The Fall of Light by Niall Williams

Author:Niall Williams [WILLIAMS, NIALL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780446569439
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-10-31T04:00:00+00:00

4

He was in a corridor. There was timber flooring and it creaked beneath his foot. He heard the noise travel and listened in its aftermath for any response. But there was none. He brought the second foot inside and stood there, growing accustomed to the quiet, listening within it to hear the sounds of sleeping. He moved down the corridor then. A pulse in his brain beat and he seemed to hear it along with another in his neck. He paused to still them and failed and moved on. He came to the first of the doors and pressed himself flatly against it, his ear and the palms of his two hands against the timber. Shut-eyed, he listened. Then he moved farther down the hallway to the next door. With each he did the same, but it was no use. He could not tell. He turned and arched his head back and leaned against the wall and his chest heaved. The moonlight shone on him. He waited. Then suddenly he turned and held the porcelain knob and opened the room door next to him. It made a small click. He held it tight and leaned in and smelled the strong powdered air of the room and saw in the rumpled bedclothes a woman large and a man small. Teige withdrew as silently as he had entered. He moved down the way to the next door. This time he squeezed the lock back and there was no click. The moment the door was only slightly ajar he knew it was hers. He was informed by some instinct not attributable simply to scent or sound or sight. He knew, and stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

She was lying on her side. The bedclothes were white. Her right hand lay on the pillow beside her head. Teige stood there. He heard his own breathing and held it and wished it might have stayed so and he a silent and invisible presence there, timeless, witness only to this creature sleeping. The room stilled about him once more. When his pulse had steadied he took a step closer to the bed, and then another. He beheld her. He beheld the way her fair hair fell there and how her eyelashes quivered in sleep, how her lips were pursed. He studied the line of her nape, the delicacy of her ears. Such things. He did not move closer to touch her. He stayed there and the night passed on about him and the sleeping house rumbled sometimes and made airy noises and creaked with the traverse of ghosts and dreams. She moved in dreams of her own, too, and turned away from him and then back again, making small moans in her throat that Teige could not decipher as pleasure or pain. He matched the rhythm of his breathing with hers, and when he had achieved this he closed his eyes, and was so, and found a kind of peace in that union.

Time sped on.

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