The Fall of Light Read Online Free PDF

would come back to him like the younger ghost of himself,
     and he would be walking the streets of a town where none knew his history or name and suddenly that afternoon’s wait for the
     darkness would arrive in his heart like a spear.
    If he could, he would have given a year of his life to move the clock forward four hours.
    But as it was, the time was much longer. It was long enough for all of his childhood, boyhood, and adolescence to revisit
     him. All the battles of the small two-room house on the lord’s estate where his father had knocked him down to make him grow
     up. Tomas sat and was revisited by them all while his feet froze.
    When darkness fell at last, he moved quickly down the cold pathway of the street. When he arrived at the place he had met
     Blath the night before, she was not there. There were other figures in the shadows. Tomas went up the steps of the house.
     In the doorway there stood a woman. He thought at first that she was wearing a mask, for her eyes and lips were painted and
     shone glossily beneath the lamplight.
    “Love,” she greeted him.
    But he was already past her. He was already bounding the stairs two at a time. He was already at the bedroom door itself and
     turning the knob that was locked, making him knock at the cheap door with such fierce insistence that it was instantly clear
     he was not going to turn away. He stood back and then thumped at it with his shoulder, and then again until it splintered
     down the centre and two boards fell apart and he pushed his way on into the room of Love.
    The smells were the first thing to strike him. They were the smells of the night before, the smells he had lost on the ride
     back to his brothers and tried in vain to recover. Now the perfume assailed him. That there was another man in the bed with
     Blath did not arrive in his consciousness for a moment. There was a brief pause, a frozen nothingness. Then all proceeded
     as in bizarre phantasm and took the form of quickened nightmare, and Tomas Foley saw the arms of Blath lying by her sides
     and saw the man on top
of
her in his shirt. And she was trying to get up and get him off of her, and he was making a low moaning and hurrying as if
     in some desperation to finish even as he knew the other had crashed in the door. Then there was noise and cries of alarm and
     more people coming from rooms down the hallway. There was sudden pandemonium, floorboards creaking and some hastening away
     and others arriving down to where pieces of the door hung. But none of these mattered to Tomas Foley. “Stop stop,” he heard
     Blath say. He saw her fists come up and hit the man on his sides, but then Tomas swung and cracked open his head with a plank
     from the door. The crack was loud and sharp and the fellow fell sidewaysand blood shot on the wall and there were cries and shrieks and the very air of the room itself seemed to pulse and beat.
     Blath screamed and sat up and held to her the blanket, and she saw it was Tomas and was shaping some words to him when the
     painted woman arrived in the doorway with a pistol. The woman aimed at the broad back of Tomas and Blath shouted to her to
     stop and in the same instant still Tomas was dropping the plank and drawing from his pocket the money and spilling it on the
     bed. His breath was heaving. The bloodstain dripped on the wall. He wore the look of a man mad without comprehension yet of
     the violence and passion that had risen inside him.
    “All I have, I said I would give it you.”
    He said the words and may have imagined from them would follow the rescue, and may even have thought they could both walk
     from there. But then through the door came a man called Maunsell with bald head and wide reddish sideburns who saw the dead
     man and the coins and called stop and grabbed the pistol from the woman in the door and fired it just as Tomas Foley dived
     sideways. There were screams, there were yells from down the hall and men and women running. The room