The Great Costume Inspection

Every Halloween, before the first doorbell rings, there is a parade around Pumpkin Patch Plaza. It is a parade with paperwork. Every costume in it has to be inspected, and every costume that has been inspected has to be stamped. That is the rule, and it is painted on a sign beside the fountain.

The stamping is done by Inspector Clementine Crumb of the Parental Revenue Service. She sits at a little table under a striped umbrella, with a pot of red ink and a velvet case. Inside the case are forty-six rubber stamps, one for every kind of costume there has ever been. There is a stamp for Ghost, Friendly. There is a stamp for Pirate, Mostly Polite, and one for Cat, Sitting.

“Next,” said Inspector Crumb.

A small witch stepped up. The Inspector looked at the hat. She looked at the broom, and checked that the broom had a name, which it did, because it was called Derek. Then she chose a stamp, breathed on it, and pressed it onto the witch’s ticket: Witch, Very Pointy. Approved.

The line moved along. Two astronauts. A bumblebee with one wing on upside down. A ghost in a flowery bedsheet, who got Ghost, Floral, a stamp the Inspector had made especially the year before. Stamp, stamp, stamp went the stamps, and the parade grew longer behind the table, rustling and giggling and waiting to go.

Then it was Ada’s turn.

Ada was wearing a big cardboard box, painted silver. There were two slots in the top, and sticking out of each slot was a slice of toast made of yellow felt. On the side was a dial that said Light to Dark. When she pressed a button on her front, both slices of toast popped up.

Inspector Crumb looked at the costume for a long time. She opened the velvet case. She looked at all forty-six stamps. Then she closed the case again. “I have no stamp for Toaster,” she said.

The whole parade went quiet. Somewhere near the back, a bumblebee whispered, “Uh-oh.” Every costume needs a stamp, and without a stamp a costume cannot march, and nobody at all wanted to march without the toaster.

Inspector Crumb tapped her pencil on the table. Then she reached into her bag and brought out a potato. She cut it in half with a small carving tool from her pocket, and she began to carve, slowly, with the tip of her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth.

It took four minutes. The whole parade leaned in to watch. When she had finished, she dipped the potato in the red ink and pressed it firmly onto Ada’s ticket. It left a wobbly red picture of a toaster with two slices jumping out, and underneath, in letters she had carved backwards so they came out the right way round, it said: Approved. Excellent Crumbs.

“Forty-seven,” said Inspector Crumb, and she put the potato into the velvet case, in a brand-new slot. Then the band struck up, and the parade marched round the plaza, with the witch and Derek and the astronauts and the floral ghost, and right at the front, a silver toaster that popped every time it went round a corner.

Late that night, when the plaza was dark and every trick-or-treat bag was full, Inspector Crumb sat at her kitchen table and put her stamps to bed. She cleaned each one with a soft cloth and laid it in its slot. Ghost, Friendly. Pirate, Mostly Polite. Cat, Sitting.

Last of all she wiped the potato, very gently, and tucked it into slot forty-seven. Then she closed the lid, switched off the lamp and went to bed herself, and in the dark the stamps lay quietly in their case, all forty-seven of them, waiting for next year.