Halloween here had always been pretty typical before the Water House.

 

It’s been the Packer House before, up on top of our street. Out front, the Packers grew basil beside wild blueberries, kept hummingbird feeders full and dangling from their cedar-shingle porch, right above crayola-colored old buoys everyone flanked their exterior railings with. You could make out the Packers heading to the pool each morning by sound: their screen-door’s spring stretching, their flip-flops smacking downhill like clucking tongues, their long swim parkas swooshing. The Packers had a pool, covered in their backyard, wrapped in brick and boxwoods and dumped on by pine needles. They preferred swimming at the club pool, though.

 

Water here was always cold. People only swam in pools whose heat was paid for with membership dues, never personal pools or the ocean itself. Maybe in wetsuits. Or regret if naive, tourist, drunk, or all three.

 

Like birds, the Packers headed where it was warmer. Florida. Too many slipping hazards here, especially in snow, and Mrs. Packer’d already broken her hip. Twice.

 

So it ceased to be theirs and, frankly, neighborhood kids weren’t too bummed to see them go. The Packers, nice and all, gave out peppermint patties on Halloween, and didn’t have grandkids to offer for weekend and summer play.

 

Interestingly, the buyer hailed from somewhere warm himself. But no kids either. Just a man and moving truck filled with unlabeled boxes, furniture covered in grommeted sound blankets and clear tape. After unpacking—or whatever he did after that truck left and screen slammed—he hung some of those blankets over his front windows, obstructing light and sound and snooping efforts. Quieter, less normal than the Packers.

 

Well then.

 

“Big Hollywood guy,” Virginia whispered. “Mr. Waters.”

 

“Oh, you’ve actually met him?” neighbors responded, their dogs braking outside Virginia’s yard, where she’d leave a dry metal bowl they all treated as a mid-walk bullseye for their urine, pissed she never added water.

 

Everyone had seen Mr. Water’s silhouetted, shadowy form. A large man with dark facial hair and tinted glasses, ordered Chinese delivery a few times a week. A real recluse, only answering his door to sign for DHL packages or pick up his knotted bag of food, white-and-red cartons with disposable chopsticks left on his inherited doormat. The homemade cobblers and sourdoughs welcoming neighbors offered him went unclaimed on his porch, save for hummingbirds who jabbed into the baked berries.

 

“Well, I tried, of course,” Virginia explained. “But Phyllis told me everything from the sale.” Virginia paused, always trying to edge her neighbors with busybody bullshit nobody asked for.

 

“Phyllis said Mr. Waters worked in big blockbuster films, even won an Oscar, and she said—get this—was being consulted to turn one into a roller coaster or something in Dubai!”

 

Virginia volunteered at the bookstore, but wasn’t allowed to give customers recommendations, on account of her political and erotic leanings. Still, those books weren’t going to alphabetize themselves. In her plentiful spare time, Virginia mayored her neighbors, like when it came to beautifying the traffic circle down at street’s end—after the city felled a maple and replaced it with round curbs, fresh concrete, and a gaping grey hole—it calmed traffic but angered idle minds. Virginia cc’ed all, “What should we do about this?!” Many responded, actually, volunteering their ideas, time, supplies.

 

“Another tree?”

 

“How about a community, or kid’s, garden?”

 

“Yes! Or a pet cemetery, could add a plaque/dog stick library?!”

 

The pool of collaboration flowed from many households, trickling in ideas.

 

Virginia went and planted geraniums in the circle, then replied all: they could chip in to pay her back. Like a wave always beckoning then washing away sandcastles, she was.

 

Lowering her voice into a sharp little riptide, she added, “Phyllis told me he’d been fired. Studio shut him out. Never married, nothing. He told Phyllis our town reminded him of a movie!”

 

Could’ve made less sense, a man moving here. A seaside slice of family-friendly suburbia, by boat or puddle jumper. The louder city over is where most new beginners migrated, stacking their lives’ rocks like totems—engineers turned farm-to-table chefs, spies turned B&B proprietors, prostitutes turned lobstermen. Here lived, well, mostly leftover seniors and content families, offspring watered down from humble boating industries; the sorts to watch the water ebb and flow, freeze and thaw, and ultimately make the most of, and live off, its idyllic majesty.

