by Susan Cooper
“Turn that thing OFF!” Mrs Stanton yelled desperately from the sink. But though Mary, pouting, shut off the crackle and the buried music, the noise level changed very little. Somehow it never did when more than half the family was at home. Voices and laughter filled the long stone-floored kitchen as they sat round the scrubbed wooden table; the two Welsh collies, Raq and Ci, lay dozing at the far end of the room beside the fire. Will kept away from them; he could not have borne it if their own dogs had snarled at him. He sat quietly at tea — it was called tea if Mrs Stanton managed to produce it before five o’clock, supper if it was later, but it was always the same hearty kind of meal — and kept his plate and his mouth full of sausage to avoid having to talk. Not that anyone was likely to miss your talk in the cheerful babble of the Stanton family, especially when you were its youngest member.
Waving at him from the end of the table, his mother called, “What shall we have for tea tomorrow, Will?”
He said indistinctly, “Liver and bacon, please.”
James gave a loud groan.
“Shut up,” said Barbara, superior and sixteen. “It’s his birthday, he can choose.”
“But liver,” said James.
“Serves you right,” Robin said. “On your last birthday, if I remember right, we all had to eat that revolting cauliflower cheese.”
“I made it,” said Gwen, “and it wasn’t revolting.”
“No offence,” said Robin mildly. “I just can’t bear cauliflower. Anyway you take my point.”
“I do. I don’t know whether James does.”
Robin, large and deep-voiced, was the more muscular of the twins and not to be trifled with. James said hastily, “Okay, okay.”
“Double-ones tomorrow, Will,” said Mr Stanton from the head of the table. “We should have some special kind of ceremony. A tribal rite.” He smiled at his youngest son, his round, rather chubby face crinkling in affection.
Mary sniffed. “On my eleventh birthday, I was beaten and sent to bed.”
“Good heavens,” said her mother, “fancy you remembering that. And what a way to describe it. In point of fact you got one hard wallop on the bottom, and well-deserved, too, as far as I can recollect.”
“It was my birthday,” Mary said, tossing her pony-tail. “And I’ve never forgotten.”
“Give yourself time,” Robin said cheerfully. “Three years isn’t much.”
“And you were a very young eleven,” Mrs Stanton said, chewing reflectively.
“Huh!” said Mary. “And I suppose Will isn’t?”
For a moment everyone looked at Will. He blinked in alarm at the ring of contemplating faces, and scowled down into his plate so that nothing of him was visible except a thick slanting curtain of brown hair. It was most disturbing to be looked at by so many people all at once, or at any rate by more people than one could look at in return. He felt almost as if he were being attacked. And he was suddenly convinced that it could in some way be dangerous to have so many people thinking about him, all at the same time. As if someone unfriendly might hear. . . .
“Will,” Gwen said at length, “is rather an old eleven.”
“Ageless, almost,” Robin said. They both sounded solemn and detached, as if they were discussing some far-off stranger.
“Let up, now,” said Paul unexpectedly. He was the quiet twin, and the family genius, perhaps a real one: he played the flute and thought about little else. “Anyone coming to tea tomorrow, Will?”
“No. Angus Macdonald’s gone to Scotland for Christmas, and Mike’s staying with his grannie in Southall. I don’t mind.”
There was a sudden commotion at the back door, and a blast of cold air; much stamping, and noises of loud shivering. Max stuck his head into the room from the passage; his long hair was wet and white-starred. “Sorry I’m late, Mum, had to walk from the Common. Wow, you should see it out there — like a blizzard.” He looked at the blank row of faces, and grinned. “Don’t you know it’s snowing?”
Forgetting everything for a moment, Will gave a joyful yell and scrambled with James for the door. “Real snow? Heavy?”
