Archie's Candy

Daddy pulled into the driveway.

Archie turned from the window and sat in the middle of the couch as he did every day. He adjusted his thick glasses that were held around his head with a black elastic band and placed his hands on his legs. He grinned. He was so happy to see Daddy.

The door opened and Daddy walked in. Archie made a happy noise, a greeting yowl that sounded most like “aeyyh!”

Daddy put his case on the ground and took off his coat. “Hiya, sport. Have a good day?”

“Uh-heee.” He had. He’d spent it looking through the window.

“Good.” Daddy looked at the stairs and back at Archie. “Arch, I think I’m just going to go straight to bed. I’m really go-sleepy. Okay?” Archie grunted, because that was fine. He knew how to make sandwiches and brush his teeth on his own. Daddy could go-sleepy because Archie was a big boy.

Daddy took off his tie and paused. “Oh shit, that’s right. Uh. It’s Halloween, Archie. I’m going to put a bowl of candy on the porch, and people are going to walk up and take it. Other kids. Watch them and wave, but don’t answer the door, got it?”

Archie nodded vigorously, because he got it.

Daddy took a little candle and lighter outside and lit up Archie’s jack-o-lantern. The shapes cut into the pumpkin looped and swirled. Daddy didn’t know what the design was, and neither did Archie, but it had made them both happy to create it together.

Next, Daddy got the big bowl off of the refrigerator. It was filled with all the best candy. Blue wrappers, white wrappers and orange wrappers. The orange ones were Archie’s favorites. It had a yellow word on the front. The yellow word was REESE’S, but Archie didn’t know that. Daddy placed the bowl on the stoop outside and turned the porch light on, then came back to the couch. “Hold out your hands, say ‘trick or treat!’”

Archie did. “Ahee Ayeh!” A crackling bunch of candy was dropped into his grasp. He squealed.

Daddy sat on his spot on the couch with a sigh. Daddy was very tired, Archie could see. “Jesus. I don’t know what to do sometimes, Arch. Richardson’s on my ass about AP-4. Yield on the latest batch wasn’t great, but I could do better if they’d outfit my station on the line with decent equipment. My titration shielding’s almost as old as you are and I can’t do my best work on a 2nd generation Kaper alkene filter. Know what I mean?”

“Uh!” Archie actually didn’t know what Daddy meant, but he knew that it was important to listen and nod.

“Of course you do.” Daddy put his arm around Archie and smiled. The smile held for a moment and faded. “Plus… this stuff is pretty…” he trailed off. “It’s not right, what we’re doing. Government contracts can be lucrative, Arch, but dammit if they don’t make you feel positively inhuman. This stuff’s meant to be airdropped to hostile regions. The suits don’t care if kids will pick up the product.” Daddy stared at the wall. “Hell, I think they like the idea.”

Archie nodded again. It seemed like the right time to say something. He gestured and looked at Daddy gravely. “Ayehee… Uhoo. Uhoon.”

“Hah! That’s why I love you, Arch.” Daddy leaned over and kissed Archie’s head. He stood up with a groan. “Happy Halloween, pal. You be good, okay? Don’t stay up too late.”

“Ahee!” He wouldn’t. Archie waved bye-bye to Daddy as he walked upstairs. When he was gone, Archie knelt on the couch and faced the window, lined with its nose marks and handprints. An electric candle glowed softly on the sill beside him as he studied the goings-on of Fisher street.

The whole outside world was Archie’s personal show. Everyone outside was putting on a play for him, and he watched it every day with rapt fascination. It was especially interesting outside this afternoon. Children were walking around wearing brightly colored clothing, and some wore masks. They carried bags and knocked on doors. Some walked up to Archie’s door and took candy from the bowl. Archie unwrapped a candy bar and munched at it. He munched another, and another, and the last. The sky grew dark and the lights of the neighborhood came together in a symphony Archie knew every note of. His jack-o-lantern flickered with a very pleasant yellow-orange glow. As he watched, a group of three kids on the street stopped and noticed him.

“Oh god, look, it’s Archie the idiot.”

“Now that’s scary, haha.”

Archie waved to the kids. “Uhuh hee!”

“Oh look, it’s waving! Hi, stupid!” The kids walked over to the candy bowl and upended it into their bags, then put the empty bowl back on the stoop.

“Ugh, he’s drooling. I can’t watch this.”

“Let’s go. Thanks for the candy, dumbbell.”

The kids walked away laughing, and Archie laughed too, because he liked jokes. He waved until the kids turned a corner, then got off the couch. He wandered over to the base of the stairs and looked up. Daddy’s door was closed, Daddy was go-sleepy. Archie reached into Daddy’s coat pocket and took out his keys. He put the one small key into the hole in Daddy’s briefcase and turned it. Daddy didn’t think Archie knew about keys, but he did. The case opened with a pop. “Ayyhh!” Archie clapped.

Archie reached into the case and took out a sheaf of papers in a manilla envelope. The text on the envelope read:

Anoxic Phantyrecil-4

Potential application in bio-weapons

Foston Chemical Concepts, Inc.

