The Shadow and Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

Oh, and Merral, I saw Isabella today. She asked after you. ‘ When is Merral coming back?’ she said. Father and sisters send their love too. Love from your mother.”
    The metallic voice returned: “Message ends. No further messages.”
    â€œOkay. Go to today’s notes.”
    â€œReady.”
    â€œAdd ‘Final Observations’ as follows. . . . ”
    For the next five minutes, Merral listed what he had seen on the last part of his journey north. He would tidy up the report when he got home. Then he briefly outlined what he hoped to achieve with his uncle tomorrow before he rode south again. Finally, he switched to screen mode and continued his current evening reading of the Word before bringing his praises and concerns before the Most High.
    Then Merral slid in between the sheets and lay there listening to the silence of the house and the soft creaking of the wooden frame as the night winds swirled around it. There was, he felt, something extraordinarily satisfying about being tired: the draining of energy from limbs, the leisurely and ordered shutdown of body systems.
    On the verge of sleep, he realized that he had not recorded in his diary anything about the meteor. He would, he told himself, do it tomorrow. Toying with the image in the last moments of wakefulness, he played back through his mind the brief glimpse he had caught of it—the ball of light, like some great firework, racing overhead.
    As he did so, it struck him that something about it was odd. But what? He ran over the vision again and again, now faster, now slower.
    His last thought as he plunged finally into sleep was that, for a meteor, it had been moving too slowly.
    Far too slowly.

2

    T hat night Merral dreamed in a way he had never thought possible. Normally, if he did dream, all he would remember of it on waking was a short-lived, gentle, and vague memory. But that night his dream was of an extraordinary intensity and unpleasantness. He was standing alone on a dark, endless sandy beach at the edge of a sullen, night-colored sea, whose slow, heavy waves never broke, but seemed to just crawl up the shore and die before sliding back with a quiet, drawn-out whisper. Somehow, there was something swollen and infected about the sea. The cloudy, sunless sky above was lit with an overcast, tepid yellow light that seemed sickly. In the far distance some dark-winged objects, which he knew were not birds, wheeled and dived ominously.
    It seemed to Merral that he stood there for an age, a lone figure looking at a sick sea and a dead sky, watching the oily ebb and flow of the waters. There was an atmosphere of expectancy, a feeling that something was on its way, something impending. It was as though the waves in their slow, lapping decay were saying in words just beyond hearing, “Wait. . . . Wait. . . . Wait. . . .” He knew, with a strange certainty, that there was something out there in the waters. Something that was waiting out its time before emerging.
    Then, in a fearful moment, he saw the faintest of movements begin far out on the water. An unhurried train of circular ripples began to spread out slowly, and the waters seemed to bulge.
    As this happened, Merral felt a strange compulsion. He wanted to run away. Indeed he knew that he had to, but somehow he couldn’t. Instead, half of him seemed to want to stay and to watch what was going to come out of the water. There seemed to be an invitation, a beckoning, even a command for him to stay, to watch, to somehow be present at—
    At what? Merral didn’t know. He felt trapped in lonely terror and expectation, bound against his will to watch and await whatever it was that was emerging from the growing ripples.
    Suddenly Merral felt he was no longer alone. Someone else seemed to have joined him, some invisible person who tugged at him so that he was forced to turn away from the mesmerizing sea. As he turned away, he felt