He remembered hugging Ellen and the children in the Leeds bookshop, hugging them more fiercely than he had been able to explain to himself. Subconsciously he must have been afraid then, or even earlier – perhaps the October day he'd watched Ellen leading the children across the moor. Had the intensity of his emotions been preparing him for the day when he would lose them? The impression of loss felt like a wound at the centre of him, and yet at the same time it seemed infinitesimal beneath the endless dark.
At last the westbound motorway appeared, a curve of white and yellow lights racing above a curve of red – a luminous blade hovering above the gash it had opened from horizon to horizon. He followed the raw stream to Leeds and drove as fast as he dared through streets which felt somehow lifeless despite crowds of people, many of them dressed as if there wasn't frost on the ground, outside pubs and clubs. Whenever he passed a phone box he had to restrain himself from braking.
Darkness began to interrupt the outlying streets, and then it overcame them. Patches of snow gleamed like exposed bone on the moors; cold glints hovered in the headlight beams. When at last the bridge rose overhead, a faint grey outline around darkness yawning like a fallen jaw, one word struggled past his stiff lips: "Please…" The bridge squeezed the headlamp beams bright and released them, and he saw Sterling Forest beneath the crags which gnawed the sky. The forest appeared to be borrowing the glow of the town, like the second-hand light of a moon. Against the forest the Sterling house was dark.
Ellen and the children could be at home; it was almost eleven o'clock, late enough for them all to be asleep. As he swung the car onto the rough track, the jerking of the headlight beams sent shadows of misshapen stones capering over the front of the house and made the snow figures behind it appear to greet him with a grotesque dance. He parked clumsily beside the garden wall and ran to the front door, keys jangling in his hand. He turned the mortice key and then the Yale, and shouldered the door open.
Silence met him – total silence. Only a muffled echo of his shouts responded to him. He trudged through all the rooms, starting on the ground floor. The children weren't in their beds, but couldn't the family be on the top floor, the three of them in his and Ellen's bed? Certainly he felt as if he wasn't entirely alone in the dark, as if he was climbing towards some form of life. When he pushed his and Ellen's bedroom door open, however, their bed was flat as an altar. He turned to the workroom, knowing Ellen and the children had no reason to be in there, hating the trick his unwillingness to give up hope was playing on him: it was making him feel that he was awaited beyond the door. He clenched his fist on the doorknob, twisted it, held onto it as the door swung inwards. He stepped into the room, and Sterling Forest came to meet him.
It seemed to fill the window even when he'd crossed to the desk. Perhaps it was by contrast with the darkness of the house that the miles of shrouded forest appeared to shine from within like a cloud, but the illumination meant more to him. The forest was where he had been heading as he climbed the stairs – because, he thought, it must be where Ellen and the children were.
He didn't question how he knew. His sense of needing to be in the forest was overwhelming; it felt so like a call that he could almost hear their voices. It sent him downstairs and out of the house, pausing only to lock the building before he sprinted up the track.
When he reached the trees he ran along the blue-arrowed path until it began to curve away from the depths of the forest, and then he left it and continued running. A white blur which he assumed to be mist hovered just above the laden trees, blotting out most of the sky, but his vision was improving. The slender treetrunks and the massive pattern of fallen needles gleamed as if they were tapping the light of the stars overhead. He felt he could run unerringly until he arrived at his destination. But he faltered suddenly, for he'd heard Ellen's voice, unquestionably her voice. It was far away behind him.
He staggered to a halt, grabbing a treetrunk which felt like a ruined pillar, scaly and chill. As his ears throbbed with the breath he was holding he heard Margaret and Johnny protesting about something, and then Ellen quietening them. A minute or so later he heard another sound, tiny with distance but unmistakable: the slam of the front door. The family had been out somewhere, and now they had come home.
They were safe. The thought seemed to unlock his mind. All his fears fell away except one which was too large to define, so large that it felt as much like exhilaration as fear. Perhaps his anxiety for Ellen and the children had been nothing but a means of attracting him back to Stargrave. He was still hearing the miniature sound of the front door; it made him think of having crossed a threshold. He'd done so once before, here beyond the marked paths, but the experience had been more than his memory could cope with. Now he was as ready for it as he ever would be, he promised himself.
He pushed himself away from the slippery treetrunk and strode into the forest. He was walking through a vast silent starlit cathedral which had built itself. It was nearly complete now; its elaborate decoration of snow and icicles was taking shape. It had been planted for Edward Sterling, not just to commemorate him but to conceal where he had died, to protect the site from the world.
Ben felt as if he was using something larger than his own mind to think with, something large as the terror which was robbing him of breath and at the same time opening his mind wide. The pattern was fitting together at last. Edward Sterling's death had been only the beginning. The forest concealed what his death had liberated – what had accompanied him beyond the restraint of the midnight sun.
Perhaps it had been waiting for as long as there was ice there, waiting for someone it could ride beyond the light. Perhaps that hadn't been Edward Sterling who had come back, but only a shell of him compelled to walk and talk. It must have been the source of the strength which had driven him north again in search of somewhere it could hide, but his body had fallen before it reached anywhere secret enough. The forest had hidden it while its power grew during the long nights, and now it was awakening.
