Appalachian Grandpa: The Last Trick of Treater

Grandpa was putting away the candy after I returned from walking Glimmer back into the woods.

If Grandpa thought anything about my time with his old flame, he didn't say anything. I hadn't exactly set out to begin a relationship with one of the creatures Grandpa was always warning me about in the woods, but it was something that had just sort of happened. The two of us tried not to rub it in his face, and I got the feeling that it made Glimmer a little uncomfortable if she thought too much about it.

I wondered if I would be in Grandpa's shoes one day, watching my own kids or grandkids falling for this mysterious creature?

I flopped into Grandma's old rocker, and Grandpa wasn't far behind me. He sat there with a contented smile on his face, before looking over at me with a wide smile stretching to replace it. He tossed something at me, and as it plopped onto my chest, I could see it was a Reese's cup. I opened it gladly, realizing that grandpa had likely saved it for me as the kids came by to take handfuls of candy from the bowl. They were always very polite, mountain kids seemed to have learned manners before they could walk, and Grandpa never minded sending them away with a few new cavities every Halloween.

"I managed to slide it into my pocket as the Helfry boy was coming up. Figured you deserved two of your favorite things this year," he said with a wink.

I felt a little guilty as I nibbled the chocolate disk, knowing the other treat he was talking about, "Gramps, I feel a little weird about this. Is this okay? This isn't crossing a line, is it?"

"Whatcha mean, kiddo?" Grandpa asked, his hand freezing as he reached for the remote.

"Glimmer and me, I don't want there to be any," but a knock turned both of us back to the front door. A muffled voice was laughing as they said, "Trick or Treat," but Grandpa looked like someone had goosed him with a poker. He came shakily out of his chair, stepping carefully over to the door as he asked who was there? This made me feel a little strange. Grandad never asked for a stranger's name before opening the door. Grandpa was always a good host and welcomed anyone who came knocking into his home.

"It's me, sir." a childish voice came, "Sorry, I know the light was off, but Clara and I wanted to hit your house before we went home."

Grandpa smiled as he pulled the door open, revealing the McCaffrey twins from down the road, "Kyle and Clara McCaffrey! I wondered what had become of you. Did you start at the bottom of the mountain this year?"

Both kids, one dressed as Elsa and the other dressed as Thor, nodded, "We sure did," Sing songed Clara, "We wanted to end up closer to home, so we figured it would be easier to walk up empty and then walk up as we filled our bags."

"Smart kids," Grandpa said, "Son, get me the bowl for these two wayward travelers in search of sweets."

I pulled the bowl out of the cabinet, and Grandpa rationed the contents equally between the two. The kids' faces lit up, and they thanked him for the sweet treats. He told them to hurry home and not to get caught by anything spooky on the way up the mountain. They said they would be careful, and off they ran as their hands came together.

Grandpa watched them go, smiling at the two kids as they ran for home, "Good kids. They had me worried for a minute. I was worried they might be something else."

He turned to find me grabbing a couple of beers out of the fridge as we stepped out onto the front porch, content to put my previous question on the back burner for now.

"Sounds like another Grandpa classic coming up."

Grandpa laughed, having a sip as he held his beer out for a clink, "It was while I was in the Army. Not all of us went to the front, some of us had to go guard the Alaskan front from the Ruskies, and I was sent there for my first year and a half in the Army. I would eventually make it to the front and come back alive somehow, but my time in Alaska was the strangest time of my life."

He was just getting ready to get started when four feet came running back up the driveway. The McCaffrey twins came hustling back up the road in a hurry, and as they fell onto the porch, they were panting. They both started gibbering about how something had been lurking in the woods near the driveway and how they were too scared to go home. They wanted to know if they could call their mom, and Grandpa told them they could. They went inside, and Gramps told me to go grab a couple of the root beers from the fridge. When they came back, saying their mom was going to be there in about half an hour after she got off work, Grandpa offered them the bottles of cold root beer, and they took it gladly.

We all clinked our bottles together, and the two drank deeply before sighing happily.

"Well, is your story good enough for an audience, gramps?" I asked.

Grandpa looked at the two kids as though weighing their worthiness.

"I dunno. You two think you're brave enough for a real spooky story?"

Both nodded excitedly, clearly having grown up on Grandpa's stories.

