Once Upon A Midnight

The moon hung like a silver lantern in the midnight sky and white sand below his feet made a soft shushing sound as he moved.  His sneakers sank with every step, and he pulled his T-shirt closer around him as the sea mist fell like a cold, cold rain.  The sea looked like black glass, except where the tide broke on the shore in glowing foam and hissed into silence.
 The castle stood before him on broken stone, as though the sea had pulled most of the shore from under it, wearing the land away.  It looked more like a ruin than a castle, dark jagged tears into the walls and towers, shadowy breaches of despair.  Jason stood for a moment, staring at it.  A cold wind pressed round him.  He’d gotten this far before….
 He walked around the castle, widdershins, three times, a long walk for his eleven-year-old stride although he stretched his legs as far as he could.  Then, and only then, he approached it.  He could feel the stone sense him, awakening.
 Putting his hand out to the great gate surrounding the castle, unlike a moat or drawbridge, he passed his palm over the immense brass door knocker and the lock sculpted as a dragon’s head and tail.  He snatched his hand back, knowing what would happen, and even then almost not in time!  Flames sprouted from the opening jaws and flared nostrils.  The air smelled hot and brassy.
 “Sssssssson of wizardssssss passsssss…” the door knocker hissed.
 The gate creaked open with a howling screech.
 Jason dashed through the opening gate before the knocker could do anything else.  He tripped on rubble immediately and went to his knees with a cry, his yelp echoing harshly back at him.  He stood, dusting himself off and cast a look around.  A broken roof overhead still blocked out most of the sky, and moonlight came through in razor rays, looking sharp enough to cut.   As it illuminated the area, he saw that he stood where he stood.  A fallen tombstone lay in front of him.  Half in moonlight, half in shadow, another one tilted not too far ahead of him.  Jason whirled around.
Out of the shadow, something grabbed at him.  He spun to face it…cold marble angel with her hand outstretched, a pleading look on her face, her wings folded at her back.  He took a deep breath and stepped away.   This was no castle…it was an immense tomb.   Stone walls built around a decaying burial ground.   He took a deep breath to steady himself.  Although he knew what he sought, he’d never been this far before.
“Don’t stop me now,” he said quietly.  His voice echoed back in a mutter he could not understand.  Jason went around a chunk of granite.  The moonlight struck on gothic engraved letters  R I P as he passed by.
 The gate clattered and shuddered behind him as the wind shivered through harder and faster.  He could feel it cut through his clothes as though it came out of the dead of winter.  Moonlight skipped across row after row of headstones and beyond them, a shadow dark doorway into the castle wall…if indeed it was a castle at all.  Perhaps a crypt!  At the far side of the graveyard, a blackened stick of a tree twisted out of the ground, its gnarled branches and twigs like grasping arms with contorted hands reaching out.
 He had to get to that doorway–had to.  What he needed to know, what he had to find must lie beyond there.  Jason steadied himself as he walked between the rows of headstones, many blank, some with their carvings worn away except for a letter here and there, others fallen to unreadable rubble.  The wind tugged at the dead tree’s branches and its stiff twigs pounded at a tombstone like skeletal fingers.  Tap…tap…tap.
 A yellow-eyed crow sat on the top branches, watching him.  An immense bird, it seemed to soak up all the shadows of the graveyard and grow larger with every movement it made.  It ruffled its wings.
 Jason hurried past, his sneakers sending up puffs of ashy dust.  He pinched his nose to stifle a sneeze, not wanting to wake whatever might sleep here…if anything did.  The shuffle of his steps and the tap - tap of the tree branch was more than enough noise for him!  Not everything here was dead, he thought…he  hoped!  And he had to hurry to find out if he was right.
 A single splinter of moonlight pointed a way through the door.  He stepped through it.
