Eric, our mutt, hates Halloween. The fireworks have him demented: his face, normally so dull, is now erupting with sad and frightened expressions, the inside of his head white with the deafening Oppenheimer thud.
Yet where we live – slightly outside the village – is an oasis of calm compared to the noise down the road.
Traditionally, according to Fionnuala, the local lads become mired in mischief at Halloween: egging houses, firing rockets at lorries and scaring people who brave the dark for a walk. Like the wren boys of old, a blind eye is turned toward their capers as it only lasts a few days. People roll their eyes; boys will be boys.
But Genghis doesn’t roll his eyes.
Genghis has an elderly next-door neighbour, Mrs Davison, and regular readers will know I’m friends with this adorable little contradiction of a pensioner. She is a widow who lives alone, and God be of assistance to any poor fool that would deign to annoy her and Genghis find out.
He materialised at our door on Halloween night, dressed all in black, with a black monkey hat and a huge spanner in his hand.
“What have you come as? The Grim Reaper’s auto-spark?”
He took a drag of his cigarette, backhanded, claw-style, and looked over my shoulder for Fionnuala.
“No smoking in the house, by the way.” I had my limits.
“I’m not coming in.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. You’re coming out.”
And before I knew it, I was in his van, driving down the lane. He said he needed a hand with something and Fionnuala would understand.
“She’s away to get sweets for the trick-or-treaters. She’ll be expecting me to help with all that malarkey.”
“It’s Mrs Davison. Sit back there.”
He pulled the van out onto the main road and I saw his face in the sweep of a streetlight. I was surprised at how clear his skin was and his long, curled eyelashes.
His expression was melancholy. Underneath the mask he was maybe like Frankenstein’s monster: malicious because he was miserable; a lonely creature who no-one pitied.
As we pulled up to his house, he took the van down the little alley at the side. “Sit here and don’t get out of the car. That’s an order.” He looked at me with those implacable, unblinking eyelashes.
After a while sitting there and failing to get a message to Fionnuala – coverage was abysmal – I was contemplating disobeying when the back door of the van opened and two heavy objects were flung in. He was swiftly in the driver’s seat and, jaw-set, he sped into the dark backroads of Tyrone.
After a mile or so I heard noises from the back and asked Genghis what the hell was going on.
“Teaching a few clowns a lesson.”
“A lesson?”
“They were throwing eggs at Mrs Davison’s and she faced up to them. Of course, that made things worse.”
“Have we kidnapped teenagers? Genghis, are you mentally deranged?”
“That’s why you’re here.”
He swung up an isolated lane and past a deserted farmhouse, where there was a shed with a locked door.
“You are here as a witness.”
“To what?” I was concerned.
“To nothing.”
Genghis took the two boys into the shed and made me come too. They had sacks – I kid you not – tied over their whimpering heads and he made them sit down on the ground.
After an aeon of their begging, he told them to shut up and when they were silent, he spoke like a surgeon delivering a grim prognosis.
“If you, or any of your friends, ever decide to do anything again to that poor widow, who lives all alone, you will be brought back here.”
He looked at me, his lips trembling, his eyes black. And we left.