As soon as she ventured into Hill Lane, the narrow street closed in. The houses seemed to lean towards her and the children beneath the weight of snow on the roofs. Since the buildings at the top of the lane had no gardens, she was close enough to see into any of the downstairs front rooms whose curtains weren't shut tight. Even where the rooms were lit and, in two instances, where the curtains were fully open as well, she could distinguish very little through the carapaces of frost except Christmas decorations hanging immobile against the glass. At least there were people in the rooms, for she glimpsed movements, however slow and pale they seemed – so slow that they reminded her of larvae stirring in their sleep. It was Ben's fault that she was thinking such things, his fault that the further she advanced down the lane, the more she felt as if the presence she had seemed to sense in the forest was behind the houses too.
She quickened her pace as much as she dared once she reached the curve in the lane and saw Kate's house a few hundred yards ahead, where the draped front gardens began. Even the sight of the house made her nervous. Of course, she was anticipating how Ben might react when he realised she was leaving the children with the Wests. She forced herself not to run down the slope with them, because they might fall on the frozen snow. Let Ben think he had no reason to give chase.
As she passed the curve she glanced back. He was halfway down the first stretch of the lane, strolling between the crystallised lamps and smiling to himself as he surveyed the vista of iced houses. Before he could catch her eye she steered the children out of sight, though she faltered for a moment as she noticed a figure at a bedroom window just ahead of her. The blanched face and hands were pressed against the whitened glass as if they were glued to it, and they seemed swollen out of proportion to the dim shape of the body. "Hurry," she said, tugging at the children, and ran with them to the Wests' gate.
She was first beneath the arch of roses, which had sprouted new translucent thorns. She stumbled along the path, her feet aching as if she was hammering them with ice, her nostrils stinging painfully with every breath, and leaned on the doorbell as the children waited by the arch. Their faces were so blue with cold that she pressed the bell again at once. She heard the ringing shrill through the rooms, but there was no other sound from the house.
She was hauling at the door-knocker when she realised it was frozen to its metal plate. The edge of the door was glittering dully, outlined by ice. Could the door be frozen shut? Even if it was, surely Terry would be able to open it if only he would come to it, and where else could the Wests be except in the house? "Keep ringing the bell, Johnny," she said, glancing nervously at the shadow which was swelling downhill towards the curve in the lane, and ran to the front window.
Between the orange curtains was a gap as wide as her hand. Through the luxuriant frost on the window she could just distinguish a group of figures beneath the light in the centre of the room. They could only be some or all of the Wests; why weren't they responding to the bell? She rubbed at the frost with her gloved palms, she scratched at it with her padded fingernails, but neither action cleared the glass. As Ben's shadow came dancing over the snow, she dragged her keys clumsily out of her pocket to scrape away the frost.
The screech of metal on glass formed a discord with the shrilling of the doorbell, which Johnny hadn't ceased for a moment to press. She had to grit her teeth until they ached while she continued with her task. Her wrist was tiring before she'd managed to clear a crosshatching on the glass, still whitish enough to blur the room. She rubbed the patch of glass vigorously with her knuckles. She was desperate to see, and then desperate not to believe what she was seeing. But now the ragged patch in the midst of the frost was too clear, and she could only stand where she was, paralysed by the sight beyond the window.
The room she had visited that afternoon was practically unrecognisable. A thick pelt of frost covered the furniture, the carpet, the books on the shelves. Under the light, whose lampshade icicles had transformed into a chandelier, Kate and Terry and the children were kneeling in the space between the chairs. Whether they had done so to pray or to huddle together more closely, she couldn't tell; she had a horrible impression that they had been trying to form some kind of structure with their bodies, or that something had arranged their bodies into a grotesque symmetry. She wanted to believe they weren't her friends and their children at all, or even human. Though their clothes were just identifiable beneath the coating of frost, she couldn't see their faces. Their bunched heads were visible only as a blur within the object which surmounted their shoulders – a globe composed of countless spines of ice.
Ellen might have stood there until the sight and the cold froze her mind entirely if Johnny hadn't tired of ringing the doorbell. The abrupt silence sounded like a shrill echo. "Is anyone coming?" he demanded.
She'd been convinced that nothing could be more terrible than the spectacle beyond the window, but now she realised there was a worse possibility: that he and Margaret might see it. With an effort which made her feel so sick and dizzy she had to grasp the icy windowsill, she turned and smiled unsteadily at him. "Nobody's there. Never mind."
"But you said we could stay with them. Can't we wait a bit and see if they come back?"
The thought of the occupants of the room rising up to greet Ellen and the children, shambling crabwise under the weight of their new translucent head, almost choked off her words. "It's too cold for waiting," she said, and her voice jerked louder as she saw Ben in the shadow of the arch. "Let's get home."
When she pushed Johnny he moved away from the house, dolefully but readily enough. For a moment she thought Margaret was going to be more reluctant – an expression which showed she knew something was wrong had tweaked her mouth – but then, bless her, she walked ahead of Ellen without speaking. Ben had stepped forwards. While the children sidled round him he stared hard at Ellen. Had he overheard Johnny's plea? He seemed only to be scrutinising her emotions, discovering the horror she was fighting to conceal. What he read in her eyes sent him striding to the house to peer through the peephole she'd created.
