When Gordie first said he was gonna do it, I didn't believe him.  He was always like that, saying he was gonna do a thing and then not, and I guess I figured him being thirteen and a year younger than me, he wouldn't have the nerve.  But then one night right in front of Aunt Gert he says that when he's figured out how to unseal the night door, he's going outside.  Aunt Gert nearly had a stroke on the spot, and said he oughtn't trifle with the Law of God like that, and to get all his "outdoorsiness" out of his system in the daytime when he was supposed to.  "And you, Benjamin," she says to me over her nose, "you stop putting ideas like that into his head!"

Well I never put it there, but I can't say I never thought about it myself -- going outside after dark, I mean.  The grown-ups never give you any good reason why not.  Not really.  Except for all of that kid's stuff about demons and monsters.  It's all got something to do with freedom of religion and how we came to New Earth, like the pilgrims, and with the stuff people were doing back on Old Earth that we didn't believe in.  It's got something to do with all that, only nobody will tell me exactly what.

I tried unsealing one of the doors once, but I couldn't.  Gordie's smarter with mechanical things, though.  He got a window unsealed.  I never would've thought of it, the way he did it.  There was a crack in the wall under this window, and he pushed an ice pick in there over and over till it made a round little hole all the way through to the outside.  He plugged it with flour paste, so in the daytime no one would notice.  Then he stole all kinds of weird stuff out of the kitchen -- "borrowed it," he says.  Anyhow, he mixed up this powdery stuff and sprinkled it around outside the window one day when nobody was watching him.  Next night we both snuck out of bed and went to the same window, and Gordie had a long, thin stick he'd put in the furnace and lit the tip of.  With the unlit end, he pushed the flour plug out of the hole, then he shoved the lit end through.  Next thing I know, whoosh -- the window seal curls up just like it's morning.  Gordie jammed the stick in it so it couldn't come down again.  He says he fooled the little glass eye out there into thinking it was daytime, but I still don't understand how.  It didn't matter then though, because the seal was open and night was looking back at us through the open window.

There were hulking, shadowy things swaying out there -- the trees, I realized.  I'd seen them a million times through that window in daylight, but now they looked all gross and misshaped, like the monsters God says are supposed to wait for you in the night.  Me, I never figured why God would want any truck with monsters, anyhow.  I think Aunt Gert and the rest just made all that up to scare little kids.  Excepting the grown-ups must be scared of something, else why don't they ever go out after dark?

Gordie, he must've thought the same, because he stared out that window with me a long time before he whispered, "See? I knew there weren't any demons."  Like he expected them to be standing right there, dripping scales and flicking their forked tongues at us or something.

"Well then," I said, all grown-up like, "let's go out and see if we can find some."

Gordie made a noise in his throat, sort of a stifled cough, and went all stuttery on me.  "Let's... let's not.  Not t-t-tonight, huh?  Tomorrow.  I think I'm tired now."

"But you got the seal open tonight.  What's the deal?"

"Nothing.  I'm tired, that's all.  I can open it again tomorrow night."

I thought he must've spent so much time planning how to fool that stupid glass eye, he'd never really thought about going outside after he'd done it.  So now he was scared -- too scared even to move.

"All right," I told him.  "You be a baby and go back to bed.  I'm going out."  And I put one leg over the sill, just to show him I wasn't bluffing.  "You coming or not?"

He said "Yeah," but he didn't look so sure.  He crawled out after me though, and then hung onto the sill like it could save him if some slobbering thing with three-inch teeth suddenly came hulking around the corner.  I didn't really much care that he was scared.  I was a little shaky myself, mostly because I had the knots-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach feeling we maybe could get caught any minute by one of the grown-ups.  But I wasn't afraid of any monsters.  Crap on the monsters.  It was night and I'd never seen night before, and I wanted to see it.  All of it.

The first thing I noticed that wasn't the way I'd expected was the dark.  I mean, it wasn't dark, not like when the light is off in your room and you can't see anything.  Out here, I could see everything pretty clear, once I looked at it hard.  I guess that was because of the moons.  I knew the moons stayed out at night, not like the sun, because I'd heard Grandpa Samuel talk about them and how they lit up the night.  They say once, a long time ago, he fell off his horse hunting and knocked himself out.