-CLEARANCE LEVEL GAMMA-

Eyes Only

Archie didn’t know how to read, but he knew it all looked very official. Below the papers there was a white box with the same text printed on it. Inside the box, Archie found candy. He gasped. It was in purple wrappers with a red logo. The logo’s text was Arabic for Caramel Crisp Bar, but Archie didn’t know that either.

The candy bowl outside was empty, and the kids needed candy. Archie could help. Archie opened the door and dumped the box’s contents into the candy bowl. He shut the door and ran to the window to watch his show. The neighborhood was rich with delights.

Owen Boatman and his friends walked back up the street, having exhausted the cul-de-sac’s reserves. Owen’s bag was heavy with candy. They’d found no fewer than three houses with candy in bowls by the doors. Take one, happy Halloween, a sign would read. They’d dumped all the candy into their bags. For good measure, they’d kicked in the face of any jack-o-lantern they could find, so long as they’d felt certain they weren’t being watched.

The last house had given away Necco wafers, and Owen was in a foul mood. “We left a jack-o-lantern,” he muttered.

Kevin Downy looked around. “Where? All the ones left over are in view of grown-ups.”

“The idiot's.”

“Ohhhh. But he’s always watching.”

“Who’s he going to tell, you idiot? Dude can’t even talk.”

Kevin flinched. “I guess.”

“Let’s go then.” Owen took the lead. He was the biggest, so the others followed. They soon reached Archie’s house. The dope's goony head bounced in the window as he waved at them.

Kevin waved his arm with his middle finger and the others laughed. Owen looked around for any grown-ups in sight, saw none, and made his approach to the stupid-looking jack-o-lantern. In the bowl, he saw the flickering glint of purple mylar.

“Hey.” He leaned over and picked up the bowl. “Hey, there’s more candy!”

“Score!” The others rushed to him.

Owen snatched a purple piece from the bowl and held it up so he could read the label in the light of Archie’s pumpkin. “What the hell is this?”

Jenna Fitzgerald shrugged. “I’ve never seen that. Must be new.”

Owen shoved the bowl into Kevin’s arms. He unwrapped his candy and popped it into his mouth. Caramel, chocolate, crisped rice. Tasty, but nothing special. He walked over and stared at Archie, who was still waving. Jenna and Kevin divided the candy into their bags, took a piece each and stood with Owen as they munched.

Jenna looked at Archie with contempt. “Do you think he smells?”

“Probably,” Kevin shrugged. “What do you think, Owen?” A pause. The wind rustled the leaves in the trees overhead. “…Owen?”

Owen was looking at Archie. A yawning thing was happening beneath Owen’s consciousness- he had a growing sense of the ground opening away beneath him, and what was there was black, and that terrible things swum in that black. A slow sense of blooming dread. Colors curdled. The branches and their leaves clicked and hissed like a mass of beetle carcasses whispering secrets. The moon seemed to take up half the sky, yellow and terrible in the mere fact of its being a celestial body one could look up and see.

The worst, though, was Archie.

Archie lolled in the window, almost a silhouette, capering slowly like a grinning marionette. His skin and teeth were dim against the black of his shadows, but his thick glasses reflected the glow of the corner streetlamp. Archie moved like one of those paper dolls Owen had made in second grade crafts, connected with brass fastenings at its joints, but alive for all that. The arm waved its boneless wave.

Owen tried to turn, and he couldn’t. He tried to run, and he couldn’t. Tried to scream, and he couldn’t. All he could do was stand and look with rooted legs.

Behind Owen, the neurotoxin began working its way into the others. The perception that thundered out from the opened doors of Jenna’s subconscious was one of very vivid hallucinations. She croaked breathlessly at Archie’s jack-o-lantern, whose whirls and shapes began to suggest a face to her, and that face was the devil’s. Jenna was raised Catholic and had once seen a Bosch painting in one of her grandfather’s books. The leering face of a creature she knew must have been the devil had stared back at her from the page. That face was slowly developing in the glowing cuts of the jack-o-lantern. It was looking right at her, and it seemed to be breathing. She could not look away.

Kevin felt a sickening tide rise in him, and it carried the crushing weight of knowing that his mother would cry herself hoarse to know her son had called a disabled child the r-word. It would absolutely break her heart, and the guilt was plain and bare in his mind like a third rail, sparking with bright shame. He no longer deserved his own mother’s love. He had become bad. Only bad boys did what he had done. He was a bad boy. His ego collapsed on itself and his chest shuddered with sobs.

Archie was delighted that the kids had decided to stay so long. They stood and looked at him as he waved. Tears were streaming down their trembling cheeks. Soon the secondary effects would take hold, but of course Archie didn’t know this, nor did he know that the neighborhood was an hour from being plunged into a panic and two from a riot that would shortly consume surrounding towns. His show was about to get very interesting indeed, and he didn’t know that. Archie didn’t know a lot of things.

The kids outside were very cruel to him. Daddy’s job made dangerous things, and the candy in Daddy’s briefcase was harmful. The meaning of hate. These things Archie knew very well.

The children’s minds ate themselves in silence while Archie waved bye-bye.