SCARY

Her front yard looks like the Grim Reaper's carnival set up shop. Tomb stones litter the flower beds. Gargoyles bask in black lighting. A ten foot spider crouches guarding against sidewalk riff raff. An undead woman in rotted wedding regalia laughs maniacally at the front door while fog machines seethe a low haze of dread across the lawn.

She's scary. She's my neighbor - a woman in her late thirties who looks like any other mother of boys driving a mini van to the elementary school twice daily and dropping by Kroger for ten items or less every few days. But this mom looks forward to Halloween. It's her Christmas, she exaplins. After the first week of October, as soon as her yard begins crawling with plastic ghouls of all manifestations, people start to wonder "Who ARE these people living among us?"

She's an accomplished author, that's who. She's written book adaptations of some very frightening films, examples of which I won't list here for fear of blowing her cover and drawing fans to our otherwise sleepy neighborhood. Her biggest claim to fame is, however, a series of original books about a vampire slayer - a very sexually rambunctious vampire slayer. In the one chapter I was brave enough to peak at (I scare easily) a woman woke up in a dungeon chained to a bulging hunk of a man, wondering if she'd had too much to drink the night before or if something more sinister had taken place since her last memory of consciousness. In less than a page the sleeping stranger she's tethered too awakes, is of course gorgeous, and predictably amorous. He crawls on top of her and paragraphs of odd dialogue about vampires, werewolves and assassins ensue, made uncomfortable by constant internally monologued sexual fantasies from both characters. Of course the two characters consummate their new "friendship" and embark on an unholy sinister adventure and I'm left wondering A) Why am I still reading this? and B) Who ARE these people living among us? Again, she's scary.

I'm living next door to the Danielle Steele of the Dungeons and Dragons crowd. I imagine her fans to be a certain group of guys I knew in high school. I imagine them believing vampires were real back then. They probably worshipped the devil, wearing black as a kind of warning shot, to ward off the rest of us. They put curses on the homes of strict teachers and sacrificed farm animals and such. They probably talked to Satan, heard him talk back and hated all things beautiful and innocent - I imagine. And this imagination of mine kept me from getting closer to my neighbor than a wave from the mailbox and a smile. She's scary - feeding demonic sex crazed wackos page after page of encouragement every day like she does.

But then my kids asked if they could cross the street and stroll through her tomb stones and corpses and how could I refuse? That's when she came outside and we actually met, laughed, talked a long time - her in a "I'm Evil" t-shirt (black of course) and me in a "Relevant Magazine" shirt (white of course). We talked long enough that the hazer in her bushes ran out of juice and then the fog began to clear.

She's known apparently for quite some time about what I do too. "I live across the street from a guy who sings songs about God for Christians," she may have blogged in the past. "I knew people in high school who listened to that crap. They'd skip our dances and look mortified when I'd cuss or walk around campus with my hand in my boyfriend's back pocket. I imagined them talking about angels and what Jesus would major in at College or what the new Queen record says if you play it backward. They had slumber parties at which the souls of damned class mates were "lifted up", and G-rated movies were consumed while wearing footy pajamas before turning in no later than 9."

Now that we're friends though I've learned she need not use her imagination to picture one of my fans. She doesn't have to lean on foggy high school memories of Christians. Her sister is one - an angel seeing, doily decorating, ceramic figurine collecting, George Bush voting, speaking in tongues, slain in the spirit, charting the end times, boycott Disney and Ellen and the Teletubbies, "don't say geez", church twice a week, Jesus fished, until-you-stop-writing-those-kinds-of-books-don't-come-to-our-house-for-Christmas Christian...who loves my music and hates her.

Now that's scary. Or, sadly, that's what the scary are sometimes made of.