"Okay then," he said, sitting back and getting comfortable, "it was my first year away from home, my first time outside of Georgia, and I found myself in a frozen land during Halloween."

I was stationed in Alaska with my platoon, watching the shores for Stalin and his sneaky beach landers, which would surely want to take back the oil they had once held here. It never happened, of course, but we stayed there for a year and a half as we froze our backsides off. Our days were generally spent bundled up to the eye teeth and sitting in watch stations when we weren't sitting around the barracks. I picked up some skills, learned to play the guitar, and generally used my time to better myself while my checks went home to my parents.

I was sitting in my bunk one night, trying to get some sleep as some of the others played cards when there was a knock on the door to the barracks.

"Trick or Treat." came a voice from the door.

Private Marsh looked up from his hand and side-eyed the door, "Trick or Treat?"

Private Dreigh snorted, "Probably just those company D guys playing around."

"I dunno. I guess it could be kids from town." Corporal Snieder said. He was our platoon leader, but he was just as bad as the rest of us.

"How the hell would kids from town get to our barracks?" Marsh asked, laying down two cards and taking two from the deck.

"Well," Snieder hedged, "this place is pretty run down. Depending on who's on guard duty, it wouldn't be hard for a couple of kids to wander in without anyone being the wiser."

There was another knock and another chorus of "Trick or Treat," which drew the eyes of everyone at the table.

"Will someone go check and see who it is?" One of the sleepy privates on the other side of the barracks said, "I've got watch later, and I'd like a little sleep."

No one seemed to want to get up and check, despite having plenty of excuses to explain the knocking. They were just kids. They'd leave if no one answered. It was just those jerks from Company D. Better to ignore it, but after ten minutes of knocking, I finally rolled out and walked to the door. I probably made quite a sight in my BDU pants and sock feet, and I shivered as the cold hit my bare chest. Everyone at the table looked at me, looking silently pleased that they wouldn't have to do it, and they watched as I walked towards the barracks door.

I pushed it open and was greeted by blowing snow and an empty front stoop. The light over the door made the snow sparkle a little, but there were no kids standing around waiting for treats. Unless they wanted shoe polish or C rations, they would be out of luck, anyway. The guys from Company B, my platoon, were usually too broke to buy drinks at the canteen since most of us were sending money home to our families. Most of us were sons from poor families, newlyweds with babies at home, or kids paying off debt through service. We didn't just have candy to pass out, though we would have figured something out.

I glanced around, deciding it was mute, and closed the door with a shrug.

"Looks like we took too long."

As if in response, someone knocked and said, "Trick or Treat."

I opened it again, figuring they had just seen the light, and decided to run back, but there was nothing there.

That was when I realized there weren't any footprints in the two feet of powder sitting around the stoop. If there were kids walking around, there should be footprints, but nothing was coming to the barracks or walking away from it. I closed the door, but this all began to feel like something odd.

I might be thousands of miles from home, but this was beginning to feel like being back in the woods.

"Guys, there's no footprints out there," I told them, but I don't think they understood.

"Well, the snow is still coming down," said Jameson, one of the other guys around the table, "I guess their tracks would have been covered up pretty quickly."

"Yeah," I said, "but not that quickly. If they knocked and ran away, there should still be prints out there."

Snieder nodded, looking like he meant to add something, but closed his mouth when someone knocked on the back wall, the cheap corrugation sounding tinny. There was another knock on the west wall a second later, this one hard enough to send snow falling off the roof and then from the east wall and the door again. Each knock was punctuated by a cheerful "Trick or Treat" but I realized that the voice always sounded the same. Not similar, but precisely the same. Each knock was followed by the same Trick or Treat, and the repetition was a little frightening. Some of the other guys had started to realize this too, and I could tell that it was spooking them as well.

Marsh stood up then, shouting that this was getting out of hand. He was going out there, still certain that this was the company D guys playing a joke, and as he pulled his boots on, he looked at the card table to see if anyone was coming with him? Dreigh slid into his own boots, his coat already on, and Jameson started pulling on layers. Snieder was telling them to just let it go, but they were having no part of it.

"Don't go out there," said a deadpan voice from beside the door, and all of them looked up to see White as he climbed out of his bunk.

White was from the region, a Native actually, and he had a look I imagined others had seen on my face from time to time.

"It's not Company D, and it sure as shit ain't no kids. It's something different, something older. If you go out there, you won't be coming back."

