Midnight Sun Read Online Free Page A

blaming them for his mother's death. If he persisted she mightn't give him the photograph. Later, while he was clearing the table, she went up to her room, and stayed there until he began to think she had decided to refuse. At iast she brought him a photograph of himself as- a baby in his mother's arms. "That's your christening. I got your mother to have you baptised."
    His father was supporting Ben's mother, or perhaps he was leaning on her; he looked as if he wanted to mop his shiny forehead. The summer heat which had stretched wide the leaves of the trees in the churchyard of St Christopher's had visibly enfeebled his grandparents. All the smiles, even his aunt's, were past their best, as if everyone had tired of waiting for the click of the camera. Ben gazed at the photograph, feeling as if he was somehow missing the point of it, until his aunt hugged him awkwardly, making him smell of her lavender-water. "You can always talk to me about them if you need to," she said. "You ran away because I hadn't given you enough time to say goodbye, didn't you?"
    The question sounded casual, but he sensed how on edge she was for his answer. "Yes, Auntie," he said, unable to decide how far he'd fallen short of telling the truth. "What do you think happened to them all? Nobody would tell me."
    "Carelessness, Ben. That's all it could have been, up there in broad daylight in the middle of nowhere. You should never distract someone when they're driving." She enfolded his hands in her warm plump slightly wrinkled grasp. "Thank God you were staying with me that week. We can't bring any of them back, but we'll do our best for each other, won't we? Time for bed now. No arguments, you've school tomorrow. A fine guardian I'd be if I let you bend the rules."
    When he was in bed he called down to her. She let him lie under the blanket while she knelt by the bed and intoned prayers for him to amen. Her praying for peace for his family stayed with him after she'd tucked the blanket tight as a bandage around him. Somehow the idea of eternal peace invoked a memory of being carried on his father's shoulders, feeling as though he could pull the stars down from the black ice which held them and from which they had seemed already to be falling, gleams turning slowly in the night air. It had been snowing, of course, but it was odd that his father had carried him into the forest on such a night, so deep into the forest that it had swallowed the lights of Stargrave. Where had his father meant to take him that Ben had been shivering with anticipation? Ben's mind seemed to shrink from the memory, and soon a jumble of thoughts like overlapping channels on a radio put him to sleep.
    He awoke feeling full of the night at its darkest. A thought had wakened him — the thought that the dark, or something in it, had a message for him. He lay staring up, trying to recall what he'd failed to grasp. Surely this wasn't yet another of the mysteries which had to wait until he was old enough. That reminded him of Edward Sterling's last book, of Ben's grandfather telling him that in order to finish it Edward Sterling had ventured so far into the icy wastes under the midnight sun that he'd had to be brought back more dead than alive from a place without a name, and had died in Stargrave almost as soon as he'd finished the book. "What did he find?" Ben had wanted to know.
    His grandfather had gazed hard at him, looking like himself reflected in a distorting mirror — withered, pale, his limbs stiffening into unfamiliar shapes — and Ben had wondered if Edward Sterling had looked like that too. "One day you'll know," his grandfather had said.
    Ben gathered himself like a swimmer and slipped quickly out of bed. His aunt was snoring so loudly she must be fast asleep. Nevertheless he left the light above the stairs switched off as he tiptoed down to the front room. The house stood in the dimness between two streetlamps, and the houses opposite were unlit, but he was just able to