 

Artists came from miles to paint this rocky coastline, to capture the lighthouse at sunrise or sunset.

 

High tide, low tide.

 

The lighthouse drew everyone in, and out, I suppose.

 

And so, people stopped wondering about him. The first few retrieved their pecked-at pie dishes. The short-lived excitement of Mr. Water’s newness washing up into their lives eroded, everyone resumed their focus inward. Summer days lingered, back-to-school hustles returned, temperatures dipped, and the leaves themselves started to forget green, shifting ruby and citrine. That basil shriveled from dehydrated neglect, shifting dead.

 

High tide, low tide.

 

In rolled another October off the coast, dreamy and dewy and watercolored, as far as New England scenery goes.

 

Pumpkins, some carved too soon, plopped outside vestibules. Cinnamon and squash scents, heated over cast-irons, warmed the breeze still blowing through screens on their last stretch of buffering the salty elements this year. Most families put up store-bought decorations, inflatable witches or spiders assembled with Allen wrenches. Virginia dragged out her old black cat flag, fussing over nobody mounting it for her, despite her snootily declining several dad’s, and one mom’s, offers to assist.

 

Still waters run deep, they say. And Mr. Water had been so still up there, someone should have known.

 

One morning mid-October, neighbors woke to see he’d also decorated. Wrapped his property in shiny caution tape. This titillated the older kids especially.

 

“I knew it! It’s gonna be sick, a real haunted house!” Delilah Green, who fantasized about smashing pumpkins and sucking face, said.

 

Everyone started buzzing even more than their October baseline, speculating Mr. Water would create the most spectacular haunted house. Professional props, special effects that would blow all their cheap lawn ornaments out of the water? Who knew! They hadn’t understood how Hollywood worked, and this, at least, made sense now.

 

October had that kind of escalating, intoxicating effect on people. Candy-apple thick with anticipation.

 

October 31 arrived, and the excitement for dusk was palpable. Crunchy.

 

In recent years, the Arts Committee asked the lighthouse keepers to play along, putting colored film over its bulb, like pink in February, green in December. Orange today.

 

Even before the film went up and the sun went down, everything was cast in an orange haze.

 

The schools held parades, staggered across the morning, pageant-walking costumes and facepaint at their peak pristineness to be awwed and photographed. And unlike out in California, if a costume ripped and stained or a wig tangled before trick-or-treating, who cared. Nothing was ruined here.

 

At linnertime, parents fed their children apples and pizza and carrots and more apples at designated pre-party homes, everyone readying themselves to flood their streets. First, Mr. Green put orange cones out, sedating—not just calming—traffic that evening.

 

At long last. Trick-or-treat time.

 

In a cacophony of screeching kids and screen-doors and “Thriller” through some boombox poured out the costumed masses, filling the dam-stopped road.

 

Trick-or-treat!

 

Fat baby pumpkins.

 

Trick-or-treat!

 

Scarved and scarred wizards.

 

Trick-or-treat!

 

Toddling, chromatized princesses in flammable gowns and plastic crowns that would snap in half mid-tantrum.

 

Trick-or-treat!

 

Boys with pillowy muscles padding their sleeves and tummies.

 

The one little kid, dressed as Diane Keaton, all blacks and whites and chunky frames, won the hearts of all the New England moms and gays that night.

 

The Reeds made fog from dry ice.

 

That one over-zealous family was mud-runners this year, inflatable “start/finish” arch and obstacles on their lawn, their kids spit-yelling into a bullhorn, cheering their costumed, belly-laughing peers to complete their bear-crawls to “earn” their treats.

 

It was magical. Nothing scary or spooky, but bought-in jubilee. An orange candy-coated Americana dream.

 

Ding-dong! Trick-or-treat!

 

But. Kids eventually ran out of houses.

 

So the first brave kid, a ninja, Colby Jenkins, finally ninja-walked up to Mr. Water’s door.

 

A huddle of tiny cartoons stood behind him, clutching their plastic pumpkins.

 

Waiting.

 

Colby broke character, announced “Trick-or-treat!” before pushing the doorbell.

