Hurricane Sandy is coming. How feisty she’ll be when she arrives remains to be seen.

Weather officials said Monday night and Tuesday morning will be wet in Maine, one way or another. A rainstorm already is moving in from the West. With Sandy barreling up from the South, the days before Halloween could be lively, indeed.

“There’s the potential for those storms to merge,” said meteorologist Margaret Curtis of the National Weather Service in Gray.

By late afternoon Wednesday, Sandy was rampaging through the Caribbean, having been upgraded from tropical storm to bona fide hurricane. Forecasters say by the time it reaches New England, Sandy may have morphed into a monster nor’easter that will slam into our area at the start of next week.

Or not.

“Right now, there are a lot of variables,” Curtis said. “We’re definitely expecting a wet day, at the least. A lot of rain and a lot of wind is a possibility.”

Coastal regions will likely get the full impact of Sandy’s wrath, Curtis said, but if the hurricane hits us directly, it will be no easy ride inland, either.

Locally, emergency management agencies were monitoring the storm and preparing to take action in advance of Sandy’s arrival. Others were keeping track of the storm’s progress through various websites, including Hurricane Sandy’s personal Facebook page: facebook.com/HurricaneSandy.

Across the World Wide Web this week, there were numerous references to the “perfect storm” of 1991, another October hurricane that hammered the Northeast on Halloween. Some weather forecasters have said Sandy could prove even more powerful than the earlier storm, which inspired the movie, “The Perfect Storm” with George Clooney.

On Wednesday, as Sandy plowed into Jamaica, at least one death was attributed to the hurricane after a woman was swept away by a raging river in Haiti.

In the U.S., the storm has the potential to blow Halloween plans apart and otherwise make life miserable. But Curtis pointed out that it could always be worse.

“This storm won’t be bringing snow,” she said. “That’s good news, anyway.”