The noise came first in the form of a scratching on the outside wall beneath Michael's bedroom window. It was so quiet that if Michael hadn't been listening for it, he wouldn't have heard it. It sounded like a twig tapping against stone, just very lightly, as though there were a person rubbing the twig, trying to see if he could touch the stone and not touch the stone at the same time. It was a very rapid tapping, and it seemed to be climbing up the wall very quickly.
And it was. Just as Michael registered the clicks as climbing, a face popped up just outside the window. And just as Michael registered the face as a face, it spoke sharply.
"What are you looking at?" it demanded. Michael, shocked to see a face, gave no answer.
"That's what I thought," the face snapped, and it disappeared below the window once more. There was more twig tapping on stone, and then all was quiet again.
Michael only took a moment to gather himself and stick his head out the window to see where the face had gone, but a moment was too long. The face was nowhere to be seen.
Still hoping to catch a glimpse, Michael leaned out the window as far as he dared, putting his hands on the windowsill and lying with his belly on the bed stand, feet dangling in the air, so he could see all the way to where the bottom of the wall met the flowerbed. There was nothing there. Oh, there was the honeysuckle bush that grew beneath his window, certainly, and there was the family room window below Michael's, and there was the wall itself, smooth, whitewashed stone, but that was it. There certainly wasn't a face, neither was there a body to match.
Michael supposed there had to be a body that matched. He couldn't imagine a bodiless face popping up in the middle of his window in the middle of the night to ask what it was he was looking at. Of course, until a few seconds before, he had never imagined a face popping up in the middle of his window in the middle of the night, body or no body, so he really didn't know whether it needed a body or not. Regardless, the face, with or without a body to match, had gone. The garden was as quiet as it had been not a minute before.
Michael slipped off the bed stand, picked up one of the sheets he had dropped on the floor and draped it over his head again. He remained looking out the window, partly hoping to see if anything moved in the garden, partly wishing the face would pop up again, partly fearing it might.
It was a memorable face. It wasn't very large. The whole head couldn't have been much bigger than a medium-sized cabbage, so the face was a bit smaller around than that. Unlike a cabbage, it was pointy. The chin stuck out. The cheeks were severe and looked like they had been carved out of wood by someone who didn't carve very well and was using a dull blade, so that the face seemed clumsily chipped rather than cleverly cut. The eyes were thin, angry, shiny black slits resting deep and narrow on either side of the nose. They sat under thick, mossy, shimmerless black eyebrows. The mouth was large and wide, with no lips that Michael could see, and filled with splintery teeth that appeared as though they liked to bite.
The dominant feature of the face was the nose. It stuck straight out of the face in the way a branch sticks out of a tree. It was long and thin and spindly, and it wasn't at all straight, turning left and right and up and down at peculiar intervals, and at more peculiar angles. It had a very unfriendly shape.
Michael should have been frightened, he supposed, and he knew that ordinarily he would have been. Had he been lying in bed, and had it popped up at his bedside, he would have been very frightened indeed. He'd have pulled the covers tight over his head, and he'd have wished the face away. And he wouldn't have peeked to see if it was gone until morning. This wouldn't have been the first night he had spent that way. He did live nearly next to a graveyard, after all.
Behind the shed, beyond the back wall, across the stream, beside the Vicarage Road, there was an old, old, maybe ancient graveyard that was at least as old as Mistleton, the village where Michael lived. People who knew about these things said that the graveyard was even older than St. Lucy's, the little Norman church it served. People who didn't know any more than this, but were the type of people who should have known about such things, said that they were fairly certain that it had been a religious gathering place since the time of the druids. There was no solid proof, but since the village seemed to be named with mistletoe in mind, and everybody knew that mistletoe and druids went together, it was simple and logical to conclude that in this case the mistletoe, the druids and the town were all connected. Anyway, it sounded nice.
Whatever the graveyard's exact age and heritage, it was old enough, historical enough and shadowy enough to be sure to have ghosts. Michael was certain of that. Often, as he lay in bed listening to a storm or watching the moon, he would hear a woeful, haunted groan when he should have only heard the wind moaning in the trees, or he would hear a finger tapping against a windowpane where he should have heard a branch. That was when he was frightened.
