“Life’s full of these little surprises,” Nita said. She fitted the pumpkin’s top back in place, saw to her satisfaction that it fitted snugly. Then on an afterthought she removed it again, shook her charm bracelet around on her wrist, and pinched one charm, a tiny lightbulb, that had a ready-to-activate spell attached to it. When she pulled her finger and thumb away from the charm again, they had a little spark of bright white light between them. Nita reached inside the pumpkin and snugged the little particle of wizard-light down into the place where she’d most deeply dug away the pumpkin’s flesh at the bottom, then put the stem-lid back on. The wizard-light shone very satisfactorily through the pumpkin’s new eyes and mouth, even in daylight. “Anybody sees that,” Nita said, “they’ll think it’s an LED. Give me a couple of minutes to deal with the handle and we can go.”
It took less than that, as it turned out: some of the heavy braided raffia-twine that her dad used in his florist’s business proved to be perfect for this job. When it was done Nita tested the handle, found it entirely secure, and then equipped herself with one of several Halloween-themed paper shopping bags. She handed one each to the others. “You ready?”
“All set,” Ronan said.
“Daddy, we’re going…!” Nita said.
“So I see,” he said, looking in again from the kitchen. “And you’ve got your phones with you if there are any problems…”
“Don’t think there’s likely to be much in the way of problems,” Nita said.
Her dad watched them head for the front door with a slightly thoughtful expression. Nita blushed one more time, for though her dad knew that there’d recently been some kind of status change in her relationship with Kit, she hadn’t yet been successful in explaining it to him, because she hadn’t yet finished figuring it out herself. “Don’t be too late,” her dad said: and Nita knew this was code for Don’t do anything I wouldn’t want you to.
“I won’t,” she said: and very much hoped, as the front door shut behind them, that this was going to turn out to be true.
*
The weather at least was cooperating with the local trick-or-treaters. After a few days of rain and wind earlier in the week, conditions had abruptly settled the day before into a lovely still crispness exactly right for the end of October. The trees were on the turn and glowing in the last rays of late-afternoon sun; and things had fortunately had time to dry out, so that the yellow and orange maple and oak leaves you scuffed through rustled satisfyingly instead of just lying there wet and sodden on the sidewalk.
Nita sighed as the four of them walked down the street and stopped at the first few of their neighbors’ houses. She loved this time of year, both for the changeableness of it and the slight sense of sadness that seemed to hover over it, the world saying Oh well… as it reluctantly gave up the midyear warmth and paused for a few long cool breaths before turning inevitably toward the winter. The particular blue the sky went, the growing quiet even on windy days when the leaves came off the trees: they all mattered a lot to her.
That changeableness seemed to have come over Hallowe’en itself, in a way. It was a little weird to see so many older kids dressed up and taking part in the last-day-of-October ritual. But over the last few years it seemed that a lot of junior high-age, even senior high-age kids, had been getting into it. Partly it was being pitched among the kids as a way to have fun after dark with the excuse of taking care of the littler participants… though pretty much everyone involved understood that this was actually a good way to get out from under the ever-watchful parental eyes for a while. Nita knew very well that a lot of kids from school, though they’d gotten themselves costumed and acquired all the rest of the necessary props, were actually up in town snogging in the darkness behind the shopping center, or meeting in various vacant lots to get drunk. Their problem, Nita thought. She had other priorities tonight.
After the first few houses, where everyone collected the usual little bags or miniature candy bars, they came to the McLoughlins’ house up the street. There were no lights in the windows, no light on over the front steps. “Nobody home,” Ronan said.
“No,” Nita said, “they’re never ‘home’. They don’t do Halloween.”
“Seems like other people have opinions about that, ” Ronan said as they walked past the house. He was noting the enthusiastic TP-ing of the big sycamore tree in the McLoughlins’ front yard.
“Yeah,” Nita said. “And it’s gonna make a big mess all over their lawn. I think I might stop by real early tomorrow morning and see if I can get all that to sort of melt away…”
“What, just vanish it?” Ronan said.
“Nothing so obvious. But the paper’s made to biodegrade pretty quickly, so it’s just a matter of convincing it to do it all in a couple of hours instead of a couple of weeks…”
They stopped at another house and collected a couple of taffy apples and a caramel pop each, then headed off again, idly discussing the best ways to use wizardry to disguise the artificially accelerated breakdown of toilet tissue. As they got down toward the end of the street where Nita’s road crossed another one and more trick-or-treaters were visible, she caught Kit giving some of the kids down the road a dissatisfied look. “What?” she said.
“I’m starting to feel like a walking wardrobe malfunction.”
“Why?” Nita said. “You look great. You heard the people at the last house, they thought you were something out of the movies! And anyway, we haven’t seen that many other pirates.”
Kit snickered. “It’s not that,” he said. “I mean, look at them…” He gestured down the cross street at some of the other trick-or-treaters making the rounds, among whom there were a lot of long overrobes, pointy hats, souped-up broomsticks, and a positive superfluity of wands. “Half the planet’s running around dressed as wizards.”
Ronan grinned one of those lazy superior grins he specialized in. “One day of the year, sure we can cut them some slack,” he said. “Since we dress as wizards the other three hundred and sixty-four…”
As they continued to work the street, the four of them amused themselves for a while by counting the wizard costumes. But there were also a fair number of the usual glow-in-the-dark skeletons and bedsheet ghosts, not to mention Supermen and Batmen and winged fairies of various types, often shepherded by watchful parents or older brothers and sisters. And there were also other forms of supervision, both more annoying and less green.
Cars were very slowly driving up and down the street in the slowly growing dusk, stopping, pausing, driving on again. “What are they doing?” Ronan muttered.
“Curb-crawling,” Kit said, his disdain only thinly veiled. They paused on the sidewalk to watch as yet another overprotective parent in an SUV pulled up into the vacant street space between a couple of the neighbors’ driveways, let a batch of costumed kids out, waited until they’d rung the nearest houses’ doorbells and collected the expected booty, and then— once they’d all piled back into the station wagon again— drove them a few doors further down to repeat the process.
“What the feck happens when these kids grow up?” Ronan said under his breath, disbelieving. “Will they be able to wipe themselves, you think?”
“No telling,” Dairine muttered. “Never mind them. Here’s the Kerricks’ place, they love Hallowe’en and they always give out a ton of stuff…”
They stopped there, had their costumes duly admired by the Kerricks, were given truly astonishing amounts of candy and fruit, and headed on down the street again. It was an old familiar route for Nita: down East Clinton to the cross street, Park Avenue; work up and down Park for about a quarter mile in each direction, then retrace your steps to East Clinton and hit all the houses up the length of it to Nassau Road. Then head for home, because by the time you got near there, you’d be having trouble carrying your candy bag, it’d be so heavy. If you got your second wind, you might then go out and do another run up some of the nearby side streets. Might as well enjoy this first run, though, Nita thought. Because who knows if we’ll feel like a second? Or for that matter, whether this might be the last time we do this. We may really be getting a little old for this kind of thing…