We never encountered any in the house and although we
occasionally remembered the October 20th clause and joked about it, we
were so occupied with other matters we very nearly forgot about the
date when it finally did arrive. Mrs. Dallis, however, had foreseen
the possibility of that and made provision for it. At five o'clock on
the afternoon of October 20th she telephoned to make sure that we were
planning to vacate the house by six. We assured her that we would be
out in an hour. Actually, we just did make it. We had neglected to pack an overnight
bag till the last minute and, as always, several minor but essential
items had to be searched for. After we had checked the locks on the
back door and all the windows, we stepped out onto the front porch. I
think it was about one-half minute before six p.m. when I turned the
key in the front door and we walked down the porch steps. We made a lark of the affair. We had dinner at a fine restaurant,
attended a play, drank cocktails and finally turned in at the hotel
room which we had engaged for the occasion. The next morning Madge sleepily assured me that she had no qualms
whatsoever about returning to our house and that she'd consider me a
fussbucket if I insisted on leaving early so that I could stop at the
place before I left for the office. I told her I'd go directly from the hotel to work and leave her to
contend with any old ghosts that happened to be nursing a hangover on
our premises. Madge is always vague about time early in the morning however, and
I did leave the hotel earlier than was necessary. I started driving
toward the office, thinking I'd get a head start on some papers which
had piled up. But some obscure impulse persuaded me to turn the car and
drive toward the suburbs. I felt a bit foolish, but I couldn't argue
myself out of stopping at our house for a quick checkup. I have always
been grateful that I heeded the dim prompting which caused me to change
directions that morning. When I unlocked the door and walked into the house, everything seemed
in order. The windows and rear door were still securely bolted and
nothing was amiss. I searched the house from cellar to garret and found
nothing disturbed. Finally, feeling rather sheepish at this point, I sat down in one of
the living room chairs to rest a minute before I drove to work. As I sat there, I noticed some small object protruding from behind the
divan on the opposite side of the room. I couldn't distinguish what it
was; mild curiosity prompted me to get up and peer behind the divan. As I bent down, I froze. Huddled against the back of the divan was a
pitiful little heap of fur lying in a pool of blood--our cat, Jinko,
with his throat slashed wide open. It was the tip of his tail which I
had seen protruding. In our haste to leave the previous evening, we had forgotten about him. We hadn't noticed him in the house and I think we both subconsciously
assumed that he was outside when we locked up. I cleaned up the blood, buried the little creature in a corner of the
backyard, poured myself a stiff drink and went to work. Several times
during the day I called up to make sure that Madge was all right. She
called me a ninny and said she couldn't even find an old shroud dropped
around the house. Of course she got somewhat suspicious in a day or so when Jinko failed
to show up. But he had disappeared for days at a time before, and I
finally persuaded her that he must have wandered away or met with an
accident. The following summer I saved some of my vacation time; Madge and I
spent the entire week of October 20th in Maine. In December I put
a down payment on a new house. We moved into it just before the
holidays--and one of Madge's Christmas presents was a cuddly little
Persian kitten. She had been teasing me to buy one for months, but somehow I just
hadn't got around to it till then. THE MAN WHO FEARED MASKS


Mr. Apondee was terrified by masks or false faces of any type. Halloween to him was an idiot's festival of unmitigated horror. He
would sooner enter a tiger's lair than attend a masked ball. If he
saw a false face harmlessly dangling in the window of a novelty shop,
he would shudder and turn away. The memory of it would haunt him all
evening long--even intrude in his dreams and torment him until he
awoke, limp with nightmare panic. The detailed circumstances surrounding the inception of Mr. Apondee's
mask fear were somewhat hazy, since he was scarcely three years old at
the time. But the particular moments of terror he remembered vividly,
as if they had transpired within his recent adult life. He was sitting in a huge circus tent with his father. It was his first
circus; he was enormously excited, tense, somewhat fearful. He held
tight to his father's hand. Suddenly all the lights went out. There
were screams, frightened cries, roars, howls and monstrous bellowings. People began pushing and shoving, trying to force passage toward the
entrances of the pitch-black tent. In the whirlwind commotion he lost his grip on his father's hand. He
was swept away in a trampling, cursing tide of sweating humanity. He fell down between the seats, screaming, and suddenly out of the
darkness appeared a nightmare face, luminous with a green-silvery
shine, huge of nose, gashed by great white rubbery lips which writhed
with insane merriment. The face bent over him, with its tiny glittering
eyes, its fearful pink mouth and its greasy shine. His screams of a few moments before turned to delirious shrieks of
ultimate terror. He remembered nothing more. Eventually of course the lights went back on and the masked circus
clown returned a screaming and hysterical child to its father. The child screamed all the way out of the circus tent, screamed all
the way home and screamed and sobbed half the night, until exhaustion
brought hypnotic sleep. The distressed parents finally forgot the unfortunate incident, but the
child never did. In the recesses of his memory a grotesque and hideous
mask wavered always just out of sight, awaiting its chance to loom out
of the darkness, awaiting the sudden unexpected moment when it would
leap into light and petrify him with pure terror. The show window of a toy store might bring it lunging out at him. He might be swept with acute panic upon glancing up at a billboard
advertising a traveling sideshow. Once he nearly fainted on the
street when a weirdly masked "Man from Mars"--advertising a local
movie--strode around a corner in front of him. The fear remained with him through his childhood, through his
adolescence and on into full maturity. It seemed impervious to the
rationalizing of his adult years. It would not be argued away. Its
roots had pierced the psychic marrow of his being and resisted all his
efforts to wrench them out. The obsessive fear haunted him to such an extent that he finally
consulted a reputable psychiatrist.