Strange is the Night Read Online Free PDF

William whispered through the glass, “Why didn’t you ever tell me how horrible it really is?”
    They would spend hours on end just facing each other, hands pressed to either side of the partition. They would stare at one another until they blurred in each other’s vision and melted into nothing but smears and shapes. Some days William wouldn’t be there when Robert woke up and he’d panic, living in fear until the moment he came back to him. When William would come back, often he was bloody and bruised, his eyes too big in his face and taking on a permanent cast of fear that crept closer to insanity every day.
    Almost everyday he told Robert that he didn’t know what was happening. He said that Robert was the only thing he could rely on anymore because no matter how real the world he was trapped in felt, it couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be.
    “The things here, Robert, the things ,” he would say, muttering it under his breath until all the words ran together and became nothing but sound, a noise like a breeze gone mad.
    Robert could only shush Willaim and tell him he was there. He never said anything about how there was a patch of shiny blue scales the same color as William’s eyes growing up the side of his neck.
    Robert took to praying to the angels that wheeled around in the sky at night; those big, dark silhouettes that had been the one constant in the world since the first night he watched it. Of all the bad things he had seen, he hoped that at least the angels were good, though he’d never seen them intervene or perform an act of kindness in the cruel world they held dominion over. He’d never even seen them descend from on high at all, for any reason, but he was a longtime observer of the mirror world and knew that things changed.
    One evening William sat down on the other side of the mirror and bawled and shrieked as he tore bloody scratches in his face. That same night Robert begged the angels to please come for him because he couldn’t leave William alone. He cursed them and their uncaring distance; for a thing to so deify itself then it must first do something godlike and as far as he could tell they did nothing .
    He sobbed himself to sleep, unwilling to look away from William’s mutilated face as he mouthed apologies—apologies to himself or to Robert, he had no idea. He could only tell him to shh , he said that it would be okay. When William laughed, Robert heard the chitinous clack of a million locusts buzzing in his scaly throat.
    The next night, William was not in the mirror, but something was. It took Robert’s breath away as he stared at the angel. They had heard his call and one had come. It stood at least eight feet tall with black wings that shone with a dirty blue sheen. The feathers covering its body were tighter, shorter and hid none of the power and musculature of it. There was another set of wings, smaller with delicately scalloped edges folded over where its eyes should have been. The angel had a beak like that of a raven which curved from its face, severe and capable of tearing huge chunks of flesh away. Its fingers were tipped in black talons. Robert stared at it, his brain not quite comprehending what he was seeing, but he didn’t turn away.
    “Take me,” Robert said. “I want to go. I’m ready now.”
    The terrifying angel cocked its head and made a chirping sound that went straight through Robert’s brain and into his bones and blood. He grimaced in pain and stared at the smaller wings where the angel’s eyes should be as he held out his scarred arms.
    “Come on.” He smiled in invitation because blind or not, he knew the angel could see. “Come and get me.”
    The angel reached out with its taloned hands and scratched at the mirror. The glass tore with the sound of madly ringing church bells and the screams of dying rabbits. Robert felt his brain judder, trying to pull away, but he gritted his teeth, kept his eyes open and waited. Soon, he would be where he was