A Box of Gargoyles by Anne Nesbet Page A

and laughter.
    â€œMischief Night, Maya!” they said, and wrapped a blanket around her to keep the chill away. “We’re going to watch your birthday come in this year: what do you think about that?”
    Maya thought that made birthdays sound like a wonderful, silvery tide flooding in across the world; maybe it was the moonlight spilling over the lawn outside that made her think that. She sat on the front step with her parents, watching her birthday come in, and then when it was after midnight and her birthday was all safely arrived, her father carried her back to bed and pulled the quilt up around her and kissed her on the top of the head, and that was a magical birthday, for sure. In the years after that her parents were too busy with little baby James to do crazy things like wake up a birthday girl in the middle of the night, but what they didn’t know was this:
    Maya had always remembered. She had gotten up in the middle of the quiet night before every single Halloween since that first one long ago, and she had watched her birthday come in, every year.
    Even in France, even with gargoyles parked outside her window, Maya was determined to be up in the dark middle of Mischief Night to watch her birthday roll in. She set her alarm before going to sleep, and then had the traditional hard time actually falling asleep (since knowing an alarm is going to ring soon makes even a very tired person jumpy), but when the bell did go off, a muffled jangle from underneath her pillow, she woke up in a flash, remembering right away who she was, and where she was, and what she was waking up for.
    It wasn’t like being at home, where there was that front yard she could go out into for a few minutes. Paris is a big city, and she didn’t want the trouble of going all the way downstairs and past the door of the concierge and out onto the chilly sidewalks of the rue de Grenelle. No, she figured it was less trouble to face those gargoyles for a moment, and the third of a moon that was hanging about somewhere in the sky above the back courtyard.
    So she took a deep breath and opened the window. Sure enough, the nearest gargoyle glittered dimly in the little bit of moonlight.
    â€œHey there, Beak-Face,” she said under her breath. It made her feel braver. “Don’t mind me. My birthday’s on its way in.”
    She could feel how cold the air was, but she was still warm enough, with the blanket pulled around her shoulders. It must be just about time. She had set the clock for 11:55, not wanting a long wait.
    There were scattered windows with lights on, far away across the courtyard, but their shades were drawn. Everything was chilly and still. Hard to believe a whole city was out there, beyond these quiet windowed cliffs of buildings.
    And then the universe turned some tiny corner, and the fire escape exploded into clattering, chattering motion.
    It caught Maya so much by surprise that she froze instead of flinching, her hands just clenching the blanket, her jaw trembling, her eyes stuck wide-open in disbelief.
    A whirlwind of gargoyles!
    Clattering tornado!
    Stony, cacophonous blur!
    She had an impression of wings, claws, motion: something happening over on the other side of the fire escape. The blur was deepest there.
    The whole world on fast-forward, that’s what it was like. The gargoyles, who had been unmoving statues all day long, had suddenly jumped into life at racing speed. To catch up with the rest of us , thought Maya, and she leaned a little forward on the windowsill to get a better view of exactly what they were doing. This must be the clatter she had been waking up to the last few nights.
    After all, it made some kind of sense. If you were a gargoyle and moved at normal human speed, you’d be caught pretty soon at it, wouldn’t you? And people would fuss? So doing your living all at once, maybe that was a good way to go about things, if you were a gargoyle. Or maybe gargoyles