Oscar, eager as ever, watched as Natalie gingerly dove her face into the bucket of lukewarm, apple-scented water. His two other friends chanted Natalie’s name like a horde of boisterous football fans. Bubbles flooded the bucket as Natalie emerged triumphant, an apple lodged in her mouth with the aid of her gapped, slightly yellowed teeth.

“Me next, me next!” shouted Tessa. Her face had been smeared with what appeared to be a pound of chocolate. Her forehead glittered with sweat, and candy flowed through her veins. As Tessa marched to the bucket, Natalie went to town on her prize. Oscar giggled.

Wash, rinse, repeat. Tessa, face sopping wet, had produced another ruby-red apple. She spat the thing back into the water. “I thought you said they were candy apples, Ben!” she said petulantly.

“Ew!” yelled Oscar, Natalie, and Ben in unison. Tessa disregarded their reaction, and stuck her tongue out, stained blue by a bag of sour gumdrops she had wolfed down minutes ago.

“Oscar, your turn,” said Ben, elbowing his friend in the ribs. “Don’t want the girls to beat us, do ya?”

“Oh, cut it out!” Natalie said, tossing her applecore into the trash. “Girls are better, anyway.”

Oscar and Ben rolled their eyes. Tessa smiled much like a cat. “What she said.”

Oscar hesitantly approached the bucket of water. The apples floated in welcome, in tantalizing welcome. Could he really manage to beat the girls? Ben was counting on him. The girls would try to sabotage them somehow—he imagined them as twin witches over a cauldron overflowing with apples. Double, double, toil and trouble!

Oscar took a deep breath in the same manner as if he was preparing to leap off the diving board for the first time, months ago in the scorching summer. Ben began to clap as Oscar submerged. Eyes closed, Oscar moved his head side to side in search of a luscious apple. Bubbles swarmed around his face. No apple to be found.

Oscar pulled his head above the bucket, desperate for breath.

“Ah, he’s chicken!” said Tessa, munching on a caramel loudly.

Clenching his jaw, Oscar spat back, “Am not!”

“Are too!”

“Am not—”

“Guys! He gets a second chance, remember? That’s what was decided in the rules… don’t be lame!” Ben said. The two boys grinned at each other.

“I hope he finds the apple you had,” whispered Natalie to Tessa. “He’ll get sick and puke up all his candy.”

Oscar dove into the bucket again. In record time, he arose from the frothing water with an apple. Tessa had her legs and fingers crossed, praying to some entity that Oscar had latched onto her apple. Natalie sat in wait for Oscar to retch and vomit, but he did not.

“We’re at a tie,” said Ben. “We’ll have to do another round, guys—”

“We’ve been bobbing apples for so long,” Tessa drawled. “Can we please do something else? I know Natalie is tired too, she told me!”

Natalie clicked her tongue. “Tess, I didn’t—”

“Natalie has spoken.”

Ben and Oscar exchanged glances. “What else can we do?” asked Oscar. He took a bite from the apple and chewed loudly with his mouth open, smacking every few seconds.

“We could go trick ’r treating again,” Ben proposed.

“But aren’t all the neighbors done now?” asked Natalie. Tessa put her hands on her hips.

“It’s Halloween!” shrieked Tessa. “They have to stay open all night, jeez!”

Oscar ate more and more of the apple. To him, it was like he and Natalie were the only third graders who enjoyed eating anything remotely healthy. Tessa was the pickiest eater on Earth, while Ben had broccoli every now and then. Speaking of food, he couldn’t wait till Thanksgiving. He managed to convince his parents to allow Natalie to come, and—

“Fine,” Ben said, freezing Oscar’s thoughts. “One last trip around the neighborhood, and then we come straight home. I’m starting to get sleepy, and my parents went to bed an hour ago, remember? We’ll be alone…”

“Ben’s a chicken, too,” said Tessa. Natalie nodded.

For the second time that Halloween, the quartet of kids initiated their nighttime quest. Most of the porch lights had been extinguished; no bowls left out by the neglectful and socially awkward had any contents worth snagging. Tessa began to complain, as well as Oscar, though Natalie and Ben stopped their friends in their tracks as they approached a new house.

A golden porch light, a beacon in the suburbs.

“Candy!” Tessa said. Natalie laughed, and made room in her pillow case.

“Who’s ringing the doorbell?” asked Ben. Realizing what was to come, he touched his nose. “Nose goes!”

Oscar, tying his shoe, had lost. With a sigh, he walked up to the door, shoulders back and chest puffed outward. His nose crinkled as the scent of expired meat slithered up his nostrils, though he did not say a word. The door in front of him glowed with a scarlet sheen, almost like the delectable apples he and Natalie had consumed. He was filled with the urge to touch the door, for reasons unclear to him at the time.

Oscar placed a hand against the door, and retracted it. The texture was chitinous, not the aged and cracked wood he expected. Chitinous, with a coat of saliva-like film. He rubbed his hand against the side of his pants in horror.

“Ring the doorbell, chicken!” Tessa screeched. Oscar glared at her. She sounded more like a chicken than he ever would.

Oscar pressed his index finger on the doorbell.

Not a ding-dong, but a deep, hollow sound. A laugh that would have fired spit in all directions, with a low, no, abyssal pitch. Oscar yelped and jumped off the two stone stairs. The laugh rose in volume. Raw amusement, delight, perverted amusement and delight. Oscar had never heard such a sound before. It was wrong.

“Out of my way,” Tessa said. She punched Oscar in the stomach, and he felt digested sweets and bits of apple rush up his esophagus. He bent over, hands on the grass, and brown, malodorous vomit dropped out of his mouth.

Tessa rang the doorbell. The laughing sound returned, though Tessa seemed to be unfazed. “Um, hello!” she screamed. “Your porch light is on, let us in! You know what that means, right? Trick. Or. Treat!”

The door creaked open.

“Tessa, don’t go in!” yelled Ben, “Tessa, no—”

Tessa waltzed into the doorway blindly. Oscar heaved over the yard and vomited once more. “Tess—” he managed to call out, before another torrent of bile and candies spilled out of his mouth. Ben ran up to the house as Tessa refused to listen to any of them.

Tessa vanished, and Ben did as well.

Though none of them rang the doorbell on the way into the derelict house, the chuckle reappeared. The door slammed shut, and Natalie covered her eyes and ears as more sounds were added to the chuckle, which deepened in timbre and blared as loud as a siren.

Screams, eight-year old screams. The scream of a boy, and the scream of a girl. A sickening crunch.

“Oscar, let’s go!” Natalie said, and she grasped onto his wrist, yanking him off the yard. A final sound from the direction of the door—a satisfied belch.

Oscar turned his head away from the door, and never looked back again. In fact, he never saw the door again. All he knew, and all Natalie knew, was that Tessa and Ben were missing because of it. Never dead; how could they have died?

Oscar never saw the door or the strange house again, but it was forever burned into his memories. A scar. The visage of the door, the screams of the children, that laugh, that hideous laugh.

It echoed through his brain as he slept that night.

He never bobbed for apples again, and he never went trick ’r treating again. He simply couldn’t bear it. The thought of the door devouring him left a stain within his mind forevermore.

He was just a potential delicacy, a candy, a treat.