“I’ll say,” said Max, scattering drops of water over them as he unwound his scarf. He was the eldest brother, not counting Stephen, who had been in the Navy for years and seldom came home. “Here.” He opened the door a crack, and the wind whistled through again; outside, Will saw a glittering white fog of fat snowflakes — no trees or bushes visible, nothing but the whirling snow. A chorus of protest came from the kitchen: “SHUT THAT DOOR!”
“There’s your ceremony, Will,” said his father. “Right on time.”
* * *
Much later, when he went to bed, Will opened the bedroom curtain and pressed his nose against the cold windowpane, and he saw the snow tumbling down even thicker than before. Two or three inches already lay on the sill, and he could almost watch the level rising as the wind drove more against the house. He could hear the wind, too, whining round the roof close above him, and in all the chimneys. Will slept in a slant-roof attic at the top of the old house; he had moved into it only a few months before, when Stephen, whose room it had always been, had gone back to his ship after a leave. Until then Will had always shared a room with James — everyone in the family shared with someone else. “But my attic ought to be lived in,” his eldest brother had said, knowing how Will loved it.
On a bookcase in one corner of the room now stood a portrait of Lieutenant Stephen Stanton, R.N., looking rather uncomfortable in dress uniform, and beside it a carved wooden box with a dragon on the lid, filled with the letters he sent Will sometimes from unthinkably distant parts of the world. They made a kind of private shrine.
The snow flurried against the window, with a sound like fingers brushing the pane. Again Will heard the wind moaning in the roof, louder than before; it was rising into a real storm. He thought of the tramp, and wondered where he had taken shelter. “The Walker is abroad . . . this night will be bad. . . .” He picked up his jacket and took the strange iron ornament from it, running his fingers round the circle, up and down the inner cross that quartered it. The surface of the iron was irregular, but though it showed no sign of having been polished it was completely smooth — smooth in a way that reminded him of a certain place in the rough stone floor of the kitchen, where all the roughness had been worn away by generations of feet turning to come round the corner from the door. It was an odd kind of iron: deep, absolute black, with no shine to it but no spot anywhere of discolouration or rust. And once more now it was cold to the touch; so cold this time that Will was startled to find it numbing his fingertips. Hastily he put it down. Then he pulled his belt out of his trousers, slung untidily as usual over the back of a chair, took the circle, and threaded it through like an extra buckle, as Mr Dawson had told him. The wind sang in the window-frame. Will put the belt back in his trousers and dropped them on the chair.
It was then, without warning, that the fear came.
The first wave caught him as he was crossing the room to his bed. It halted him stock-still in the middle of the room, the howl of the wind outside filling his ears. The snow lashed against the window. Will was suddenly deadly cold, yet tingling all over. He was so frightened that he could not move a finger. In a flash of memory he saw again the lowering sky over the spinney, dark with rooks, the big black birds wheeling and circling overhead. Then that was gone, and he saw only the tramp’s terrified face and heard his scream as he ran. For a moment, then, there was only a dreadful darkness in his mind, a sense of looking into a great black pit. Then the high howl of the wind died, and he was released.
He stood shaking, looking wildly round the room. Nothing was wrong. Everything was just as usual. The trouble, he told himself, came from thinking. It would be all right if only he could stop thinking and go to sleep. He pulled off his dressing gown, climbed into bed, and lay there looking up at the skylight in the slanting roof. It was covered grey with snow.
He switched off the small bedside lamp, and
the night swallowed the room. There was no hint of light even when his eyes had grown accustomed to the dark. Time to sleep. Go on, go to sleep. But although he turned on his side, pulled the blankets up to his chin, and lay there relaxed, contemplating the cheerful fact that it would be his birthday when he woke up, nothing happened. It was no good. Something was wrong.
