Tales Around the Jack O'Lantern Read Free

He was a representative of the
paper and it was his job to deliver the news.
    Swallowing his fears, he took a deep breath and walked
forward towards the house.   The leaves
under his feet crunched with such noise he wondered if they were really corn
flakes instead of leaves.   The air around
him seemed to be still and heavy.   It was
harder to breathe, but that could have been because his heart was beating so
quickly.
    As he placed his foot on the first step he heard a rustling
sound in the overgrowth next to the house and he nearly stepped back.   Then he looked down at the paper in his hand,
and placed his next foot on the step.   Looking around the porch, he tried to find a safe place to put the
paper.   But where the porch was not rotted
away, it was covered with spider webs or thick vines.   He had no other choice than to deliver it in
person.
    The wooden screen door lay haphazardly against its frame,
the screening hanging loosely down the side.   He put this hand through the hole and knocked on the old front
door.   A dim glow appeared in the windows
next to the door and Timmy breathed a sigh of relief.   Good!   Someone was home.
    Timmy counted to sixty three times before the knob on the
other side of the door rattled and the door slowly opened.   A thin, wrinkled face peeked out from the
narrow space between the door and frame. “Hello?” the parched voice whispered.
“What do you want?”
    Clearing his throat several times to get rid of the panic,
Timmy took his cap off his head to be polite and finally said, “I’m here with
your paper.” Lifting the said object up for the thin man to
see.
    Eyes almost too wide for their sockets followed the
movement. “Paper?” he croaked.
    Nodding eagerly, Timmy handed it to him. “Yes, it’s today’s
copy of the Chicago Beacon,” he replied. “I’m your new paperboy.”
    A long, thin hand reached out and grasped the paper, slowly
pulling it back into the house, but at the last moment, the paper slipped from
his grasp and tumbled to the floor.   Dropping his hat, Timmy dove for the paper and caught it before it disappeared
into one of the holes in the porch. “Here you are,” he said, offering the paper
again.
    The old face stared at him for a moment longer and then
nearly cracked in half with a wide smile. “Thank you, boy,” he whispered.
    “You’re welcome, sir,” Timmy replied. “Um, have a nice
evening.”
    The old man nodded slowly and then closed the door.
    Breathing a sigh of relief, Timmy walked down the stairs and
stepped onto the sidewalk.   The rustling
in the overgrown lawn intensified and all he could imagine were big, hairy rats
waiting to grab hold of him and pull him under.   Tossing caution to the wind, he ran down the sidewalk and pushed the
gate closed firmly behind him.
    Pulling his bike from the bushes, he hopped back on it and
hurried down the street, delivering the rest of the papers.   When he got to the very last house on his
route, he reached in the bag and, to his surprise, found no more papers.
    There had to be a mistake.   He had enough papers for every house on his route.
    Pedaling his bike next to a streetlight, he pulled out the
paper with the route.   He counted the
addresses on the street; there was one less subscriber than houses on the
street.   Studying it, he realized the old
house with the iron fence had not been a subscriber.   He’d given them a free paper.   He thought for a moment about going back
there, but only for a moment.   There was
no way he was going back through that yard in the dark.   But, it was his fault, he hadn’t checked his route before.
    He dug into his pants pocket and pulled out the shiny
dime.   He knew what he had to do.   He rode out of the dead end street and over a
block to a metal newspaper box on the corner, inserted his dime and pulled out
the paper he needed.   In a few minutes,
the paper was delivered and he was on his way back home.
    “Hey, Mom, I’m