Read Online The Last Revelation Of Gla'aki by Ramsey Campbell - Free Book Online Page A

very much."
    "The season's over for this year." As if she were reassuring a disappointed child Mrs Berry said "We promise you won't miss them."
    "I appreciated your husband's help," Fairman said to leave his peevishness behind. "Please do thank him for me."
    He wasn't expecting this to be met with a stare so distant he couldn't identify an expression. "Dream well, then," she said as he moved away. "Try and lose yourself."
    He wondered if the state of the man in the booth at the zoo was her excuse for seeking solace elsewhere. In any case she mustn't look to Fairman. Once he'd checked the safe he hurried to the bathroom. He couldn't hear a sound in the hotel, and the silence seemed so expectant that it made him even more conscious of the noise he tried to muffle by flushing the toilet. As soon as he was able he retreated like a culprit to his room.
    He left the first book in the darkness of the safe and lined up the others in front of the mirror before opening the second volume, On the Purposes of Night. "What is daylight but the ally of brutish creation, the progenitor of mindless growth? Let the night be celebrated as friend to the true possessors of the world. Let its powers be roused that it may reveal the nocturnal truth which lies even within men."
    Did this refer to dreams? It would take more than a book to rouse any within him, although while reading he did feel as if the night was growing not just darker but more substantial—the fog, of course. The book wasn't capable of persuading him that the night was pregnant with secrets, let alone teeming with creatures best left unseen, but he was quite glad to reach the final page. He'd finished the third volume last night—however little of it he recalled, he felt as though its burden had lodged somewhere in his head—and so he turned to Of the Secrets of the Stars, the fourth book. "Cry out the names of the ancient constellations ..."
    The night was always beyond the sky, however bright the sun strove to appear. The infinite darkness was older than time, and the stars were simply playthings that its avatar had shaped and scattered in patterns to which the universe was in the process of reverting. Fairman understood this much; at least, he saw the meaning of the words, although the further he progressed the more he felt that the book was a kind of reverie, incomprehensible to a waking mind. By the time he reached the end he was little better than asleep, and the reflections of the trinity of volumes in the mirror made him feel as if the books were dreaming of companionship. He laid the books to rest in the safe and stumbled to the window.
    The old folk in the shelter raised their heads as he dragged up the sash. The beach was still peopled as well. Most of the occupants were supine, but Fairman saw a woman stand up and waddle away from the edge of the sea, leaving a rubbery cushion on which she'd been seated. The roundish object glistened and stirred feebly, having been caught by a wave. As Fairman shut the window and turned away, unenlivened by the stagnant smell he'd let into the room, he saw a man carrying a large plastic bucket down a ramp to the beach.
    Fairman went to bed expecting to be kept awake by thoughts of the books, but the vision that was waiting for him to lie down in the dark came from somewhere earlier. Once more he was beset by the image of the stone cocoon, but this time he imagined the end of its wanderings. He saw it blaze like an enormous coal as it plummeted into the depths of a forest, blasting a crater many times its size and setting fire to the surrounding trees. He had to watch as it cooled and split open, a spectacle too reminiscent of the hatching of an egg. Through the fissure he glimpsed a whitish spongy lump that must be some species of face, since eyes reared up from it to peer in all directions from the crack in the meteor—two eyes and then another. He managed to avoid imagining its size until the meteor tumbled apart in huge fragments