1976

What happened was Danny was Fire, Dave was Famine, Ralph was Pestilence and Gene was Plague. The lawn was ablaze, and the boys could not be contained; their prank had worked to spectacular effect. They were whooping and roaring with glee now, dancing, literally dancing, between the skulls and the spiders, daring each other to run through the flames. Their faces were hidden by their masks, but they caught each other’s eyes, and their eyes too were aflame, with mischief, with malice. Each of them noticed the two Bradberry kids in the window, staring out, their faces wide-eyed with fear. Each of them pretended he couldn’t see them. ‘Get the fire bottles,’ someone said, and though they had all agreed that they probably wouldn’t need to use them, in the moment, everyone wanted to add to the blaze.

They had all agreed that they would throw them nowhere near the house, that had been established in the ground rules. Danny – because it was his operation, after all, his revenge – had been very particular about this. And because it is his spectacular, he gets the first throw, and he lines himself up to pitch it at this enormous old sycamore in the far corner of the garden, diagonally opposite the house, right by the fence the boys had all piled over. The flames are beating hard and loud now, and the heat is building, and a couple of voices agree with Dan that the sycamore tree is the best, indeed, scanning round the yard, the only tree sufficiently far away from the house to be safe.

Afterwards, they decide that Danny broke the rules: he panicked, or freaked out, or slipped and, in trying to keep his balance, lobbed the fire bottle at the house. Whether by accident or design, it was Danny who did it, and the result was the same.

But that’s not the way it actually happened.

What happened was they all lined up, Danny first, and as he ran, the others followed, and Ralph skidded and pushed Danny in the back and they both went tumbling through a blazing skull. Ralph landed on top of Danny in the flames – he scooped him up and hurled him away and Danny went flying into the tree and knocked himself out. Meanwhile, the two remaining were lined up, ready to throw. They couldn’t throw at the tree, because Danny was there and they would have risked setting him alight. One of them – F – threw his bottle at the fence the other side of the tree, on the boundary with the next yard over. And then P – Ralph was watching, and he saw – P, careering through the blaze in Danny’s direction, flung the fire bottle over his head and back in the direction of the house. Nobody could find Danny’s fire bottle, so it was clear he had thrown his too. And when they saw the house in flames, they panicked, and hauled Danny out of there, and ran.

Afterwards, out of their costumes, it was all decided: Danny had thrown the bottle that set the house on fire.

But years later, Ralph read the report of the investigation into the fire, and found that a fire bottle had been found intact, with the cloth fuse unlit, lodged between the sycamore and the fence on the other side of the boys’ exit route. Danny’s fire bottle. So it hadn’t been him. And it hadn’t been Ralph. And Ralph was Pestilence, he’d picked P because Gene had picked Plague, and Ralph did whatever Gene did. Gene was P and P threw the bottle that hit the house.

It wasn’t Danny after all.

It was Gene.

Danny had spent all this time thinking it had been his fault, had been told it was all his fault. But it wasn’t. What’s more, it hadn’t been all along. It had been a lie, insisted upon by Gene Peterson, and the others had gone along because it had all happened so fast; the heat had been so intense and the flames so bright and so high. They had been scared and uncertain, and Gene had been calm and sure, and that was what they had looked to Gene for all along, and so they believed him.

But they were wrong.

Extract from

Trick or Treat

Unpublished manuscript by Ralph Cowley