And times after, when smuggling was no more and the smugglers had become all but legends, and when the tide was just right, the village children would gather by the mouth of the cave at Halloween and make a candlelit pilgrimage through the tunnels and up into the cellars at the Nook. It was still going on when I came to live here with my aunt. We would bang on the door to the cellar, half wild with fear and excitement, and she would open it up and feign surprise to find us all standing there, cold and wet and smelling of the sea.
“Well!” she would say. “You’d better come up since you’re already here!” And up the stone cellar steps we tramped and into the tearoom, where she would have made toffee apples and ginger parkin enough to feed five thousand! We’d play bob-the-apple and snap-dragon and one of the fishermen would tell the tale of how Willow Bay got its name, making sure to add in plenty of lost souls and shrieking selkies.
Over time, the tunnel processions had to be abandoned; there were incidents, I’ll say no more about that. And what with the rock falls, soon nobody went into the tunnels even for dares. Halloween became altogether tamer and eventually it was decided that even snap-dragon was not really in keeping with health and safety—children poking their fingers into bowls of brandy-flaming raisins probably wasn’t ideal on many levels. But my goodness we had fun!
These days the costumes are a little fancier and the ghost stories a mite gentler, but the Willow Bay folk still do a braw Halloween. I don’t want you to feel pressure to keep the old ways going. Time must move on. And you, whoever you are, will have your own ideas about things.
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.
* * *
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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.
The first box contained Halloween fairy lights: strings of orange plastic jack-o’-lanterns, white grinning skeletons, bats, and baubles with black cats silhouetted inside them. Some were indoor and some outdoor, but there was enough for an impressive display. Annie carefully replaced the flaps and pushed the box toward the hatch before going back to open the next one. She was just detangling two flying witches’ heads when she heard a knock at the door to the flat. She froze. The main front door to the building was locked, as was the door to the tearoom; it must be someone with a key—John Granger! Annie’s initial fear morphed into anger. The bloody cheek of it! She was sure there must be a law against this sort of thing. The knocking came again.