Exactly seven years ago this hour, he was driving back to his hotel from the Wichita funeral home where he’d bidden farewell to his mother’s body. Plastic skeletons colonized every housing tract, taunting him with their gap-toothed grins, offering no solace, no dead man’s wisdom. He recalled the hotel valets—willfully ignorant numbskulls—hiding their inbred pug faces behind rubber devil masks and mistaking his black cloak for a costume.

“I vant you to believe . . . to believe in things that you cannot.” They quoted Bram Stoker at him in Bela Lugosi-ese.

Out Raymond’s picture window, the ragtag Halloween parade was just starting up. Pint-sized monsters and fuzzy-wuzzy animals trailed behind taller chaperones. A towering Statue of Liberty waited for a junior hobbit to finish tying his shoelaces. Bevies of grade-school princesses teetered on heels like pygmy whores, their mothers egging them on. This was the twilight crowd, gormless blackmailers who wanted little more than petrified fruit chews and praise for their crayon whiskers. He didn’t have to worry about them calling at his door—they never did. He’d tucked his Jaguar in the garage and turned off all his lights. As far as the outside was concerned, nobody was home.

In this “changing neighborhood,” as his realtor had termed Santa Claus Lane, the night folk were what people had to worry about. Hooded teenage boys roaming the streets, their faces shadowy, anonymous. He remembered the uproar the previous Halloween when a band of ruffians, all minors, assaulted three women in neighboring Sierra Lucre—the only time he’d ever felt sympathy for soccer moms. These fiends had no respect for boundaries, not on a night like this. These were trickster lords who cared nothing for sweets; they’d scratch obscenities on your windowpane with switchblades and piss on your doormat without so much as a “trick or treat?”

He’d seen these boys prowling in packs on Halloween nights past, swigging from plastic bottles of rum, clucking, whistling, hollering, strutting down the center of the street in their oversized pants like kings of the netherworld, all cheekbones and demon eyes and not a shred of soul. These kids had no code of honor; they shot babies and slashed old men. With them it was all death, all darkness, all the time, and they spooked him no end. When he was writing his Deathwatch books, his flesh-eating zombies were bourgeois, milquetoast innocents, wronged by the indignity of death. Every time he saw one of these street hoods he was reminded how fey and parochial his imagination had been. How could he return to writing horror when he no longer understood the form?

He took a gulp of whisky and tried to think of jollier things—spending the rest of his life in flannel pajamas, watching Law & Order reruns.