Page 35 of The Boo Next Door

"You drive a horrifying bargain. Done." She shakes my hand on it, formally, under the covers, which is the single most Merriweather contract execution in recorded history, and the cat opens one eye to witness it, which we agree makes it binding.

Item two. The shed. She's keeping it exactly as it is, except operational — Bee Spooked Designs, prop fabrication and seasonal attraction consulting, sole proprietor L. Merriweather, headquarters one lavender-scented shed, first three commissions already inquired via the Haunted Homes Tour people before the bonfire even burned down. "I'm going to need garage access," she says, into my collarbone. "For overflow. Strictly professional."

"There's a form. Behrens invented it this morning."

Item three. The Fright. The sponsorship board goes to the council the second week of November, real names, real numbers, Marge's sheet as founding document — the whole machine hauled up into daylight where a town can hold it, the way it always should have been. Dottie's chairing the transition. I'm demoted, at my own request, from secret patron saint to line item, and the line item has a name she proposed at the bonfire with a straight face and a full cider: The Merriweather Fund. Nobody voted. Nobody needed to.

Item four, entered over my objection. "The dragon stays demoted," she says. "He's better as a gargoyle. It's character growth." I point out that the dragon cost four years and a second mortgage's worth of servos. She points out that so did my personality, and look how well demotion's going. The item carries. The dragon stays a gargoyle.

Item five. Beetlejuice's chair count reaches four. Unrelated to the evening's other business, but the record should be complete.

Item six, unnumbered, unspoken, filed only here: her breathing goes slow against my shoulder somewhere between items, mid-sentence, planning to the last — something about the regatta, something about gauge — and I lie in the lamplight of a house I fixed the wiring on before I ever kissed its owner, under a moon burning its bulb down over two roofs, and I do the full structural review. Six years I built this life like a portfolio. Perfect miters, level pictures, nothing on any wall that said anything. It took a Merriweather forty days to condemn the whole structure and rebuild it around me, and the new one's crooked, one degree, on purpose, and it will hold anything.

At five to midnight she sits up like a woman remembering a stove.

"Get up. Get dressed. There's a thing we have to do and we have six minutes."

The thing lives on the top shelf of the shed, and I carry it out to the middle of the one lawn under the burning moon while she brings matches and the cat supervises from the porch rail in the cold: a cast-iron jack-o'-lantern mold, black with forty years of Octobers, Bee's first — the one she poured the very first face from, before the moons, before the brides, before any of it, the whole empire's seed.

"She lit it every Halloween at midnight," Lila says. "After the crowds. After teardown. Just her. I watched her do it from that window my whole childhood and she never once explained it, and the year I finally asked, she said—" her voice catches its breath, steadies, goes on, "—she said, that's the porch light, Lila-bug. The show's for the town. The light's for whoever's still out there."

We light it together at midnight, one match, two hands on it against the wind.

The first match dies. The second dies. The third one takes, cupped between our four hands, her cold fingers laced over mine, and I understand, all at once, that this is why it needs two people, that maybe it always needed two people, that maybe forty years of doing it alone at midnight was the only part of the whole empire Bee ever built wrong.

The little flame takes hold inside the old iron face, and it grins up out of the dark between our four feet, and the moon leans crooked over the two houses, and the last of the bonfire smoke drifts up the lane, and neither of us says anything for a while, because there's a species of quiet that outranks even me. Up on the porch rail, the cat sits with his tail wrapped over his feet, watching the flame, keeping the other watch, the one he's kept since March.

"Happy Halloween, Bee," she says finally, to the lawn, to the moon, to the lit iron face. "We kept it on."

Dottie corners us at Frankie's the morning after, over a victory breakfast the whole shop applauds. Frankie comps the maple foam and then stands there tapping the wedding-fund jar with one finger until I put a twenty in it, which is extortion, which I mention, which costs me another ten. And Dottie informs us — informs, the woman has never once asked a question she couldn't already answer — that next year we're not eligible to enter.

"Conflict of interest," she says, stealing my bacon. "You're hosting. Founders' Fright headquarters, the double lot. The committee voted at seven this morning."

"The committee meets in November," I say.

"The committee meets when I'm holding coffee." She produces, from her enormous purse, a folder: Behrens has already made the form. HOST PROPERTY DESIGNATION, it says, above a small, careful, unasked-for illustration of the moon. "Sign."

Lila signs laughing. I sign watching her sign — the draftsman's lettering, Bee's hand living on in it, the pen looping through her name like it's glad about it — and across the table this woman who arrived five weeks ago with a dead woman's key and a war to pick looks up at me over the paperwork of our shared empire, cider-foam on her lip, absolutely lit with plans, and starts telling Dottie her ideas for a pumpkin regatta.

Next October, in front of everyone, on the night we host the whole town on one lawn, I'm going to ask this woman to marry me, and I already know exactly where I'm going to hide the ring, and God and Bee forgive me, it's going to be inside a prop.

She'd want it that way. Both of them would.

I start planning it before the bacon's gone.

Epilogue

Lila

One year later, the fence never grew back.

Things that did grow: the Fright, which now runs on a sponsorship board with twenty-nine names and its own line in the town budget, restored by unanimous council vote in a meeting where Behrens presented forms for forty minutes and nobody minded. The group chat, which has schismed into four chats, all of which I'm somehow in. The wedding fund at Frankie's, which was a joke until it wasn't, and which paid for exactly one thing, this June — the good champagne, drunk out of jam jars on a lawn with no fence in it, by a town that took full credit.

And the compound, as the hashtag insists on calling it. Founders' Fright headquarters, one double lot, two houses, one moon.

Tonight is our second Halloween, our first as hosts, and from the porch — from Bee's rocker, specifically, with a clipboard and a headset and a cat — I can see the whole machine running at once. The judged route goes down the far side of the lane this year, eleven entries deep, because with the champions retired into management, the field went wild: Marge built a haunted hardware store in her actual hardware store, and Frankie's staff have turned the coffee shop into something called The Depresso Zone that has to be experienced to be believed, and the Hendersons, the actual Hendersons, are currently sitting in third with an inflatable armada so shameless the judges keep going back. Walt has waited six years for this. If he places, this town will hear about it until the sun burns out, and he will have earned it.

Our lawn doesn't compete anymore. Our lawn is the finish line. Gary and the skeleton troops work the cider table now, semi-retired, posed in aprons. Carla the flamingo has a witch hat for every weekend in October, funded by a group-chat dues structure nobody remembers voting for. My build sheets still say WWLD across the top, except the new hires keep asking what it stands for, and I keep telling them the truth: it stands for whatever gets the town to the third thing. The homecoming runs bigger this year — nine ghosts now, the bride leading, the travelers arriving up the walk all night with their luggage, the table set and steaming, the chair pulled out — and after the route, the whole town ends up here, cider in hand, under the moon.