7

Under the cloudy night sky, Jason Braddock watched the clouds obscure the moon once more and pulled up once more outside 1313 Mockingbird Lane. The brakes on his Volkswagen bug squealed as he came to a stop, a distant wolf howled into the night and he picked up Marilyn's shoes and skirt from the passenger seat at his side to return them. A short jaunt to the front door, he rapped on the gargoyle knockers and waited for an answer. There were loud thunderous footsteps inside as he suddenly realized he had his glasses on again. Not wanting Marilyn to type him as a geek, he remembered where he was and leaned on the door with his back to hurriedly remove them as the door opened and then fell through the opening to the floor, his glasses slipping from his fingers and bouncing once before skidding a few feet from him.

"Jason," Herman recognized him on the floor and acted unprepared. "You're here? Uh, um..."

"You broke my glasses!" The college student briefly ran his hand over the dusty floor and picked up his broken frames in the forefingers of his right hand. Grieving internally, he whined under his breath and lifted himself to his feet. "I was looking for Marilyn. I wanted to apologize to her." He fretted back and forth remembering the incident in his mind. "I don't know what I did, but I felt I to apologize to her if I offended her..."

"Apologize?" Herman glanced to his son, Eddie, standing behind him confused. "He wants to apologize to Marilyn? What are we going to do?"

"Why does he want to do that?" Eddie wondered confused and looked up to his father. Uncertain what was going on anymore, he turned and raced to the trap door of the parlor and descended through the trap door down into the lab. Marilyn was back to full size and uncomfortably squeezed from floor to ceiling watched her beloved Grandpa explode one formula after another into her face trying to shrink her back to normal. Her rich azure eyes turned up and noticed Eddie come down and rolled toward him. He looked back to her as if she were an animated billboard in the image of his weird blonde cousin.

"Your date's back." Eddie announced it like a warning.

"He is? Oh no!" Marilyn reacted defeated and turned to Grandpa. "Grandpa, help me! I don't want Jason seeing me like this!"

"I'm working as best as I can!" He checked one glass of powder and tossed it away. He looked at a bottle of blue liquid and tossed it into his bubbling brew on the fire... vial and all. "I wondered if Dr. Frankenstein's family ever put the screws on him as he scoured graveyards." He mumbled out loud as he tried to perfect a new restoration formula to revert his grand-daughter to her true form.

Upstairs, Lily passed a nervous glance to Herman as Jason returned the clothing Marilyn had left behind in the park. Once again, he sat on the sofa and looked around the house and tried to read his perceptions from behind his askew eyesight. The house was dark and dimly lit and a bit drafty, but he didn't dare offend them by asking about it. He also heard the distant rumbles of something stirring under the house like a dinosaur waiting for fresh victims to wander down and wondered about that. Sitting in the chair near him, the tall figure with the greenish complexion was Marilyn's Uncle Herman acting a bit distant as he read the newspaper, but the moving ethereal visage in his eye line seemed to be Marilyn's Aunt Lily, and she was most certainly a warm and cordial hostess trying to make him feel to home.

"How would you like some Wolf Head tea?" Lily offered.

"That would be nice." Jason nodded and squinted to her blurry image. "Wolf Head?" He wondered if he'd heard her wrong then hoped Marilyn hadn't become disenchanted with him. He thought they had hit it off. Trying to figure out what he had did to offend her, he realized that the sofa he was on was rising with him on it almost a foot above the floor! It was almost as if the section of the floor he was on was being lifted up from the basement.

"Marilyn!" Lily came gliding back from the kitchen, pausing briefly to scream down stairs to her father's lab in the dungeon. "Slump!" She then continued gliding back to the living room with the tea tray in her hands. Before her, Jason looked over to her as the floor warped itself back to normal.

"What was that?" He asked semi-curiously to the blurry image he thought was Marilyn's uncle.

"Oh," Herman grinned nervously as if everything was normal. "Maybe it's a truck going by..." He chuckled a bit good-naturedly.

"Is he still up there?" Marilyn whispered as low as her voice could go without being heard through the floor and shifted her weight to the other side of the room as part of the house's foundation cracked under her. Fearful she'd have to take Spot's chamber under the stairs, she watched as her wolf-like little cousin peeked through the trap door on top a second, noticed Jason on the sofa from floor level and came back down to her.

"Still there..." Eddie returned and announced casually as if these crazy incidents happened all the time and looked over to his grandfather with a bit of curious fascination. "Grandpa, why are you mixing chemicals? Why not recharge the gun?"

Grandpa stopped where he was and put his test tubes down. He blinked his eyes a few times and realized that sometimes the simplest solutions came from the simplest minds. Feeling less than a mad scientist and more of a big boob similar to his idiot son-in-law, he looked to his nephew sitting on the stairs with renewed fascination tainted with a bit of elderly annoyance.

"Where were you in the Dark Ages when I was trying to invent the light bulb?"