Falling Hour by Geoffrey Morrison

Author:Geoffrey Morrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coach House Books

15.

The sky continued to darken and as it did so another thing happened in perfect and diametric opposition to it. Other lights got brighter. First a star – or more probably the planet Venus – and then another star, and another, each faint still in the navy-blue near-night, forbidden here beneath the dazzle of city lights to reach the gemlike purity I understood they might in country fields and distant places I had never been. The city lights themselves now made their appearance, windows once smoke-black now amber and see-through, Victorian houses repurposed as offices now emptied of workers and perfectly open to view: coat stands, desks, and monitors, many nondescript white waiting rooms with pictures of the sea. An insult, I always felt, in landlocked towns. The street lights now planted their cloudy yellow cones of light on their appointed intervals of sidewalk. Only the sepia-toned windows of the quartzite cubes remained opaque. There could have been hundreds of people inside. There could have been the devil, eating sinners in a vision of medieval hell. There could have been naked contorting bodies in a Boschian orgy scene. There could have been nothing, nothing at all, no rooms or floors or walls, nothing, like the inside of a pyramid already robbed, or perhaps like a real pyramid empty except for a couple of shafts pointing up to the sky for no clear purpose. Aligning, perhaps, with powerful stars. I hated these buildings, I feared them, I could not stop looking. But around them more and more lights were coming on. I thought I should surely see the lights of cars now, although I had not yet. I thought I should surely see, through the windows of the yellowbrick Victorian houses farther down the street that I knew to be homes and lived in, the silhouettes of people moving around, watching television, eating food. I saw the lights in those houses but as yet saw no silhouettes of people.

I had mentioned before the possibility of planes passing over. They would appear to me at this stage in the night – yes, now it was night, truly night – as a cluster of lights, a Southern Cross in motion, red, yellow, perhaps a blue-green, some blinking, some steady. It was technically possible. I had seen them up there before. But I had seen only one all this day, now night – and that had been early, before my phone died. I had not seen another plane any more than I had seen a car. And the shouts from distant streets I had not heard, despite predictions, nor had a group of teenagers come, or even a couple. I was walking now in the open field of grass I had looked upon at the start of my vigil and compared to the sea. I heard the blades of the grass rustling in a slight breeze. I could no longer see the blades well. I doubted they were steaming anymore. I would have been frightened if I saw they were still steaming after all this time.

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