Midnight Sun by Ramsey Campbell

shut, Ben sent himself out of the school.
    There was no mist. The first star hung low in the sky as if it had crystallised out of the deep blue. The star was so bright, and the unblemished sky so glassy, that he felt as if the blue was about to shatter and let the starry night appear. The roofs of buildings and the bare branches of trees looked as though they had been outlined with a razor, and to Ben that seemed a sign that everything was about to grow still clearer. Buildings and trees were absolutely motionless against the sky, which appeared to solidify as it darkened, holding fast the luminous peaks of roofs, the sunlit tips of branches. As he walked home the glowing branches turned grey, and he remembered this was the shortest day of the year.
    When his aunt opened the front door, a draught followed her in. Ben heard pine-needles scattering on the carpet, and fetched the brush and dustpan from beneath the kitchen sink. As he cleared up the needles he saw his reflection in a silvery globe on the tree, his head swelling as he shuffled closer on his knees, until he thought he looked like a tadpole held by ice. His grandfather had had to be pleaded with to decorate the trees they brought into the house from Sterling Forest; he'd seemed to believe that the trees, or whatever they signified, were enough.
    His aunt gave him sausages and Christmas pudding for dinner, and found a carol concert on the radio to accompany the meal. Afterwards, while she put away the dishes, she sang along with the last carols as if she hoped Ben would. However, when he told her well before his bedtime that he was going up to his room she only said "I'm here if you need me."
    He didn't switch on the light above the stairs as he climbed towards the stars which he could see beyond his bedroom. From his window he gazed at the stars, which barely pierced the blackness in whose depths galaxies floated like snowflakes. The blackness was no more than a hint of the limitless dark in which the world was less than a speck of dust. He imagined seeing a star move as the Christmas story said it had. The idea disturbed him, and he didn't think he wanted to know why. He switched on his bedroom light and knelt in front of the photograph.
    But praying was no use: the words meant nothing to him. Had the headmaster robbed them of meaning, or had it been Father Flynn? Even the photograph unnerved Ben — not so much the frozen smiles of the women as something about the eyes of his father and grandfather and even his own eyes. He turned off the light so as not to see the eyes, and returned to the window.
    A star blinked, and then another. For a moment he was sure he was about to see one move. Downstairs his aunt had tuned the radio to a comedy show to which he often listened with her. He thought she was turning the volume higher in case that would tempt him to join her, but the signature tune might as well have been trying to reach him from another world, because he'd understood at last how reassuring the sight of a moving star would be: it would mean that however dark and cold and empty it appeared to be, infinity cared.
    He felt as if he was falling off the world. The endless dark seemed to be reaching for him with its swarm of stars, with light which, felt as bleak as the space between them and which might be older than the world. He thought he could feel how the light was travelling towards him, unthinkably swift and yet slower than snowflakes when set against the expanse of time. All at once he was sure the headmaster was right to suggest that the truth which the crib made appealing was far more terrible and awesome. He realised he was shivering uncontrollably when he shoved himself away from the window, towards the light-switch. But the dark and the stars were in the mirror too, and so was he, beside the photograph. The dark was gazing back at him out of his own eyes.
    The sight paralysed him. He thought of the eyes of the old man with the drum in Edward Sterling's