Read Nightfall for Free Online

go back to being a professional now. Time to approach this hill like a scholar, not a treasure-hunter or a journalist.
    Let Balik take his photographs, first, from every side. Then take the soil samples at the surface level, and put in the first marker stakes, and go through all the rest of the standard preliminary procedures.
    Then a trial trench, a bold shaft right through the hill, to give us some idea of what we’ve really got here.
    And then, she told herself, we’ll peel this hill layer by layer. We’ll take it apart, carving away each stratum to look at the one below it, until we’re down to virgin soil. And by the time we’re done with that, she vowed, we’ll know more about the prehistory of Kalgash than all my predecessors put together have been able to learn since archaeologists first came here to Beklimot to dig.

[6]
    Kelaritan said, “We’ve arranged everything for your inspection of the Tunnel of Mystery, Dr. Sheerin. If you’ll be down in front of your hotel in about an hour, our car will pick you up.”
    “Right,” Sheerin said. “See you in about an hour.”
    The plump psychologist put down the phone and stared solemnly at himself in the mirror opposite his bed.
    The face that looked back at him was a troubled one. He seemed so wasted and haggard that he tugged at his cheeks to assure himself that they were still there. Yes, there they were,his familiar fleshy cheeks. He hadn’t lost an ounce. The haggardness was all in his mind.
    Sheerin had slept badly—had scarcely slept at all, so it seemed to him now—and yesterday he had only picked at his food. Nor did he feel in the least hungry now. The thought of going downstairs for breakfast had no appeal whatever. That was an alien concept to him, not to feel hungry.
    Was the bleakness of his mood, he wondered, the result of his interviews with Kelaritan’s hapless patients yesterday?
    Or was he simply terrified of going through the Tunnel of Mystery?
    Certainly seeing those three patients hadn’t been easy. It was a long time since he’d done any actual clinical work, and obviously his sojourn among the academics at Saro University had attenuated the professional detachment that allows members of the healing arts to confront the ill without being overwhelmed by compassion and sorrow. Sheerin was surprised at that, how tenderhearted he seemed to have become, how thin-skinned.
    That first one, Harrim, the longshoreman—he looked tough enough to withstand anything. And yet fifteen minutes of Darkness on his trip through the Tunnel of Mystery had reduced him to such a state that merely to relive the trauma in memory sent him into babbling hysteria. How terribly sad that was.
    And then the other two, in the afternoon—they had been in even worse shape. Gistin 190, the schoolteacher, that lovely frail woman with the dark, intelligent eyes—she hadn’t been able to stop sobbing for a moment, and though she was able to speak clearly and well, at least in the beginning, her story had degenerated into mere incoherent blurtings within a few sentences. And Chimmilit 97, the high school athlete, obviously a perfect physical specimen—Sheerin wasn’t going quickly to forget how the boy had reacted to the sight of the afternoon sky when Sheerin opened the blinds in his room. There was Onos blazing away in the west, and all that huge handsome boy could manage to say was, “The Darkness—the Darkness—” before he turned away and tried to scuttle down under his bed!
    The Darkness—the Darkness—
    And now, Sheerin thought gloomily, it’s
my
turn to take a ride in the Tunnel of Mystery.
    Of course, he could simply refuse. There was nothing in his consulting contract with the Municipality of Jonglor that required him to risk his sanity. He’d be able to render a valid enough opinion without actually sticking his neck into peril.
    But something in him rebelled at such timidity. His professional pride, if nothing else, was pushing him toward the