EW is thrilled to offer an exclusive excerpt fromThe Last Days of Nightin advance of its August release.
The immolation occurred late on a Friday morning.
The lunchtime bustle was picking up as Paul descended from his office building onto the crowded street.
His hair, perfectly parted on the left, had just begun to recede into a gentle widows peak.
He looked older than his twenty-six years.
The Western Union man was attempting to untangle the two sets of wires.
He looked like a child flummoxed by enormous shoelaces.
Pauls mind was on coffee.
He hadnt determined which of the local coffeehouses he preferred.
There was the one to the north, along Walker.
And the slower-serving but more fashionable one, on Baxter, with the rooster on the door.
The air felt good against his cheeks.
He hadnt been outside yet that day.
Hed slept in his office the night before.
When he saw the first spark, he didnt immediately realize what was happening.
The workman grabbed hold of a wire and tugged.
Paul heard a popjust a quick, strange popas the man shuddered.
Paul would later remember seeing a flash, even if at the time he wasnt sure what it was.
The workman reached out for support, grasping another wire with his free hand.
This, Paul would come to understand, was the mans mistake.
Hed created a connection.
Hed become a live conductor.
And then both of the workmans arms jolted with orange sparks.
Broadway was the artery that fueled lower Manhattan.
A wealth heretofore unknown on the face of the earth was burbling up from beneath these very streets.
All eyes fixed on the man in the air.
A blue flame shot from his mouth.
The flame set fire to his hair.
His clothes burned off instantly.
He fell forward, his arms still wrapped around the wires.
His feet dangled against the ladder.
His body assumed the position of Jesus upon the cross.
The blue flame fired through his mouth and melted the skin from his bones.
No one had screamed yet.
Paul still wasnt even sure what he was watching.
He had seen violence before.
Hed grown up on a Tennessee farm.
Death and the dying were unspectacular sights along the Cumberland River.
But hed never seen anything like this.
Epochal seconds later, as the mans blood poured onto the teenage newsboys below, the screaming began.
A stampede of bodies fled the scene.
Grown men knocked into women.
The newsboys ran through the crowd, not heading anywhere in particular, simply running.
Trying to pull the charred flesh from their hair.
The horses reared on their haunches, kicking their legs into the sky.
Their hooves flew at the faces of their panicked owners.
The stallions shook at their reins, lurching forward and drawing the wheels toward the boys chest.
Paul was not aware of making the decision to lungehe simply did it.
He grabbed the boy by the shoulder, pulling him out of the road.
Paul used his coat sleeve to brush the dirt and blood from the childs face.
But before Paul could check him for injuries, the boy fled into the crowd again.
Paul sat down against a nearby telegraph pole.
He realized he was panting and tried to steady his breath as he rested in the dirt.
It was another ten minutes before the ringing of bells announced the arrival of the firemen.
Three horses pulled a water truck to a stop beside the grim scene.
A half dozen firemen in black-buttoned uniforms lifted their disbelieving eyes to the sky.
One reached instinctively for his steam-powered hose, but the rest simply gazed in horror.
This was like no fire theyd ever witnessed.
And the dark marvel of man-made lightning was as mysterious and incomprehensible as an Old Testament plague.
Paul sat transfixed for the forty-five minutes it took the fearful firemen to cut down the blackened body.
He took in every detail of what he saw, not to remember, but to forget.
Paul was an attorney.
And this was what his as yet brief career in the law had done to his brain.
He was comforted by minutiae.
His mortal fears could be assuaged only by an encyclopedic command of detail.
Paul was a professional builder of narratives.
He was a teller of concise tales.
There would be a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Stories reach conclusions, and then they go away.
Such is their desperately needed magic.
The properly assembled narrative would guard his mind from the terror of raw memory.
Even a true story is a fiction, Paul knew.
It is the comforting tool we use to organize the chaotic world around us into something comprehensible.
It is the cognitive machine that separates the wheat of emotion from the chaff of sensation.
The real world is overfull with incidents, brimming over with occurrences.
In our stories, we disregard most of them until clear reason and motivation emerge.
A good story could be put to no less dangerous a purpose.
As an attorney, the tales that Paul told were moral ones.
There existed, in his narratives, only the injured and their abusers.
The slandered and the liars.
The swindled and the thieves.
Paul constructed these characters painstakingly until the righteousness of his plaintiffor his defendantbecame overwhelming.
That was the business of Pauls stories: to present an undeniable view of the world.
And then to vanish, once the world had been so organized and a profit fairly earned.
Catalogued and boxed, stored for safekeeping.
All Paul had to do was to tell todays story to himself and it would disappear.
To revisit the images over and over in his head.
He bore a telegram.
Your presence is desired immediately, read the message.
Much to discuss in strictest confidence.
It was signed T. Edison.
From the Book, THE LAST DAYS OF NIGHT by Graham Moore.
Copyright 2016 by Graham Moore.
