Captain Kull Smith of Quebec Castle, Oshawa, Ontario had been invited to the Royal Ontario Museum for a Halloween celebration among the province's most notable archeologists. Making a field trip out of it, he arrived in Toronto with all forty of his students, all five of their teachers, his fiancée Igraine Lombard, his nephew Alan Carter, his daughter Hippolyta, his gardener's daughter Gemma Cook to help keep an eye on the forty students and Hippolyta and four of his beasts: the wolf dog Cnut, the rough collie Emma, the Asiatic caracal Roxana and a Northern caracal named Alexander.

This was not the Toronto of the Victorian era, nor was it the Toronto of the Edwardian era. George V, a worthy king, ruled Canada and the rest of the British Dominions at a time when the nation was once more at war. The reign of Victoria had been plagued with wars and the sole war of Edward VII's reign had been one he had inherited from his mother, but this war was one the world had not seen the like of since the Seven Years' War. This was the Toronto of the time of the Great War.

Alexander was a year-old and like any caracal he was a medium-sized cat with a robust build, long legs, a short face, long, black tufted ears and long canine teeth. A caracal's coat was either uniformly reddish-tan or uniformly sandy, both with the ventral parts being lighter with small reddish markings. Alexander's fur was reddish-tan and as a male, he stood at twenty inches at the shoulder, had a head-and-body length of forty-three inches and a bushy tail of thirteen inches. Weeks had passed since his battle with Miltiades the Canada lynx and now that he was healed, he longed for a chance for a rematch to end Miltiades' reign and avenge his predecessor, the Southern caracal Darius.

As he walked with the group down a sidewalk to the Hotel Mossop, Alexander looked back and forth, never imagining that only twelve years prior a great fire had ravaged this portion of the province's capital. While he looked back and forth, he wondered about this strange thing that he'd heard spoken for many days.

A thing called "Halloween."

Alexander had first heard of the thing when sitting in his office with Alexander upon his desk, Hippolyta playing with some dolls on the floor, Alan reading a book and Ian, his other nephew who was one of his students, attempted to fix a compass, Captain Smith uttered: "Your grandmother loved Halloween." Immediately, Alexander looked to his master with ears fully erect. What was this Halloween that the late Nana Smith had loved so much? Why had he never heard her speak of it? Captain Smith then continued saying: "She called it the time of year when the stories such as 'Dracula', 'Frankenstein', 'The Invisible Man' and 'The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' were at their most powerful in their ability to take you to the places they tell off."

Those stories, Alexander had heard throughout the month. If it was not Alan and Gemma reading "Frankenstein" together then it was all forty of the students taking turns reading "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" or Captain Smith reading "Dracula" to his six-year-old daughter at her insistence.

Alexander did not know what Halloween was beyond what Captain Smith had said and a few other things that he had observed throughout the monumental country house that was Quebec Castle. He wished to know it better.