Midnight Sun Read Online Free Page B

distinguish Edward Sterling's book, its spine darker than those of its companions on the shelf. He closed his fingers around the spine, whose binding made him think of old skin, and squatted by the gap between the curtains.
    The book fell open at the frontispiece, which showed a wizened old man sitting crosslegged and beating a drum with the palms of his hands. In the dimness his eyes resembled globes of black ice. Ben had often thought that he must have been one of the magicians who were supposed to beat drums for months to keep the midnight sun alight, but now the eyes unnerved him. He began to turn the pages, peering at the chunks of unrhymed verse which the book said was magic poetry but which he had never been able to follow. He supposed he would have to turn on the light when he found what he was looking for, though the stars tonight seemed almost bright enough to read by. Indeed, he was beginning to distinguish the separate lines of print on the pages. He felt as if illumination was reaching for him. He didn't know how long he crouched there, but he was sure he was about to be able to read the words and what they had to tell him when he heard his aunt wailing his name.
    She ran downstairs clumsily, switching on lights. She must have found his bed empty while he'd been so engrossed in gazing at the book that he hadn't heard her get up. When she barged into the room, grabbing wildly at the light-switch, he wobbled to his feet. "I couldn't sleep, Auntie. I only wanted —"
    He wasn't sure how to continue, but she appeared not to be listening; she was staring grey-faced at the book in his hands as if it mattered more than anything he could say. He leaned it against the boys' adventure annuals on the shelf and headed for the door as she stepped aside like a wardress.
    The guilt of having upset her again kept him awake almost until dawn; but when she wakened him for school she was smiling as if the day had disposed of the night. He felt better at once because she did. If his reading the book bothered her, he'd wait until she was out of the house.
    But that evening, when he sneaked into the front room for a surreptitious glance at the picture of the shaman with the drum, he found the annuals were alone on the shelf. He ran into the kitchen, where his aunt was chopping vegetables. "Auntie, where's my book?"
    She glanced at him with a casualness which didn't begin to fool him. "I couldn't have been thinking, Ben. A woman came collecting books for some charity, and I didn't like to let her go away empty-handed. Never mind, you've still got the photograph I gave you. It was only an old book."

    FOUR

    In the weeks that followed she tried to make it up to him. On Saturdays, shopping in Norwich, she kept showing him the oldest parts of the town, cobbled streets where muddles of houses seemed about to tumble downhill. On Sundays after church she often took him to the coast, where she played timid football with him on the stony beaches or walked with him along cliff paths whose seaward edges smoked with windblown sand. Once she took him to the highest point on the coast, a token hill a few hundred feet above the sea at Sheringham. He gazed at the grassy landscape which was almost as flat as the sea, and wished the day were already tomorrow, because he'd realised how he might track down a copy of the book. The father of one of the boys in his class at school was a bookseller.
    The boy's name was Dominic, and Ben knew little more about him. He seemed not to have any close friends — certainly not Peter and Francis and Christopher, who let Ben join in their schoolyard games, such as they were. Peter and Francis punched each other several times daily and made faces at each other in the classroom to try and get their classmates hit for giggling. Christopher had saved Ben from that on his very first day by faking a coughing fit to cover up Ben's fit of mirth, and the next day Francis had bitten a chocolate bar in two and given Ben the