The Night Eternal

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Book: The Night Eternal Read Online Free PDF
Author: Guillermo del Toro
and dubious pronouncements. It charted a backward path throughout the course of human history, steered not by the hand of fate but by the supernatural grip of the Ancients. The text confounded him, as it did the others. Fet lacked faith in his own scholarship. Here, he missed most the old professor’s reassuring wealth of knowledge. Without him, the Lumen was as useful to them as the nuclear device was without a detonator.
    Still, this was progress. Fet’s restless enthusiasm brought him topside. He gripped the rail and looked out over the turbulent ocean. A harsh, briny mist but no heavy rain tonight. The changed atmosphere made boating more dangerous, the marine weather more unpredictable. Their boat was moving through a swarm of jellyfish, a species that had taken over much of the open seas, feeding on fish eggs and blocking what little daily sun reached the ocean—at times in floating patches several miles wide, coating the surface of the water like pudding skin.
    They were passing within ten miles of the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts, which put Fet in mind of one of the more interesting accounts contained in Setrakian’s work papers, the pages he had compiled to leave behind alongside the Lumen . In them, the old professor related an account of the Winthrop Fleet of 1630, which made the Atlantic voyage ten years after the Mayflower, transporting a second wave of Pilgrims to the New World. One of the fleet’s ships, the Hopewell, had transported three pieces of unidentified cargo contained in crates of handsome and ornately carved wood. Upon landing in Salem, Massachusetts, and resettling in Boston (due to its abundance of freshwater) thereafter, conditions among the Pilgrims turned brutal. Two hundred settlers were lost in the first year, their deaths attributed to illness rather than the true cause: they had been prey for the Ancients, after having unwittingly conveyed the strigoi to the New World.
    Setrakian’s death had left a great void in Fet. He dearly missed the wise man’s counsel as well as his company, but most acutely he missed his intellect. The old man’s demise wasn’t merely a death but—and this was not an overstatement—a critical blow to the future of humankind. At great risk to himself, he had delivered into their hands this sacred book, the Occido Lumen —though not the means to decipher it. Fet had also made himself a student of the pages and leather-bound notebooks containing the deep, hermetic ruminations of the old man, but sometimes filed away side by side with small domestic observations, grocery lists, financial calculations.
    He cracked open the French book and, not surprisingly, couldn’t make heads or tails of it either. However, some beautiful engravings proved quite illuminating: in a full-page illustration, Fet saw the image of an old man and his wife, fleeing a city, burning in a holy flash of fire—the wife turning to dust. Even he knew that tale … “Lot … ,” he said. A few pages before he saw another illustration: the old man shielding two painfully beautiful winged creatures—archangels sent by the Lord. Quickly Fet slammed the book shut and looked at the cover. Sadum et Amurah.
    “Sodom and Gomorrah … ,” he said. “Sadum and Amurah are Sodom and Gomorrah …” And suddenly he felt fluent in French. He remembered an illustration in the Lumen, almost identical to the one in the French book. Not in style or sophistication but in content. Lot shielding the archangels from the men seeking congress with them.
    The clues were there, but Fet was mostly unable to put any of this to good use. Even his hands, coarse and big as baseball mitts, seemed entirely unsuited for handling the Lumen. Why had Setrakian chosen him over Eph to guard the book? Eph was smarter, no doubt, much better-read. Hell, he probably spoke fucking French. But Setrakian knew that Fet would die before allowing the book to fall into the Master’s hands. Setrakian knew Fet well. And loved
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