 Inside, moonlight danced almost as if it were sunlight coming through a window.  He stood in…a room.  Not quite a room, it was nearly bare, but a room with a rocking chair and a window and a small writing desk up against the wall, and Jason thought his heart would stop because he knew this room!  Oh, it wasn’t the same, but he knew it and he hurried farther inside, because someone sat in the rocking chair.  Could it be the person he’d hoped to find?  The someone he could barely remember no matter how hard he tried?
 “Mom?” said Jason softly as he drew near.  Warped wooden floorboards creaked ominously under his weight.  His heart thudded in his chest like a great drum beating.  His hand went out to the shadowy woman’s shoulder.  He could just see the back of her head, her body as she sat resting in the chair.  Only in a dream could he get this close—
 Ker-ACK!  He plunged downward as the floor gave way, tumbling him into total darkness, and when he hit, it was on cold stone and he lay for a moment, breathing hard, his pulse skipping now.  The moonlight had followed him down, pooling around him like a puddle of spilled milk, sour spilled milk, and he stood slowly.
 Cold, icy stone all about him, pressing close, and at the other end of the narrow passageway, a solid, long, yet tablelike object.  He rubbed his eyes and took a cautious step forward, no longer sure what was solid and what was not.  As he moved toward it, he could see what it was.  A stone sarcophagus, a coffin, like the ancient Egytians had used.  He turned around to go back, but the passage had narrowed to a mere slit, closing, and he had nowhere to go!
 “I’m all right,” he said to himself.  “I’m fine.” Like a chant, he repeated it over and over, as he was forced toward the coffin step by step.  He’d gone as far as he wanted to, enough was enough, memory or dream, he didn’t care, he did not want to go any closer.
 But he had no choice as the passage narrowed behind him, nudging him forward.  The stone coffin became clearer, a man lying on its top, arms crossed over his chest, himself granite or as still as stone.   Etched into the side were two words:  Jarred Adrian.
His father’s name.
Jason could feel every inch of him raise in goose bumps.   No!  This wasn’t what he wanted.  He wanted to see them both alive!  Alive and warm, and his…. He stopped in his tracks.  He wanted out!  Out or…he put his head back, looking where moonlight rayed through from above…out or up!  He could hear the tap– tap of the dead tree in the cemetery overhead.  Looking into the shadows, he could see black roots, twisting down, splitting the stone.  There had to be a way out.  Up!  Yes…up!   He jumped and grabbed the roots and began to pull himself up and out.  The tree felt slimy and slippery, bark and stubs catching at him, snagging, but he shinnied up stubbornly as the tree tried to wrap itself about him.   The roots surged around him like giant wings, trying to hug him and hold him.  He swore he could see yellow crow’s eyes in the winged darkness pecking and grasping at him. He fought back.  Up!  Up!
       Li #
 “Wake up!”
 Jason bolted upright in his bed, blankets twisted around him, gasping.  “Wake…up.”
 He took a deep breath.  Sharp moonlight sprayed across his bed, as white as the bright sun, striking his face.  He shook.  He drew in another deep breath.
 He rarely slept through an entire night.  Jason sat there for a moment.  He turned his head, trying to read his clock despite the dark, shifting shadows that filtered through his room in the still of the night.  Rays of light like silvery swords guided his glance.  There in the corner, was a wooden rocking chair, the only thing he had left of his mother.  His soccer gear sat neatly folded on the seat, his backpack hanging from its arm.  Bookshelves stretched across one entire wall.  He could read some of the titles:  Sword in the Stone, The Dragonriders of Pern, The Last Unicorn, The Dragonbone Chair, and others.  Too many to actually see but he knew them all well.
They were braced in their places on the shelf by stuffed animals here and there.  Three teddy bears, a fat stuffed cat, and two bunnies.  In the sunlight, all would look rather well loved and with a bare spot here and there.  On the top shelf lay a squadron of toys from X-men and Star Wars, squared off to contest one another.  There was a small CD player on the nightstand next to him with a collection…well, a stack, of CDs, two of which needed to be returned to Alicia.  A book lay folded back on the nightstand, too, its chapter heading reading:  DRAGONS BARRED THE WAY to the kingdom of the dead.
