Aaaiiieee

dogs were found shot in Phillips’s back yard—two of them still clinging to life, a mother and pup. The mother died, the pup was saved. The dogs had been picked up by him only the day before, not held for the proper amount of time before humane termination. It reached the papers, death threats came even from out of state, and Phillips was out a job. At that time, cages were found in his basement—his own kennel—though, oddly, no one had ever complained of undue barking at his house. There was talk of digging up his yard and some pressure from humane society people but it was never done.

He never worked again, apparently, and how he sustained himself I haven’t as yet determined. He was well known as an amateur inventor, however, so maybe one of his inventions had become successful somewhere down the line and he lived off that. For lack of a town witch, the kids called him a mad scientist, or Dr. Frankenstein. Maybe he was assembling a Frankencanine out of various parts of dogs he’d slaughtered, they no doubt joked.

It was because of the dog stories that Crazy Ed Phillips became the suspect in town gossip when those two old men disappeared in 1950. Both were boozers with no real family and they lived in the rooms over the little center pub my father still frequents today. The first, Gregory Hitchings, vanished on or about January fifteenth. The second man, old Frankie Allen, the town drunk of the day, was discovered missing (a funny expression) February seventeenth. Gone without a trace, both men, no clothes packed, and both boarders at the little center pub…two streets over from the Yellow House.

There was another funny story about Ed Phillips and the two missing men, but first a little background. Phillips himself occasionally visited the pub for some brews alone in the corner, and the other men would taunt him a bit. Kill any dogs lately? How’s the mad scientist business these days? Well, apparently several times Phillips had lashed back at the men, his tongue loosened by beer, and cursed their stupidity and ignorance at not recognizing his greatness, for not respecting his important work, which would change the world forever. The standard mad scientist lines. So the men would laugh harder, send him over some beers which he would drink in brooding silence.

But in early 1950 Phillips became a feared and hated celebrity again as the rumors spread. One man whom Phillips had raged at in the pub claimed that Phillips had alluded to “experiments in human longevity,” and suggested that he had kidnapped the two old-timers to use as human guinea pigs, figuring they wouldn’t be missed much. Others quickly took up this belief. Finally it was brought to the attention of the town chief of police, Richard McGee. He found the rumors ridiculous and groundless, and Edwin Phillips was never officially questioned about the disappearances. But Greg Hitchings and Frankie Allen were never heard from again, and even McGee couldn’t offer a plausible explanation.

And now the funny story. In May of 1950 a boy of about twelve was found wandering around the sand-pits across from the reservoir. He seemed dazed, maybe deaf and dumb (he didn’t respond to questioning), his over- sized clothes were in tatters and he was seriously under-fed and dehydrated. In police custody, he died of cardiac arrest no more than two hours after he’d been picked up. The “Mystery Boy” was photographed and his picture run in the papers, but he was never identified and was ultimately buried in the potter’s field corner of Pine Grove.

The thing was, the pitiful Mystery Boy had a large pink C-shaped scar on his temple near his right eyebrow. I’m looking at it now, quite distinct, in a copy of that yellowed old newspaper my grandmother had fortunately saved all those years (zealous child lover, gossip lover and collector that she had been).

Frankie Allen, fifty-eight at the time of his disappearance, had had a large pink C-shaped scar near his right eyebrow, from a time when he’d fallen down drunk and bashed his head a good one on the curb.

And that was how the Yellow House got so famous. And to top it all off, Crazy Ed Phillips himself vanished sometime in the summer of 1957, a few months before I was born. He hadn’t packed, either, and no trace of him ever turned up. Some now say a serial killer had claimed Greg Hitchings and old Frankie (maybe had something to do with that boy, too)…then came back and got old Crazy Ed. In any case, his house stood empty a long thirteen years, for whatever legal reasons, until 1970. I mean to look into that oddly lengthy delay.

When I came back to live here this past spring, I went out of my way one day to walk down to the Yellow House with my fiance, to point it out to her and tell her the stories. She had to know them if she were to become an official resident of this town. She acted disgusted and irritated by the whole thing… that’s how I could tell she was becoming afraid. I ate it up; I’ve always loved a good nasty mystery.

“The Mystery Boy was old Frankie Allen!” I told Pammy.

“Oh grow up,” she said, hugging her arms and anxious to go. But as we walked on, her curiosity wouldn’t let up, and she meekly asked me, “So what did he look like; have you seen an old picture?”

“What, of Frankie Allen? No.”

“No, of Ed Phillips. What did he look like? Creepy? Like a mad scientist?”

“Of course. I don’t have a picture, but my mother told me he had sunken suspicious-looking eyes and wild uncombed red hair, and he was always unshaven.”

“How old was he when he disappeared?”

“In his fifties, I guess.”

“So he could conceivably still be alive today.”

“Yeah, he’s got a cabin in Tibet with Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa. The guy would be—what—ninety almost, now.”

“So?”

*     *     *

Of course Halloween has always been my big day, and so it was natural and inevitable that on this first Halloween back in my old home town I should want to walk to the Ed Phillips place. It was this impulse that has led to my current investigation of what went on in Crazy Ed’s “kennel.”

I couldn’t convince Pammy to go with me…she thought it was immature and stupid, and she was irritated and disgusted (afraid). So I told her fine, I’ll go alone. I put on a rubber monster mask (a cheapie; it was a balding old man with frizzy white hair—a mad scientist, very consciously chosen for the occasion), and took an orange plastic pumpkin to go trick-or-treating at the age of thirty-three.

I even hit a few other houses on the way. “I am Edwin Phillips,” I proclaimed in a deep voice behind muffling rubber on the step of one house.

“Oh, you’re terrible!” laughed my mother, a hand to her heart.

As I turned onto the street at last, my heart actually began to beat with that old dread excitement, with the extra thrill of reliving a nostalgic memory. I felt foolishly jubilant in my mask, wet inside with my breath. I wondered where my old best friend Dicky Evans was, and wouldn’t it have been great if he and Ronny Hall and David Porter were with me now, daring each other to be the first to run up the walk and knock. Here with me now to witness, for the first time, someone actually answering our knocks. Some pleasant yuppie man or woman, and yet still my heart was deliciously pounding.

As it was, I never made it to that newly painted black door to knock. The house was glowing, the yellow paint undiminished after all this time. Maybe it was one of Crazy Ed’s inventions, I now thought…and if so, it certainly would have changed the world, in its way, if he’d lived to market it. An enterprising person (myself? I thought) might scrape off a sample, have it analyzed and find a way of producing it somehow. Just a fantasy.

The house was glowing, and I felt like I hadn’t seen it with Pammy in the day, hadn’t seen it since the last, long-ago Halloween I’d come up this street. A chilly gust of wind sent leaves scampering across the road and my sneakers, like yellow flakes of paint finally fallen from the house to blow away. I heard children laughing in the darkness ahead—ghostly echoes from my past.

As I advanced along the street I saw the dark form of a man standing on the sidewalk directly in front of the Yellow House.

There were three children on the step, and the door to the house was open, but away from me so that I couldn’t see who it was on the other side dropping things into their proffered pillow cases. My attention was torn back and forth from the man to the open door as I continued advancing. The man must be waiting for his children, I reasoned. If I had small children I’d want to accompany them just to be safe. So why did I keep looking back at him, away from the door?

The door closed, the children turned and ran down the walk. Past the man. On to the next house. The man didn’t move.

Now I was really looking at him. Straining to see detail. A lot of my nostalgic thrill went right out the window, and I had a strange impulse to just keep on walking past the man once I got to him, and not stop at the Yellow