Will tossed uneasily. He had never known a feeling like this before. It was growing worse every minute. As if some huge weight were pushing at his mind, threatening, trying to take him over, turn him into something he didn’t want to be. That’s it, he thought: make me into someone else. But that’s stupid. Who’d want to? And make me into what? Something creaked outside the half-open door, and he jumped. Then it creaked again, and he knew what it was: a certain floorboard that often talked to itself at night, with a sound so familiar that usually he never noticed it at all. In spite of himself, he still lay listening. A different kind of creak came from further away, in the other attic, and he twitched again, jerking so that the blanket rubbed against his chin. You’re just jumpy, he said to himself; you’re remembering this afternoon, but really there isn’t much to remember. He tried to think of the tramp as someone unremarkable, just an ordinary man with a dirty overcoat and worn-out boots; but instead all he could see once more was the vicious diving of the rooks. “The Walker is abroad. . . . ”Another strange crackling noise came, this time above his head in the ceiling, and the wind whined suddenly loud, and Will sat bolt upright in bed and reached in panic for the lamp.
The room was at once a cosy cave of yellow light, and he lay back in shame, feeling stupid. Frightened of the dark, he thought: how awful. Just like a baby. Stephen would never have been frightened of the dark, up here. Look, there’s the bookcase and the table, the two chairs and the window seat; look, there are the six little square-riggers of the mobile hanging from the ceiling, and their shadows sailing over there on the wall. Everything’s ordinary. Go to sleep.
He switched off the light again, and instantly everything was even worse than before. The fear jumped at him for the third time like a great animal that had been waiting to spring. Will lay terrified, shaking, feeling himself shake, and yet unable to move. He felt he must be going mad. Outside, the wind moaned, paused, rose into a sudden howl, and there was a noise, a muffled scraping thump, against the skylight in the ceiling of his room. And then in a dreadful furious moment, horror seized him like a nightmare made real; there came a wrenching crash, with the howling of the wind suddenly much louder and closer, and a great blast of cold; and the Feeling came hurtling against him with such force of dread that it flung him cowering away.
Will shrieked. He only knew it afterwards; he was far too deep in fear to hear the sound of his own voice. For an appalling pitch-black moment he lay scarcely conscious, lost somewhere out of the world, out in black space. And then there were quick footsteps up the stairs outside his door, and a voice calling in concern, and blessed light warming the room and bringing him back into life again.
It was Paul’s voice. “Will? What is it? Are you all right?”
Slowly Will opened his eyes. He found that he was clenched into the shape of a ball, with his knees drawn up tight against his chin. He saw Paul standing over him, blinking anxiously behind his dark-rimmed spectacles. He nodded, without finding his voice. Then Paul turned his head, and Will followed his looking and saw that the skylight in the roof was hanging open, still swaying with the force of its fall; there was a black square of empty night in the roof, and through it the wind was bringing in a bitter midwinter cold. On the carpet below the skylight lay a heap of snow.
Paul peered at the edge of the skylight frame. “Catch is broken — I suppose the snow was too heavy for it. Must have been pretty old anyway, the metal’s all rusted. I’ll get some wire and fix it up till tomorrow. Did it wake you ? Lord, what a horrible shock. If I woke up like that, you’d find me somewhere under the bed.”
Will looked at him in speechless gratitude, and managed a watery smile. Every word in Paul’s soothing, deep voice brought him closer back to reality. He sat up in bed and pulled back the covers.
“Dad must have some wire with that junk in the other attic,” Paul said. “But let’s get this snow out before it melts. Look, there’s more coming in. I bet there aren’t many houses where you can watch the snow coming down on the carpet.”
He was right: snowflakes were whirling in through the black space in the ceiling, scattering everywhere. Together they gathered what they could into a misshapen snowball on an old magazine, and Will scuttled downstairs to drop it in the bath. Paul wired the skylight back to its catch.
“There now,” he said briskly, and though he did not look at Will, for an instant they understood one another very well. “Tell you what, Will, it’s freezing up here — why don’t you go down to our room and sleep in my bed ? And I’ll wake you when I come up later — or I might even sleep up here if you can survive Robin’s snoring. All right?”
“All right,” Will said huskily. “Thanks.”
