About 6 minutes to read aloud.

On the longest night of the year, a girl called Ivy lay awake and listened to the dark.

It was the shortest day too, though nobody had thought to tell her that. Tea had come and gone before the sky had finished going properly blue, and now, hours later, the dark still pressed against her window as if it meant to stay there for good. She tried counting sheep. She tried breathing out for longer than she breathed in, the way her grandmother had taught her. Neither did any good, so she got up, wrapped the blanket round her shoulders like a cloak, and went to see what the garden looked like at this hour of the night, which she had never done before.

Frost had drawn feathers across the glass. She rubbed a clear patch with her sleeve and looked down at the lawn, silver under a moon that seemed close enough to touch.

That was when she saw him: an old man in a coat the colour of holly berries, standing quite still by the gate, looking up at the same moon she was looking at.

She should have been frightened, she thought afterwards, but she wasn't. She opened the window instead, letting in air so cold it made her eyes water, and called down to him.

'Is it always this dark?' she asked.

He looked up, unhurried, the way people look up who are not in the least surprised to be spoken to. 'Tonight is the darkest it gets,' he said. 'This is the longest night there is.'

'Forever?'

'No,' he said. 'Just tonight. Tomorrow will be a little shorter, and the day after that shorter still, though you'd need to watch closely to notice it happening. That's how it always goes. The dark reaches as far as it can, and then it starts letting go.'

Ivy thought about this for a moment. 'Why does it have to get this dark first?'

The old man considered the question as though nobody had asked it of him quite that way before. 'I don't know that it has to,' he said. 'But it does, every year, and every year the light comes back regardless. Some things are true whether or not we understand the reason for them.'

A fox crossed the lawn behind him, unhurried, its paws leaving neat prints in the frost. Somewhere in the hedge a robin shifted and settled again, and for a moment none of them, fox or robin or old man, made a sound.

'Will you still be here in the morning?' Ivy asked.

'No,' he said, 'but the morning will be, which is rather more use to you than I am.' He said it kindly, not as a joke, and Ivy found she believed him completely.

He turned to go, his coat catching what moonlight there was, then stopped and looked back up at her window. 'Go to sleep now,' he said. 'It's shorter already than it was an hour ago. You've simply outlasted the worst of it.'

Ivy watched him walk on down the lane until the dark took him, then shut the window, climbed back into bed and pulled the blanket to her chin. She was asleep before she had time to wonder whether she'd dreamed him.

When she woke, the room was grey, which she understood, without anyone telling her, to mean that morning was already on its way. The frost was still on the window, though the feathered patterns had shifted in the night, as if something had breathed on the glass while she slept. She lay listening to the house wake around her, a floorboard creaking, the kettle clinking downstairs, and thought that the old man had been right: the night hadn't lasted forever, however much it had felt as though it might.

She never told anyone about the man at the gate. Some things are for keeping, and she was fairly sure this was one of them.

Where this story comes from

The longest night in this story is the winter solstice, the point in December when daylight is at its shortest before it begins to lengthen again. British midwinter customs marked that turn long before Christmas existed as a festival, and the history is covered in more detail on Midwinter Before Christmas. Anyone wanting another quiet story for the same evening can find one on the Christmas Stories to Read Aloud page.