Cobwebs and witches are for children and morons. If you’re
looking for the most hair-raising Halloween horrors, try scouring the
streets of the Eastside. That’s where we found the most pants-wettingly
scary houses, sure to give you night terrors well past Halloween and
all the way until November 4. Because in an election year, nothing’s
more terrifying than the future.
“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting
and reasoning as fear,” wrote British philosopher Edmund Burke in 1756.
It’s as true today as ever. Case in point: this bloodcurdling Mercer
Island lawn display, a quadruple whammy of Republican propaganda
capable of driving the most reasonable citizen to insanity. By day,
it’s a standard collection of yard signs on a well-manicured lawn. But
at night, it’s a GOP graveyard, where the yard-sign tombstones are
unearthed by zombie candidates hungry for brains. Do you have what it
takes to drive a stake through the heart of zombie Dino Rossi or blast
a shotgun into the chest of zombie Dave Reichert or fight off the
reanimated ashes of Steve Litzow, swirling out of that terrifying urn?
Run.
Hungarian peasants have an old and terrible story about “the tree of
death,” which by some trick of evil had lurking in its twisted branches
the “dark lord,” the master of the underworld, the evil that brings all
things to their end. It was there in the tree, waiting, watching, and
preying on the living. Passing this dead—nay,
murdered—tree on Mercer Island takes us back to the
scariest bowels of Hungary, only instead of one dark lord, this tree is
possessed by a trinity of evil, represented quite fittingly by cheap
glossy crassness tacked over mercilessly hacked nature.
What is more terrifying than this edifice, in which there is no
door, few windows, and no handholds by which one might scale its
faceless heights to register complaint? One half-expects loudspeakers
on the roof to be blaring Orson Welles voice, from his movie version of
Franz Kafka’s The Trial: A man comes from the country, begging
admittance to the law. But the guard cannot admit him. Can he hope to
enter at a later time? “That is possible,” says the guard. The man
tries to peer through the entrance. He had been taught that the law
should be accessible to every man. “Do not attempt to enter without my
permission,” says the guard. “I am very powerful, but I am the least of
all the guards.” Without a doubt, this is no home to man, but a
monolithic holding cell packed floor-to-ceiling with bubbling black
goo.
That John McCain sign is screamingly scary enough in the
early-evening light, like a little flag for an evil army of pint-sized
ghouls marching through the leafy streets of Mercer Island. And that
zigzagging, funereal fence behind it? That is the sign of an isolated
home, sheltering isolated minds—bristling, cold and black, a
thousand points of death—and the kind of house that gives
trick-or-treaters miniboxes of raisins. Beware.
This most terrifying tableau gains its power from what’s not shown
but easily imagined: the presence of John McCain and Sarah Palin not in
name but bodily form, striding triumphantly onto this balcony like a
trailer-park Eva Perón and her cryogenically defrosting old-man
running mate. Down below, the desperate, unemployed masses huddle in
the shrubs, their bellies roiled by hunger and heartbreak, their cold
bare ankles stung by the blades of wet grass. Or… could those be tiny
tentacles or the haunted bubbling of mass graves or the desperate
clutching fingers of a special-needs child? Flee, and don’t look
back.
Like an oversized cousin of John McCain’s aged, brown iguana teeth,
this foreboding fence is busy keeping immigrants out and Jesus’s love
within. How like the wily immigrant is the frightening foliage, as it
insidiously creeps and scratches at Real America’s doorstep! How mighty
the speculum of Dino Rossi—an army of dead-baby ghosts at his
back—aborting civil rights before civil rights can abort him
first! Who knows what liberal bogeymen lurk outside this fence’s
cherished sanctum? The nightmare has just begun for you, Republican
fence. 