Read The Horses of the Night for Free Online

myself laugh. It was an inward sound. I was so cold it hurt the bones of my limbs, my body aching with the cold, and I was laughing! This wasn’t a game, now, I told myself. This wasn’t play. People died like this.
    Thirty seconds, and counting. The society columnists and the critics, the heiresses and the wealth-fatigued men of leisure would be surprised if they could see this: Stratton Fields at play. Drowning.
    But it was sport, I told myself. It was fun, and nothing more. When my head broke the surface I could see nothing. The air was sweet. Sand needled me, and my lungs were shrinking into two leaden stones. My heart contracted into a smaller and tighter fist with each pulse. I blinked, and swam, sensing the direction of the shore.
    I let the waves lift me, buoying me toward the beach. A wave tumbled itself, and my limbs along with it, but the danger and the greatest part of the pleasure was past. I body surfed, catching up with another wave that warped, angled me, and then the sand bit my knees and I erected myself panting, out of the foam.
    A wedge of water nearly cut my legs out from under me. The risk, the salt on my lips. It was all was so delicious, so unlike the rest of my life.
    Another wave tackled me, and I staggered and stalked my way from the sea slowly, as though reluctant to leave. I laughed at myself, gasping, dripping. Fun, I told myself, should not be so much work—or danger. I worked at the zipper of my wetsuit with stiff fingers.
    The fog was streaky, rolling past me, and seemingly through me, like a second, diaphanous surf. My fingers stopped unzipping the suit. My breath caught.
    I saw something.
    I told myself that I must be mistaken. No one ever swam this surf—no one but me. It was too dangerous. But there could be no mistake. There was something out there.
    I peered, striding into the wash of the waves. The fog and darkness obscured whatever it was, then blotted it entirely. But my instinct could not be denied: It was a human being.
    There was someone out there.
    I was in the water again, swimming hard as the fog closed in. I could see only a stroke or two ahead. I called out, but my voice was soaked in the hiss of the surf and the mat of the fog.
    I plunged ahead, swimming steadily, until I reached the place where I was convinced I had seen—what? What had I seen? Surely not a person, I tried to convince myself. Surely it was a seal, or a bit of ship’s spar, or a life jacket fallen from a fishing boat. Perhaps it had been nothing, an illusion.
    I called, wordlessly, my voice a universal: Are you there? Can you hear me?
    Am I alone?
    I was beyond the waves, the combers breaking behind me, somewhere beyond the fog wall. I felt the unease, the flickering anxiety that meant that the cold was even more dangerous than before. I was nearly spent.
    But I couldn’t abandon someone out here to drown. I called again.
    And this time there was an answering cry.
    It was a brief, evanescent sound, almost not a sound at all. Someone was even farther out, through the fog. Someone was calling, and it seemed in my fear for the life of this stranger that this human voice was calling my name, if indeed it was a human call and not the song of a gull somewhere beyond the ceiling of gray.
    I shuddered. My own fatigue clung to me. My own confusion drove me to wrestle upward, out of the water, in an attempt to see through the mist, and then fall back again.
    There was indeed a voice calling. It was a human voice, and it sounded familiar.
    Then I saw her.
    Far off, indistinct with distance, there was a woman in the water. Her head and one shoulder were all I could see. She called out to me again, and I could not be certain any longer that what was happening was real.
    When I kicked hard, fighting the water in her direction, she receded and grew farther away. I wanted to rescue this woman, but at the same time I was growing certain that I had suffered harm through lack of oxygen, or the cold.