I will mention parenthetically that we have no fear of the residents on the other side of the veil for we have been neighbors for years and know their children's names. And, last but not least, we have a full complement of cats and, as I mentioned in an earlier post, cats do not abide zombies. Zombies are to cats less than the dust beneath their chariot wheels.
As I said, we were ready. Yet, although the gates oped at 6:00, there were no spirits in sight on the High Street at 6:12. We were stumped. Wouldn't you be? Then Wonder's eyes opened wide and a smile played on her lips. I admit that her behavior interested me strangely.
"What?" I said.
"Fake it till you make it," was all she said but it was enough. She and I have spent years hanging out in the same secret societies and I knew exactly what she was getting at. We opened the front doors wide and carried the cauldron out to the front stoop where we sat and waited.
"It's a wide, windy world we're riding through, Billy Bob," I said as an invocation. I like invocations. Makes me feel like I'm doing something. But it wasn't the invocation, it was the boffo--the going outside to wait for the trick-or-treaters. It was just enough priming to get the crackle flowing. Siempre-bango! Just like that, the veil parted and High Street was filled with spirits.
There were witches and goblins, there were imps and ogres, there was a dragon pulled in a little red wagon followed by a were-lion and a were-catepillar. Fairy princesses, a UPS man, who must have been enchanted by a fairy dancing, and too many more to list here.
It was the most beautiful Halloween night in memory and it lasted until well into It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.
"Are we going to Jenny and Bill's to see how they made out?" Wonder asked when the last of the spirits returned to Otherworld.
"Hmmm, I think not," I said.
"But I thought you wanted to do that," she said.
"That was before I locked Bill in the handcuffs," I said.
"Excuse me," she said.
"He insisted on demonstrating that he could escape from handcuffs in less than a minute," I said. "So I handcuffed him, hands behind his back, and then he realized that the cuffs were not the cuffs he practiced with."
"So?" asked the Wonder.
"Well, he didn't have a key," I said.
"Poor, Jenny," she said. "But they have a full complement of cats, so I guess it's not as bad as it could be."
We both mused for several minutes. It grew darker.
"Life comes hard and fast," I said.