So that’s where he got that nightmare from this time.  He should know better.
Everything was familiar.  Jason felt a little better and prepared to scrunch back down in bed.
 Then …
 Tap.  Tap.  Tap.
 He froze in place.  From the north end of the house came the light, fluttering snore of his stepmother.  Punctuating it like a big kettledrum came the booming snore of his stepfather.  The McIntires slept in what Jason referred to as the Heavy Metal part of the house.  Of different blood, he apparently didn’t have the snore gene.  Or, at least, if he did...he slept through it.
 Ker -rack!  At the window again.  Jason peered down the length of his attic bedroom, gloomy in the deep night.  No trees reached this high.  Something was at the porthole window, the only one in the odd-shaped attic that had no screen.  It wasn’t really meant to be opened and shut, although he could…and did.
 He slept in the attic, undeniably the best room in the house, with its porthole window that faced the dimly seen ocean, and its second bay window facing the foothills.  The door to his room was in the floor, not the wall.  Jason rather like the idea that he could pull up his ladder and lock himself away from the world.  He didn’t really belong here, not really.  He was here by default.
 Not that he could get away with hiding for long.  William “Dozer” McIntire would stand in the hallway and bellow until the ladder was lowered.  “Boy,” he’d roar.  “Come down here and join your family!”  Then Jason would risk having his teeth shaken out of his jaws by one of his stepfather’s enormous bear hugs.
William “Bulldozer” McIntire stood tall enough that his thinning brown hair threatened to scrap the ceiling that led to the attic.  His great tough hands felt like catchers’ mitts on Jason’s shoulders and he looked like he could carry a building on his back.  Jason’s stepfather was in construction.  He tore things down so he could rebuild them twice as big and four times as expensive.
 Then there was Jason’s stepmother Joanna.  Dainty, petite, with wide blue eyes and a seemingly innocent stare.  She could wrap the Dozer around any of her slender fingers.  Daughter Alicia took after her mother, with quick, small hands and eyes that looked at you while she made secret plans.
Yet, once he’d had two parents like everyone else.  It was so long ago, he didn’t remember his mother dying.  He remembered being along with his dad, the two of them together.  After a while, his father had married Joanna, giving him a stepmother and stepsister.  Then his father had died, and Joanna had married William McIntire.  She liked to look fondly at her third husband and declare, “Third time’s the charm!”  Which, although it seemed okay to say, always made Jason feel funny deep down.  It wasn’t his father’s fault that the second husband hadn’t lasted.  Jarred Adrian would have lived if he could have!
 McIntire had thrown open his home, his heart, and swept all of them inside without even asking if it was what they wanted.  But how could they not want it?  McIntire enjoyed life.  Hale and hearty, loud and laughing.  Even Alicia seemed happy.  At any rate, she was the darling of both now and he was…what was he? A leftover?  If he was loved, it was rather like a stray cat, he thought.  And if he sometimes thought that Joanna had married awfully quickly after losing his father, he never said anything.  It would not, he knew, have made a difference.  Everyone else was happy.  What did it matter if there were great, yawning gaps in his own feelings?  What did it matter if he remembered, although dimly, far happier times?
 Ker-ack!
 It sounded as though the window itself had split!  Jason rolled out of bed,
his sandy blond hair sticking out all over.  His pajamas were rumpled from the restless night.  His feet stuck out like great clumsy things and he stared at them and his bony ankles in dismay.   He’d grown again?
 A weed, Jason Adrian, he told himself.  That’s what you are.  A stray weed that wandered into the McIntire garden….
 Jason dragged his desk chair over and kneeled on it, pulling aside the shutters.  Silver light shot through, practically stunning him with brightness.  It flared up from the brilliant moon outside and…he leaned on his knees.  Someone down below.  Someone with a mirrorlike flash in her hands, gazing back up at him.
