The following summer I saved some of my vacation time; Madge and I spent the entire week of October 20th in Maine. In December I put a down payment on a new house. We moved into it just before the holidays—and one of Madge's Christmas presents was a cuddly little Persian kitten.
She had been teasing me to buy one for months, but somehow I just hadn't got around to it till then.
THE MAN WHO FEARED MASKS
Mr. Apondee was terrified by masks or false faces of any type. Halloween to him was an idiot's festival of unmitigated horror. He would sooner enter a tiger's lair than attend a masked ball. If he saw a false face harmlessly dangling in the window of a novelty shop, he would shudder and turn away. The memory of it would haunt him all evening long—even intrude in his dreams and torment him until he awoke, limp with nightmare panic.
The detailed circumstances surrounding the inception of Mr. Apondee's mask fear were somewhat hazy, since he was scarcely three years old at the time. But the particular moments of terror he remembered vividly, as if they had transpired within his recent adult life.
He was sitting in a huge circus tent with his father. It was his first circus; he was enormously excited, tense, somewhat fearful. He held tight to his father's hand. Suddenly all the lights went out. There were screams, frightened cries, roars, howls and monstrous bellowings. People began pushing and shoving, trying to force passage toward the entrances of the pitch-black tent.
In the whirlwind commotion he lost his grip on his father's hand. He was swept away in a trampling, cursing tide of sweating humanity. He fell down between the seats, screaming, and suddenly out of the darkness appeared a nightmare face, luminous with a green-silvery shine, huge of nose, gashed by great white rubbery lips which writhed with insane merriment. The face bent over him, with its tiny glittering eyes, its fearful pink mouth and its greasy shine.
His screams of a few moments before turned to delirious shrieks of ultimate terror. He remembered nothing more.
Eventually of course the lights went back on and the masked circus clown returned a screaming and hysterical child to its father.
The child screamed all the way out of the circus tent, screamed all the way home and screamed and sobbed half the night, until exhaustion brought hypnotic sleep.