I waited a few minutes for the wings to reappear. They didn't. My spine was as stiff as a skateboard. I bear-hugged Mum protectively, keeping my eyes on the window behind her. She laughed, pushed me back, gently, and rested her hands on my shoulders.
"What's wrong?" she asked, her eyebrows raised in tiny tents of bemusement.
"Nothing," I said. "Just cold." That wasn't a total lie. Sub Rosa, originally a school, had high ceilings and large windows that almost forced the heat out. It was like an icebox in winter.
Mum eyed me up and down dubiously. "Are you sure that's all it is?" she asked.
"Yeah," I said, studying the fine cracks in the paint near the cornice of the wall. "And I'm real tired."
"Really tired," corrected Mum. Once an English teacher, always an English teacher! "You'd better get off to bed," she continued. "We're going to go and see Dr Vassel tomorrow, just to check you're OK. I want my number one baby-boy to stay healthy." It was easy to be her number one when I was an only child!
Mum guided me out of the kitchen into the hall, then kissed me goodnight and went back through the kitchen towards her room. I ascended the stairs, entered my room, and leapt into bed, rubbing my frozen feet together as I dug under the covers.
My head twittered with thoughts. I lay flat on my back and stared up at Uncle Gerry's old chandelier. A streetlight shone through the boughs of the giant pomegranate tree that framed my window. A rainbow of colours refracted from the chandelier's crystal teardrops and splashed unevenly onto the white walls, like a toddler's finger painting.
I turned onto my side and propped my head up on my arm, surveying my bedroom. Uncle Gerry and Aunt Bea had never had kids, and my room - a small classroom during Quakehaven's gold rush in the 1850s - had been dedicated to housing my uncle's impressive stamp and coin collections. It still did: two floor safes dominated the room, planted on either side of the wall beneath the window like guards.
The safe on the left was bronze, and stacked full of antique coins. The one on my right was silver and full of leather folios of rare stamps. Or so Aunt Bea told me - she kept the safe combinations to herself. Probably thought I'd hawk the coins for a console and some games, if I had the codes. I must admit I would have been sorely tempted!
Aunt Bea didn't like changes to Sub Rosa, especially to Uncle Gerry's rooms. After he'd passed away, the house had become a museum to his stuff. It took weeks for Mum to persuade my aunt to let us lug up a spare bed and an old oak wardrobe with no doors from the backyard shed. Reluctantly, she'd also let me put up a few family photos and one of my Dad's favourite posters: Tobor the Great, a classic robot movie from the 1950s.
Just after I started school at Quakehaven Public, Mum had gone out and picked up a second hand folding card table, a rickety chair and a battered desk lamp at a garage sale. Miraculously, the card table fit perfectly between the safes, and functioned as my desk. The rest of my possessions - clothes, school stuff, old CDs, a travel clock, and a couple of Dad's trashy horror novels stashed under my bed - The Beastbreaker and Ghostgurgler - looked like a pile of random objects plonked temporarily in someone else's room. More than a year after I'd moved in, this was still close to the truth.
I fell back onto my pillow, closed my eyes, and sucked my bottom lip, puzzled: why had I had lied to Mum about the wings in the garden? For all I knew, there was a crazed puppeteer squatting in the backyard. A normal son would have raised the alarm and called the police.
For some reason, however, I knew the display was for my benefit and mine alone. The wings belonged to something much more special than a creative burglar or confused performance artist - I was sure of it. Or I may have imagined the whole thing: it wasn't a giant leap to go from sleepwalking to moonlight hallucinations! Either way, I didn't want Mum to worry. She had enough on her plate.