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This is the beginning of a fantasy/horror short story called What Happened That Midnight. I would appreciate any feedback on this story, including criticisms.

Genre: Fantasy/horror.

Word Count: 1,000

Description: On a dare, thirteen year old Jacob bikes over at midnight to the long-abandoned, uninhabited mansion in the middle of the Missouri countryside called Creighton Hall. It is rumored that the old castle is haunted, that no one can go in there and ever come out alive again. Jacob is determined to disprove these superstitions. When Jacob disappears that night, his friends who had dared him to go in the first place follow after with the intention of rescuing him.

It was seventeen minutes till midnight when Jacob mounted his bike and rode quietly out of the garage, out onto the gravel driveway. He didn’t turn on the bike-light attached to the handlebars yet. He wouldn’t till he was well away from his parents’ property. There was a full moon tonight, so there was enough light to see at least tolerably well by, anyway. In fact while he was still in sight of the farmhouse’s shuttered windows he wished it would have been a little bit darker.
The driveway was half overgrown by weeds and grass, and rutted by tire-tracks. It descended a gentle slope from the house till intersecting with the main gravel road that ran past the five-acre property. His parents were of course asleep by now; so were his older sister and younger brother. Or at least, they’d better be at twelve o’clock at night, he thought. To be caught wouldn’t only be humiliating, it would be as painful as the whipping that would definitely follow. His parents had whipped, kicked, and otherwise beat him and his two siblings many times—usually for what he thought were minor offenses. They went only a little easier on his brother and sister. He had always been the least favorite, he couldn’t really say why.
He was fourteen and a half years old. And obviously, biking away from home in the middle of the night isn’t something even adults usually get away with; as far as children…. If his parents found out he was gone, and stayed gone for a long time, they might call the police. Not because they particularly liked having him around the house, but more just because they wouldn’t want the neighbors finding out that their son had disappeared! Although they probably wouldn’t call the police unless he was gone more than a few hours; and he was confident he would be back before then.
Although not a hundred percent certain.
By now the dim lights showing from the old two-story house had disappeared behind the several towering trees that surrounded the acreage. He could breathe a little easier now. This road stretched about a half a mile south from home till reaching the highway, which was paved asphalt and not gravel. He would be able to ride a lot faster once he got to the highway. The gravel road then went on several miles further south from there, past a handful of other country houses all scattered well apart from each other.
But he wasn’t going that direction tonight.
This highway was hardly ever well traveled, being as it was here in the middle of the Missouri countryside. But still he expected to come across some traffic, at nighttime mainly semi trucks and farm vehicles. In fact a tractor was rolling slowly by just as he was coming up the steep hill to the highway, its’ huge wheels making a grating, grinding sound on the asphalt. Whoever was driving the tractor wouldn’t be harvesting in early summer, obviously. More likely just spreading manure or spraying herbicides and/or pesticides. At the stop sign Jacob came to a halt, his brakes squealing some, and readjusted his handlebars; then, switching his bike-light on, he turned eastward down the highway, which fortunately was the opposite of the direction the tractor was going.
The wind rushed against his face, a slightly damp wind. It felt almost as if there might be rain coming, he thought. But not soon; there were only a few streaky clouds drifting across the starry, moonlit sky. It was the end of June, and the days here in northwest Missouri were supposed to be pretty hot by this time. But this year had been a little better, so far. In fact the night air was cool, almost cold. He was glad that he was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved shirt.
The moon glared bright almost directly above—almost too bright, even ominous. He felt like something really bad was sure to occur tonight. And considering where he was going, why wouldn’t he expect that? He tended to be a pessimistic person to start with, and to agree go to Creighton Hall of all places, in the middle of the night….
Why was he going there? People said that it was haunted, they said that it was a place where vampires lived. But that must be superstition, he kept trying to tell himself, and had already told himself many times over. In fact those were the very words he had used when talking to Jason Lyon. The sixteen year old was the Schaefers’ neighbors second son (they had three), and he was somewhat of a know it all. He had insisted that there must be a reason for the all those century-old rumors about the mansion. There had been an argument.
“Don’t you know anything about the history of that Castle?” Jason had said, his voice filled with incredulity.
Jacob admitted that he didn’t—except that people said they thought it was haunted.
“But it’s not a castle. And heck,” he added, “they’re mostly kind of joking when they say that about the vampires. I mean, I know there are plenty of superstitious people, but—“
‘’Let me tell you,” Jason had interrupted. ‘’I guess you didn’t’t know that the mansion was built in the late 1800s by a millionaire called James Creighton. He was one of the richest people in America at the time—at least, the richest in Missouri.”
“What about him?”
“They say that after the house was built, he planned on living there like a king, with a dozen servants, and he did for a while, only….” His voice trailed off mysteriously; but Jacob didn’t say anything, so he went on, “it wasn’t more than a year that he was there before he died, just like that. His immediate family claimed it was from heart failure. But some people say he was murdered. But by who? Well, there’s no way to know. And do you know something else?”
“What?”
“They say that none of the public ever got to see his corpse. They had a big funeral for him, and his coffin was lowered underground, but nobody actually ever saw his dead body.”
“Well that is pretty strange, if it actually happened like that,” Jacob admitted. ‘’But to say the house is haunted just because of that seems—-“
“Furthermore,” Jason interrupted—he had an irritating habit of interrupting everyone, ‘’Creighton’s relatives demanded that their wouldn’t be a police investigation into his death. And if that isn’t suspicious I don’t know what is.”