Nightfall Read Online Free Page B

Darkness—Darkness—you can’t imagine what it was like—you can’t
imagine
—how black it was—how
black
—the Darkness—the Darkness—”
    Suddenly Harrim shuddered, and great racking sobs came from him, almost like convulsions.
    “The Darkness—oh, God, the Darkness—!”
    “Easy, man. There’s nothing to be afraid of here. Look at the sunlight! Four suns today, Harrim. Easy, man.”
    “Let me take care of this,” Kelaritan said. He had come rushing to the bedside when the sobbing began. A needle glinted in his hand. He touched it to Harrim’s burly arm, and there was a brief whirr of sound. Harrim grew calm almost at once. He slumped back against his pillow, smiling glassily. —“We need to leave him now,” said Kelaritan.
    “But I’ve hardly only begun to—”
    “He won’t make any sense again for hours, now. We might as well go for lunch.”
    “Lunch, yes,” Sheerin said halfheartedly. To his own surprise he felt almost no appetite at all. He could scarcely remember a time when he had felt that way. “And he’s one of your strongest ones?”
    “One of the most stable, yes.”
    “What are the others like, then?”
    “Some are completely catatonic. Others need sedation at least half the time. In the first stage, as I said, they don’t want to come in out of the open. When they emerged from the Tunnel they seemed to be in perfect order, you understand, except that they had developed instant claustrophobia. They would refuse to go into buildings—any buildings, including palaces, mansions, apartment houses, tenements, huts, shacks, lean-tos, and tents.”
    Sheerin felt a profound sense of shock. He had done his doctoral work in darkness-induced disorders. That was why they had asked him to come here. But he had never heard of anything as extreme as this. “They wouldn’t go indoors at all? Where’d they sleep?”
    “In the open.”
    “Did anyone try to
force
them inside?”
    “Oh, they did, of course they did. Whereupon these people went into violent hysterics. Some of them even became suicidal—they’d run up to a wall and hit their heads against it, things like that. Once you did get them inside, you couldn’t keep them there without a straitjacket and a good stiff injection of some strong sedative.”
    Sheerin looked at the big longshoreman, who was sleeping now, and shook his head.
    “The poor devils.”
    “That was the first phase. Harrim’s in the second phase now, the claustrophilic one. He’s adapted to being here, and the whole syndrome has swung completely around. He knows that it’s safe in the hospital: bright lights all the time. But even though he can see the suns shining through the window he’s afraid to go
outside.
He thinks it’s dark out there.”
    “But that’s absurd,” Sheerin said. “It’s
never
dark out there.”
    The instant he said it, he felt like a fool.
    Kelaritan rubbed it in all the same, though. “We all realize that, Dr. Sheerin. Any sane person does. But the trouble withthe people who have undergone trauma in the Tunnel of Mystery is that they are no longer sane.”
    “Yes. So I gather,” said Sheerin shamefacedly.
    “You can meet some of our other patients later today,” Kelaritan said. “Perhaps they’ll provide you with some other perspectives on the problem. And then tomorrow we’ll take you over to see the Tunnel itself. We have it closed down, of course, now that we know the difficulties, but the city fathers are very eager to find some way to reopen it. The investment, I understand, was immense. But we should have lunch first, yes, Doctor?”
    “Lunch, yes,” said Sheerin once again, even less enthusiastically than before.

[4]
    The great dome of the Saro University Observatory, rising majestically to dominate the forested slopes of Observatory Mount, glinted brilliantly in the light of late afternoon. The small red orb of Dovim had already slipped beyond the horizon, but Onos was still high in the west, and Trey and