Beguilers Read Online Free

the water, they never made any ripples. The surface of the lake was as still as a slab of gloss-rock.
    After a while I realised that they were moving closer, towards my side of the lake. They were still beneath me, and I looked directly down on them as they took up their strange flight pattern again.
    There are some creatures called waterpods that we used to play with in the ditches after the rains. They are completely transparent except for their eyes and their digestive systems. It makes me feel sick to think of it now, but we used to aim them at each other and burst the poor things. I remembered them as I watched the beguilers dancing because there was something similar about them. Mostly they were just light, and mostly you felt that you could see straight through them if it wasn’t darker on the other side. That’s true, I think, and that’s the reason that you can’t see them during the day. But there is a suggestion of something more substantial about them, of something not quite seen, and that is what intrigued me about them and made me strain my eyes against the night. They were infuriating, always moving so that I couldn’t quite see, and leaving irritating trails of light to evaporate behind them, insubstantial as steam.
    I don’t know to this day whether or not the beguilers were aware of me watching them, but at the time I didn’t think about it at all because I was so fascinated. They moved away a short distance, still dancing, still dropping towards the water now and again so that I wondered if they might possibly be feeding on something in there. I had realised by now that they were making a full circuit of the lake, round the edge from one side to the other. As they moved further away it was even more difficult to see them and I closed my eyes for a while to rest them from the strain of trying to see something that couldn’t be seen. When I opened them again, the beguilers were still there, just about completing their circuit of the drowning pool.
    The air was warm on my back. I closed my eyes again, and a blissful sleepy sensation trickled through me. It would have been so easy to go to sleep there, as warm and comfortable as in my bed at home. But something jerked me awake again. Perhaps it was some sound that the beguilers made or perhaps it was the movement of their light outside my lids. They must have gathered in the centre of the lake, for suddenly they were sweeping off in different directions up out of the bowl. And one was coming straight towards me.
    I was wide awake now and my eyes were glued to the flying light. It rose swiftly, gracefully, up in front of my eyes and then up above my head and over me. Despite myself I turned on to my back to follow its flight, and when it was directly above my face it stopped and hovered in the air.
    Now I could see it, the beauty that hypnotised people. Now that the creature was no longer in motion the light had ceased bleeding out from behind it and seemed to be concentrated at its centre. The substance that I had been straining to see was almost apparent as it looked down upon me with unmistakable curiosity in its eyes. Yes, its eyes; it did have eyes. They were mellow and deep; golden concentrations of pure light or pure heat, fire refined and compacted into two bright globes which looked straight down upon me. Exactly what was in those eyes I will never know, but what I saw was a number of things. There was curiosity as strong as my own, but also pain and longing and a need to be understood. Those were all qualities that were familiar to me, the visual equivalent of the tormented cries that I had heard so many times. That was disturbing, of course, but what was even more disturbing to me was the certainty that the being that hovered above me was familiar. I had encountered it before somewhere. The eyes that looked down on me were not human in origin, but nevertheless they were known to me, in some other form, the way someone might not be themselves in