Mission Hallowen Prank

“Did you get the dog shit?”

The pirate held up the Zip Lock bag and nodded. Bat Man smiled behind his plastic mask. Yoda displayed the can of lighter fluid.  Casper exposed a plastic lighter. They were ready.

“That dog shit better be fresh,” Bat Man warned.

“I got it from the lawn just a few minutes ago, Oscar was wormed yesterday. This stuff is crawling.”

Everyone wrinkled their noses.

They were moving along the sidewalks haunted now by fairies, Freddy Kruger’s, witches and ghosts. Parents moved among the wraiths smoking cigarettes and bitching about the cold, the national deficit and other adult topics. They stood at the sidewalk shuffling their feet while their little monsters rang the doorbell on porches decorated with glowing Jack o’ Lanterns. The ghoulies shrieked “Trick or Treat!”

Bat Man lead his bizarre crew down Emily Avenue, past the gun shop and liquor store, through the Emery school playground and up Willow Hill to a collection of old houses built there after WW2.

The target tonight would be Old Man Danfry.

This was a particularly sour old bastard who would get his news papers in his underwear. When the Pirate’s little brother fell off his bike from the curb last month Danfry was watering his shrubs and laughed as he sprayed the bawling kid where he fell in the street.

“That’ll teach ya, ya little prick!”

He wheeled his broken bike all the way home soaked to the skin. Tonight was “pay back” time.

Bat Man was using his Bat Sonar to figure out where he was. He recognized the shrub wall on the street side that his brother described. There was the house with the metal awnings. A little further was the place with the barbeque grill in the car port. Here was the place with the metal fence. A little further now and they would be at the target. Ghosts and witches trundled past them laughing and pulling on each other’s costumes. A little girl was crying. Her mother picked her up and carried her, brushing green witch hair from her glistening eyes.

“There it is,” Bat Man said with a low hiss.

The house was old, even in the combination of street and moon light you could see splitting, rotting wood that needed sanding and paint. By the garage a faded American flag dangled. A car on cinder blocks sat in the driveway like some rusting guard dog. Everyone checked themselves.

1. Dog shit.


2. Lighter.


3. Lighter fluid.


4. Bag.

The team approached the house by way of the shadowed bushes. Outside the fence little goblins passed, their parental keepers hobbling after them. Cars rolled slowly down the narrow streets stopping for swarms of Trick or Treater’s.

The team moved along behind the car and was able to look down the garage face to the flag. They slipped combat style to the garage corner and Bat Man looked at the lighted front porch trying to reconnoiter where the bag of flaming dog shit would go. It had to be where the old fart would see it burning and try to stomp it out. You didn’t want it on the mat, it could catch fire too. Bat Man located the spot centered on the cement porch. It was then that he saw the old man in his chair watching the TV.

He was turned away from them, a scrawny arm dangling over the side of the chair. It didn’t move. Cigarette smoke drifted from a butt between the mottled fingers. This was good. They would wake him out of sleep. Serves the old bastard right. This was really, really good.

“Billy,” the pirate said.

Bat Man was putting the dog shit in the sack. His stomach churned a little as he saw worms twisting in the beige goo.

“Billy,” the pirate said again.

Bat Man stopped, exasperated. “What the hell do you want Wayman?”

“We need to go.”

The others were looking at the pirate now, their masks hid their annoyance.  What was the matter with this pussy anyway? We were almost there. This was “pay back.”

“We need to go,” the pirate insisted. “Someone has seen us.”

Bat Man jerked the lighter fluid out of Yoda’s hand. “There’s no one around and the old man is asleep,” he hissed.

The Pirate started to back away and moved to the sidewalk. “You guys need to get the hell out of here,” he warned. And then he turned and fled down the street.  Casper and the plastic lighter fled after him. He had seen it too.

“Pusses!” Yoda hissed after them and then stopped, his eyes fixed on a corner of the yard. He was trying to make something out in the shadows.

“Benny, do you have a light?” Bat Man asked Yoda. But Yoda was backing down the sidewalk now too. Bat Man looked up. “What’s wrong with all you little girls? I thought this was payback night!”

But Yoda was several yards down the street now offering no sign of returning.

Bat Man was really mad now. He was going to settle for smearing the old man’s door knob with the wormy dog shit. He’d show those little girls at school next week. He approached the lighted porch. Any minute now some stupid Trick or Treater’s were going to come running up and blow this. He had to hurry.

Half way between the porch and a rusted garden light a shadow came quickly from the corner of the yard in the shape of a large man. A cold, invisible hand hit Bat Man in the forehead with a clammy heel and he went down sprawling across the stones along the front walk, cutting his forearm and the palm of his right hand.

When he looked up the shadow was standing over him looming in a threatening manner. The darkness around where the head should be shifted and agitated like dirty smoke, and then...in a voice full of fluid and rot...said...

“That’ll teach ya, ya little prick!”

Bat Man screamed like a whipped pup, scrabbled to his feet, tore through the shrubs losing his mask and bat-ears and made it home at a brisk run in record time. As he rushed into the house his brother and sister were at the dining room table sorting thorough their candy.

“We have candy and you don’t,” his sister still dressed in her fairy costumed mewed.

But Bat Man was in his room now, in the corner with his football uniform and remotely operated Big Wheels, brandishing an autographed baseball bat, his eyes glued to his bedroom window darting between that and his bedroom door.  He would be like that until morning.

Back at the Danfry home the TV still flickered. Inside the cat was trying to open a cupboard. A pot was boiling over on the stove. The kitchen was a mess but so was the whole place. Old man Danfry sat in his chair slouched a little. The hand that Bat Man saw with the cigarette had been burned through, two fingers sprinkled with ashes now. In the other hand that Bat Man didn’t see was a German Lugar, stolen by private Aesop Allen Danfry decades ago from a dead German officer that Danfry’s unit had blown apart in a pill box with an allied tank.  

The Lugar was held in a hand peppered with splashed blood from a self inflicted head wound.  Trick or Treat you little pricks.