A Little Pinch of Death

He enjoyed most of his route except for the immediate neighborhood of the H. There, for a block or two, the ground mist, one or two feet high, would pluck at his ankles with cold white tentacles, and the two halves of the H, where the old Judge lived, would loom out of the shadows.

He reached the H, the double Victorian home of Judge Marshall Denning, as the sun rose to mark a gray, damp, winter day. The air had a chill about it, but Robbie ignored it. He had on his favorite school sweater and the pedaling of his bicycle kept him warm. He wore his fur-lined leather gloves and hurled his newspapers at porches with deadly accuracy.

Judge Denning, famed for prosperity and evil temper, had built two, thin, three-story Victorian homes side by side, one for his wife and himself, and one to house his three daughters and their several hired attendants. He was not a man who tolerated the company of children. In deference to the motherly and insistent urging of his wife, he had compromised by joining the separate homes, at the second story level, with a windowed causeway. The resulting appearance gave rise to the name, the H.

Since he was as diligent in avoiding the intrusions of his neighbors as he was his daughters, the irascible Judge had surrounded both homes with a decorative wrought-iron fence topped with sharp iron spikes. The iron posts at the gates leading to each half of the residence were some two feet higher than the fence itself and capped with lethal points of their own.

What young Robbie Bartlett saw, impaled on the top of the left gatepost of the Judge's half of the H, he assumed to be a Halloween head. As he rode closer, he realized the head and the congealing blood were real. It was the grim open-eyed countenance of the Judge that greeted the boy that chilly morning. The cold stare was as effective in death as it had been in life.

Robbie Bartlett dropped his newspapers, made full speed home, and after a period of incoherent tears and trembling, brought his father to witness his discovery. The aftermath was a newspaper field day and a police disaster. The case was never solved.

Children often operate under the illusion that terror can be made impotent by incantation, so Robbie lived for a while under the torment of:

Halloween! Halloween! A bleeding head!

The Judge! The Judge! The Judge is dead!

Robbie! Robbie! What’s on that spike?

A head! A head! Fall off your bike!

The cruel ditty, Robbie's nightmares, the literary horror of English teachers, and the intense police activity eventually expired and the world moved on to newer misadventures.

The wife of the Judge had earlier gone to her grave, worn out, many said, by her husband's fluctuating moods. The three Denning girls, Agatha, Beatrice and Caroline, then in their middle thirties, were still housed independently. The oldest, Agatha, vanished the night of the Judge's murder.

The police sought Agatha, or her body, without success. The search wore on, until the press deemed her dead and created the Denning Ghost to keep the story alive. Reporters, plaguing the H for some months after the event, claimed to have seen eerie lights in the Judge's empty half of the house during the dim dawning of several winter mornings.

It was faithfully recorded that the larger part of Judge Denning had been found in his living room. Beside the Judge's body lay the engraved saber which had been the instrument of separation. It had been a gift to the Judge when he had been made an honorary colonel for imaginary service in an unrecorded war.

For thirty years the remaining Denning sisters, the twins, Beatrice and Caroline, kept the Judge's half of the H closed, stayed reclusive and never married. They had been asked, or pressured, to give up teaching at Ben Nevis High, the one physical education, the other science. Fortunately, the Judge had left them a substantial inheritance. They might regret, but could afford, the isolation, freed from the snide torments of their charges and the general public. Time passed, decaying all.

***

Thirty years later, Robbie Bartlett Jr. rose in the predawn darkness, bundled his papers, dug out his bicycle, and delivered the daily news to the residents of a rapidly declining neighborhood of Ben Nevis. In the choice of the delivery area, and that only, he was a duplicate of his father.

He reached the H as the sun rose to mark a grim, gray, post-Halloween morning. Capping the top of the left gatepost of the left half of the H was what he thought to be a Halloween head. It was only as he grew closer that he realized the object was real and the blood real. It was the open-eyed head of a young man in his late twenties, Jerry Anderson, the very fellow who had, at great length, persuaded the Denning sisters to let him occupy the left half of the house, clean the garden, repair the roof, and erase the past. The dead stare of Jerry was no less horrifying than that of the Judge thirty years before.

But this Robbie was of a new age and a tougher generation. He dismounted from his bicycle, studied the grim presentation for several minutes and said: "Holy shit!"

He gave the matter some thought, remounted his bicycle, pedaled four blocks to a pay phone, dropped a quarter in the slot, and dialed 911. After a lengthy argument with the operator, he hung up and pedaled back to the H to inspect the head more closely and wait. There would be sirens, red lights and excitement sure to come.

"Neato!"