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147 THINGS THAT WERE SCARIER THAN DAD 6 We used to play an incredibly scary version of hide-and-seek called “Beaster.” It was the last organized game any of us remember playing with Dad before he went over the edge. It was always played at night. To begin a game of Beaster the six brothers would scatter through the four floors of the Millstone and extinguish every light. Wherever you were when the last light went out, the game began. My father, armed with a rolled-up newspaper, was now waiting for you somewhere on one of the four floors of the huge house. His job was to whack you with the newspaper. Your job was to not make a high wailing girlie scream when his form loomed out of the darkness and the whacking began. So you crept through the Millstone looking for a hiding place. The Minnesota winter banished any thought of escaping the game by going outside. There were thirty rooms to hide in, but most were too scary to be in all alone. After a half hour of hiding in a distant hallway closet, part of you wanted to give up and run screaming and public through the house and just get it over with. Eventually, though, you tiptoed past the dead end of the music room to the relative safety of the living room. It was in the living room where my last game of Beaster ended. I’d made it to the red chairs near the fireplace and tucked myself into a small triangle of space behind the back of the chair and the corner of the room. It was a good place to hide but offered no escape if you were discovered . On the far side of the living room was the stereo amplifier (or the “hifi ,” as we called it then). From where I hid in the corner I could see its little orange on-light, the only illumination in the room and a sort of lighthouse, a reminder that the room was the way I remembered it in sunshine. As I looked at this light I listened, trying to hear Dad’s footsteps overhead ; listening for the discovery of one of my brothers and the high girlie THINGS THAT WERE SCARIER THAN DAD 148 scream that would surely follow. I fixated on the little orange light and waited; listened. That’s when I saw something begin to move between my hiding place and the hi-fi. The little orange light, my connection to the world, went out—was blocked out—and I began to scream like a teeny little girl. At work, office employees get free coffee. Bone doctors—they get free skeletons. “Roger is now lecturing down at the boys’ school on an appropriate Halloween subject, the skeleton,” wrote my mother in October 1959. “He brought it from his office and it now stands in lonely dignity in the Music Parlor, lending a rare atmosphere of horror to the gleefully told ghost stories Kip and Jeff concoct.” This skeleton was the real thing. It wasn’t made out of plastic; it was made out of a person. To preserve it for medical study, the bones had been dipped in shellac and they all bore tiny ink markings, as if the worms that had picked them clean left notes, like food critics. During the day, we little ones had nervous fun with the skeleton, making it wave its hand at the passing dog (or perform some worse indignity). But at night, the skeleton exacted revenge simply by standing there in the moonlight, dangling from its support pole in all its clickety marionette horror. What made the skeleton especially frightening wasn’t so much its toothy gravestone grin or the twin dark crypts of the eyes. It was the idea that it was once a living person, a man, with a name. “It used to be . . . a reeeeallll guy,” Jeff told us, leaning in for effect. “It’s Kevinnnnnnn . . .” One of our favorite ghost stories was W.W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw.” But the ghost story Kip and Jeff told that night at the foot of the skeleton (the feet rather) used the great size of the surrounding Millstone and its thirty rooms to good effect. “It happened one night in a house just like this one,” Jeff would say with a gesture to the rooms looming around us. He probably cribbed the plot from a Twilight Zone (none...

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