He picked up his discarded clothes — with the belt and its new ornament — and bundled them under his arm, then paused at the door as they went out, and looked back. There was nothing to see, now, except a dark damp patch on the carpet where the heap of snow had been. But he felt colder than the cold air had made him, and the sick, empty feeling of fear still lay in his chest. If there had been nothing wrong beyond being frightened of the dark, he would not for the world have gone down to take refuge in Paul’s room. But as things were, he knew he could not stay alone in the room where he belonged. For when they were clearing up that heap of fallen snow, he had seen something that Paul had not. It was impossible, in a howling snowstorm, for anything living to have made that soft unmistakable thud against the glass that he had heard just before the skylight fell. But buried in the heap of snow, he had found the fresh black wing-feather of a rook.
He heard the farmer’s voice again: This night will be bad. And tomorrow will be beyond imagining.
• Midwinter Day • He was woken by music. It beckoned him, lilting and insistent; delicate music, played by delicate instruments that he could not identify, with one rippling, bell-like phrase running through it in a gold thread of delight. There was in this music so much of the deepest enchantment of all his dreams and imaginings that he woke smiling in pure happiness at the sound. In the moment of his waking, it began to fade, beckoning as it went, and then as he opened his eyes it was gone. He had only the memory of that one rippling phrase still echoing in his head, and itself fading so fast that he sat up abruptly in bed and reached his arm out to the air, as if he could bring it back.
The room was very still, and there was no music, and yet Will knew that it had not been a dream.
He was in the twins’ room still; he could hear Robin’s breathing, slow and deep, from the other bed. Cold light glimmered round the edge of the curtains, but no one was stirring anywhere; it was very early. Will pulled on his rumpled clothes from the day before, and slipped out of the room. He crossed the landing to the central window, and looked down.
In the first shining moment he saw the whole strange-familiar world, glistening white; the roofs of the outbuildings mounded into square towers of snow, and beyond them all the fields and hedges buried, merged into one great flat expanse, unbroken white to the horizon’s brim. Will drew in a long, happy breath, silently rejoicing. Then, very faintly, he heard the music again, the same phrase. He swung round vainly searching for it in the air, as if he might see it somewhere like a flickering light.
“Where are you?”
It had gone again. And when he looked back through the window, he saw that his own world had gone with it. In that flash, everything had changed. The snow was there as it had been a moment before, but not piled now on roofs or stretching flat over lawns and fields. There were no roofs, there were no fields. There were only trees. Will was looking over a great white forest: a forest of massive trees, sturdy as towers and ancient as rock.
They were bare of leaves, clad only in the deep snow that lay untouched along every branch, each smallest twig. They were everywhere. They began so close to the house that he was looking out through the topmost branches of the nearest tree, could have reached out and shaken them if he had dared to open the window. All around him the trees stretched to the flat horizon of the valley. The only break in that white world of branches was away over to the south, where the Thames ran; he could see the bend in the river marked like a single stilled wave in this white ocean of forest, and the shape of it looked as though the river were wider than it should have been.
Will gazed and gazed, and when at last he stirred he found that he was clutching the smooth iron circle threaded onto his belt. The iron was warm to his touch.
He went back into the bedroom.
“Robin!” he said loudly. “Wake up!” But Robin breathed slowly and rhythmically as before, and did not stir.
He ran into the bedroom next door, the familiar small room that he had once shared with James, and shook James roughly by the shoulder. But when the shaking was done, James lay motionless, deeply asleep.
Will went out onto the landing again and took a long breath, and he shouted with all his might: “Wake up! Wake up, everyone!”
He did not now expect any response, and none came. There was a total silence, as deep and timeless as the blanketing snow; the house and everyone in it lay in a sleep that would not be broken.
Will went downstairs to pull on his boots, and the old sheepskin jacket that had belonged, before him, to two or three of his brothers in turn. Then he went out of the back door, closing it quietly behind him, and stood looking out through the quick white vapour of his breath.