It's Halloween, and a bunch of children are out trick-or-treating with one of the kid's uncles. All night they've been making their way through the neighbourhood, banging on doors, collecting a sizeable pile of handouts. Towards the end of the night they stop on a corner to count up what they've got. Most of the kids seem to have amassed a good pile of sweets, along with a few small toys and a number of differently-sized apples from concerned members of the healthy eating brigade.
Satisfied, the kids and their chaperone start to head back to their home neighbourhood. On the way, the kids start in on their haul, munching their way through various sweets and snacks. They're almost halfway back when one of the boys yelps and drops the apple he'd been chewing on. Blood is dripping from his mouth.
Concerned, the uncle crouches down by the boy and inspects the injury. It looks like he cut his mouth on something. The uncle comforts the boy until the crying stops, then snatches up the apple from the pavement. There's something metallic stuck in there, he sees. Squinting closer, he sees to his horror that the metal thing is a razor blade.
The first thing he does is collect the apples off the other kids. With mounting horror, he sorts through the fruits, finding first one then another with a little telltale slash in its skin.
He's panicking now. So many people gave apples this year there's no way he can tell who the perpetrator might be. And who knows how many more of these doctored apples are out there? Thought whirl around his head, but one is most prominent of all: which of all the nice, normal-looking houses they stopped at tonight was the house of a lunatic?
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