IT’S BEEN A YEAR now since Sarah and I met the monsters of Morley Manor, and a lot of things have changed.
Morley Manor is one of them. Gaspar managed to prove that he was the rightful heir, and once the legal battle was finished (it took until late spring), he and Albert began work on restoring the mansion to its former glory.
Ludmilla and Melisande spend most of their time in Zentarazna these days, but they are often guests at the old house. Sometimes when they come to visit, Gaspar will have a dinner party, to which he invites Sarah, Gramma Walker, and me. Every once in a while the sisters will have some strange new look. The first time they actually had to tell us who they were, which they seemed to find hilarious. But usually they’re in their familiar bodies, Melisande with her snaky hair, Ludmilla with her vampire fangs.
Mom and Dad don’t quite understand our connection to Morley Manor. That’s all right. As I tell them almost every day, “The world is too vast and strange for any of us to understand all of it.”
“You’ve changed this past year, Anthony,” Mom says sometimes. “You’re growing up.”
Maybe. She seems to say that mostly when I’m helping out at the flower shop. But I’ve got a reason for that. It was something Grampa said to me during that last conversation, what he told me to remember. It didn’t sink in completely at the time; there was too much going on, and I was still pretty rattled. But it keeps coming back to me. I suspect he etched it in my brain somehow, leaving it as a little present for me, because I can still hear him say it, as if he was inside my head even now, instead of—
Well, instead of where he is.
Anthony, all your life people are going to tell you to stop and smell the roses. But they won’t usually tell you why. So let me give you one good reason, the one I learned too late. There are no gardens in the Land of the Dead. You have to embrace life now, Anthony—now, while you’re still part of it. Grab it to you. See it, feel it, hold it, love it. Don’t let it pass you by, boy. Don’t shut yourself off from it. Because the truth is, you never know what moment is going to be your last, what scent, what sound, what smell will be the last one you experience. Make it good. Make it real.
Probably pretty good advice, coming from a dead man.
So I spend more time at the flower shop than I used to. I like helping Mom and Dad.
Besides, you never know which rose will be your last.
I also spend a lot of time at Morley Manor, working with Gaspar in his strange laboratory, with its mad mix of magic and science, trying, as he says, to plumb the mysteries of the universe.
I don’t suppose we’ll ever manage to know it all.
On the other hand, I know a few more things than I used to.
Like what it means to have a family that loves you.
We should all be so lucky.