Midnight is a Lonely Place by Barbara Erskine Read Free Book Online Page A

There at last her groping fingers encountered the tiers of stacked logs, their ends sharp, angled, their sides rough and rounded. Cautiously she pulled at one. The whole pile stirred and she leaped back. ‘From the top, you idiot.’ She found she had actually spoken out loud and the sound of her voice was somehow comforting. Straightening a little, she raised her hands, groping for the top of the pile and one by one she reached down four logs. That was all she could carry. Clutching them against her chest she stumbled out of the shed backwards and retraced her steps towards the corner of the wall. Once there the stream of cheerful light from the hall guided her back to the front door. She almost ran inside and throwing the logs down on the floor she turned and slammed the door shut, shooting the bolt home.
    It was only as she looked down at the logs, covered in sawdust and cobwebs that she realised how frightened she had been. ‘You idiot,’ she said again. Shaking her head ruefully she began to pull off her anorak. What had she been afraid of? The silence? The wood? The dark?
    She had been afraid of the dark as a child in her own little bedroom next to Anne’s in their Herefordshire farmhouse. Night after night she would lie awake, not daring to move, hardly daring to breathe, her eyes darting here and there around the room, looking – looking for what? There was never anything there. Never anything frightening, just that awful, overwhelming loneliness, the fear that everyone else had left the house and abandoned her. Or died. Had her mother guessed in the end, or had she confessed? She couldn’t remember now, but she did remember that her mother had given her a night light. It was a china owl, a white porcelain bird with great orange claws and huge enigmatic eyes. ‘You’ll scare the child to death with that thing,’ her father, a country doctor with no time for cosseting his own family, had scoffed when her mother produced it from the attic, but Kate had loved it. When the small night-light candle was lit inside it the whole bird glowed with creamy whiteness and its eyes came alive. It was a kind bird; a wise bird; and it watched over her and kept her company and kept the spooks at bay. When she was older the owl had remained unlit, an ornament now, but her fear, tightly rationalised and controlled, had remained. Sometimes, even when she was a student at university, she had lain in her room in the hall of residence, the sheet pulled up to her chin, her fingers clutched in the pillow she was hugging to her chest as she stared at the dark square of the window. The fear had gone now. Only one hint of it remained. She always opened the curtains at night. With them closed the darkness gave her claustrophobia. Jon had laughed at her, but he had conceded the open curtain. He liked it open because he loved to see the dawn creeping across the London roofs as the first blackbirds began to whistle from the television aerials across the city.
    Well, that Kate was grown up now, and on her own and not afraid. Pulling herself together, she gathered up the logs and, walking through into the sitting room, she stacked them neatly in the fireplace beside the stove. Opening it again she peered in. The embers were very low. She looked at the logs thoughtfully. If she put one of those in it would just smother the small remaining sparks and put the whole thing out. She had no fire lighters. What she needed was newspaper and some dry, small twigs to rebuild the fire. She stared round.
    In the kitchen the vegetable rack in the corner was lined with newspaper. She grabbed it, showering a residue of mud from long gone potatoes over the kitchen boards. There was enough to crumple into four good-sized wads. Stuffing them in around the log she lit it and closing the doors, slid open the damper. The sudden bright blaze was enormously satisfying but she held her breath. Would the paper burn and then leave the log to go out?
    She glanced over her