The Midnight Express

It was a battered old book , bound in read buckram. He found it , when he was twelve years old , on an upper shelf to his father's library ;and against all the rules, he took it to his bedroom to read by candlelight, when the rest of the rambling old Elizabethan house was flooded with darkness. That was how young Mortin always thought of it . His own room was a little isolated cell in which , stolen candle ends he could keep the surrounding darkness at Bay, while everyone else had surrendered to sleep and allowed the outer night to come flooding in .By contrast with those unconscious ones his elders ,it made him feel intensely alive in every nerve and fibre of his young brain The ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall below the beating of his own heart the long drawn rhythmical 'ah' of the sea on the distant coast ,all filled him with a sense of overwhelming mystery and as he read , the soft thud of a blinded moth striking the wall above the candle , would make him star listen like a creature of the woods at the sound of a cracking twig
                                The battered old book had the strangest facination for him though he never quite grasped the thread of the story . It was called the The Midnight Express ,and there was one illustration,on the fiftieth page ,at which he could never bear to look as it frightened him
                                        To be continued..