 

Everyone heard it.

 

If you want to scare someone, you can’t rely on just one surprise.

 

Colby’s ring set off a blast, a jolt that boomed so strong the Water House windows shattered and ground shook.

 

A car alarm went off.

 

People screamed.

 

Luckily, Colby’s ninja reflexes spared him injury from any ninja star-like shooting glass.

 

“Holy hell! Colby, Mr. Waters, are you okay?!” Two nearby dads, tonight a footballer and a drag queen, ran upstream through the children to the house, whose bones were creaking. Colby and his cartoon pack ran, their dropped candy buckets rolling.

 

Everyone thought they heard something else in there. Like rumbling.

 

“Or, more of a hissing, or gushing sound?”

 

“Was that really an explosion or some fucked-up special effect?”

 

The footballer banged on the door, then slammed the screen shut, standing back. Listening. The drag queen hollered through a busted window, tugging at the blanket, cracking glass with his heels.

 

“Mr. Waters!”

 

But then, like a flag in a storm, the screen’s frame began flapping, pushed by water forcing itself out. The men started backing away, one teetering uneasy in heels.

 

The water released itself. First through the door, then out windows, seeping through blankets, down the hill, along the sidewalks. That empty metal bowl scraped the pavement as it was finally wetted and carried away. The orange cones toppled and disappeared too.

 

Parents yelled for their children. Past the glass shards riding the wave, the drag queen threw off his heels and picked up an Elsa, frozen in fear.

 

You need at least two extraordinary surprises for a scare. Only one explosion, people doubt what they experienced.

 

There must be two.

 

The second Water House explosion broke the dam of uncertainty. Its loud blast reverberated in everyone’s veins. So strong, it quaked beyond the block, beneath the street, shaking the pines and maples and oaks and floorboards several houses away. Trees dropped cones, clinging colored leaves lost their grip, cascading down before being violently washed away. Parts of the Water House came undone.

 

A deluge.

 

Different neighbors would describe it differently, but all sopping wet. Pop-starred mothers used panic, onesied dads used expletives.

 

Perhaps it came best from the hand-painted tin of anchovies, Jamie Murphy.

 

“It was exactly like the flood at Universal Studios,” Jamie said. “We’re all doing our normal trick-or-treating thing, but then we heard the first loud ‘BOOOOM!!’ and stopped and turned around and saw up at Waters House Colby was crouching, his mom really screaming, super loud, ‘COOLBYYYYY!!’ and then it was freaky—like, were we all going to die? But some of us noticed water glugging out from inside the house, it was flooding? We were like, ‘What the heck is happening!’ and it was thrilling and terrifying, and you could kinda hear pipes or, I don’t know what, something bursting, and it literally reminded me of Universal Studios, that flood, right? And then the second bomb happened, and it was even bigger and louder and more parents started screaming, trying to get their kids, dropping their phones and ripping through the water, and it was really happening, this humongous flood, right? Just a huge bursting torrential wave from that house, and no idea how or why, but suddenly it was everywhere and nonstop and our whole block started flooding up FAST, higher and higher, and a lot of us were panicking, like oh shit—sorry—about all of our stuff, this is going to totally wreck our houses, right? But also, this is really dangerous for the littlest kids; we gotta try to make sure everybody, the people, are gonna be okay, right? The flood went everywhere, man, we couldn’t even think it was so fast and supercharged like on a ride allofasudden, except it was real, and our street was fucking drowning.”

 

Right. A deluge.

 

High tide, higher tide.

 

An unnatural disaster, caused by a rerigging of pipes and pumps and dark magic beneath the Water House, masterminded by a man who’d been paid and awarded for blowing things up, then thrown out to sea and told that would be all. The man had a black belt in building catastrophe, and a whole ocean to pull water in from for his final, redemptive board-breaking blockbuster.

 

It couldn’t be stopped for hours. Not by dads or firefighters or plumbers or anyone.

 

And I saw it all.

 

First, the ground covered in a gushing.

 

Then, the children starting to lose their footing, crying.

 

The lightest items, synthetic crap, was flushed away first. Schools of plastic pumpkins, fairy wands, caldrons, light sabers, footballs.