 He rubbed his eyes to clear them.  It looked like…Mrs. Cowling…his English teacher.  Jason squinted down at the neighborhood street and the woman, whoever it was, disappeared, briskly walking down the sidewalk, behind trees and out of his view.  One last bright flash illuminated his window.  What the heck?   Jason leaned his chin on the brass sill, nose almost to the glass.
 Ker-ACK!  Yellow-eyed blackness swooped at him!  Crow!  His heart jumped in his chest.  Was it?  How could it be?
    Black wings fluttered, shadow filled the window then disappeared.   He pushed his face back to window again.
 Silently, it came at the glass and swerved away at the last moment before smashing into it.  Frowning, Jason unscrewed the great brass clips that held the window firmly in place, and swung the glass out.  He leaned out, looking. Warm spring air washed across his face as though the yellow moon hanging low in the sky exhaled at him.   He wasn’t still dreaming…was he?
 Pain slashed through his scalp.  “Ker-aw!”
 “Yeow!”  Jason swatted wildly.  His hand jabbed at air, then connected heavily.   Feathers flew, followed by a dull thump on the roof.
 Now what had he done?  Killed it?  If it wasn’t dead, just hurt…well, he couldn’t just leave it there.  With a grunt, Jason levered himself out the porthole and onto the rooftop.   Crouched barefooted on the shingles, he swept his gaze about and saw nothing.
 Nevertheless, streetlights glowed a soft yellow, muting the nearly colorless colors into drab beige.  Nighttime cloaked the entire neighborhood.  The walking woman could not be seen anywhere.  His head stung.  He was almost a hundred percent positive he was awake, and…
He leaned away from the porthole window a bit more.  His pajama sleeve caught on the framing and as he yanked his arm to free it, the window swung shut.  With a hollow sound, it fell into place.
 Jason groaned.  Locked out, and on the roof!  What mischief he’d get blamed for, he wasn’t quiet sure, but he was in trouble.
 The brass frame to the porthole window rattled coldly under his hand, refusing to budge.  Jason stifled a groan.  He’d have to get in through the front door, somehow.  He’d done this in reverse once before, up the back of the house, inching up on a rain gutter which was scarcely used in Southern California, and swinging across the roof gable.  And where was the bird anyway?   Nowhere.  It had probably flown off, cackling at waking him from a deep sleep and making him fall out of his nest of a bed.
Jason took a deep breath and began to scramble sideways until he reached the gutter.  As the metal took his weight, it creaked and swayed in protest.  It threatened to bend away from the house entirely, and send him crashing down.
 Jason bit his lip, looking down.  Was a jump out of the question?  The faraway ground suggested that was the case.   Maybe a mild thud into the flower bed of creeping charlies planted in this shadowed side of the house.  He might even be able to do it without waking everyone.  He might make it back to bed and sleep without getting a stern lecture and Joanna watching him sorrowfully as though she had somehow failed in her duties.  He might even do it without hurting himself so badly he’d miss soccer tryouts, providing he hadn’t been grounded.  He hung his head over, considering the options.
 No, at this point, at least a climb partway down seemed best.
 The roughened metal of the rain gutter scratched his bare feet as he climbed, scraping his toes raw.  The hot night hung over the neighborhood, and the sunken yellow moon could now barely be seen over the rooftops.  Something black and swift darted at his head!
“Ow!”  Jason twisted his head around.  Back again!   He glanced up.  Scalp smarting, he shinned down the gutter a little more carefully.  Where the eaves jutted out and the second story began, he had to stop.  Bare feet and ankles wrapped tightly around the coarse, pitted metal, he lifted both hands to pull himself over.
 Then it came at him again, intent as if protecting a nest of eggs or fledglings.
