Midnight Sun by Ramsey Campbell Read Free Book Online Page B

get them."
    The crib was the size and approximately the shape of a rabbit hutch. The cradle in the straw was surrounded by three identical sheep from a toy farmyard, two plaster shepherds and a Virgin Mary whose hair a trace of dust was greying. A star cut out of silver paper hung above the scene, one of its points drooping. The cradle and the swaddled baby it contained were too big for their entourage, and Dominic had claimed to Ben that if you picked the baby up it would cry ma-ma. When Dominic shuffled alongside the crib now, however, he emitted a loud sniff. "Use your handkerchief, boy," the headmaster snarled, low enough to suggest grudging approval of Dominic's performance. There were just three girls in front of Ben, sniffing almost in unison, and suddenly Ben knew that he would be the first child to fail to weep, unable to respond to the crib whose incongruities seemed to have been arranged as a test of faith. It wasn't just those that troubled him, it was the sight of the headmaster glaring across the crib. If what the crib represented were real, how could it need someone like Mr O'Toole to terrorise people into believing in it? How could it bear to have anyone act that way on its behalf? The questions frightened him even more than the headmaster did, and so he began, rather to his own bewilderment, to weep as he came abreast of the crib.
    At first he thought he was weeping only for his family and from knowing he would never again spend Christmas with them. He remembered the snap of crackers as the family formed a chain with them around the laden table and pulled them all at once; his grandfather saying "To the season" as everyone raised a glass of wine; the long evenings when the boy would sit on his mother's lap by the fire while she and his grandmother sang carols that seemed somehow to embody the time of year, the icy sparkling of the vast night over Stargrave, the wind rushing down from the moors and through the forest and fluttering softly at the windows — and then he found himself observing himself. Perhaps this was the only way he could deal with the confusion of his thoughts. He felt as if he was looking down on the crib and the headmaster and himself from somewhere too high for his emotions to reach. This new clarity seemed to unlock his mind, and with disconcerting vividness he remembered learning to walk, his father and grandfather dancing out of reach and leading him deeper into the forest, their faces proud and a little nervous. The family had looked like that when he'd begun to realise that Father Christmas was a myth, but had there been a secret for him to realise in the forest? A sudden panic which he didn't want to understand jarred him back to full awareness of the crib, and for a moment it seemed to be the source of his panic rather than any kind of a reassurance.
    During the last few days of that school term he felt as if whatever he had almost glimpsed was lurking at the edge of his thoughts. The days were growing colder, not with the clinging chill of mist but with a relentlessness which made him feel like frozen bones imperfectly insulated by flesh as he walked between his aunt's house and the school. He tried to distract himself with schoolwork and with the token party which Mr O'Toole conceded to the school — apparently at the request of the teachers — on the last day of term, but the schoolwork seemed as much of a game as the party. Wearing a paper hat and consuming sandwiches and lemonade and playing battleships with Dominic in squared exercise books all felt like putting off the inevitable, and he was afraid to know what it was.
    "Enjoy your Christmas," their teacher said when the final bell rang, "but don't eat so much you won't fit behind your desks." Some of the children gave him Christmas cards, and Ben wished he had thought to bring one, not least so that he could linger in the classroom. But his aunt was waiting at the gates. Taking deep breaths and pinching his coat collar