 

Candy buckets bobbed in the flood, drenched fake spiderwebbing became white kelp, like hair pulled from a drain.

 

Old lobster buoys, hummingbird feeders… gone.

 

The current swept the children away next. It was the ones in the inflatable costumes everyone most worried about. Too fast, too hard to grab.

 

Down at block’s end in the traffic circle, the water first followed the road’s curve, bending along the curb. Then flooded up, well over it. Those geraniums were decimated.

 

All the Reeds’ dry ice turned to mystical white gas, carbon dioxide fogging the treeline. Nothing calm about that.

 

Orange and purple lights were the first to flicker and fade, and then everyone’s power went out, like the third black boom. Music and inflatables’ fans stopped abruptly.

 

In all that sudden quieter darkness, the cold water was louder somehow than everyone shouting, crying, splashing.

 

The orange beams of the lighthouse cast recurring shadows through the trees and rooflines, but were too far apart in the rush of the flood for anyone to rely on, to find something lost in or pulled away by the current. All they could see was their wet breath in front of them.

 

It was terrifying and beautiful; chillingly haunting, all that I saw.

 

I saw it from my roof, across from the Water House. The flood didn’t get that high, but it wouldn’t have made a difference if it had.

 

It got pretty high, though, for a man-made flood and all.

 

I saw the news vehicles coming, first in a helicopter overhead, then later in vans parked a couple blocks over as the water drained, slowly making its way back home. The cameramen flashed bright lights on everything, and before going live the newswoman removed her cat-ears but still had faint whisker marks on her cheeks people with HD could make out if they tried.

 

In the moonlight, I saw neighbors’ possessions float out of their homes and into the street canal. Mostly sad stuff like pizza boxes, sippy cups, clothes, shampoo bottles, books, magazines, dolls and all those apples. I saw, next door, a couple thick dildos flopped up to the surface and bobbed along out from Virginia’s bedroom. If I’d been any more high, that image might’ve really made me trip balls; you never consider their buoyancy when freed from a nightstand drawer.

 

I’d often go up on my roof to get a little high now and then, trying to quiet the noise of my life down inside, get the volume just right in my mind. I could see past our block, across the promenade towards the coastline, some parts into town, like the theater’s steeple, all blinking and neon pink and yellow, and even out further, where wave caps glowed white under the stars. I’d hypnotize myself, mesmerized by the lighthouse, but when that wasn’t enough, I’d turn my gaze downward, across the street, and watch the strange man who was doing something secretive in his new basement, making sparks in a welding mask with whatever came in all those boxes he kept signing for.

 

Halloween night, I saw him again. On his roof too, pulling at a lever he’d made down to the pool in his backyard.

 

I saw him, his glasses tucked into his collar, the whites of his eyes looking up towards the moon, just before the second explosion.

 

I saw him wait for the water levels to drop in his backyard before he escaped through a secret door he’d carved in those boxwood hedges.

 

I saw him up there on the roof, this transplant from Hollywood who’d once upon a time been the SFX Master of the world, watch his masterpiece below tear apart our little block with his naked eyes alone. He didn’t film or photograph any of it. I don’t think he considered himself a terrorist. Maybe he was no different than the visiting painters. Maybe he was offering up real action for those seeking the fantastic on Halloween, otherwise let down by bales of hay and tarped scenery. I think this, you see, because I saw him wearing a red clown nose that night.

 

Or I don’t know. I was pretty high.

 

I know what you’re wondering. Besides where all the water came from (like I said, the sea, and we still don’t fully know; the investigators aren’t sharing their findings “in the interest of public safety”), and how bad the damage was? Pretty bad, but folks around here had insurance for this, living near the coast and all. Well, everyone did except for a few who got fucked and had to move down to Florida, too.

 

The city put a tree in the traffic circle though. Out of pity, seems. Nobody died or anything, they just hospitalized some littler kids to ensure no secondary drownings in the earliest hours of November, so they didn’t have to put up any real plaques or cemeteries.

 

Also. Virginia was wrong. His name was Water.

 

Oh, the other thing you’re wondering?

 

No.

 

He didn’t see me when I was watching him up there. Nobody saw me. I was a ghost.