Ben had tried to tell himself a garbled version of this without consciously realising it had any basis in truth, but there was no avoiding that awareness here, surrounded as he was by signs of the truth. The icicles which hung like frozen starlight from the branches high above him all pointed deeper into the forest in defiance of gravity. They were pointing to the unseen glade, as if whatever the forest hid was transforming it into a shrine of ice.
His terror had passed beyond awe into a kind of breathless calm. He was scarcely aware of walking or of how long he had been doine so since he'd left Ellen and the children behind. He must be near the glade, because the ice which sprouted from the trees was becoming more elaborate, forming shapes he couldn't find words for. It looked as though the trees were undergoing an identical mutation, revealing forms of which the foliage and slender trunks were merely skeletons. Though they were absolutely motionless, he sensed that their stillness was an omen of growth. Besides, all was not motionless in the forest. He could see pale movement beyond the trees ahead.
The movement was so large that he would have turned tail if he had had any control over his gait – but the compulsion which had brought him to the forest was in charge of his limbs now, and all he could do was scurry forwards. The trees parted ahead of him and closed in silently behind him. For a few steps he managed to believe that he was seeing a snowfall ahead, even though the flakes were falling only in the glade; but although the movement was within the glade, he sensed that it was nevertheless awesomely vast. As soon as he realised that, he was unable to avoid knowing that whatever he was seeing was aware of him. A shiver which felt like terror and anticipation and his body somehow preparing itself passed through him, sending him to the edge of the trees at a helpless stumbling run.
Perhaps he was seeing only ice and snow, or perhaps his mind was unable to cope with the reality after all. Certainly thick snow was dancing just within the glade, though it appeared to be rising triumphantly from the ground rather than falling f
rom the sky which it blotted out. Within the snow, or forming from it, or both, something else had taken shape. He thought of a spider whose squatting body almost filled the glade and whose restless limbs were far too numerous, or a gigantic head obscured by tendrils of white hair or of its own white flesh, tendrils between which its many eyes were watching him. He could see that it was perfectly symmetrical; it must have eyes on every side to see the world into which it was emerging. All this was only a hint of its nature, he thought numbly. It was using the snow to hint at itself.
Because the snow obscured the sky as well as the far side of the glade he couldn't judge how tall the shape was, but that wasn't at all reassuring; it made him feel that in some sense it went on for ever. He had to look up, because pale tendrils were hovering above him, and he was afraid they were reaching for him. But they were only playing in the air around their body – playing with shapes which they were forming and reforming, letting them grow recognisable and then turning them perfectly symmetrical. They were human faces, he saw: masks composed of snow, except that to judge by their expressions and their desperate trapped fluttering as the tendrils toyed with them, some human consciousness was associated with them. The one above him, which appeared to be trying to scream as its halves were rendered identical, was Edna Dainty's face.
To Ben the sight was a promise of more wonders, of greater transformations. All that he was seeing was another metaphor, he realised, and even that was proving too much for him. His mind was going to forget again in order to preserve itself. He felt tears or snowflakes on his cheeks. He gazed at the appearance in the glade and its juggling of frozen souls for as long as he could bear, then turned shakily away. At best his experience would resemble a half-remembered dream before he was out of the forest, and tomorrow there would be so little left of it that he would mistake the remnants for another story waiting to be told. As he thought that, he heard its voice behind him.
It wasn't a sound he would ordinarily have called a voice: a whisper of snow, audible because it was both immense and isolated by stillness – the whisper of patterns forming and elaborating. Nevertheless his instincts were able to decode its message. He could contrive a tale about the midnight sun if he liked, to keep his imagination alive and under control, to let his mind grow towards the presence in the forest. He wouldn't have long to wait now. His shivering carried him away from the glade in a kind of helpless festive dance. All the stories he had told were scarcely even hints of the story he would soon be living.
THIRTY-TWO
As Ellen and the children turned along the track they saw the parked car. "Daddy's home," Johnny shouted, and ran towards the house.
Ellen wondered if one night at the Milligans' had been enough for Ben or if he had just been homesick. "Don't ring the bell, Johnny. He's probably asleep."
The boy dodged around the house and hid among the snow-figures. "Mummy, he's going to chuck snow at us. It'll be hard. Mummy," Margaret protested, wailing with tiredness.
"Come out now, Johnny. I let you stay up late so you could finish your game on Stefan and Ramona's computer. I thought you were old enough to behave."
When she advanced towards him he leapt up among the figures, and Margaret screamed. "I said not to wake Daddy," Ellen said, thinking as she spoke that Ben might not be asleep yet: the windscreen of the car was clear of frost, and so it couldn't have been parked for long. She glanced past it, at the oddly symmetrical luminous cloud which had been hovering above the forest ever since they'd started home from Kate's. Somehow she couldn't judge how large or how distant the cloud was. She unlocked the front door and switched on the hall light. "Straight into the bathroom, now," she murmured.
"Can't we just peep at Daddy?" Margaret pleaded.
"Very quietly, then. Quiet as snow."
