Dean R. Koontz - The Scariest Thing I Know

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The Scariest Thing I Know Dean Koontz Dean wrote the following short

story-about a boy named Nick Loffman, who has a very unusual Halloween

experience-far the special Halloween issue of Martha Stewart Living. When I

was twelve years old, in seventh grade, I was a disaster waiting to happen.

I wasn't the equivalent of a simple flood or a mere train wreck. I was an

earthquake in ragged sneakers, a tornado in patched jeans, ready to bring

tremendous ruin down on myself and on everyone around me. I didn't realize I

was a loser. I thought i was smart and tough. 1 was so smart, I knew school

was a concentration camp where they brainwashed kids to be good citizens and

spiked the lousy cafeteria food with be-nice pills. To me, being an upstanding

citizen meant working your whole life for nickels and dimes and having no fun.

I preferred to be bad. And tough? Other kids called rne Stony, because I was

hard. You didn't want to mess with me. I had my secret smokes-Lucky Strikes,

the~smokes of tough men-and recently I'd started carrying a knife. Five-inch

biade, gravity release. I hadn't used it in a fight-not yet-because so far I'd

never been in danger of losing with rny fists alone. Looking back, I can

remember the anger that was in me, the storm of violence waiting to break, but

I can't feel it anymore, not the way I felt it then. The twelve-yearold me is

more unknowable than a stranger. He's an alien from another world. I'm

grateful I didn't grow up to be him. My name is Nicholas Loffman. My friends

call me Nick or Nicky. No one has called me Stony since I was twelve,

thirty-eight years ago. Halloween 1963 was the night my life changed forever.

I didn't believe in spooks and such. The world held no mystery for me in those

days- I saw everything simply, clearly: There were people who always got what

they wanted-and people who never did. 1 was determined to be one of the

always-gots, not one of the never-dids. I intended to take what I wanted, no

matter what the risks. That Halloween, most other twelve-year-olds were still

doing the witch-vampireskeleton thing, toting huge shopping bags door-to-door,

hoping to fill them with enough candy to rot their teeth before

Thanksgiving. I was looking for bigger loot. My English teacher, Mrs. Carson,

was going to be away from home for the evening. She and her husband, who

taught twelfth-grade English, were chaperoning a corny "Goblin Hop" at the

high school. I figured I could jimmy a window at their place, without much

chance of getting caught, and see if I could find some loose money or anything

else I wanted. I didn't have anything against Mrs. Carson. She never sent me

to detention- She tried her best to teach me. And I didn't even know her

husband, though I did know he was a coin collector, and I figured maybe there

would be some significant change lying around. The word burglary never entered

my head. As I saw it, if I had the nerve to take something I wanted, then it

was rightfully mine. In school, we'd learned about evolution, the survival of

the fittest, predators and prey. 1 was fit, strong for my age, bold-so, hey, I

was just fulfilling nature's plan. Late in the afternoon that Halloween,

nature's plan had to be put on hold when my mother informed me that I had to

accompany my little brother, Dink, when he went trick-or-treating. By twelve,

I was a thief and a bully, but I couldn't say no to my mother when she asked

for my help. I was perpetually angry with her. I'm ashamed to say that

she embarrassed me, that I had no respect for her, that I shrank from her

touch and was often rude to her. But when she asked me to do a chore, I did

it. Never with a smile, always with a display of contempt, but I did the

chore. This curious obedient streak frustrated and puzzled rne. I didn't

understand why she had this power over me- because back then, I didn't realize

that I loved her. 1 This is very hard to tell you, very hard, but if you're to

believe what follows, I need to be painfully honest and admit that she

embarrassed me because she was constantly tired, endlessly worried about one

thing or another, every day counting pennies and cutting corners and planning

for crises that might never come. We were poor, and I blamed her for our

poverty, because it seemed to me that she had just accepted it. In reality,

she was tired all the time because she worked six and sometimes seven days a

week as a waitress at the Good Plate Diner out on the state highway. She sewed

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Dean R. Koontz - The Scariest Thing I Know

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