Johnny ran ahead in search of puddles to trample and splinter, and Ellen strode after him. Margaret ventured a few paces and turned, looking rather daunted by so much loneliness. "Quick, Daddy, or we'll be left behind."
He felt as if she'd come between him and his perception of the landscape, of a meaning which he might have grasped. When he and Margaret caught up with the others by the crag, Johnny's teeth had begun to chatter. "It's lovely up here, but I think we'd better start back now," Ellen said.
"You three go back. I'll be down soon."
"I shouldn't stay up here by yourself. It'll be dark before you know it, and you need to see the path."
He stayed where he was and watched her lead the children down the path, into a twilight which appeared to grow darker in some exact but obscure relationship with the shrinking of the three of them. When Ellen sent him a look of mingled appeal and reproach, he trudged after them, and found that he felt as if he was walking further into the open. The fields and moors beyond the railway line stretched to the horizon, but it wasn't just the view; the openness he felt himself approaching was larger than that. He must be anticipating the night beyond the horizon, the night which was the edge of boundless darkness, yet for a moment it felt as though the edge of that darkness was much closer, massing above Stargrave. The mass was Sterling Forest, of course, and the night which came earlier beneath the trees than to the rest of the landscape, as if the tips of the pines were drawing it down to earth.
Before he reached the stile, the forest was above him. Though the nearest trees were several hundred yards away, he felt as if the shadow of the forest had fallen across him, an icy exhilarating shadow which helped him see the first star in the eastern sky, a bright steady star like a sign of the clarity he was aching to grasp. But Ellen was poking her head over the stile and making faces at him. "You look as if you're about to take root," she said.
As he followed her into Stargrave the streetlamps lit up. Beyond the chains of yellow light like an inverted double necklace the silhouette of the Sterling house was reaching for the star. Ben was gazing towards it when Johnny said "Are we going there now?"
"I've already said no hurry. We'll have plenty of time tomorrow."
"Remember Daddy hasn't been here since he was about your age," Ellen said. "It may feel strange to him."
"Let's go to that playground I saw," Margaret suggested.
As she and Johnny raced towards the square, Ben muttered to Ellen "Strange in what way? Tell me later."
The playground was on the highest curve of Church Road, between the church and the school. Two streetlamps stood guard outside it, but it was deserted. The streets staggered lamps and lamplit patches of terraced houses down to the railway; the church and the school were ponderous blocks of dimness relieved by the glint of streetlamps on the edges of bricks and in windows. None of this made Ben feel more than impersonally nostalgic; any childhood memories it conjured up were too faraway and minor to be worth recapturing. He moved closer to Ellen, who was jogging on the spot while the children pushed themselves on the swings, the shadows of the chains reaching for the forest as the children competed, each swing taking them higher into the dark. "Strange in what way?" Ben asked again.
"I thought you might be remembering so much all at once that you needed time to adjust. You didn't seem to want to go to the house yet."
So she hadn't seen the face at his old bedroom window. Now that he was sure, he felt unexpectedly sad. "I haven't remembered anything worth telling you," he said, and squeezed her hand.
As the family walked back to the hotel Ben felt as if he wasn't quite with them – as if he was already on the way to where he meant to go. During dinner he told Margaret and Ellen how pretty they looked, helped Johnny cut up his steak and unobtrusively picked up scraps of food the boy dropped on the carpet, kept the conversation light and flowing. A couple in evening dress, the only other diners in the panelled dining-room which occupied one side of the ground floor, glanced with increasing approval at them. When the Sterlings rose to leave, the woman beckoned Ellen over. "Your family's a credit to you," she said.
Once the children were out of the bathroom Ben told them the story of his next book, about the little boy who had to keep the fire alight to imprison the ice spirits. Tonight it seemed so clear to him that if he'd been at home he would have started writing it at once. He scribbled a few notes while Ellen tucked the children into their beds, and when she rejoined him he was ready. "You look tired," he said. "You don't mind if I go for a stroll, do you?"
"Don't wake me if I'm asleep when you come back. You aren't thinking of going on the moors so late."
"Of course not." He kissed her and held onto her, his reluctance to let go surprising him. He must feel guilty that he was concealing his intentions from her so easily. He gave her a last kiss and went quickly out of the room, out of the hotel, towards the Sterling house.
FIFTEEN
Market Street was deserted. In many of the houses, televisions flickered like will-o'-the-wisps. The temperature had dropped further while he was in the hotel. The cold and the solitary sounds of his footsteps excited him, made him feel almost childlike, out by himself on a night near Christmas. Beyond the streetlamp which stood outside the newsagent's at the edge of Stargrave, the glinting tarmac led past a few cottages. They seemed to sink into the night as the Sterling house came into view, a shape like a monolith crowned with stone and stars. All the windows were unlit, indistinguishable from the bricks, and the house seemed darker than the night to him, as dark as the forest which loomed at its back.
A floodlight on the wall of the new bungalow on the main road whitened the hedge and the garden around the bungalow and lit up the end of the rough track. A friend of his grandmother's had lived where the bungalow now stood; he wondered why her house had needed rebuilding. He picked his way past it along the track, over chunks of rock and their elongated shadows which looked as deep as the ruts frozen into the earth.
