There was a knock at the door, and at precisely the same time, the house phone rang.

Why in the heck hadn't I had that damn thing turned off? Just an added expense and I can't remember the last time it rang. Anyone who really wants to find me can call my cell.

Oh, crap … I almost forgot … the door. I grabbed a dishrag beside the sink, drying my hands as I hustled from the kitchen to open the living-room door.

I wiped off a spot of the fogged-over glass, enabling me to see a faint image of a man standing on the porch. He stood with his backside to me, dressed in a black-trench coat and stiff-brimmed hat.

I flipped the security lock as I opened the door and welcomed the visitor with a hearty greeting. “Hello, how are you?”

No sooner had I spoken, than a slight gust of wind took me back with the stench of the old man's woolen overcoat. Nasty and disgusting, a mixed odor of dead fish, sour milk, and mildew laced with a hint of mothballs.

Nauseated, my guts churned and triggered my gag reflexes to siphon foul-tasting acidic bile from my stomach, through my esophagus, and into my mouth. Burning like hot oil. I threw my hand up hiding my face, not wanting the stranger to see me grimacing.

All I could do was shudder, swallow, and try to force a smile to hide my pain and discomfort.
   
Then, he turned around and my knees went weak. Withered and weather-beaten, the old man had a face resembling crackled stone, looking every bit of a hundred-fifty years old. Deep squiggly lines with more ridges than tree bark. His piercing baby blues stared a hole, sending a chill clear through me. He stood, saying nothing. So, I said, “Can I help you?”

He continued to stand staring, still not saying a word. It left me wondering if he might be hard of hearing. Therefore, I repeated myself … louder, “Mister … is there something I can help you with?”

With his few remaining scraggly teeth, which were mostly black, caked with a buttery-yellow tarter, and undoubtedly, rotten, he gave me a jagged grin. Rancid was his breath that reeked of decay and an unfamiliar smell of what I could only imagine as sun-baked cow guts.

His words came in a gravelly growl that switched in midsentence from a deep baritone to a witchy-mumbling shriek, but nothing was understandable. Looking so bony and brittle enough to break, his huge blue veins and broken-red vessels showed more lines than a roadmap through his tissue-thin skin.

Hard to figure where he might have come from. There are no sidewalks in these rural outskirts of town, and to walk on the side of such narrow, curvy roads would only be asking for disaster.

The old timer had slightly more meat on his bones than a skeleton, making him fit right in with the black cats, mummies, witches, ghouls, goblins, and Jack-o-lanterns beneath the spider-webs of cotton that decorated the streets for Halloween.

He stood, examining every inch of me, up and down—up and down, again—one time after another. Fear festered within me. My spit turned to cotton, and I struggled to catch my breath for what seemed to be minutes. Oddly, as his blank stare twisted into the facial expressions of a crying child, he turned and walked down the porch, his steps fading away into the misty night.

That night, I woke up in a sweat, every hour on the hour, feeling like I was missing something, feeling an eerie connection to a not-so-perfect stranger.

The next morning, I walked to the mailbox by the road to retrieve the local-weekly newspaper. I pitched it on the kitchen table with yesterday’s mail, poured a cup of coffee, and grabbed a couple chocolate-covered cupcakes before I sat down.

I unfolded the paper to the main page and read the headline. The Statue of Liberty opened in Upper New York Bay, on October 28, 1886, as a gift of friendship from France. Emma Lazarus’s poem, “The New Colossus,” inscribed on the pedestal, and the statue becomes America’s leading symbol of freedom around the world.

Placed in the bottom-left-hand corner of the front page was a clear picture of the old man who had come to my house last night, with a caption that read: Theodore J. Doodlewanger brutally murdered on Halloween night, October 31, 1886, exactly one hundred and nineteen years from yesterday.

My name is Theodore J. Doodlewanger V, and as I read, reality set in. I began to tremble and shake, overwhelmed with the fear of knowing that, at anytime, he may reappear—today, tomorrow, and forever on Halloween.