If he let the children suspect the truth… She no longer knew what he was capable of. She was taking hold of the children to hurry them away when he turned from the window. He looked apologetic but not even slightly distressed. "Ready to come home?" he said.
She wanted to believe he was controlling himself as she was, for the children's sake, but wasn't he too convincingly unconcerned? What had his expression been when he saw the contents of the room? Her mind felt as if it was shrinking, refusing to accept anything further, contracting around the only plan of action it was able to produce – that she should go back to the Sterling house, because the car was there. "Do as your father says," she said for Ben to hear, and was pushing them under the arch, towards the slope to Church Road, when she saw the figure she had noticed earlier at the upstairs window. Its face and hands were huge now, and she could see that they were frozen to the pane.
Though her hands wanted to clench, she managed to steer the children away from the sight. "We'll go along Market Street," she said in a voice as tightened as her mind. If she kept quiet and did her best to seem as unconcerned as Ben appeared to be, if she managed not to wonder what they might be passing as they walked between the silent blinded houses, perhaps her fears would remain formless, a darkness surrounding the spark of her consciousness.
The family was on the slope which wandered down to the main road, Johnny holding hands with her and Ben while Margaret held tight to Ellen's other hand, when Johnny cried out. "Hey!" he shouted.
Ellen thought his father had caused him to cry out until she saw Ben's puzzled glance at him. Margaret was the first to realise that he was shouting at the stillness of the town. She gripped Ellen's hand as though she was securing herself, and launched her own cry. "Wake up!" she yelled.
Her shout seemed to disappear as swiftly as her white breath. There was no response, no sound or movement within the intricate icy shells which covered ever
y window. "Don't," Ellen whispered, jerking the children's hands, feeling too much like a terrified child herself. The stillness appalled her, the sense that the four of them were alone in Stargrave, but even worse was the possibility that the shouts might awaken some other response. "Save your breath," she said, though the words made her inexplicably nervous. At least now they were at the main road – the route to the car.
It showed her more of the deadened landscape, the deserted square, the darkened shops sealed by ice, the tangles of footprints like a memorial to the townsfolk, preserving the pattern of a dance in which they had participated unaware. But it led to the bridge and out onto the moors, out to the world beyond. She mustn't let herself start wondering if there was life beyond the moors which were pale as the moon. Whatever had happened to Stargrave and its people, surely it couldn't have overtaken the world. There would be time for her to attempt to comprehend what had happened when she had taken the family somewhere safe.
She wouldn't leave Ben behind if she could persuade him into the car. Surely he wouldn't stay in the dead town, and surely even in his present mental state he wouldn't try to prevent her from taking the children away from Stargrave. Nothing could, she told herself – certainly not the stillness, even if it felt like an icy presence which seemed to lean closer as she and Ben led the children past the first of the outlying cottages. It felt as if the dead town was rising up and looming over her, waiting for her to look up and see its vast new face. There was nothing to see, and she wouldn't be forced to look, though not looking made her feel as though the enormous silent presence was herding her and the family towards the track to the forest. She needn't be afraid of the forest when they would reach the car first. She forced her numb indeterminate hands to grasp the children's hands more firmly as she came to the beginning of the track.
The car looked like a shell dwarfed by the forest – like a snow sculpture less convincing than the figures behind the house. It would take minutes to clear the windscreen and the windows. She would never be able to conceal her intentions from Ben, and she had to believe that there was no need, that however calm he was managing to seem, they were united in distress. "We've got to start the car," she said.
He was gazing up the track, and his face remained blank as he spoke. "Give it a try," he said in a tone which could mean anything.
"You and the children clear the glass while I start the engine." She relinquished Johnny's hand so as to grope in her pocket for her keys. Her finger and thumb felt impossibly distant from each other and from her as she used them to lift out the keys. She couldn't help remembering how Ben had taken the keys from her handbag, but that mustn't matter now; only driving mattered. She ran to the car and scraped the lock of the driver's door clear of snow, and succeeded in fumbling the key into the slot. Her gloved hand was so clumsy that she twisted the key too hard, then let go of it for fear it would snap. She could feel that the lock was frozen. "Come in the house while I fetch some hot water," she said, quickly enough to keep her shivering out of her voice.
She was talking to Ben as well as to the children, but he stayed by the car. She ran up the slippery path to the front door, where the key skittered over the lock until she managed to control her panic. She pinched the key between her finger and thumb, which felt like a rag doll's, and slid it shakily into the lock.
