A Box of Gargoyles by Anne Nesbet

she was still trying not to make any sounds loud enough to tempt James or her mother into this room. They didn’t know anything about the gargoyles, and she was absolutely determined to keep things that way. The gargoyles were her problem, hers alone.
    And that’s when the cold little wind kicked in, whipped right over her shoulders and through the room behind her, rustling through her birthday cards. In fact, one of those envelopes went flying right out the window—and ran right smack into the solid wall of the gargoyle’s chest, while his stone eyes kept staring ahead at Maya in the most disconcerting way.
    The letter was plastered against him now, like a beauty queen’s sash or one of those “Hello, My Name Is” stickers, and his stone claws gripped the edges of it as if that was what they had been meant to do all along, the one sharp-clawed digit now not tapping his chest so much as pointing. She thought at first it was pointing at nothing, but the nothing changed as she looked, as if ink from the letter inside the envelope were leaching out through the creamy-green fibers—squiggles and lines—no, actual words from that awful letter, a whole phrase:
    the memory stone—it will hold your instructions
    It lingered there under the gargoyle’s emphatic claw for a moment and then faded away again, leaving only that one word—
    INSTRUCTIONS
    â€”against the faintest, most delicately inked-in background of Medusa’s scary-face-with-snakes-for-hair.
    Maya found she had reached some kind of limit.
    â€œYou know what?” she said aloud to the stone gargoyles, to the old Fourcroy’s Medusan letter, to the world. “That’s enough. Forget it. I’m not doing any of it. Go away. Stop it. He can bring himself back to life, if that’s what he wants, that stupid old shadowy Fourcroy. Good-bye!”
    But even while she said these things, she wasn’t moving safely away from the gargoyle, or closing the window, or anything like that. No, what she was actually doing was noticing that each letter of the word INSTRUCTIONS was growing larger and larger in its own right, as if the ink were still spreading across the paper. And now she could see that the letter I , for instance, actually contained (how clever!) whole microscopic sentences. Not lines of ink: lines of words . She couldn’t help tipping her head a little to see what they said:
    Once on the clockwork path, no foot can stray. . . .
    Oh, good grief, what was she doing? Her eyes felt as if they had just been scorched. Was she really being that stupid, all over again? She snatched the letter away from the gargoyle’s chest and crumpled it in her hand.
    â€œNO,” said Maya, outglaring the gargoyle as best she could. “I said no. No way. Stop it. I quit. And you know what?”
    She ducked back into her room for a moment and came out again brandishing the button in her hand.
    â€œIt’s all going away now,” she said to the gargoyles. “Watch this!”
    And she broke one of her father’s cardinal rules about life in tall buildings: she threw the button and scrunched-up letter right out of that window, right over the gargoyles’ heads and down into the debris of the courtyard below.
    â€œDone,” said Maya, and she slammed the window shut and walked away.
    Had it been her imagination? Possibly. But it seemed to her that as the button had gone whistling out over his head, the gargoyle on the fire escape had looked for a moment—strikingly so, for a monstrous stone creature—not so much threatening as amazed .
    There was a secret about Maya’s birthdays. It went back to a night long ago, the thirtieth of October in the year she was turning seven. She had fallen asleep after the usual stories and teddy-bear kisses and tuckings in, and then, right in the smack-dab middle of the night, suddenly there her parents were again, waking her up with whispers