He wasn't frightened now. What he'd heard in the shed and what he'd seen at his window hadn't been a ghost. Michael didn't know what it was, exactly, but he knew it wasn't a ghost. Not being a ghost, it wasn't frightening, it was a mystery. Being a mystery, it was a thrill.
Michael held his breath, sure that the garden and everything in it were holding their collective breath as well. By holding his breath, he could be sure not to miss when the garden started breathing again. He was worried that if he breathed, he might miss it. The garden might mimic his breath's rhythm, so that every time he breathed in, so would the garden. Then when he breathed out, the garden would exhale as well. He could feel the air in his lungs, in his throat, in his mouth and in his nose, all waiting to be breathed. Who would breathe first, Michael or the garden?
It was Michael, of course, because he had to. When he did, it was as quietly as he could manage, through his mouth, so that there was no chance of nose whistle. In came the air, and out it went again, and still no sound from the garden. Still the shed was silent.
Or was it?
Michael couldn't be sure at first. The sound was that small. It almost wasn't a sound at all. It was a sound only in the way a tiny mouse scuttling across a lawn seems to make a sound because you see it and know it must. You hear the sound because you know it's there. You hear it with your head, then you hear it with your ears. This was the type of sound that Michael heard.
It might have been a squeak at first, the creak of wood against wood, the tweak of a rusty nail, the shift of a shelf, the cringe of an aging hinge. Soon it was a rustle, or shuffle, a scrape or a bustle. It was whispers, Michael thought, and it was tussles. Yes, definitely tussles, because Michael was listening--and he was sure of this--listening to an argument, just as he had been earlier.
To be more exact, Michael wasn't really listening, so much as overhearing, because he couldn't make out what was being said. Regardless, he was holding his breath again, this time out of excitement. He didn't know what was arguing, and he wasn't sure what it was arguing about, but it was in the shed at the bottom of his garden and whatever it was arguing about had something to do with him, or his house, or his family, or all of them. This he knew.
He knew it in the way he knew that his parents were planning Christmas when they spoke in low voices around him and his sister Willow in December. He knew it in the way he knew Willow was plotting with her stuffed bunny just how to sneak up on him when they were playing hide-and-go-seek. He knew it in the way he knew that his mother and Mrs. Chatterway from down the lane were discussing how Michael was probably going away to school fall term, and where he was going, and how Michael wasn't supposed to know he was going away at all.
He knew it because whoever was talking about him very often did so just closely enough for him to know why they were talking and just quietly enough for him not to know what was being said. It was something he hated, because it always made him angry not to know what was going on, and it was something he loved, because he always enjoyed finding out things he wasn't supposed to know.
He was pretty sure he wasn't supposed to know what was going on in the shed, and he was pretty sure he had to find out. He was absolutely sure he wanted to find out. He was equally absolutely sure that he would never find out standing at his bedroom window.
His first idea was to make a rope from his bed clothes and climb down the wall into the garden. This was an adventure, after all, and he had to begin an adventure in an adventurous manner. Getting dressed, strolling downstairs and casually stepping out the back door into the garden was not how to begin an adventure. Getting dressed, strolling downstairs and casually stepping out the back door into the garden was how to begin a long, tedious day of mowing the lawn and pulling up weeds to earn pocket money. It was how to begin a long, tedious day of walking into the village with an aunt to do a long, tedious spot of shopping and be told the long, tedious history of every insignificant house, cottage and shop window in Mistleton, for the long, tedious millionth time, already. It was how to begin a long, long, long, unbearably tedious day of school. No, there was nothing adventurous about getting dressed, strolling downstairs and casually stepping out the back door into the garden.
Unfortunately, Michael's next option, bed clothes tied into ropes, while adventurous, weren't very sturdy, as Michael was all too keenly aware, having landed hard on his backside just a month before, when one of the knots he had tied in his last escape rope had slipped. If it hadn't been for the bushes beneath his window, he might have done himself a serious injury, or so his mother had insisted. As it was, her expression when she saw what had happened to his bed clothes made Michael suspect she might want to do him a serious injury herself.