Marsh stopped for a moment, looking at the men around him before scoffing loudly. He told White that he wasn't going to be tricked by some damn kids. The three of them walked out to the stoop, looking out into the winter wonderland, Marsh's cigarette looking strange in the cold weather as it puffed against it. They stared into the darkness outside the halo of light, looking for any sign of whoever had been knocking. I stayed in the barracks, my bare chest prickling as the cold outer air hit it, and I was thinking about going to get my own jacket. Maybe this was just a Halloween prank, and if we went out after them, we could find out who was behind it.

White took hold of my arm as though reading my thoughts, and when he shook his head in the face of my confused stare, I stayed put.

When Marsh heard something trill a childish "Trick or Treat" from the nearby mess hall, he and others were off. They tromped through the snow, crunching along as they headed for the sound. They hadn't taken rifles, not figuring they would need them, and as they disappeared, Snieder threw up his hands and said he was going to bed.

"If those idiots want to freeze to death, then let them. Bunch of buffoons will have to work with the colds they get out there tomorrow."

He scooped up the pot in the middle of the table and went to bed. White still had his hand on my arm, but he let it go pretty quick when he realized he was still holding it. I sat on the edge of his bunk, looking at him questioningly, wanting to know what he knew but not daring to ask. He kept looking towards the door, the sound of the men traipsing through the snow getting farther and farther away.

"They shouldn't have gone out there. The Kushtaka is just waiting for them out there."

"The what?" I asked, leaning in curiously.

He told me about the Kushtaka, a nasty little creature that was half otter and half man. They were said to help fishermen sometimes, but more often than not, they lured them to their deaths. They could mimic the screams of women and children to accomplish this, but he supposed it had learned a new trick. He told me they were devious, so it wasn't too far-fetched to assume that they might have acquired a little something new over the last century or two.

"So," I hedged, "If I had gone outside," I asked, knowing the answer but needing to hear it.

"You'd be dead," he said matter of factly.

We sat up a little bit that night, talking about legends from the area, and he was interested in hearing about the boogins that skulked the hollers as I was in hearing about what went bump around the tundra. His people had a very interesting collection of creatures, and when it was my time to go to watch, he offered to come with me and continue our conversation. We shared a lot of stories, he and I, and White became one of my best friends. Of the three that went out that night, only Jameson ever came back. They found him frostbitten in the woods behind the base, and he was discharged after losing a foot and his left arm to the cold. He kept gibbering about shadowy, slippery things and how his friends had been dragged off toward the water.

I never saw him again, but I saw other things out there on the icy banks of Anchorage.

We all sat quietly, listening to the story, and the perspiration running down my bottle was very cold against my palm.

When the lights of an approaching station wagon lit the porch, everyone but Grandpa jumped a little.

"Mommy," both kids squealed, thanking Grandpa for the rootbeer and the candy before running to the car.

Grandpa smiled as he watched them go, but I still had questions as his story came to an end.

"So, was it the Kushtaka?" I asked.

Grandpa shrugged, "whether it was or not, they still never found the other two privates from my platoon. They dredged the waterfront, they searched the woods, but they never found a trace of Private Marsh or Private Dreigh, and Private Jameson was never in his right mind ever again."

Grandpa watched the taillights disappear down the driveway, looking to the woods as if searching for the thing that had scared those kids.

"Remember that, kiddo. Only some people who go into the woods come out again. Some never come out, some come back broken, but some go in again and again and never feel more than a momentary sting."

"Are you trying to warn me about," but he cut me off with the sound of his bottle as it sailed off and shattered against a nearby tree. The motion was smooth, practiced, and filled with zero malice. Grandpa threw the bottles into the woods because he always had, and when he turned back to smile at me, I knew he wasn't mad.

"I'm telling you that it's okay if you want to see her. It's okay if you want to do more than see her, but don't forget what she is. Glimmer can't help what she is. No more than you can be held responsible for your humanity, but don't forget that there are things in her world that hate you because God gave you a soul and a choice. I can't prove that none of them have a soul, but I know they hold such things against us. I won't tell you not to see her, but I will tell you to be careful, boy. Be careful, and be prepared."

He left me to think about it then, and I heard the tv come to life as he took his recliner again.

It seemed life was only going to get tougher from here.