Midnight Sun Read Online Free PDF

them's still published. Of the Midnight Sun by Edward Sterling."
    "Shall my dad get it for you if he can?"
    "Better tell me how much first," Ben said as the teacher blew her whistle for everyone to line up, and covered his mouth in case she'd heard him talking after the whistle and would send him to Mr O'Toole the headmaster.
    As his class filed into the building, Ben's shoes his aunt had bought him for his new school making rodent sounds on the linoleum, he saw the headmaster waiting in the corridor, cocking his head which always made Ben think of a horse's grinning skull. He felt as if the heat and the smells of mopped floors and of the sickly green paint on the walls were writhing inside him as the class marched him to his doom. His ears were throbbing so hard that he barely heard what Mr O'Toole said to him. "I should get those oiled if I were you or you may be more than squeaking."
    "Yes, sir," Ben stammered, feeling isolated and vulnerable and horribly ashamed of himself.
    He was only a few paces past the headmaster when Dominic's murmur behind him almost caused him to trip himself up. "Funny, /un-ny," Dominic said.
    Ben felt breathlessly exhilarated, and terrified for him. He didn't dare turn round, but he flashed Dominic a grin as they filed along the row of folding seats in the assembly hall. When Mr O'Toole thundered prayers at the hallful of children while the teachers glared prayerfully at them, Ben no longer felt alone. In the classroom he even raised his hand when Mr Bolger asked questions, and found that his palms no longer started sweating.
    He was glad that his aunt didn't ask why he was pleased with himself; she seemed content that he was. That night he could hardly sleep for waiting; it felt like Christmas Eve. Soon he might know who Edward Sterling had met on his last exploration and what they had revealed to him. But when he hurried into the schoolyard, not even waiting until his aunt was out of sight, Dominic showed him his empty hands. "My dad laughed."
    "How do you mean?"
    "He said to tell you he wished you had a copy of that book, because he'd have given you a year's pocket money for it. He rang up a friend of his who sells old books who said he's never seen a copy in his life. You're as likely to see one as snow in summer, my dad said."

    FIVE

    At least Ben had made a real friend at school, which was more than he ever had in Stargrave. His aunt let him stay at Dominic's house until she came home from her tax office job to collect him. She must be pleased that she no longer needed to work in her lunch hours and that he had someone else to keep him in Norwich. Dominic's parents welcomed Ben, but it took him a while to get used to them. Mrs Milligan kept offering him food in no apparent order, perhaps because Mr Milligan was constantly on the move even during mealtimes, picking up books from the sideboard, from chairs, from a dozen other perches in the small house crammed with dingy rooms, and strolling about like an actor at a rehearsal, reading aloud. "Just listen to this," he would say, raising his squat face and half closing his eyes under their fierce reddish eyebrows as if he was smelling the pages rather than reading them, until Dominic's mother would lose patience with him and fly at him like a terrier, her short-legged body crouching to shove him towards the table, her square head lowered so that her chin appeared to engulf her stubby neck. "Their brains need feeding as well as their breadbaskets," he would protest mildly as his wife confiscated the book, growling "Don't be teaching them your manners."
    The first time Ben visited Milligans Bookshop he saw a portly man with a briefcase waddling away like an endangered penguin, almost tripping over cobblestones as Mr Milligan harangued him. "Stop that man, he's living off immoral earnings. Where's a policeman? I'd like you to show him that page you didn't want me to read out loud," he shouted, and the salesman broke into a stumbling run. "Just a