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
