All Other Nights by Dara Horn

Author:Dara Horn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: WWNorton
Published: 2009-09-04T04:00:00+00:00

4.

IT WAS PRECISELY TEN O’CLOCK ON MONDAY NIGHT AS JACOB approached Solomon’s Inn—half an hour early, but he couldn’t keep himself away. The night was cool, with a full moon and stars shivering in their places above the dirt road to the tavern on the edge of the woods. A few times along the way, he allowed himself to wonder what would happen, why she had invited him, what she might want from him, whether it really could be what he thought it might be. Trying to apply sense to anything in his life had become a useless exercise. Instead he trailed Abigail like an animal, following her scent.

When he came to the inn, he saw that the door was closed, and the few windows on the tavern level were shuttered and dark. The only light, other than the moon and the stars, came from two windows on the second floor, where lamps glowed behind drawn curtains. He took his watch out of his pocket and lit a match to check the time, hoping he wouldn’t have to wait long. To his dismay, it was still only a few minutes after ten o’clock. He stood outside the front door for a time, afraid to knock. He quickly grew restless, and wandered around the side of the bramble-covered lair until he was standing at the edge of the forest that backed up against the property. On a whim, he stepped into the woods.

The last time he had walked alone in the woods was in Virginia, when he was fleeing from Lottie, but it had been daylight then, and the plants and trees had been familiar even to a city boy like him—ordinary maples, oaks and elms, occupied by ordinary chipmunks and squirrels. But these woods were enchanted. He was standing in a corridor of towering trees that he couldn’t even identify, with heavy curtains of Spanish moss that hung down to his knees and swayed slightly in the cool night breeze, a shivering upside-down forest. The forest floor was a tangle of pale thorns and patches of black mud, and the air rattled with the voices of hidden crickets and croaking frogs. In the silver moonlight that seeped through the branches and vines, he saw a path on the ground between the brambles, leading to the brightness of a clearing just beyond the first few rows of trees. He followed it for about a dozen yards, and came upon a pond.

The pond was small, only about twenty yards wide, and surrounded by curtains of heavy moss. The gleaming pool of water lay on the forest floor like a mirror dropped by a giant, its surface gently rippled by the breeze and the occasional fallen leaf. He had barely emerged into the clearing when he heard a soft splash, and saw the water shiver as if shattered. He heard the frogs croaking; an animal must have jumped into the water. Despite his time sleeping in tents, he was still a city boy, and the suggestion of wild animals nearby unnerved him.

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