By that point I would have done anything Neil told me. I popped the pills in my mouth, swallowing without water.

Neil handed me the telephone beside his bed. He told me to call my parents and claim his mom would be escorting us. When I lied to Mom, it didn’t feel so scandalous. “I’ll take Kurt around the neighborhood without you, then,” she said. “Call back when you want me to drive over and get you. Don’t stay out too late, and remember what I told you about those perverts who prey on kids on Halloween.” She laughed nervously. I thought of her stories of razor blades wedged into apples, stories that never ceased to thrill me.

Two hours came and went. We wandered around Hutchinson as spiders, our extra four legs bobbing at our sides. The rows of our eyes gleamed from our headpieces. The shadows we cast gave me the creeps, so we shied away from streetlights. Neil hissed when doors opened. One wrinkly lady touched my nose with a counterfeit black fingernail. She asked, “Aren’t you two a little old for this?” Still, our shopping bags filled to the top. I stomped a Granny Smith into mush on the sidewalk. No hidden razor.

Neil traded his Bit-O-Honeys for anything I had with peanuts. “I’m allergic to nuts,” I said. That was a lie, but I wanted to make him happy.

At Twenty-third and Adams, a group of seven kids walked toward us. I recognized the younger ones from school under their guises of pirate, fat lady, and something that resembled a beaver. “Hey, it’s you-know-who from school,” Neil said, and pointed to a green dragon in the crowd’s center.

I couldn’t tell who it was. “It’s that retardo,” Neil told me. He was right. Even under the tied-on snout and green pointy ears, I could make out Stephen Zepherelli.

“Hey,” Neil said. Their heads turned. “Hey, snotnoses, where’re your parents?”

The beaver-thing pointed west. “Back there,” it said. The words garbled behind its fake buck teeth.

Zepherelli smiled. The dragon snout shifted on his face. He carried a plastic pumpkin, chock-full with candy. “Let’s kidnap him,” Neil said to me.

I’d witnessed Neil’s damage to Robert P. and Alastair. Now, some dire section of my brain longed to find out what twisted things Neil could do to this nimrod, this Stephen Zepherelli. Neil checked the sidewalk for adults. When none materialized, he grabbed the kid’s left hand. “He’s supposed to come with us,” Neil said to the rest of the trick-or-treaters. “His mom said so. She doesn’t want him out too late.”

Zepherelli whined at first, but Neil said we were leading him to a house that was giving away “enough candy for three thousand starving kids.” Zepherelli didn’t seem to mind the kidnapping after that. We stood on each side of him, gripped his scrawny wrists, and pulled him along. Mahogany-colored leaves spun around our rushing feet. “Slow down,” he said at one point. We just moved faster. He stopped once to retrieve a handful of candy corn from his plastic pumpkin, and once to find a Zero candy bar. His painted-on dragon’s teeth shone under street lamps, as white as piano keys.

We arrived at Neil’s. “Is this the house with the candy?” Zepherelli asked. He rummaged through his pumpkin, making room.

“Good guess.”

Neil’s mom snoozed on the living room couch. Nearly every light in the house had been left on. Neil pushed Zepherelli toward me. “Hold this little bastard while I’m gone.” He trotted from room to room, flicking switches. In seconds, darkness had lowered around us. Neil slid aside a record by a band called Bow Wow Wow and slipped another LP on the turntable. Scary sound effects drifted through the house at a volume soft enough to keep his mom sleeping. On the record, a cat hissed, chains rattled, crazed banshees wailed.

“Neat,” Zepherelli said. His snout showed a smudge of white chocolate from the Zero. He nibbled the tip from a piece of candy corn.

I heard Neil pissing. I suddenly felt embarrassed, standing there with our victim. Neil returned, carrying a flashlight and a paper sack. He opened the latter. Inside were firecrackers and bottle rockets. “Left over from Fourth of July,” Neil said. He winked. “Let’s take him out behind the house.”

The McCormick backyard consisted of overgrown weeds, an apricot tree, and a dilapidated slippery slide-swing set. Behind the swings was a cement-filled hole someone had once meant for a cellar. We walked toward it. The rotten apricot odor permeated the autumn air. Stars glittered in the sky. Down the block, kids yelled “trick or treat” from a doorstep.

Neil pushed Zepherelli toward the stretch of cement. “Lie on your back,” he said.

The yellow pills had done something to me. My skin tingled like I’d taken a bath in ice. I was a hundred percent awake, and prepared for anything. I adjusted a loose arm and stood above the victim; Neil spilled the bag’s contents onto the cement. “Bottle rockets,” the dragon said, as if they were hundred-dollar bills. I could smell Zepherelli’s breath, even over all those apricots.

Neil told him to shut up. He pulled off the dragon’s snout. The string snapped against Zepherelli’s face. “Ouch.”

I watched as Neil took three bottle rockets and placed their wooden ends in Zepherelli’s mouth. He pinched Zepherelli’s lips shut. He moved briskly, as if he’d done it all a thousand times. Then he straddled the kid. I remembered that seance, Robert P.’s still face. Stephen Zepherelli’s resembled it. It looked drugged, almost as if it really were hypnotized. It didn’t register any emotion. Its cheeks had been smeared with green makeup. Its eyes were cold and blank, not unlike the peeled grapes we had passed around during the inane Haunted Hall setup at school that day. “These are the dead man’s eyes,” Miss Timmons had told us in her best Vincent Price voice.

“Keep these in your mouth,” Neil instructed the LD boy. “Do what we say, or we’ll kill you.” I thought of Charles and Caril Ann. Neil’s extra eyes caught the moonlight and sparkled.

From the effects record inside the house, a girl screamed, a monstrous voice laughed. Neil turned to me, smiling. “Matches are in the bottom of the sack,” he said. “Hand them over.”

I fished out a book of matches. The cover showed a beaming woman’s face over a steamy piece of pie and the words “Eat at McGillicuddy’s.” I tossed the matches to Neil. “Be careful,” I said. I tried not to sound scared. “Someone could see the fireworks.” I still thought this was all a big joke.

“Tonight is just another holiday,” Neil said. “No one’s going to care.” He lit the first match. The flame turned Zepherelli’s face a weird orange. In the glow, the rockets jutted from his lips like sticks of spaghetti. His eyes were huge. He squirmed a little, and I sat on his legs. I felt as though we were offering a sacrifice to some special god.

Zepherelli didn’t spit the rockets out. He made a noise that could have been “Don’t” or “Stop.”

Neil touched the match to the fuses. One, two, three. He shielded me with one of his real arms. We skittered back like crabs. I held my breath as tiny sputters of fire trailed up the fuses and entered the rockets. Zepherelli didn’t budge. He was paralyzed. The bottle rockets zoomed from his head, made perfect arcs over the McCormick home, and exploded in feeble gold bursts.

The following silence seemed to last hours. I expected sirens to wail toward the house, but nothing happened. Finally, Neil and I snuck toward Zepherelli. “Shine the flashlight on him,” Neil said.

The oval of light landed on our victim’s face. For a second, I almost laughed. Zepherelli resembled the villain in a cartoon after the bomb goes off. The explosives’ dust covered his dragon snout, his cheeks, his chin. His eyes had widened farther, and they darted here and there, as if he’d been blinded. We leaned in closer. Zepherelli licked his lips and winced. Then I saw what we’d done. It wasn’t funny at all. His mouth was bleeding. Little red splinters stuck through Zepherelli’s lips, jammed there from the wooden rocket sticks. Bubbles of blood dotted the lips.