  Didn't come home all night, and next day about all he could talk about were those moons.  Grandma and the others all said he'd gone loony, and nobody paid much attention to him after that.  But he still goes on about the moons, and Aunt Gert and Esther and Eban all shush him just like Grandma used to do.

Standing there by the window, the wind blew cold on us, and I think it spooked Gordie, but I liked it.  Demon wind it was, maybe, like could take your soul away, and that was fine with me, too.  Anywhere away from here.  We both knew we'd get a whipping if we were found out here.  I guess that made just being there a pretty big thrill all by itself.  I hadn't felt that tingly since we both snuck our first drink of liquor out of Uncle Eban's still.  I wasn't planning to get sick this time, though.

"Geez," Gordie had hunkered down until he was almost sitting in the scorched little mound of his powder concoction.  "Look at the buildings."

I squatted down beside him and was about to say "What of it?" till I looked at the other houses too, and saw what he meant.  They weren't the same -- nothing at all like in the daytime.  They seemed closer together, huddled in a scared circle as if they could reach out for each other at the first sign of something dangerous.

"It's the seals, Gordie.  The windows, the doors -- they're all covered over for the night, like usual.  We just never saw it from the outside."

"It... Well it's just sorta weird, but... they look like a picture I saw once, of a place where they used to put dead people."

"Yeah.  I know the picture you mean, in one of Schlessinger's old books.  But they only buried you in one of those buildings if you were rich.  Otherwise they burned you."

"Listen, forget I mentioned it, okay?"

"Fine, " I said, and got up.  "Let's go, then.  We won't find any demons sitting around here."

Gordie started to stammer some more, but rather than stay there all alone, he followed me out past the Donahue's place and their sealed-up barn, over the wood rail fence and into the corn fields.  Well, leastways they used to be corn fields before harvest.  They'd get rotated to string beans next.  The earth was new-plowed now and scrunched under our feet.  Shadows, long and spidery, reached out to clutch at us and that wind kept blowing, fresh and chilly and stinging with a wonderful crisp kind of wetness that it never had in the daylight.

"Look up, Gordie.  Look at the sky!" I wanted to shout the words out loud, but in the stillness even my normal voice was almost booming.

"It's all different," Gordie squeaked.  He was straining his voice through a craned neck.  "It's so black.  Where does the sun go?"

For some one smart enough to fake out a glass electric eye, Gordie could be awful stupid.  "It sinks into the ocean, you dope.  Don't you know anything?"

I guess he didn't, because he stared up at that wide, dark sky like it could drink him, and turned circles round and round till he fell whump on his backside from the dizzies.

"What is that?" he breathed, still sitting there in the plowed furrows, an overgrown turnip with legs.  "God, it's beautiful.  It glitters."

"Not it.  They.  The stars.  Didn't you ever hear Grandpa Samuel talk about the stars?"

In both his hands, Gordie had picked up dirt clods, and he was crumbling them through his fingers while he talked.  "I guess not," he said.

"I dunno what you wanted to come out at night for then." I plopped down beside him to get a better look at the stars myself.  "I've been wanting to get out here to see them ever since I first heard Grandpa Samuel say how they sparkled like sun shining on a snow bank."

I could tell by the pout in his voice that Gordie was irked.  "So if you wanted out so bad, why didn't you figure out how to break the seals yourself?"

"Because you did, dope."

I guess he didn't feel much like arguing the point, and the stars were too beautiful to argue under anyhow.  So we both just sat hugging our knees and watching the sky without saying anything for a while.  Then Gordie looked over at me and whispered, "Listen."

"To what?"

"Don't you hear it?  Singing.  They're singing."

For a minute I thought he'd gone raving crazy.  Then I did listen, and I realized there'd been a sound -- a whole bunch of sounds, really -- chiming like a million little bells ever since we'd climbed through the window.  I'd been so wrapped up in looking that I hadn't even thought to wonder what it was, even though I'd been hearing it right along.  The sound was almost eerie, now I listened to it close, and it made me shiver just a little.  I crossed my arms to keep Gordie from noticing.

"What singing?" I asked him, and then, edgy-like, "That's not singing, stupid."

"What is it then?"

"How do I know?  Maybe it's the monsters."

He giggled.  "Monsters can't sing.  Besides, all I see are stars. Just stars."

"What's making the noise, then?"

"It's them," he decided.  "It's the stars singing."

"Yeah," I agreed, and looked at the sky with new awe.  "I guess it is."