The dark hall met her with a feeble surge of heat which reminded her unpleasantly of a dying breath. She slapped the light-switch and sprinted along the hall, trying to ignore the dark which towered overhead. The faceless guardian appeared at the kitchen window as the fluorescent tube fluttered alight. There was a kettle of water waiting to be heated on the stove, and at least her gloved hand was capable of turning the control. "Don't take anything off," she told the children, "we'll be out again any minute." She couldn't tell if she was hot or cold or if the house was, she wasn't even sure if she was seeing her breath. "Didn't anyone close the door?" she cried, and ran back along the hall, trying to identify the soft flat thuds beyond the door. Ben was punching the windscreen to crack the snow. "Don't do it too hard," she called to him, and heard him say "Don't worry" as she closed the door. She raced to the kitchen again, but the kettle wasn't yet steaming. "Walk about to keep your circulation going," she said, and led the children round and round the kitchen until she felt trapped in a ritual dance. When the kettle began to spout mist, she seized the handle with her fattened hand and urged the children out of the house. Ben had almost cleared the windscreen and the other windows of the car, except for faint patterns which she preferred not to examine too closely but which she prayed wouldn't interfere with her vision while she was driving. She poured a little of the boiling water on the lock and around the edge of the door, and placed the kettle on the snow, which shrank back from it, cracking. She aimed the key at the lock and found the aperture at once, an achievement which seemed like a promise. She turned the key and pulled at the handle, and the door opened with a creaking of dislodged ice. Bending her legs in order to sit behind the wheel was agony, but she had to bear it, telling herself that it would lessen once she was driving, once the vehicle heated up. She poked the ignition key into its slot and turned it, turned it again, turned it while treading on the accelerator, turned it when she'd pulled out the choke. The engine remained silent as the snowscape.
She tugged at the bonnet release and climbed out of the car, biting her frozen lip. The bonnet hadn't lifted as it should, but that was because of the snow weighing it down. She swept the bulk of the snow off the bonnet and heaved it open, and stared into the exposed machinery. She felt her eyes prickling with tears which felt as if they were turning into shards of ice. Even if she succeeded in unfreezing the electrical components, the vehicle was useless. The radiator had burst, and icicles hung out of it like teeth in a spitefully grinning mouth.
Of course the town was full of cars, but there was no reason to suppose they weren't in at least as bad a state. She was standing helplessly, feeling as if she had somehow let the family down and wondering what she could possibly say, when she felt a cold arm hug her and turn her towards the house. "We're here to stay. There never was anywhere else for us," Ben said.
FORTY-FOUR
It was nearly time, Ben thought. The winter had finally emerged from the forest, and soon it would come for them. Everything around them was a sign of it. The world had been awaiting it without knowing, disguising it as myths to suppress the terror of it, but you had to give yourself up to the terror before you could experience the awesomeness. He'd done his best to guide the family through the process, but Johnny had made Ellen stop him. Now she and the children weren't ready, and it was nearly time.
He mustn't blame them. They hadn't had his upbringing. At least they had responded to his stories, which had been symptoms of the imminent awakening in the forest and of his buried awareness of it – responded so enthusiastically that he was sure their minds were capable of being opened further. He must be patient with them, as patient as he had time to be. Surely now, after seeing so much in the town, Ellen had to accept that he knew best. He moved closer to her and put his arm around her. "We're here to stay. There never was anywhere else for us."
He had to feel sorry for her – she was staring at the damaged engine as though she had been robbed of her last hope – but he thought that, disillusioned as she was, she might be more receptive to the message he had to finish communicating. When he turned her towards the house she didn't resist, which was encouraging. "Come in with us, you two," he said. "I hope you enjoyed your walk."
Ellen grew tense at that. He hadn't intended to sound as if he was dismissing what she'd seen; after all, the children hadn't encountered anything they couldn't handle. He ought to be able to choose his words more carefully – he'd had enough practice – though he found the task burdensome now that he was brimming with the imminence of an experience beyond words, older than the hindrance of words. "We want to talk to you," he said.
Ellen glanced at him, too briefly for him to m
eet her eyes. He was unexpectedly relieved not to have to meet them, because he had realised he wasn't referring to her. "We're together," he said loudly, and snatching Ellen's keys from the ignition, strode to the house. "We'll go up," he said.
"Do you think the phone may be working now?" she whispered.
So the car hadn't been her last hope. Perhaps there was always one more so long as you were alive. He had forgotten the phone, but he was willing to pretend he'd had it in mind if the pretence would lure them to the workroom, where he could keep an eye on them and on whatever might emerge from the forest. "We'll have to see," he said.
The reawakening of hope seemed to restore her to herself. As he prepared to unlock the front door she took her keys from him, gently but resolutely. He found her determination both touching and frustrating; couldn't she understand that it was irrelevant? She was clinging to fragments of life as she had always lived it, as if they contained some magic which would revive normality when this winter came to an end, but they were only a refusal to accept that it never would. At least she was opening the door, and it was up to him to ensure that was a first step towards acceptance.
"Quick, you two, into the warm," she said tightly, flapping her hands at them as if she was trying to limber her quilted fingers, and pushed the children into the house as soon as they were within reach. Once she was over the threshold she faltered, blinking at the lit hall. She must be wondering belatedly why their house hadn't yet been overtaken by the winter. Wasn't that his cue to explain that whatever happened, she and the children would be safe with him? If she understood that, he could begin to persuade her that they were being saved for last, to complete the awakening as they experienced it and became part of it – but her concern for the children had already preoccupied her. "Don't stand there like statues, take some things off and keep moving," she urged them.
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