“You? Go to bed, you,” said Sina, sitting down wearily and beginning to light the coal lanterns.

“What, you mean to my cabin? I’m not going out there in the dark all alone. There are ghosts!” Gladys reminded her.

“Ghosts? I wouldn’t be worried about the ghosts if I were you,” said Old Tom. “I’d be worried about the cougars. But to each his own. And, you two, why can’t you be more like your brother? Wilfred is a model of ideal deportment. You’d never catch him—”

But he was cut off by Wilfred, who had just seen the letter from their father with the mysterious NOW IS THE TIME and erupted with “Were you keeping this a secret, you little wretch?” and promptly bopped Zebediah on the head.

Obviously, given Wilfred’s cool and collected nature, this was a surprise to all of us. It did not seem to be a surprise to Zebediah, who was apparently used to such treatment.

“Oh, for God’s sake, go to bed, the three of you,” said Old Tom, not caring that Wilfred had bopped Zebediah but annoyed that he had done it in the middle of what was to be a stirring speech exhorting Wilfred’s virtues.

“Go to bed, everyone,” said Sina.

“I’m not going out there with the ghosts!” shouted Gladys.

So Old Tom very kindly picked up a coal lantern, lit it, and proceeded to escort her across the yard to her cabin. You could hear them over the wind and the rain yelling.

“There’s no such thing!”

“Yes there is!”

“No there’s not!”

“IS!”

“There’s cougars. There’s bears. There’s owls that might fly at you and scratch your eyes out. There’s bats. There’s wolves. There’s enough things to be afraid of out here. But there ARE NO GHOSTS!”

“Are!” said Gladys.

After Old Tom left with Gladys, Sina turned to us with fierce eyes and said, “Go to bed, each and every one of you, and no speaking. I don’t dare let anyone in this house interact any more tonight, for it’s clear there’s a friction in the air that will ignite with the least provocation. We must not make contact with each other.”

Then, as we all stood staring dumbly at her, trying to ingest this loquacious tidbit, she narrowed her eyes and barked “GO!” in a most un-Sina-like way and we scattered off to our rooms like so many rabbits making for so many holes. The Madden children went up to their bedrooms, but I went up to the cupola to write about the ghost.

Although I felt full of the magic and mystery of this and wrote fiendishly, when I reread what I’d written there was, as usual, something missing. I should have known better than to try to make a story out of an actual event. I tried to insert a mermaid, but that was no help. I wasn’t an idiot; I knew you couldn’t make stories by just sticking things together and hoping for the best, that wherever stories came from, it wasn’t from your own clever little mind, but even so, I sighed, one must try. So I tried again, but that didn’t work either. I was beginning to think that when there is magic in a story it isn’t because something magical is being written about. The story itself seems to be magic. And I couldn’t help feeling that had nothing to do with its author. I wanted to will this magic into my stories yet had been unable to do so. It was very frustrating. Many people write good enough stories, but few write ones that are magic. Finally I just went to bed.