 It sailed back, yellow eyes shining and talons outstretched.  Jason ducked, smothering his yelp of alarm.   His whole body swung wildly away from the house.  The gutter moved with him, creaking horribly.  With a skkkkrink  and a skkkronk, it tore lose.  For a moment, he swayed wildly as though on a single, giant stilt.  It swayed toward the house.  He scratched at the siding, trying to catch hold.  It swayed away.  His heart pounded.  Back.  Forth.
 The rain gutter shuddered like a wild beast and then tossed him.  He soared downward through the air, arms and elbows flying, and crashed into the hedge surrounding the yard with an oooof!
 Good news.  The hedge stopped his fall.  Bad news.  It prickled through his pajamas with a hundred nasty little thorns and slugged the air right out of his solar plexus.  The wind fled his lungs for a moment or two.  He lay faceup, looking at the night sky and the golden eye of the huge moon and gulped for air like a beached guppy.  After long moments, he finally inhaled deeply.  Once he could breathe, he lay still, both his heart and his head pounding, and worried whether the crash had been heard.
 With no dog or cat in the house, there was nothing to sound an alarm but the sharp ears of the McIntires themselves, but the only sounds reaching him were a thunderous snore chased by a faint one.
 He sighed.  The gutter wobbled in the night air, waving at him, but it looked as if it would stay partially attached, now that his weight was gone.  However, there was no chance he could shinny up it again.
 Jason was done for, as far as sneaking back in the house.  The moon hung over him, and as plain as could be, a shadow glided across the face of it.  Glistening blackly with spread wings, it turned and came for him.
 Jason sat up abruptly, gathering his feet under him.
 The creature dove right past his eyes, stalled in mid-flight, and landed.  It folded its wings about its body, an immense crow, as yellow-eyed as if it had absorbed the moon.  The bird cocked his head, then hopped forward.  It blinked and studied him.  Took another crow-hop nearer.
 Jason tensed.
 With a gleam in its yellow eyes, the bird darted forward, pecked the back of his hand, and launched itself into the air with a great “Ker-aww!”  Feathers and something white were shed as it soared skyward.
 He snatched his hand back, but the bird’s peck hardly amounted to anything compared to the stinging assault of the hedge’s prickles.  His hand was a mass of scratches already and his skin crawled with itching.  Stupid hedge.
 Strange crow.
 He stood cautiously, eyeing the night sky to see if the shadow had come back.  Nothing.
 He bent over to see what the crow had dropped into the dewy grass.  A scrap of paper.  Jason retrieved it.  The moon seemed to sit on his shoulder, illuminating spidery writing:
You May Have Already Won….

 Jason scratched his head, the only part of him which did not itch abominably.  He muttered quietly, “I’ve never won anything.  And, I am locked out with a thousand bloody scratches all over me, thanks to you…stupid bird.”
 He squinted.   It must have been ripped off some junk mail contest entry, thrown in someone’s trash, gilt edges attracting the bird’s eyes.  He shoved it in the pocket of his pajamas.  He had no luck.  His present predicament proved that.
 Jason stared at the rain gutter again.  Well, there was no sense putting it off any longer.  He would have to ring the doorbell and awaken someone to get back in.  With any luck, it might be Alicia.  She could be bribed.
 Jason limped to the corner of the house.  A slow, dark cloud moved over the face of the golden moon, plunging the whole neighborhood into immense, purple shadows.  He stumbled into the hedge (Ow!, again) and it exploded with a spitting hiss.   He sprang back as leaves flew.  A great ginger tomcat burst out, green eyes gleaming and bounded off, his crooked tail flipping in disgust with every leap.  The cat stopped, turned, flashed a defiant flag of his tail, and dodged into a hole under the fencing.
 With a deep breath of resignation, Jason sidled around the corner of the house. The front door opened as soon as he touched it, and Alicia stood on the threshold, looking at him, framed in glaring light.
 “Oh,” she said with a smile.  “Are you going to owe me.”