The Meaning of Night Read Online Free Page A

be.
    2:

    Nominatim?

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    I had slept fitfully, ever aware of the soft, warm mass of Bella’s body curled up
    against mine as I drifted in and out of wakefulness. Though pricked by occasional
    anxieties, I remained confident that no one could connect me to my victim, and that I had
    completed my experiment in murder undetected. Having consciously subdued all thought
    of the man as a man, I found I had attained to a kind of indifference to the enormity of the
    act I had so recently committed. I was guilty, and yet I experienced no feeling of guilt. It
    was true that, when I allowed my eyes to close, images of the red-haired stranger would
    rise up before me; yet even in this twilight state, between sleeping and waking, when
    conscience may often call up horrors from the depths of our being, I continued to feel no
    revulsion at what I had done. Later, it also struck me as odd that my mind did not keep
    returning to the fatal moment itself, when the knife had entered the yielding flesh of my
    victim. Instead, I would see myself following the man along a dark and deserted
    thoroughfare. From time to time we would emerge into a ring of sickly yellow light
    thrown out from an open door set in a tall windowless building. Then we would proceed
    once more into darkness. Time and again, when uncertain sleep came, I would find
    myself in this perpetual procession through dark and nameless streets. Not once did I see
    his face: his back was always towards me as we walked slowly from one oasis of
    jaundiced light to another. Then, just before daybreak, as I fell back once more into
    half-sleep, I saw him again.

    We were in a small skiff, which he was rowing lazily down a placid river on a
    silent, heat-heavy afternoon. I lay in the rear of the vessel, my eyes fixed on the muscles
    of his back as they flexed beneath his coat with each pull on the oars. Incongruously, on
    such a day, his clothes were those in which he had died on that cold October evening,
    including his muffler and tall black hat. As we entered a narrow channel, he let the oars
    rest on the surface of the water, turned to face me, and smiled.

    But it was not the face of my anonymous victim. It was the face of Phoebus
    Rainsford Daunt, the man whose life I was studying so assiduously to extinguish.

    Leaving Bella asleep, placing only a gentle kiss on her flushed cheek by way of
    good-bye, I made my way to my rooms. The sky was beginning to lighten over the
    waking city, and the sounds of Great Leviathan stirring were all about me: the rattle of
    milk cans; a moaning drove of bullocks being driven through the empty street; the early
    cries of ‘Fresh watercress!’ as I approached Farringdon-market. As the church clocks
    strike six, I stop at a coffee-stall near the market entrance to warm my hands, for it is a
    sharp morning; the man looks at me indignantly, but I face him down, and he retires
    mumbling deprecations.

    On reaching Temple Bar I considered strolling over once again to the scene of my
    late encounter with the red-haired man, to satisfy myself that all was well; instead I chose
    breakfast and a change of linen. At the corner of Temple-street, Whitefriars, I mounted
    the narrow flight of dark stairs that led up from the street to the top floor of the house in
    which I lodged, from there entering a long, wainscotted sitting-room under the eaves.

    I lived alone, my only visitor being the woman, Mrs Grainger, who came
    periodically to undertake some modest domestic chores. My work-table was littered with
    papers and note-books; a once handsome, but now faded, Turkey carpet covered most of
    the floor, and about the room were scattered several items of furniture brought from my
    mother’s house in Dorset. From this apartment a door led off, first to a narrow bedroom
    lit by a small skylight, and then, beyond, to an even smaller space – really no more than a
    closet –