He had tried to explain to her that he was being held against his will in the Tower of London, a fact that Willow, who was Mary Queen of Scots at the time, was happy to confirm. Mrs. Scott did not agree that destroying one's bed clothes was the best method of escape, but she couldn't think of a suitable punishment for Michael, both because she really was more relieved that he wasn't seriously hurt than she was angry and because sending him to his room wasn't a very good punishment when his room was a prison cell in the Tower of London. Even angry, she had to admit that locking Michael in the Tower would be a bit harsh.
When she told Mr. Scott at dinner what had happened, in hopes that he could think of a suitable punishment, he laughed so hard that he snorted milk out of both nostrils at once. As everybody knows, you can't dole out punishment when you've laughed so hard that you snorted milk out of both nostrils at once, so Michael had gone unpunished. He had, though, learned his lesson in the way of bed clothes and climbing out of windows.
There was nothing for it, then, but to use the stairs and the back door. That did not mean, however, that adventure was impossible.
He looked around his floor for the blue jeans he had left there when he had gone to bed. He wasn't overly messy, but his blue jeans did have a way of landing on the floor when he went to bed. This would allow him to jump into them at a moment's notice, if such a moment were ever to present itself. This being such a moment presenting itself, he was glad of the habit. He slipped his blue jeans over his pajama bottoms and slipped into his running shoes, which he always kept under his bed. Then he draped the sheet like a hooded cloak over his head and shoulders and crept out into the hallway.
The Scott house was a very old house. It had an old, narrow upstairs hallway, with creaky floorboards along its entire length. Michael, being an expert adventurer, knew every floorboard intimately, and he took extra care as he made his way along the hall. The creakiest boards, of course, were just in front of Mr. and Mrs. Scott's bedroom door, which was right at the top of the stairs. The trick to passing his parents' door was to lean over the landing and grab the handrail. Then he could hop to the top step and avoid the creakiest boards altogether.
Catching the step was a tricky proposition in stocking feet, but in his running shoes, Michael had little problem. He almost dropped his sheet as he grabbed the rail, and he needed a dramatic flourish to pull it up from over the banister and cloak himself again. Holding on to the rail with his left hand and pressing against the wall with his right, he half stepped and half lowered himself down the staircase, putting as little weight on each stair as he could.
It was a painfully slow trip. Michael wanted nothing more than to run as quickly as he could, but it was well known that adventurers never ran as fast as they could towards danger. Hopefully they never ran away, either, although that was allowable under extreme circumstances. Of more immediate importance to Michael was the fact that the stairs were nearly as noisy as the upstairs hallway, and his parents would definitely hear him if he was not as careful as a creeping cat.
At the bottom of the stairs, Michael was in the front hallway, at the front door. He took a peek through the post slot, not because he expected to see anything, but because it seemed the proper thing to do to peek through something. The lane was silent and still in front of where Michael lived. Things were always silent and still in Mistleton--at least before tonight. For a time tonight, Michael's back garden had been neither silent nor still.
Thinking of this reminded Michael that he was missing whatever might be happening back there, in the neither silence nor stillness. He turned away from the front door and tip-toed past the parlor door beneath the stairs. The floorboards on the ground floor were well worn, but they almost never creaked, provided you stayed against the right-hand wall, so he was able to move quickly into the kitchen.
The same light that shone through Michael's bedroom window now shone through the window in the kitchen door. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end with excitement. He could see the shed at the end of the garden, but he couldn't tell whether it was moving or making any noise.
Michael carefully unlocked the door, opened it just enough for him to fit through, and slipped out into the dark. The night was cool but not cold, and there was not even the slightest breeze. The dew on the grass was so heavy that in the moonlight it glowed like frost. Michael was tempted to touch it, just to be sure it wasn't frozen, but he didn't want to disturb the enchantment in the air. In the chill, he was glad he'd brought his bed sheet. He stepped carefully down the garden path, from one slate paving stone to the next, stalking the shed, silent step by silent step.
He was surprised by how suddenly he found himself beside the shed door. He hadn't had time to listen. He hadn't had time to watch. He hadn't had time to think. He'd only had time to suddenly find himself beside the shed door.
From behind the shed door came the sound of voices.