But I’ll tell you how it’s been done up to now and you can choose for yourself. The children—with their parents these days, of course—begin to call at the houses in the village for their tricks and their treats. Then they gather at the top of the hill for the procession and down they come, all the way to Saltwater Nook. You’ll find in the attic some provisions for decorating the place. I used to dish out hot drinks and sundries, but not for the last twenty or years or so, I can’t keep up! Now I make sure I’ve a bucketload of sweets and the outside of the place is decorated with spooky things and Ely will frighten the bairns senseless with the tale of the sunken Willow and ghostly sailors. Legend has it that the captain’s bounty was never recovered and rests at the bottom of the ocean somewhere around these parts. Children love a sunken treasure tale. And they go home happily terrified and no doubt sleep with the lights on for days after, but it’s all in the name of fun.

—

Halloween had not been something Annie had seriously considered—beyond the obligatory carving of the jack-o’-lantern—for years, since usually she was working. Ever since reading Mari’s notebook, though, she had found herself thinking about Halloween with a surprising amount of glee; her list-making senses were tingling. She had picked up a veritable feast of tooth-shriveling sweets and had been checking the internet for decorations. She had her eye on a few things, but she really needed to check what Mari already had before she committed.

The attic was reached by a small hatch in the hallway between the sitting room and the kitchen. After hauling the ladder from the cellar up the stairs to the flat, Annie pushed open the hatch and was greeted with a cold waft of dank air. She climbed up and crawled into the roof space. There was just room enough for her to stand up in places, and a skinny path of planks ran along some of the beams beneath her feet. On either side of the planks, balanced across the beams, was a sea of cardboard boxes.

Annie shone her phone torch around and found, to her relief, that they were all neatly labeled. She stepped gingerly toward the boxes marked Halloween and set about opening them; she didn’t want to drag them all down to the flat if they weren’t things she would want to use. She had just taken a vegetable knife to the tape on the first box when the doorbell rang. Shit, Annie thought, but then she thought fuck it and decided to ignore it. She turned back to the box. The bell rang again. Annie huffed exasperatedly but carried on slitting the tape and pulling open the flaps. The doorbell rang again.

“Go away!” she yelled.