Sometimes the children took Ellen's instructions too literally out of contrariness, but now they seemed to be trying to do as they were told; by the time they reached the top of the house she couldn't hear them. From the foot of the stairs she watched Margaret ease open the bedroom door and then the door of the unlit workroom. "He isn't here," Margaret called to her.
She must be too tired to realise that meant there was no need for quiet; Margaret could barely hear her voice. "Faces and teeth, then," Ellen said. "I'll be up to tuck you both in in ten minutes."
While they were in the bathroom she looked into the downstairs rooms in case Ben had been so exhausted by his journey that he'd fallen asleep in one of them, but they were deserted. She filled the percolator and switched it on before shooing Johnny up to his room, having checked that he'd washed his face and brushed his teeth. "Where's Daddy?" he repeated.
"He must have gone to look for us. The quicker you go to sleep now, the less time you'll have to wait to see him."
She was making Ben sound like Father Christmas, but she didn't want Johnny worrying about him and giving himself anxious dreams. She kissed Johnny as the pillow swelled around his cheeks, she stuffed the edges of the duvet under the mattress and made sure his bedroom window was securely fastened, then went into Margaret's room. "I'll come and tell you if I hear Johnny in the night," Margaret whispered.
"I shouldn't think he'll walk again. He never has before. Anyway, I'm going to wait up for your father."
"Can't I?"
"You go to sleep. You'll see him in the morning," Ellen said, and stopped Margaret's flagging protests with a kiss. She left the bedroom doors ajar and returned to the bubbling percolator.
The coffee took away a little of the chill which was penetrating the kitchen window and the blind, but Ellen felt as if something huge and cold was massing just beyond the glass. She pulled the blind-cord and sent the strips of plastic rattling upwards. There was nothing to see except the frozen garden and the pack of rudimentary figures at the edge of the glow from the kitchen. She let the blind down and retreated to the living-room.
The suite she'd brought from Norwich and the easy chairs she'd bought in Stargrave were old friends by now, all part of the room. She curled up on the sofa and sipped her coffee while she gazed at her pictures and the children's hanging on the walls, the velvet curtains shutting out the night, the grey stone mantelpiece which she would fill with Christmas cards. She tried to imagine how the house had felt before it had become hers and the rest of the family's, but she could call up nothing but an impression of empty darkness.
She finished her coffee and sat listening for footsteps on the track. Surely Ben wouldn't be long now; he'd had time to walk around Stargrave and back. She listened until her intentness made the silence seem to be settling against the windows and she had to resist an urge to break it. It evoked the night and the crowd of still figures behind the house, and for no reason she could identify, a phrase began to repeat itself in her brain: faces and teeth, faces and teeth.
When she found herself remembering the grin of the climber who'd frozen to death on the crag, she reached for the remote control and summoned up the channels on the television. Nothing looked like sufficiently good company, not even a Cary Grant film that she watched for a few minutes. She was keeping the sound low in order to listen for Ben, and once she realised that the black and white film was set mostly at night she felt as though it was helping darkness and silence to gather. She switched it off and closed her eyes.
She wasn't intending to fall asleep; she meant only to quieten her thoughts. Sleep came almost at once, a soft weight which settled on her eyelids and her mind. She didn't know how long she dozed before the cold wakened her. A door or a window must be open, and she was about to force herself fully awake in case Johnny was sleepwalking when she heard the front door closing quietly. It was Ben. He was home.
She ought to go to him or at least call a greeting to him. But he seemed to have brought sleep into the house with him, a drift of heavy enveloping somnolence. She no longer knew how much she was dreaming. She felt Ben come into the room and tower over her as if the winter night had added to his stature, but her eyelids were too ponder
ous to open. Now he was slipping one arm beneath her shoulders and the other behind her knees. He was carrying her upstairs, lowering her onto the bed, raising her legs out of the flower of her skirt, undressing her. The touch of his hands sent shivers through her, and she wanted him. But when he eased himself into her, his penis felt like ice.
She must be dreaming, otherwise surely that would have shocked her awake – though if she was dreaming, how was she able to rationalise the situation that way? She clenched herself around his icicle of a penis, trying to impart some warmth to it as her body responded drowsily to him. When he came and then shrank, she felt as if the icicle was melting inside her. The sensation was so dreamlike that she fell asleep almost at once.
The next time she wakened, the room was dark. She was lying on her side, facing away from the middle of the bed, her empty arms reaching out beneath the duvet. How much had she dreamed? She turned over and found Ben lying beside her. That was all that mattered. She pressed her face against his neck and drew the quilt over his shoulder, and was asleep.
The children's cries roused her. She was alone in bed. Brightness pressed against her eyelids, making them flinch: daylight between the curtains. As she shielded her eyes with one hand and levered herself out of bed with the other, she heard the children again. They were cheering.
They and Ben were scattered about the furniture in the living-room, watching television. A long-range weather forecast was just ending, and Ben's eyes seemed even brighter than the children's. "Mummy," Johnny cried as his father continued to gaze ahead with an odd smile of which he seemed to be hardly aware, "there's going to be snow everywhere for Christmas."
THIRTY-THREE
Midnight Sun Page 21