A frosty wind came down through the forest to meet him. He heard its long slow breath like the sound of a wave on an invisible beach, and saw the forest stirring wakefully, a dim movement which appeared to spread to the outline of the house. The forest creaked like a great door. His breaths glimmered in front of him, ghosts leading him towards the house, and their appearance made him feel close to recovering a memory. That sense of imminence, and the need to walk carefully on the uneven track, preoccupied him until he was nearly at the gate. As soon as he looked up at the building, however, the sight drove everything else out of his mind. The face was still at the window.
Or was it a face? As he gazed up, clouds like rags of the moon, which was rising beyond the forest, streamed between the stars above the top-heavy roof, and the house seemed to topple towards him. Surely the pale shape must be a mark on the glass; no face could be so perfectly circular, and besides, it was in exactly the same place where he had seen it earlier. He gazed at it until the crescent moon and its globe of blackness were clear of the crags, and the darkness of the house appeared to solidify around the shape at the window. With a start like awakening from a trance, he stepped into the shadow of the house and opened the rusty gate in the chest-high stone wall.
He couldn't really be feeling the shadow, but he felt suddenly colder. He ventured along the cracked path bordered by weedy flowerbeds and stood on the doorstep between the secretively narrow window of the cloakroom and the unwashed bay window beneath a lintel the colour of lead. The front door used to seem like the entrance to a giant's domain, and it was still several heads taller than he was. Paint fell from it, exposing the oak, while he groped for the keyhole. As he jiggled the key into the lock he smelled the old wood and heard flakes of paint whispering down. He twisted the key back and forth, but it failed to engage the mechanism. He gave the door an angry shove, and it swung inwards as though it had been opened from within.
All he could see beyond the doorway was darkness so deep that it appeared to have no end. Dropping the key
into his pocket, he waited for his eyesight to catch up with the dark. He felt more childlike than ever, as if he'd risen in the middle of the night to see the house transformed, and almost unable to breathe for the pulse in his throat. Eventually he began to distinguish hints of outlines: a thick banister which began in mid-air several paces ahead of him and which slanted upwards to vanish in the gloom, the edges of two ajar doors and their frames to his right. He would have seen more if the kitchen door were open at the far end of the hall, but he'd retrieved enough of a sense of the layout to step forwards, reaching for the brass light-switch outside the cloakroom. It resisted momentarily, then clicked down, its lever skewing almost imperceptibly leftwards in its housing. All this was as he remembered, but the light above the hall stayed dark.
He could just see the bulb, a hovering bulge of dimness. He paced forwards over the worn carpet and pushed the first door wide open. Beyond it was a shadeless bulb over a barren room twenty feet square. He groped around the door-frame and found the chilly switch, but it had no effect on the bulb. The electricity must be turned off. He couldn't recall where the main switch was, and it might be dangerous to search for it without a flashlight. Sighing, he stepped away from the room, and the front door slammed shut.
"All right, if that's what you want," he said. It had been the wind, of course – he thought he heard the forest creaking faintly beyond the kitchen door – but it felt as if the house had told him to stay. He held onto an upright of the banisters while his heart slowed down, and gazed at the patterns of light on the floor of the room, long oblique glowing slabs so indistinct that he wasn't sure he was seeing them. The promise of light enticed him into the room.
The echoes of his footsteps made the room sound considerably larger than it was. If it hadn't been for the circle of plaster from which the light-bulb hung, plaster carved into a pattern which looked elaborate even in the dark and which put him in mind of snow frozen halfway to melting, he could have imagined that the ceiling was tall as the trees in the forest. By the time he was beneath the pattern he felt as if he'd taken as many paces to cross the room as he would have when he was a child. That impression, and the view of the lights of Stargrave beyond the window to his right, sent a shiver through him, so violent that it made him feel he was shaking off a burden. "My God," he whispered.
He wasn't seeing Stargrave, just the lights. The view of the town seemed no more than a symbol, a key to unlock his memory. At about this time of year the room had been full of lights, crystal blossoms shining in the tree the Sterlings brought out of the forest, and the sight of Stargrave made him feel that everything the room had seen was still present around him in the dark. He could almost hear his grandfather's voice telling wintry tales which had seemed to invoke the dance of snow on the crags, the winds that roamed the forest and the moors under the stars. Those tales had been taken from Edward Sterling's books, Ben thought, and he'd told some of them in his own books; they'd become so much a part of him that he hadn't realised where they came from. Now he felt as if he'd missed the point of them – he felt as if something in the dark was close to making itself clear to him. Suddenly too nervous to stand still, he retreated to the hall.
It seemed less dark, or more familiar. He strode to the kitchen door and pushed it open. Cupboards packed with darkness hung open on the walls; outlines of a sink and a cooker glinted in the light of the bony scythe above the forest. Helping in the kitchen had been an adventure, especially near Christmas: he'd been allowed to pierce the fowl with a giant fork, and his grandfather had promised to teach him how to decorate the solstice cake, which the old man had iced with designs so intricate that gazing at them had made Ben dizzy. How could he have forgotten that? For a moment he was sure that if he looked around him he would see the design gleaming somewhere in the dark. He swung away from the moonlight and shoved the dining-room door open.
