Three nights ago, my son lost his first tooth and I haven’t been able to sleep since.
If you’ve ever wondered how Urban Legends rise to the level of infamy, where the mere utterances of their name send cold shivers down your spine and cast reckless teenagers into unexplored corners of nearby graveyards, or hospitals, or abandoned tunnels, then I can tell you that they are birthed in truth. At least this one is.
It was Halloween night, 1983 and my weeks of hard work and pestering was about to pay off. Since my birthday, in September, I had been relentlessly pleading with my parents to let me go trick-or-treating on my own that year. Even up until five minutes before my father and I were to hit the neighborhood streets, I was holding out hope that I would get to enjoy those few sugary, ghoulish hours the way my friends were able to. As he opened the front door, my mother called to him and, in one their patented silent-adult-arguments, she told him that I was old enough to be trusted and that if I didn’t go further than 3rd & Lindell, I could go out on my own. In my overwhelming excitement, I slightly misunderstood their mute conversation.
“Dracula, take your sister” mother said in a rising voice that suggested her idea was much more fun than she actually thought it would be. In that one sentence, I went from having a babysitter to being one, but I rationalized that this move was one step closer to my eventually freedom. I didn’t argue and slyly hid my disappointment. From behind a layer of white face paint, and a shitty, black cape, I hissed at her through a set of plastic fangs that were just too big.
To anyone watching us, I was certain that sight of Dracula, holding hands with Raggedy Ann, was some sort of affront to the gothic deities I had read so much about, but by the time we reached the curb at the edge of our front yard, I was already concocting a plan to ensure my freedom in the coming years.
By a shear technicality, I knew that I could stay true to mother’s rule of not going past the intersection, three blocks north of our house, by turning onto Lindell and taking it all the way down to where it dead ended. It was no secret that an abandoned house sat deep into the woods beyond the squat, concrete pillars, set in place by the city when the property fell into an overgrown plot of disuse. That Ann would be terrified to ever leave our house again, after laying her eyes upon the vacant, dilapidated house, I was certain. Remembering how scared I was when I first saw the place, I knew that I did not need to fabricate any sort of urban legend to accompany it; the sight of it alone, brooding and riddled with forest creatures, would populate her nightmares.
Ann refused to take one further step past the concrete pylons, but I knew that I had to, at least, knock on the door to bring as much fear to her as possible. ”Raggedy Ann got so scared she peed her pants” I repeated in a singsong manner as I hurried down the old driveway. Whether once a robust layer of gravel or a form of asphalt, it was hard to tell because Mother Nature had crept in resolutely that the whole area appeared to be frozen in the last moments of digestion.
I made sure to stay within the beam of Ann’s flashlight as I approached the front door of the house. The rotted wood of the front porch was missing in places and threatened to give way in others. I turned back to wave at Ann, then swallowed a vinegary pool of fear before giving the door a quick knock. Through the open holes that were once windows, I listened as my knocks evaporated into the chilled depth of the unlit structure.
My plan was to let out a sudden scream and sprint back toward Ann, all under the guise of witnessing some horrific monstrosity peering back at me from the mouth of a broken window. That alone would be sufficient enough to scar her from ever trick-or-treating with me again, or so I told myself. To this day, I wish I could have seen my plan to fruition instead of the alternative.
Beyond a thin split in the front door, I saw a faint light turn on. Disbelief outweighed fear and I squinted, trying to focus harder on it. The light was so ambiguous, I could not tell if it was a candle or an electric light, but there was no question about its presence. More mindful of my retreating footsteps than I was during my approach, I backed slowly away from the door and the house and that awful, eerie glow.
When the door opened, a flash-freeze engulfed my heart, soon followed by my feet. In contrast to the endless dark of the house and even in opposition to the light, a silky, blue color first caught my eye. Vibrating shock slowed my thoughts and it took many moments for me to realize that the shimmering, blue fabric was something like a one-piece bikini, stretched near to ripping, over the lumpy, disproportional body of a swarthy, old woman.
There was no distinction between the color of her hair and the pitch blackness in the unlit areas of the house. A dingy tiara sat atop her head, providing the only notable separation between where she stopped and the night began. I managed to break one foot free of its frozen state and slide it backwards. The noise that my scraping foot produced, or the motion itself, seemed to interest the lady because she squinted her already thinned eyes and titled her head at me. Her pimpled cheek made contact with a ruffled swath of powdery-blue fabric, attached to the shoulders of its parent cloth and wrapped around her neck in a wide loop.
“Trick-treat” she slurred out, even though, to my ears, it sounded more like SCHIKT-SCHEET. It was then that she did something that set fire to the ice in my body. Off the smile that will forever torment my soul even long after I’m dead and gone, my mind reeled on the lapping shores of a nightmare.
Staring back at me was a gaping wound that could scarcely be considered a mouth. It was congested with yellow, broken shards as if every misshapen, absurdly sized tooth had been stabbed into her gums by a blinded, palsied hand. They jutted out in weathered putridity at so many bulging angles that her lips were stretched tighter than her outfit and appeared dry and cracked, desperately out of reach from her tongue’s moisture.
SCHIKT-SCHEET
SCHIKT-SCHEET
SCHIKT-SCHEET
I sprinted away from that thing and that place at such a speed that, in my haste, I nearly dislocated Ann’s shoulder when I snatched her arm. My mind saved nothing from our run home, save a numb deafness and the awkward glances from fellow trick-or-treaters at, what I can only assume to be, my incoherent ramblings.
Ann and I ran straight into our mother’s arms after we stormed through the front door. Our tears and our blathering sent father into a state of worry, manifested as anger, and brought forth mother’s comforting, nurturing side. Father slammed and locked the door, then promptly turned off the porch light. It was many minutes before we were calm enough to release our death-grip on mother.
As she tried to pry out the convoluted details of our story, father began scooping up the contents of our candy-bags that we had so feverishly discarded in our search for sanctuary.
From within the piled mass of candy, father withdrew two, small burlap pouches, each tied off with a blue, silk ribbon. He gave them a shake as if to question us, but my pale, terrified expression, coupled with the sharp rattling sound from inside each sac, must have been enough of an answer.
From the mind, and mouth of my sister, whose innocent wisdom presented to her a world of unlimited beliefs and possibilities, came the words, “The… Tooth Fairy.”
Father hurried to the kitchen table, proceeding to empty the pouches with a controlled panic.
In a cacophony of taps and rattles, a dozen, or a hundred, or a million teeth poured onto the table like a bone waterfall. Mother screamed and father was on the phone to the police before the last, nightmarish shard rolled from the pile of its brethren and slapped onto the floor.
The authorities found nothing in the abandoned house past the dead end of Lindell St. No bodies were unearthed, no teeth, and no silky blue fabric was discovered after the fire department burned it to the ground. But that place, that woman, and her grotesque teeth are immortal in my mind.
I do not relish the fact that I’ve become an unwilling victim in, what is now, the most widely-known Urban Legend in my area. I only tell you my experience as a warning to pay careful mind to what truths you wish to seek.
Sunrise Arcadia 