User blog:Muppetfan/Hallo, Dave!

This page is a fan-made fiction or fanon made by Muppetfan. It is not officially part of the Arthur storyline, nor has it been approved by Marc Brown or the Arthur team.

Hallo, Dave! is the first seasonal mini-fanon written by Muppetfan. Though chronologically it is the second fanon he has started, this fanon is much shorter and, as previously stated, a seasonal fanon, in this case based on Halloween.

This story is rated PG for some levels of spookiness and some references to blood and violence.

Chapter 1: The Wink

It was a beautiful July morning in Elwood City. The majority of the citizens walked around in light clothes, and often shorts to account for the extreme heat and humidity that was too bothersome to be forgotten. Even the few cars that ran through the city on their vacation expedition to Virginia Beach could smell the sweat in the air in the few minutes that they were trespassing.

As for the city's local third graders, they opted to be congregated at the public pool. A brown, sunglasses wearing bear sat on a lawn chair at the brim, fiddling around with some electronic circuits. A tan dog in purple sat with a tablet and pen, writing a mystery novel. A brown moose ran inside and laid down to quench is nose bleed.

In the pool, two monkeys, a rabbit, a bulldog, and most importantly an aardvark bounced around a rainbow striped inflatable beach ball. If they aardvark had known what lie in store for him because of that pool visit, he may have liked to shut himself in his home for the day. But, for the sake of both excitement and this story, he didn't.

The pool crowd was enormous, but there happened to be one particular figure that Arthur found to stand out. The figure stood hunchbacked, leaning on two crooked canes, one in each hand, one taller, one shorter. He wore a black cape over a dark green suit, a color that was so dark that only a eagle's eye could detect the slight, off-black color. Even the bright white shirt underneath seemed to get lost in the portal of darkness.

The thing that made Arthur consider the strangeness of the situation was the fact that the figure's face was clearly visible, yet for some reason still lost within the black hole of a man. Somehow Arthur sensed that the face was wrinkled, crooked, and one with a nasty hook of a nose, most likely complete with shaggy, half-shredded eyebrows, the wrinkles in his face holding one up above the other, as if he was thinking. This seemed to be pure speculation on the aardvark's part, yet not at the same time. Arthur couldn't decide if he had concluded this from looking at the face, looking at the body, or merely by the sense he felt in the air.

All in all, this character seemed to be the typical figure that one would find at the beginning of a Halloween novel, which, to Arthur's unawareness, is ultimately true.

It wasn't the strange appearance of this figure that drew Arthur's eyes to the creature, as he may be called, as he had considerable contrast from a human, though at the same time was one by and by. It was more the fact that the figure had seemed to have such directed his eyes into a stare toward Arthur, which was an odd realization to one that could not determine if his eyes were to be seen.

It began when Arthur was waiting for the ball to bounce his way, when he noticed the strange man begin to slyly walk around the rim of the outer part of the pool gate. He noticed the figure peer through the metal gate's small holes, attentively looking in the direction of Arthur. Though he considered it for a moment, Arthur shrugged the entire ordeal off, too distracted by the gleam of the rainbow ball to care much.

As the figure seemed to enter the pool area and creep around the edge of the inside part of the gate, Arthur began to take notice of how the figure never, no matter what direction he faced, seemed to take his eyes off of Arthur, yet continued to attentively stare. When this strange character, now standing in place, remained looking Arthur's way, Arthur realized that something a bit strange was going on. Only the run of a young child pulling his mother's arm past the creature, almost knocking him down, was enough to make the man's eyes diverge off of the aardvark for a few moments, in which he tapped his cane on the ground, as if trying to scold the long gone child without his mother knowing. Little did Arthur know the truth this statement would later hold in some form.

Tired of being eyed, Arthur departed from his friends over to the diving board area, where he dived a few times to try to lose the stranger's attentive stare. On one occasion at the top of the diving board, Arthur noted that the figure's attention did not follow Arthur to the diving board. This convinced Arthur that the stranger had not been staring at Arthur, but rather something else in that vicinity, that is until Arthur noticed the stranger looking up toward the diving board during his next dive.

The thing that puzzled Arthur the most was how content the stranger seemed to be in the extreme heat, as if nothing mattered except an ordinary, glasses wearing aardvark wearing blue swimming shorts. He observed that the creature was easily so wrinkled up and dry that the heat most likely didn't even make him flinch, no matter if the reason was that he didn't care or didn't feel it at all.

It wasn't until Arthur's eighth or ninth dive that the stranger and Arthur locked eyes for the first time. It was a short eye-lock, as Arthur pulled his eyes back at a rate that he heard his neck snap. But either way, the lock served as the stranger's confirmation that Arthur was indeed aware that something odd was going on.

At about four o'clock, the third graders began departing on an expedition home for supper, which was figured to start at about five. Arthur looked back at the man one last time as he left, noting how he continued to watch Arthur as the aardvark left for home. Arthur breathed a sigh of relief to finally get the stranger out from under his neck.

As his friends conversed about their progress on their summer reading assignments, Arthur could only keep silent and stare at the sidewalk below him. He remained this way for the entire trip, until he smelt a scent that was reminiscent of a faint fragment he had picked up at the pool. He looked up, and to his absolute bewilderment, the creature of the man that had been staring at the pool was sitting on the approaching bench on the route. As the group passed it, Arthur couldn't help but glance over towards the man, who seemed to wink at Arthur in a way that both surprised and scared him. Upon passing the bench, Arthur looked back and found the man already gone.