping into the night.
“I haven’t got your foot!” Jimmy Joe hollered.
“THEN I’LL TAKE YOURS!” the skeleton roared, and Jimmy Joe felt a bony hand grab his ankle. He went sprawling headfirst into a hollow and he felt a terrible pain as that skeleton twisted away at his foot. Jimmy Joe cried out, and the candlelight seemed to go dancing away in that couple of seconds before everything went black for him.
“Heavens to Betsy,” Carolina Giddle said, yawning and stretching her arms. “It’s about time you two were in bed.”
“You can’t quit there!” the boys called out. “Tell us what happened. Did the skeleton get Jimmy Joe’s foot?”
Even Barkus, curled at Carolina Giddle’s feet, gave a sympathetic “wuff,” as if he, too, wanted to hear what happened next.
“All right.” Carolina Giddle sighed. “Once you’ve brushed your teeth and have your pajamas on.”
In three and a half minutes both boys were back on the sofa, flashing their scrubbed teeth, tugging their pajama tops and bottoms into place.
You remember that old lady? The one who lived just back of the Chattahoochee? Well, when Jimmy Joe screamed and fell, Oren raced on as fast as he could go. It was that old lady’s house he came to first.
When the breathless boy managed to get enough of his story out, she grabbed her shawl and a lantern, and the two of them headed back.
