TEA WITH THE MIDNIGHT MONSTERS

CANDLELIGHT

All Hallows Eve...

Otherwise known as Halloween night: the one night a year when the underworld wall -- the divider, they say -- crumbles away, and ghosts and ghouls and zombies and witches walk the streets, interacting with warm-blooded humans.

Caroline liked the holiday -- in the past; the candy and costumes and traipsing around. She thought it was fun.

And she liked the legend: if people put candles aglow in windows, the light would lure lost souls home. After her husband Ben disappeared, she lit candles on Halloween night and placed them on the sills of the Yorkshire house. She kept them ablaze all night long...

But of course, as you know, he never came back and was now thought dead.

It was worth the try, though, to try again, Caroline thought with a heavy heart, as she searched through the boxes and found a single tiny votive.

Standing in front of her bedroom window, she lit the small white waxy wick. It burst into flame, she shook out the match, and gazed outside, across the street. There, through a window, she watched a family, in silhouette, as they ate dinner and carried on... And she wondered, with despair, what had happened to hers; her husband and children, all now gone? Were the Cumberbatches cursed? How could this be?

She parted the drapes and placed the candle in the center of the sill. Then she prayed for the first time in years:

"Bring them home," she said to the children's guardian angels, or God, or anyone out there who could bring them home; who could bring her family back...

At that moment, as you know, Millie was hovering ten stories down, around the corner -- in the alley between the building and the one next-door.

She counted the stories from the ground: first, second -- up up up -- remembering to skip the thirteenth floor. The building was missing the thirteenth floor. They called it the "fourteenth" and simply skipped the number 13. The owners of the building believed 13 was an evil number and brought bad luck.

So Millie floated higher and higher -- all the way to the sixteenth floor -- really the fifteenth -- but where, oh where, was her mother's window?

There were so many!

Which way did it face? She thought and thought. Out, she decided. Her mother's window faced the street. Her mother had chosen the noisiest room. She'd have to flitter around the corner to Eighty-sixth and risk being spotted...

The block, you see, was overrun with trick-or-treaters. The sun had dipped, the night was upon them, and children in packs roamed the sidewalks.

Hopefully, hopefully, no one looked up, Millie thought. Grown-ups went nuts when they saw the monsters, the children said. KK's grandmother nearly died. A policeman had pointed a gun at Ryan.

Like a hummingbird, she floated around the building's corner, and then she saw them! Oh, happy drapes!

Her mother's drapes! The Yorkshire drapes! The cream colored silk with strawberry buds! They'd finally arrived! The sight of these curtains, pretty and full, and long to the floor, filled Millie with joy -- as did the tiny lit candle on the sill. She pressed her muzzle against the glass and peered into her mother's room.

Caroline lay there, on top of the covers, still in her clothes and shoes and tights.

Millie lifted her right front hoof and tapped on the glass. "Mum?" she said. Caroline had finally fallen asleep. She tapped again. "Mum?"

Shouting proved hard -- she still held Hope's bag in her mouth, which made her shout more of a mumble. The pack wasn't heavy, but the strap was bulky, and she must not drop it. What if it landed on someone's head? What if she had to fly down and get it -- down to the sidewalk? She tried again.