On the Ninth Night

 

2nd of January, 1602

 

EARLY IN THE morning, as in every other morning of Creation, dawn creeps across the horizon, but in no other morning in all the numberless days of this earth has there come any dawn like this. Its rays are not golden or white, not the glow of a summer’s day or the sickly paleness of a winter one, but rather something alien and new.

When the sunlight comes it is dark red; crimson. It is the colour of hopelessness and hate. It casts a scarlet shadow upon the land, rendering everything hellish, painting the world in the colours of Hades.

You wake into an eerie dream-state, the room illuminated by this strange, savage light and you rise at once, stricken by panic and by the worst of suspicions. You find the house already up, abuzz with the sounds of fear, of alarm at the arrival of this new state of being.

You call for your children and they all three come to you and somehow you find yourselves outside, looking up into the suddenly unfamiliar sky, wondering and much afeared. You hold them close to you.

“Father’s coming home,” says Hamnet, with unshakeable conviction. “He is coming home with many others. They who are like him and yet different.”

“How can you be certain of that? Hamnet? How do you know?”

“Because,” he says, the boy oddly proud, despite the nature of this emergency. “Because I saw it in a dream. Last night. My first since...”

You look at him curiously, knowing that what he says next will possess some terrible, although as yet unguessed at, significance.

He shrugs, with a child’s dreadful insouciance. “Since the day,” he says, “when I ought to have died.”