It was a cold and rainy night. A bit colder and even wetter than any night they could remember. The streets of Teaneck were full of water, cars casting waves against the curbs and small rivers pouring along into gutters and ditches. The trees swayed and shuddered in the breeze. Neighborhood cats hid under parked cars to keep from getting wet, paper skeletons on doors suffered from the moisture, Styrofoam tombstones with jack o'lanterns containing flickering candles wavered from the breeze amidst damp leaves carried by the air and people trudged on surly and disgruntled by the cold weather. The weather was going to ruin the candy getting season that was known as Halloween. The cold autumn rain was going to ruin the spirits of many trick-or-treaters. However, it could not affect the spirits of the truly young at heart.
"I hit every single puddle on the way home!" Kevin was drenched head-to-toe as raindrops fell from his locks of hair. As Joe and Nick were rushing from the van to the front door to keep from getting wet, their brother had sloshed through the big puddle in the driveway to try and empty it, raked the leaves out of the way for the water to rush into the storm drain at the curb and then jumped into the creek in the ditch next to the house and let his feet vanish under the raging water trying to knock him down to his feet. He got to relive his childhood only a paltry nine minutes before his mother calling him forced him to get out of the rain and come into the house. Once inside, Joe looked Kevin up and down from the muddy feet to the drenched t-shirt.
"How was the ocean, Ahab?"
"You could have joined me." Kevin surrendered his wet jacket and clothes to his mother in the laundry room. "Remember when we were kids and we played pirates in the rain screaming at each other as if we were on a storm at sea. We'd call each other…"
"I remember what we called each other." Joe rolled his eyes. Once he was stripped to his t-shirt and underwear, Kevin was sent up to his room to put on dry clothes on his mother's orders. Nick meanwhile checked his laptop for a report on the weather. The forecast called for rain and cloudy for the next few days.
"This is going to be the worse Halloween ever." Nick shook his head disappointed. "We go weeks preparing and building the best haunted house in the basement, and we're not going to get anyone to see it."
"Oh, I don't think so." Their mother started the washing machine with Kevin's wet clothes in the dirty laundry. "Last year, it rained, and we got a few trick-or-treaters."
"Seven…" Nick remembered. "Seven kids, and I'm pretty sure one of them was the same little girl in three different costumes."
"Little girls are so scary." Joe thought back.
"I was once a little girl." Their mother commented.
"Thanks for backing me up, mom…" Joe acknowledged her.
"Anyway…" Raven-haired and attractive Sandra Lucas moved through the kitchen of their renovated former firehouse. "Frankie is staying over with Mitchell because of the rain, and I'm sure you boys can find something to do besides living through another horror movie." She looked to Nick and recalled his alter ego as the alleged ghost of Volunteer Fireman Smith haunting their firehouse. The ghost was supposedly real, but Nick had perpetuated it with Joe's help to scare Kevin as a practical joke a month or two ago. "Your father is taking me out to dinner and see a movie. I'm not sure what happened to all the leftovers, but I'm sure you guys can order a pizza."
"No more pizza!" The boys were still reeling from the ordeal with the hot pizza girl.
"Chinese take-out?"
"Aw…" Joe grinned, put his hands together in prayer and spoke in a Chinese accent. "Chinese food take-out on Halloween sound very promising, mama-san."
Mother whacked her middle boy with the pillow from the sofa for being a smart-mouth.
"Hey…" Kevin came down his fire pole from his upstairs bedroom into the living room. He was cleaned and dressed in his jeans and a sweater. "Just got off the phone with Stella…" He climbed over the back of the sofa next to Joe. "She stopped by the party store and got more rubber spiders, snakes, rats and tombstones for our haunted house. This is going to be the best Halloween Haunted Basement ever!!"
The thunder cracked outside. Nick looked to his mother standing with her arms crossed to Joe and back to Kevin.
"It's raining." Nick reminded him.
"I know!" Kevin laughed as if he was in a horror movie. "What timing! We are going the scare the Shrek out of all those little kids! They'll be running out so fast we won't have to give them any candy. Wait…" He stopped and thought about it. "Do we have enough candy?"
As the sound of rain poured over the firehouse, Kevin and his brothers looked back to the kitchen counter and the five large salad bowls filled over the top with mountains of lollipops, bubble gum, soft mints, hard candy, toffee, licorice, tootsie rolls, miniature candy bars, packets of candy corn and chocolates wrapped in Halloween-themed foil. They had enough candy to open their own candy store.
"Mom…" Joe asked her to deal with Kevin.
"What?" She refused to get involved.
"It's raining." Nick interjected as he once again had to act older than his older brother. "No one goes trick-or-treating when it's raining."
"Don't say that! You'll jinx it!" He leaned down to Joe on the sofa looking for something to watch on TV. "I bet that little girl from last year is up to five costumes…."
Joe made a face as if he was scared….
"Kevin… Kevin…" Nick moved away from his laptop at the kitchen counter where he was sitting. "No one in his right mind is going to going house-to-house to get candy in this weather."
Thunder cracked again as the lights dimmed threatening to go out.
"I would." Kevin confessed.
Thunder cracked again.
"Well, you did say no one in his right mind…" Joe commented. Sandra knocked him with the pillow again.
"Kevin, honey…" She tried to say the thing the others hadn't said that. "I know how much you like Halloween, and how much effort you and your brothers put into setting up that haunted house in the basement, but maybe you shouldn't get so disappointed if just a few kids show up on account of the weather."
"But it's not that bad out…" Kevin remarked as thunder cracked and the power went out in the fire station. The air from the AC stopped blowing and all there was to see by was the soft bluish-gray light through the windows from outside. The lights started flickering back on and the AC started blowing again.
"You see… even Volunteer Fireman Smith is excited." Kevin had an excited boyish spark in his eyes. "This is his time of the year…." Kevin turned away speaking to the room. "But you behave yourself, Volunteer Fireman Smith. No body-stealing or hogging the candy."
Sandra looked around confused as Joe and Nick tiredly placed their fingers up to their noses as if they both had headaches.
"Guys, can you deal with this?" Sandra looked to Joe and Nick. "Your father will be here in a few minutes, and I still need to adjust my make-up." She headed for her bedroom on the second floor. "Oh, and if you get the chance tonight, replace the battery in the kitchen clock your father's been forgetting."
"Sure, mom…"
"Kevin…" Nick tiredly turned to his brother. "If I told you once, I've told you a hundred times, there's no such thing as ghosts." He thought he made his point clear. "And besides… you promised you'd never bring him up again…"
"I promised I'd never talk about him in front of you guys…" Kevin came round Nick to the kitchen counter to use Nick's laptop. "Instead, I've been talking about him on the Internet and discovered that a lot of the stuff in that book, "Ghosts, Ghouls And Cleanest Hot Dog Shacks in New Jersey" was totally made up." He punched up the website for the Collinsport Ghost Society on the East Coast. "These guys investigated the firehouse in 1993 while it was still empty, and yes, Volunteer Fireman Smith really did exist, but he never really claimed he was going to return and start putting out fires again." He grinned like a little kid over the top of his brother's laptop. "Guys, a lot of money goes into paranormal research every year. It's real. Just check out all these photos from all these other locations…" He showed their page of ghost photos.
"Car light, reflection, shadow, reflection, car light, leaf, water spot, dust, guy in a dress…" Nick shot down each of the alleged spirit photographs.
"Wow…" Joe popped on the link to a shapely female shadow from a haunted sanitarium on the West Coast. "Why couldn't she be haunting us?" He looked up to Kevin and Nick. "What?"