The Hotel New Hampshire

It had been Halloween when one of the token cows had been tied to the goal at the Thompson Female Seminary. It had been another Halloween when another cow had been led to the Dairy School field house and indoor swimming pool, where the beast suffered a violent reaction to the chlorine in the water and drowned.

It had been Halloween when four little kids from the town had made the mistake of going trick-or-treating in one of the Dairy dorms. The children were kidnapped for the night; they had their heads shaved by a student costumed as an executioner, and one child was unable to speak for a week.

'I hate Halloween,' Franny said, as we noted there were few trick-or-treaters on the streets; the little kids of Dairy were frightened of Halloween. An occasional cringing child, with a paper bag or a mask on its head, cowered as Franny and I ran by; and a group of small children -- one dressed as a witch, one as a ghost, and two as robots from a recent film about a Martian invasion -- fled into the safety of a lit doorway as we charged up the sidewalk toward them.

Cars with anxious parents were parked here and there along the street -- spotting for would-be attackers as their children cautiously approached a door to ring a bell. The usual anxieties about the razor blades in apples, the arsenic in the chocolate cookies, were no doubt passing through the parked parents' minds. One such anxious father put his headlights on Franny and me and leaped from his car to give chase. 'Hey, you!' he yelled.

'Howard Tuck had a heart attack!' I called to him, and that seemed to stop him -- cold. Franny and I ran through the open gate, like the gate to a cemetery, that admitted us to the playing fields of the Dairy School; past the pointed iron bars, I tried to imagine the gate for the Exeter weekend -- when they would be selling pennants and blankets and cowbells to bash together at the game. It was a rather cheerless gate, now, and as we ran in, a small horde of children rushed by us, running out -- the other way. They were running for their lives, it seemed, and a few of their terrified faces were as shocking as the Halloween masks some of the other kids had managed to keep on. Their plastic black-and-white and pumpkin-coloured costumes were in shreds and tatters, and they wailed like a children's hospital ward -- great gagging snivels of fear.

'Jesus God,' Franny said, and they fled away from her -- as if she were in costume and I wore the worst mask of all.

I grabbed a small boy and asked him, 'What's happening?' But he writhed and screamed in my hands, he tried to bite my wrist -- he was wet and trembling and he smelled strange, and his skeleton costume came away in pieces in my hands, like soggy toilet paper or a decomposing sponge. 'Giant spiders!' he cried, witlessly. I let him go.

'What's happening?' Franny called to the children, but they were gone as suddenly as they'd appeared. The playing fields stretched in front of us, dark and empty; at the end of them, like tall ships across a harbour shrouded by fog, the dorms and buildings of the Dairy School seemed sparsely lit -- as if everyone had gone to bed early, and only a few good students were burning, as they say, the midnight oil. But Franny and I knew that there were very few 'good' students at Dairy, and on a Halloween Saturday night we doubted that even the good ones were studying -- and we doubted that any of the dark windows meant that anyone was sleeping. Perhaps they were drinking in the blackness of their rooms, perhaps they were violating each other, and some captured children, in their dark dorms. Perhaps there was a new religion, the rage of the campus, and the religion required total night for its rituals -- and Halloween was its day of reckoning.

Something was wrong. The white wooden goal at the near end of the soccer field seemed too white, to me, although it was the darkest night I had been in. Something was too stark and apparent about the goal.

'I wish Sorrow was with us,' Franny said.

Sorrow will be with us, I thought -- knowing what Franny didn't know: that Father had taken Sorrow to the vet's this very day, to have the old dog put to sleep. There had been a sober discussion -- in Franny's absence -- of the need for this. Lilly and Egg weren't with us, either. Father had told Mother, Frank, and me -- and Iowa Bob. 'Franny won't understand,' Father had said. 'And Lilly and Egg are too young. There's no point in asking their opinion. They won't be rational.'

Frank did not care for Sorrow, but even Frank seemed saddened by the death sentence.

'I know he smells bad,' Frank said, 'but that's not exactly a fatal disease.'

'In a hotel it is,' Father said. That dog has terminal flatulence.'

'And he is old,' Mother said.

'When you get old,' I told Mother and Father, 'we won't put you to sleep.'

'And what about me?' Iowa Bob said. 'I suppose I'm the next one to go. Got to watch my farting, or it's off to the nursing home!'

'You're no help at all,' Father told Coach Bob. 'It's only Franny who really loves the dog. She's the one who's really going to be upset, and we'll just have to make it as easy for her as we can.'

Father no doubt thought that anticipation was nine-tenths of suffering: he was not really being cowardly by not seeking Franny's opinion; he knew what her opinion would be, of course, and he knew that Sorrow had to go.

And so I wondered how long we would be moved into the Hotel New Hampshire before Franny would notice the old farter's absence, before she would start sniffing around for Sorrow -- Father would have to put all his cards on the table.

'Well, Franny,' I could imagine Father beginning. 'You know that Sorrow wasn't getting any younger -- or any better at controlling himself.'

Passing the dead-white soccer goal, under the black sky, I shuddered to think how Franny would take it. 'Murderers!' she would call us all. And we would all look guilty. 'Franny, Franny,' Father would say, but Franny would make an awful fuss. I pitied the strangers in the Hotel New Hampshire who would waken to the variety of sounds Franny was capable of.

Then I realized what was wrong about the soccer goal: the net was gone. End of the season? I thought. But no, if there was one week more of football, surely there was a week more of soccer, too. And I recalled in past years how the nets would stay on the goals until the first snow, as if it took the first storm to remind the maintenance crew what they had forgotten. The nets in the goals held the drifted snow -- like spider webs so dense that they trap dust.

'The net's gone -- off the goal' I said to Franny.

'Big deal' she said, and we veered into the woods. Even in the dark, Franny and I could find the shortcut, the path the football players always used -- and everyone else, because of them, stayed off it.

A Halloween prank? I thought. Stealing a net to a soccer goal . . . and then, of course, Franny and I ran right into it. Suddenly the net was over us, and under us, and there were two other people trapped like us: a Dairy School freshman, named Firestone, his face as round as a tyre and as soft as a kind of cheese, and a small trick-or-treater from town. The trick-or-treater was wearing a gorilla suit, though he was closer, in size, to a spider monkey. His gorilla mask was backwards on his head, so that when you saw the back of his head you saw a monkey, and when you saw his screaming face you saw him for the frightened little boy he was.

It was a jungle trap, and the monkey thrashed in it wildly. Firestone tried to He down, but the net kept jiggling him out of position -- he collided with me and said, 'Sorry'; then he collided with Franny and said, 'God, awfully sorry.' Every time I tried to get back on my feet, the net would jerk my feet out from under me, or the net over my head would jerk my head back and I'd fall. Franny crouched on all

fours, keeping her balance. Inside the net with us was a large brown paper bag, spewing forth the Halloween hoardings of the child in the gorilla suit -- candy corn and sticky balls of coagulated popcorn, breaking apart under us, and lollipops with their crinkly cellophane wrappers. The child in the gorilla suit was screaming in that breathless, hysterical way, as if he were about to choke, and Franny got her arms around him and tried to calm him down. 'It's all right, it's just a dirty trick,' she said to him. They'll let us go.'

'Giant spiders!' cried the child, slapping himself all over and twitching in Franny's grasp.

'No, no,' Franny said. 'No spiders. They're just people.'