
The Scariest Thing I KnowDean KoontzDean wrote the following short story-about a boy named Nick Loffman, who has avery unusual Halloween experience-far the special Halloween issue of MarthaStewart Living.When I was twelve years old, in seventh grade, I was a disaster waiting to happen. Iwasn't the equivalent of a simple flood or a mere train wreck. I was an earthquake inragged sneakers, a tornado in patched jeans, ready to bring tremendous ruin downon myself and on everyone around me.I didn't realize I was a loser. I thought i was smart and tough.1 was so smart, I knew school was a concentration camp where they brainwashedkids to be good citizens and spiked the lousy cafeteria food with be-nice pills. To me,being an upstanding citizen meant working yourwhole life for nickels and dimes and having no fun. I preferred to be bad.And tough? Other kids called rne Stony, because I was hard. You didn't want to messwith me. I had my secret smokes-Lucky Strikes, the~smokes of tough men-andrecently I'd started carrying a knife. Five-inch biade, gravity release. I hadn't used it ina fight-not yet-because so far I'd never been in danger of losing with rny fistsalone.Looking back, I can remember the anger that was in me, the storm of violencewaiting to break, but I can't feel it anymore, not the way I felt it then. The twelve-yearoldme is more unknowable than a stranger. He's an alien from another world.I'm grateful I didn't grow up to be him.My name is Nicholas Loffman. My friends call me Nick or Nicky. No one has calledme Stony since I was twelve, thirty-eight years ago.Halloween 1963 was the night my life changed forever. I didn't believe in spooks andsuch. The world held no mystery for me in those days- I saw everything simply,clearly: There were people who always got what they wanted-and people whonever did. 1 was determined to be one of the always-gots, not one of the never-dids.I intended to take what I wanted, no matter what the risks.That Halloween, most other twelve-year-olds were still doing the witch-vampireskeletonthing, toting huge shopping bags door-to-door, hoping to fill them withenough candy to rot their teeth before Thanksgiving.I was looking for bigger loot. My English teacher, Mrs. Carson, was going to be awayfrom home for the evening. She and her husband, who taught twelfth-grade English,were chaperoning a corny "Goblin Hop" at the high school. I figured I could jimmy awindow at their place, without much chance of getting caught, and see if I could findsome loose money or anything else I wanted.I didn't have anything against Mrs. Carson. She never sent me to detention- She triedher best to teach me. And I didn't even know her husband, though I did know he wasa coin collector, and I figured maybe there would be some significant change lyingaround.The word burglary never entered my head. As I saw it, if I had the nerve to takesomething I wanted, then it was rightfully mine. In school, we'd learned aboutevolution, the survival of the fittest, predators and prey. 1 was fit, strong for my age,bold-so, hey, I was just fulfilling nature's plan.Late in the afternoon that Halloween, nature's plan had to be put on hold when mymother informed me that I had to accompany my little brother, Dink, when he wenttrick-or-treating.By twelve, I was a thief and a bully, but I couldn't say no to my mother when sheasked for my help. I was perpetually angry with her. I'm ashamed to say that sheembarrassed me, that I had no respect for her, that I shrank from her touch and wasoften rude to her. But when she asked me to do a chore, I did it. Never with a smile,always with a display of contempt, but I did the chore. This curious obedient streakfrustrated and puzzled rne. I didn't understand why she had this power over me-because back then, I didn't realize that I loved her.1This is very hard to tell you, very hard, but if you're to believe what follows, I need tobe painfully honest and admit that she embarrassed me because she was constantlytired, endlessly worried about one thing or another, every day counting pennies andcutting corners and planning for crises that might never come. We were poor, and Iblamed her for our poverty, because it seemed to me that she had just accepted it.In reality, she was tired all the time because she worked six and sometimes sevendays a week as a waitress at the Good Plate Diner out on the state highway. Shesewed her own clothes and some of ours, and she could stretch a grocery dollar untilit would kill you if it snapped. She was only thirty then, but worn thin and pale withcare.My father walked out on us the year Dink was born, when 1 was three, and we neversaw him again. I blamed her for that, too, because my father wasn't there to take thebrunt of my anger. And even Stony Loffman, young thug in the making, wasn'theartless enough to blarne his brother Dink.His name wasn't really Dink. Walter John Loffrnan. He wanted to be called Wally, butI called him Dink because the name peeved him.The world over, little brothers-he was nine that October-are an irritant to boys on thecusp of adolescence. Often, however, I was prickly with Dink because he stronglyresembled our mother, while I was the image of my father, whom I knew fromphotographs.I hated my father and loathed my resemblance to him. Mother tried to counsel me outof my hatred. She said my old man wasn't evil, not even bad, reaily, just weak. Sheforgave him, but I would not.The creep had abandoned us for many reasons, but the deciding event had beenDink. My brother's left side was unfinished when he was born. His left arm measuredtwo inches shorter than his right, and had three fingers. His left leg-withered, seatedin a distorted hip socket-required a brace to support him.One thing I can be proud of of: I never made fun of Dink's disabilities or expectedless of him because of (hem. Anyone who dared to tease him carried my signaturebruises for a week.Yet I remained prickly with Dink, impatient, uncommunicative.An hour after sundown, we set out. Using Mother's black cardigan as a tunic and apillow as a hump, wearing a dime-store mask, Dink had dressed for trick-or-treat asthe Hunchback of Notre Dame. He was never self-conscious about his arm and leg:now it tickled him to emphasize his deformities. I