Mellow

After having to take a couple of days off to deal with the house at an impossible time, work caught up with me today. I did manage to escape for a run on the moor on what was a rather mellow, misty, hazy, windless day. I found my legs halfway around the circuit and got a bit of a pace on. It was so warm that I ended up taking my shirt off, prompting a few surprised glances. It might well be the first time I've done that all year. I think it's likely to be the last!

Thanks so much for all your good wishes for my move. I've felt lighter today. I'm living through a great deal of uncertainty at the moment but I feel confident that it's all going to come together.

Last week I read out half of my Halloween story and this is the night to post it on. I'm beginning to think that it might be the complete story. What do you think?

Revenge is Sweet

Darkness descended on the streets of the town and, one by one, small groups of children started to gather at various corners, dressed in ridiculously elaborate and ghoulish costumes. It was the night of Halloween. It has always been a celebration with both a light and a dark side, but over the years those contrasting aspects have become increasingly accentuated, and never any more so than on this particularly black night.

What once was a religious festival in honour of the dead had become a parody of itself. Death is no longer honoured but ridiculed. This annoyed Morgan. He had come to despise this particular day in the calendar, mainly because of the way it brought out the worst in children. Most trick-or-treaters, if appearing on their own, would likely be quite harmless, delightful even (for it wasn’t as if he disliked children), but together, in a gang, they were horrid, the girls as bad as the boys, the herd conferring a bravado and an imperative to show off. He hated their cockiness.

Morgan wasn’t really a mean man, but being nice never came naturally to him. He was always to the point, never understanding the virtue of tact. He often wondered if his mordant personality was the result of the alliterative name he’d been given by his parents, or perhaps they had an intuition about that and named him accordingly. He guessed it was a bit of both. Morgan Mordue was inevitably going to develop a fascination around death. Some say he was destined to become an undertaker. He never felt like there was any other choice of profession.

The local kids seemed to think this was funny and made a bit of a target of him on Halloween night. Morgan had responded in turn by playing the part they were expecting, becoming something of a caricature of himself. He’d earned a reputation over time. Some children were genuinely afraid, the stories having grown in the telling, such that they did not dare knock on his door. Even the parents were susceptible to these Chinese whispers and, while chaperoning the younger children, tended to give his house a wide berth. For the older children, though, his scariness was a lure. They dared each other to knock on his door. 

Morgan was fascinated himself at how events had escalated, year on year. What would have been unimaginable a couple of Halloweens back now seemed quite reasonable. He occasionally became disturbed that he might be losing sight of all objectivity, that he might go too far, but he remained confident in his skills. He’d never done any real physical harm to a child. His aim was to inflict merely psychological damage. He wanted to scare the living bejesus out of the snotty little brats. It was time to ratchet up the fear factor another notch.

It had all started when, as a point of principle, he refused to be blackmailed for sweets and cash. Rewards should be earned not extracted under duress. Before the Americans had distorted the tradition it was called guising, where children dressed up and performed for their treats. He would have responded generously to that. At first he tried to enter into the spirit of things and bought in fruit, at far greater expense than the cheap candy dispensed by most people. He had apples and oranges and bananas to give away and thought they would be accepted, if not with a huge amount of enthusiasm, at least with a few words of thanks. But no. The ungrateful little sods took them with a sneer and then duly peppered the front of his house with them. The bananas were peeled and the fruit smeared all over his door, drying overnight like the strongest adhesive. He realised that trick-or-treat was nothing less than a protection racket.

He wouldn’t have minded so much if they actually had the ingenuity to play a trick but all they had the capacity for was crude wanton vandalism. With each passing year he had to spend more and more time cleaning up the damage done. He’d tried contacting the police but they just laughed. He could see their point. What were they going to do? He had no choice but to take things into his own hands.

Just as the children on the street were getting excited, so was old Mr. Mordue. Everything had been planned with great precision, down to the very finest detail. He was actually like a little kid himself, as if counting down the minutes before being able to open his presents at Christmas. The truth was that trick-or-treat had become a game and, as we all know, a game ultimately has to have a winner and a loser. Morgan was recklessly determined to be the winner, at virtually any cost. He was happy to have lost many battles in preparation for winning the war. The children, unfortunately, did not understand this. They didn’t understand that they were about to arrive at the door of a man in the grip of an obsession which had begun before they’d even been born. Revenge is a sweet but terrible thing. It grows inside you like a tumour, eating you up from the inside, until there is but one thing left to focus on. He was ready.