When we finished, it was six forty-eight, according to Frankie’s watch. Boy, when you’re inspired, you work fast. It’s like your hands and feet are attached to a million bodies all working together.

We were so focused on putting the haunted house together that we didn’t even see Emily and Robert leave. They just shouted goodbye, and not one of us even popped our heads through the sheets to see them in their costumes or to find out which ones they were wearing. The best news was that I thought I heard my dad shout goodbye along with them. That meant that either I wasn’t going to get grounded at all, or at least not until he came back. I had a feeling that Emily had talked him into letting us make the haunted house. She becomes a great sister sometimes when I least expect it. I can’t figure girls out.

When we looked at what we had made, we felt really proud. The haunted house took up almost half of our living room. True, it didn’t look like much from the outside, just a bunch of sheets and bedspreads tied together. The inside, though, was full of scary, fun things. Ashley made a sign that said: ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK. We hung it up over the door flap. Then we turned on the black light inside the skeleton dude. It made the sheets glow like those iridescent fish that live at the bottom of the ocean. When we dimmed the living-room lights, our little haunted house looked like it was a floating alien spaceship. Or at least, that’s what it looked like to us.

“McKelty is going to be scared out of his mind,” I said.

“That’s if everything works OK,” Frankie said. “Don’t forget, Zip, it’s never been tested.”

“We should get some kids to test it out before McKelty gets here,” Ashley said.

“There’s not much time for that now,” I said. “Who lives near by?”

“Heather Payne lives on 78th Street and West End Avenue,” Frankie said.

Ashley and I both shot him a look that said “Since When Are You Hanging Out with Heather Payne, the Girl Who Cries if She Doesn’t Get an A-Plus on Every Extra-Credit Project She Does?” (Which, by the way, is all of them.)

Frankie could read our minds, because he added quickly, “Hey, don’t even go there, guys. We did a science project together. That’s all. Remember, we created an earthworm farm?”

“Right. I remember now.” I snickered. “The Biggle Wiggle Worm Wigwam.”

Ashley and I both cracked up. Frankie wasn’t so amused.

“Listen, man, the name was her idea,” he said. “I wanted to call it something cool like the Worm Crib. But she flat out refused.”

“Well, since you and Heather are such close personal Biggle Wiggle Worm Wigwam buddies, why don’t you call her and tell her to come here as soon as possible?” I suggested.

“Don’t say I never do anything for you, Zip,” Frankie said, getting up and heading towards the kitchen.

“And Luke Whitman lives around the corner on Amsterdam Avenue!” I shouted out. “While you’re at it, call him too.”

“Eeww, he’s so gross,” Ashley moaned. “The other day, I saw him take a used piece of cheese out of the rubbish bin, smell it and then eat it.”

Frankie disappeared into the kitchen to use the phone.

“Do you think two kids are enough to test everything out?” I asked Ashley.

“It’d better be,” she said. “It’s what we have.”

At exactly six fifty-three, the front door flew open. I was hoping it was Heather or Luke, but no, it was just my mum.

“I haven’t missed any of the trick-or-treaters yet, have I?” she said, flinging off her coat with the big, green pickle embroidered on the back. She had those coats made last year as a Christmas present for all the people who work at The Crunchy Pickle. “I’ve made a special batch of prune taffy to give out tonight.”

“Wow, Mrs Z.,” Frankie said. “Don’t let that out or every kid on the Upper West Side will be queuing up round the block.”

“Do you really think so?” my mum asked.

“Prune taffy. The name alone has my mouth watering,” Ashley said.

“I knew it’d be a crowd-pleaser,” my mum said. She just doesn’t get it that not everyone is as thrilled with prunes as she is. “And I wrapped each one individually in clingfilm with a little orange-and-black ribbon. Don’t they look sweet?”

I was waiting for her to notice the living room. It took her a minute, I guess because her head was still in her prune-taffy ribbons, but when she finally looked around, her eyes almost fell out of her head.

“Hank, where did you put our living room?”

“It doesn’t exist any more, Mum. You have entered the chamber of horrors.”

“That’s my bedspread,” she said, pointing at the wall we had made for the haunted house.

“Your bedspread had the honour of being selected from all the bedspreads in the house to form the front wall of the scariest place on the planet,” I told her.

“Hank, honey,” she said, “this is so creative.”

You have to meet my mum someday. She really is a lot of fun. She almost never gets mad when I make a mess, because she says creativity and neatness don’t go together. It’s like she can see deep inside me.

“Vlady,” she called out, running into the hall. “Bring the plates of prune taffy and come and see what Hank and his friends have made!”

Vladimir Olefski has worked for my mum at The Crunchy Pickle ever since he came to New York from his home in Russia. He is known for making the best sandwiches on all of the West Side because he stacks them up really high with meat and then adds a special zingy red sauce that the customers love so much that they write my mum letters about it.

Vlady came into the living room. He was carrying two big trays of the prune taffy. It looked like chunks of dark brown shoe leather topped with little pieces of yellow fuzz. You don’t even want to know what the yellow fuzz was, because it was probably something weird like dandelion pollen. From looking at that tray, I had a pretty strong feeling that we were going to have plenty of prune taffy left over.

“Hello, little ones,” Vlady said in his thick Russian accent.

You have to understand that everyone is a “little one” compared to Vlady. He’s so big, I didn’t think he was going to fit through the haunted house flap door. But he didn’t have to, because he looked right over the top of the sheets and stared down at what we had created.

“This look like Babushka’s place back home in Poltava,” he said.

“What’s a babushka?” Ashley asked him.

“Not what. Who. Babushka is Russian word for ‘grandmother’.”

“Your grandma lives in a haunted house?” Frankie said. “Wow. She must be cool.”

“That stuff,” Vlady said, pointing to the mushy brains in the baseball cap. “That look like Babushka’s breakfast porridge.”

I could see Ashley trying not to laugh.

“And that guy,” he said, pointing to the skeleton, “remind me of Olga, our cow back in Poltava. There was no grass in our meadow so she was … how you say … skinny like a toothpick. Maybe two toothpicks.”

That did it. We cracked up. Vlady didn’t laugh, though. I guess he was still thinking about Olga the Cow.

“What you need is vampire,” Vlady said. “There are many vampires in my country. My grandfather Boris, for example.”

“You’re kidding! Your grandfather was a real vampire?” I asked him.

“We didn’t know for sure,” Vlady said. “But we never let him kiss us on neck, just in case.”

Vlady’s bright blue eyes were twinkling. I wasn’t sure if he was kidding us or if he was just misty-eyed thinking of his grandpa.

“Well, much as we’d love to have a vampire, there’s no time for that now,” Ashley said. “We’re expecting the first visitors to the haunted house to arrive any second.”

Vlady dropped off the tray of prune taffy in the kitchen and said goodbye.

Ashley, Frankie and I waited by the door. Where was that Heather Payne? It was only half an hour until McKelty was supposed to arrive. And we still had to check that the haunted house was ready for that one incredible moment when Nick the Tick would wet his pants and never show his face in public again.

The doorbell rang.

“It’s showtime,” I said. “Ditch the lights.”

Ashley and Frankie took their places inside the haunted house. As I crept to the door, I could hear my own heart pounding.

I opened the door, and it was…