The Hanged Man

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The Hanged Man

By: lucyr

On Halloween night, the year I turned nine, something strange

happened to me that I've never dared to mention.

I've never spoken or written about it until just now.

Not because I've been afraid to, necessarily, but because

I've always held the belief that I simply didn't

understand the incident, that I must have been wrong about

it.

We were trick-or-treating: my little brother and two of

my best friends from school, along with all the other

neighborhood kids who would bunch together in one group at

this door and spill along toward the next group at that door.

I was a fairy princess that year, like 2,347,085 other little

girls across the country. Nothing unusual. Lots of giggling

and shouting as we made our way down and across the sidewalks

in the porch-lit pumpkin-dotted night of the holiday.

Our neighborhood was made up mostly of old people.

There was Mrs. Miller (the cat lady) in the big house on the

corner, who always gave out homemade cookies shaped like cats

and with any of her cats' names spelled with icing on the

tops. Miss Owens lived two houses down from ours; she would

give whole sandwich bags tied with orange and black ribbon,

each filled with the exact same number and variety of penny

candies (my little brother and always compared); there were 1

Snickers, 2 Smarties, 3 Mary Janes, 3 Squirrel Nut Zingers,

and 1 Atomic Fireball. And Mr. Weathers, who's wife had

died only the previous year, would give out nothing but candy

corn. "Candy corn again," my brother complained. And my

mother said, "Well, his wife just died." Now what his wife

dying had to do with giving out candy corn every year, I

didn't know but was polite enough not to ask about.

There was a house that all of us kids, and sometimes our

parents, would refer to as "the poor house". Every

neightborhood is burdened with one of these houses. It was a

small, rundown house whose front porch leaned to one side, the

paint was peeling and the grass was full of weeds. The house

was usually empty; though occasionally a new family would move

into it then move back out a few months later. My friend

Sylvia had lived there the previous year and was gone again

before school came back around, gone without a word. Of

course this house, when it was empty, was also the house we

kids would dare each other to approach. And on the night of

the incident, that Halloween night when I was nine, there

could be no avoiding the ritual.

"Just go knock on the door and run," my friend Cathy

suggested, for this appeared to be one of those months in

which someone actually occupied the place. There was a light

on in the upstairs window and an old car in the driveway. The

house was quiet, though. And the porch light was out, which

we all knew indicated that tricks-or-treats were not welcome

at whoever's door this currently was. At any rate, the

dare was on, and I had a reputation never to back down from a

dare; in front of our friends, this always made my brother

proud of his big sister.  So I approached the house.

As I crept nearer the front porch I saw something that I

had not seen from the sidewalk; something behind the trellis

that was hidden from view. Apparently the new family, perhaps

another Sylvia, had decorated their front porch for Halloween.

I saw something hanging there and decided the porch light

being left off must be for spooky effect. This brave little

feather in my cap will be a piece of cake, meanwhile my party

stood transfixed and frightened several yards back on the

sidewalk. Now if you've seen one corpse hanging from the

American porch on Halloween night, you've seen them all.

Some were better than others, I knew, but . . . Well, this

corpse was especially great. At least they packed the shirt

and pants full enough to represent the human body

realistically, and they didn't just use a Styrofoam head

and wig for the top.  Somebody had gone all out.

I got closer in the dark, trying to see this dark

swinging mass up close. And with every step, I admit, I was a

little unnerved. For by now I, too, was behind the trellis

and out of view of my friends out there on the sidewalk, my

shoes clunking quietly on the hollow boards below. This was

as perfect a hanging human corpse as I had ever seen (a lot

better than the paper mache' one that Gary Leonard's

family had strung up the year before); and I used my fairy

wand, with the glitter on it, to nudge him . . . to turn him

just a little so I could see how the face was made. I was

surprised that the shoes used were real shoes, hard black

shoes that shined now and again as he turned.

He turned slow and heavy, the thick rope creaking at the

beam above him, his neck probably too long, I was thinking.

Like a large pendulum he bumped slightly against me, vaguely

rustling my candy bag. And looking up to see the

corpse's face, I saw it: what at first I thought was a

cigar was really a tongue, jutting in mock fashion from his

swollen cheeks, the eyes bulging white, locked in a silent

scream. The man was real. The man was real and the man was

dead.

I walked back to my friends in a dream. I told them that

I had changed my mind about knocking. And I never mentioned

the incident. I waited over the next few weeks, listening for

my parents to mention that a man had been cut down from his

porch after suicide. But the news never came. Nothing came.

The house was soon thereafter empty as usual. The car was

gone. Only in an often recurring dream did I ever try to

confess the experience to a teacher, say, or to a policeman.

However, when I would open my mouth to utter what I had seen,

there in the dark that Halloween night when I was nine, my

tongue would pop out, stiff and swollen, and I would hear

myself, somehow far away, screaming.

Comments

Will

This story gave me the shivers. I think it was the part where she turns the hanging body with her little glittery fairy wand, and the body bumps into her candy bag, rustling it a little. Something about this was very realistic and crept under my skin and gave me goose bumps.. hahaha. Nicely done.

October 31, 2014
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The Hanged Man

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