The large room was denuded of furniture, but he could imagine that the huge round oak table was still there in the darkness – could imagine that his family was waiting there for him to join their circle, to pull their Christmas crackers all at once to signal the beginning of the dance which his grandfather led three times each way around the table. At the end of the meal his grandfather would cut the cake and present Ben with the first slice, saying "Put some winter inside you." Ben gave a loud uneasy laugh at himself for having forgotten so much. When the room laughed with him, he made for the hall.
This time he noticed a door under the stairs. Of course, the cupboard contained the fuse board and the main switch. He could turn on the lights, but now he chose not to; his memories would guide him through the house, and he thought it was partly because he couldn't see the rooms in detail that his memories of them were so vivid. The memories were beginning to seem important only as a means to an end, but what end? He had yet to determine what he'd seen at the window of his old room.
As he climbed the stairs, keeping hold of the frosty banister, he felt as if the darkness of the stairwell was rising above him. He imagined himself climbing a slope beneath the night sky with only the dim ghost of his breath for company. He hauled himself onto the landing and found he was reluctant to let go of the banister. "Grow up," he shouted, but his voice sounded lost in the dark. He flung himself away from the banister and shouldered open the door, of his old bedroom.
It was bare except for a carpet and a tattered lampshade tilted rakishly over the lightbulb. From the landing, he could see the sky above the moors beyond the railway. Could those stars be the very ones he'd watched between the curtains as he'd lain in bed in this room, stars like promises of dreams too enormous to imagine while he was awake? But something was confusing his view. His eyes focused on the window. What he'd seen earlier was still there: a circular mark on the upper sash, a mark which resembled a patch of ice more than double the size of his head.
He hadn't realised it was so large. He must have perceived it as smaller because at first sight he'd taken it to be a face. He was tiptoeing across the room, holding his breath. The closer he approached, the more like ice it looked – cracked ice, in which thousands of delicate lines composed an abstract mandala so nearly regular that it took his breath away. What could have caused such a flaw in the glass? He gripped the window-sill and craned to touch the mark. Just as his fingertips brushed the edge of it, he saw that the lines went all the way through the pane. The next moment the entire cracked patch collapsed.
Most of the shards fell outwards, jangling among the weeds under the window, as he dodged back. He was left staring at an almost perfectly circular hole in the glass and feeling like a destructive child who couldn't be trusted to behave himself alone in the house. He went in search of some material with which to plug the hole. At the far end of the landing, on the bathroom floor beside the pale dim open coffin of the bath, he found a mat so disreputable that he shuddered as he snatched it up, though in fact there were no insects underneath. He stuffed it into the hole in the pane and wiped his hands on his coat, feeling as if he'd robbed the house of the magic it had offered him.
The next bare room had been his grandparents' bedroom. He remembered hearing his grandmother wheezing in the bed to which she had been increasingly confined in the months before the car crash. She had apparently been sewing a present for him, but he had never seen it. "Shouldn't have been such a perfectionist," he muttered sadly as he climbed the stairs.
The first room on the top landing had been his parents' room. Its barrenness made him feel close to tears, especially as he remembered how his mother would come down to him when he cried out with whatever dreams the stars above the moor had given him. His aunt had slept in the adjacent room when she was visiting, and next to that one was the attic. This had been his favourite room, full of broken toys so old they were fascinating, crippled furniture, incomplete books whose pages had crumbled at the edges when he'd tried to read them. Now it looked pillaged; four dents in the carpet beneath a skylight obscured by night and grime showed that it had recently been used as a
bedroom. Nevertheless he went in, because it seemed to be the brightest room in the house.
It must be, for him to have distinguished the marks in the carpet. He wouldn't have expected the room to be so visible under such a thin moon. As he crossed to the dormer window, pines the colour of the moon appeared to rise to meet him. He was at the window before he realised that the moon was out of sight above the house; it was the forest that was shining.
Had frost gathered on the trees while he was exploring the house? Surely it took more than moonlight to turn the forest so pale that the trees resembled great feathers of ice. As he gazed wide-eyed at the spectacle, the forest seemed to brighten gradually, and he thought the room did so. There was movement among the trees near the edge of the forest, an approaching glow. He fumbled at the catches of the window and pushed its two wings open. The chill of the night gathered on him as he saw what was out there. Snowflakes luminous with moonlight were dancing beneath the trees.
How could it be snowing there and not above the forest? Indeed, it appeared to be snowing only in an area about as wide as the house. He strained forwards, trying to understand the sight, scarcely aware of the steep slope of the roof below him. It seemed to him that the silent luminous dance was constantly about to form a pattern in the air – that if he could only distinguish the pattern, unimaginable revelations might follow. He'd almost seen it once before, he remembered at last, when he had run away to Stargrave, but this time there was nobody to prevent him from following it into the woods.
Midnight Sun Page 10