wore no costume, none of that kidstuff. I was strictly Dink's chaperone, bent on hustling him along, getting his treat bagfilled, so I would be free to search Mrs. Carson's house while the Halloween hop wasstill hopping,In those days, in our quiet town, kids could safely go roaming on Halloween withoutclench-jawed adults accompanying them. The candy collected didn't have to befluoroscoped for hidden razor blades or chemically analyzed for poisons. But, ofcourse, that was in another century.Trick-or-treaters banded together in groups, to goof with one another and to play atbeing spooky. We walked four blocks from the trailer park where we lived before weencountered others in costume, but by the time we'd traveled two blocks farther,there were twelve of us, some kids as young as six, a couple as old as me.Witches, vampires, skeletons: They were the usual suspects, less convincinglymonstrous than they thought they were.A little girl, about Dink's age, missed the point altogether; she ventured into thehaunted night as an angel, dressed in white, with white feathered wings. When theothers ragged her mercilessly, she said, "I tike being an angel, and so would you ifyou were good enough to be one." This earned her even more jeers and taunts, inresponse to which she merely smiled and curtsied-eticit-ing additional mockery.One kid, masquerading as Death, had a genuinely creepy costume. He was shorterthan me, maybe ten years old. He wore a black robe that dragged on the ground, adeep hood over his head. He'd painted his face black, so it vanished in the hood.The long sleeves of his robe hid his hands. But from time to time, he raised an armand pointed at one of the other kids, and from the sleeve came the bony fingers of askeleton, no doubt a plastic, novelty-shop gag that he was holding in his real hand.2Three things about his performance were genius. First, he never spoke. No amountof taunting or wheedling could pry a sound from him. Second, he stank iike death.Perhaps with a chemistry-hobby set, this weirdo had concocted a putrescent stenchand sprinkled it on his robe.We recognized some of the kids. Some we didn't. Kid Death, as I came to think ofhim, surely seemed to be a stranger, because neither Dink nor I knew anyone whohad this cool an imagination.From house to house, we proceeded, and the trick-or-treaters grew increasinglyterrified of Kid Death. They were convinced the stinky one was real, not one of them,but the Grim Reaper in miniature.I could have grabbed the little geek, wrestled him to the ground, and yanked his hoodback, but he was smaller than me. And as bad as I was, I never fought anyoneunless he was my size or bigger. Picking on someone smaller was a sign ofweakness, and I was not my father.Besides, I just wanted to move this show along and get to Mrs. Carson's place.The third bit of genius in Kid Death's performance: He wasn't carrying a shoppingbag, and he showed no interest in candy. He held back, at the periphery of the group,watching, pointing. If he didn't want candy, then the logical conclusion, among thesmall fry in our group, was that HE WAS REALLY DEATH, AND HE WANTEDTHEIR SOULS!Before long, Dink was staying particularly close to me. In fact, all the kids werehuddling around me."He's no kid," said Dink. "He's real.""Get real," I told him. "He's no bogeyman."Just then, when Kid Death turned to us, moonlight flared in the whites of his eyes,The moon was full, pocked and yellow, with rags of clouds trailing from it, like theface of a mummy revealed between unraveling bandages. His eyes, therefore, wereyellow and unearthly.Pent-up terror exploded through the group. When yellow-eyed Kid Death pointed atthem with his bony hand, the munchkins screamed and ran, having worked themselvesinto a state of high anxiety.I lost Dink. Then I saw his small form with the fake hump and the real limp, stumblinginto the street. I saw, too, the onrushing truck.Strong as I was, tough as I was, I couldn't reach him fast enough to sweep him out ofdanger. I ran toward him. knowing it was hopeless.That's when time stopped. Not for me. But it stopped for Kid Death and all the trickor-treaters. They were frozen in midstep, in midbreath, like statues. The cloudsceased unraveling across the face of the moon. The breeze died in an instant, andnot one leaf stirred on the trees. The world was suddenly without sound: not a tick,not a click, not a whisper. I thought I'd gone deaf.Time stopped for Dink, too. and for the speeding truck. At first I afone was moving ina petrified world-but then I saw the little girl dressed as an angel. She moved fasterthan I could, straight for Dink. She was flying, she swept Dink off the street, carriedhim past the truck, and time started moving again. The truck roared by in a blast ofwind, and alt the munchkins were screaming, and Dink was safe with the whitewingedgirl on the other side of the street.By the time I reached my brother, the girl was gone. I never saw her vanish. I huggedDink so hard.When the other trick-or-treaters gathered around, I plucked off Kid Death's hood. Hewas a boy we knew, a geeky sixth-grader.Dink didn't remember the angel girl. He thought I was the one who pulled him out ofthe path of the truck. That's what he still believes, all these years after that night.Indeed, no one remembered her but me. She had been sent to save Dink, but evenback then, hardcase Stony Loffman realized she had been sent to save him, too.Which is why time didn't stop for me, why I was allowed to see her fly.I never went to Mrs. Carson's house that night. I never stole again. I threw away theknife.Dink grew up to be a doctor of biology and a medical researcher whose discoverieshave saved uncountable lives.3Me? I've become a popular writer of suspense novels, scary stuff. Married, with twokids of my own. I was successful enough, early enough, to give my mom ten years ofeasy living before she died.Because of what I write, people often ask me what is the scariest thing that's everhappened to me. I tell them, instead, the scariest thing I know: that there is a purposeto life, and meaning, and that everything we do counts in the end. This is the scariestthing I know-but also the most wonderful.4




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