As a boy, Ralph Baines had never thought about magic, one way or the other, until it happened.

He was out with two boys, not because he was popular but because he was not. He’d gone along with these boys because he wanted so much to be liked. He’d gone reluctantly but gone, even when they told him what they were about, even when they slipped inside the broken gate, even when his skin crawled as they stepped among the gravestones in the overgrown thicket of a graveyard in the dead of night.

“Come on,” one of the boys whispered. “You go first, Ralphie.”

They stood at the entry to the mausoleum, the door slightly ajar, the blackness beyond so dense it had weight. Ralph swallowed hard.

“Me mum said this was one of them thin places,” the second boy whispered. “You know, between worlds.”

“Thin places?” Ralph said, trying to keep his voice from squeaking.

“Right,” the second boy said. “Places where our world connects with the next. You know, ours with the faerie world.”

“Well, go on, Ralphie,” said the first boy.

Ralph took one step forward, then another. He didn’t want to enter that black place, but he wanted them to like him so much, so very much . . .

Then, “Cripes! What’s that?” and a screech, and the second boy yelled, and the first yelled, and then Ralph had his back plastered to the outside wall of the mausoleum, and he was trying very hard not to see what he saw.

It was both beautiful and hideous. Its face was delicate and lovely, but it had leathery wings and hands with clawlike fingers, and its fingers held the arm of one of those boys, who hung from its grip, limp and insensible, while the other boy shouted and beat the monster with a stick.

And the eyes, oh, the eyes of that creature, red like coals, burning red, and Ralph closed his own eyes and stumbled backwards, and then heard another scream that faded into the distance.

Ralph had had enough, and he ran. He ran out of that graveyard, never looking back. He ran home and dove into his room. He ran home and vowed he didn’t care about being friends with those boys.

Which was just as well, because one of them the next day rattled on and on to everyone in town that he’d fought off a monster, and he was judged to be off his rocker and taken away, especially since the second boy was found bruised and unconscious and the first boy was blamed for his injuries. Neither boy was ever the same after. Ralph never admitted to anyone that he’d been with them, never admitted to himself what he’d seen, decided once and for all that it was all some kind of hoax, that there was no such thing as monsters, no such thing as magic.

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