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The Scariest Thing I Know Dean Koontz Dean wrote the following short story-about a boy named Nick Loffman, who has a very unusual Halloween experience-far the special Halloween issue of Martha Stewart Living. When I was twelve years old, in seventh grade, I was a disaster waiting to happen.
I wasn’t the equivalent of a simple flood or a mere train wreck. I was an earthquake in ragged sneakers, a tornado in patched jeans, ready to bring tremendous ruin down on myself and on everyone around me. I didn’t realize I was a loser. I thought i was smart and tough. 1 was so smart, I knew school was a concentration camp where they brainwashed kids to be good citizens and spiked the lousy cafeteria food with be-nice pills. To me, being an upstanding citizen meant working your whole life for nickels and dimes and having no fun.
I preferred to be bad. And tough? Other kids called rne Stony, because I was hard. You didn’t want to mess with me. I had my secret smokes-Lucky Strikes, the~smokes of tough men-and recently I’d started carrying a knife. Five-inch biade, gravity release. I hadn’t used it in a fight-not yet-because so far I’d never been in danger of losing with rny fists alone. Looking back, I can remember the anger that was in me, the storm of violence waiting to break, but I can’t feel it anymore, not the way I felt it then. The twelve-yearold me is more unknowable than a stranger. He’s an alien from another world. I’m grateful I didn’t grow up to be him. My name is Nicholas Loffman. My friends call me Nick or Nicky. No one has called me Stony since I was twelve,
