slippery root beneath the needles. He fell to his knees, his hands sinking into prickly decay, and was about to heave himself to his feet when it was borne in on him that his would be the only movement in the entire forest.,
He crouched there, hands on thighs, too awed to stir. The countless slender pines and the lattice of their shadows surrounded him with a calm which suggested to him that the very air had turned to ice. The avenues of bare trunks rose to a ceiling of gloomy green high as a cathedral roof, and he felt as if he were kneeling in a vast natural shrine to a stillness of which his surroundings were merely an omen. What might he find at the centre of such a stillness? Just as he wondered that, he heard a sound behind him.
It began above him, rattling through foliage, and came scuttling down a trunk. Ben gave a cry and twisted around, kicking up a heavy shower of needles. He was in time to see an object small and brown as a sparrow drop from the leaning trunk and land among the roots. For a moment, bewildered by the sound which had responded to his cry, he thought the object was a spider. It was a pine-cone, and he told himself that the sound had been the echo of his own voice; if it had been anyone else's, he would surely have been aware of its owner by now. All the same, he wished that he hadn't been making so much noise himself that he'd obscured the sound which, as he strained to recall it, seemed like a whisper which had come from several directions. 'He could imagine that it had been the sound of the forest calling to him,' he muttered as if making his impression more like a story would distance it from him.
A shiver sent him wavering to his feet. He stared about, trying to determine which way he'd been facing when he had looked over his shoulder, and then he saw that the forest itself was showing him: most of the shadows were pointing that way. His own shadow had joined them as he rose, and he went quickly after it, as though he could outrun it if he went fast enough.
There was another idea for a story. He must remember to write it down once he was home, and carry a notebook in future. That should help him focus his imagination, which seemed just now to be escaping his control. He was beginning to think that all the shadows around him and ahead of him were indicating the route he should follow, and that too many of the fallen needles were. Surely none of this need trouble him, because he could see open sky beyond the farthest trees. It had to be the edge of the forest, and he was bound to admit he felt a little relieved. He would welcome a few natural sounds once he was in the open. Until he was out of the forest, however, he would rather not hear anything beyond his breathing and his muffled footfalls which sounded like heartbeats in the earth.
He would have expected the patch of open sky to grow more quickly as he strode forwards. Even when he jogged towards it, it stayed frustratingly localised. The soft ground muffled his footfalls so completely that he felt as if the silence was intensifying, swallowing any sounds he made. Then he faltered. That wasn't the edge of the forest ahead; it was a glade deep within it. He knew that because he had already been there.
He remembered being taken to the glade on a day so cold his mother and grandmother huddled close to the fire in the house. Had the place looked then as it looked now? The pines around it glittered as though ice was crystallising faintly on their bark, and the grass at its centre resembled an explosion of frost yards wide. His memories were slipping away, because he'd realised what he must have been too young to realise then. This was the place where Edward Sterling had died.
Ben stepped between two pines and halted at the edge of the grass, wondering how he knew. This might not be the only glade in the forest, after all. But Edward Sterling had been found in a grove of oak trees, and there were the remains of oaks among the pines which encircled the glade. Ben walked to the middle of the open space and gazed around him.
The glade was circular, about thirty yards in diameter. Within this, roughly equidistant from the centre, were four dead oak trees. He assumed that the pines had stolen their light and their nourishment, because the oaks were withered, little more than a scattering of twisted limbs around collapsed trunks. They reminded him of huge dead spiders. He stood on the grass which yielded stiffly underfoot like a frozen pond about to give way, and tried to see what else he should be noticing. Whatever it was, he felt as if it was waiting for him to notice.
He peered through the veils of his breath at the trees radiating from the edge of the glade, and thought he saw. Could the glade really be as perfectly circular as it appeared to be? He positioned himself as close to the exact centre of the glade as he could judge, then paced to the perimeter, placing the heel of each foot against the toe of its follower.
Forty-six paces brought him to the edge. A foot was a foot long, he thought, but now he had forgotten precisely where he'd started from. He took forty-six paces back and dropped a pound coin on the patch of frosty grass, then he continued in a straight line to the far side of the glade. Forty-six paces again. He'd managed to locate the centre by instinct, and he felt as if he had unlocked an unsuspected aspect of himself.
He went back to the coin and paced along a diameter at right angles to the first. Forty-six paces brought him level with the pines. He grunted with surprise, retreated to the coin and set out along the other half of the diameter. The toecap of his right shoe reached the edge just as he counted forty-six, and he couldn't help shivering with excitement or nervousness or the growing chill. No glade could be that regular, he told himself, and he meant to prove it. Until he'd walked a line across the glade which didn't measure ninety-two paces, or even a radius which wasn't precisely half that length, he wouldn't let anything distract him.
He didn't know how long he spent at the task, no longer looking at his feet as he mouthed the count rather than break the silence, trusting his instincts to find the diameters which bisected the angles between those he'd already paced, as if such obsessive precision would lead sooner to an irregular measure-ment. Here was one – the distance from the centre to an oak. He turned away from the snarl of whitened branches, towards the marker coin, which was so frosted it resembled a tiny moon. The oaks deformed the glade, he thought, and that would have to do; how much longer did he propose to trot back and forth like a puppet? If he didn't head for the moors soon he might be in the forest when darkness fell. Just walk to each of the other three oaks, he murmured, just to be tidy. At least, he thought he'd spoken, almost too low to be audible. Certainly a soft voice had.
It was his unsureness which broke his trance enough for him to realise that something around him had changed. At once he was afraid to look away from the icy moon of the coin, and afraid not to. A shiver which seemed to begin underfoot before shooting through his body raised his head for him.
At first he thought it might be only his awareness which had changed, because he saw immediately that the avenues of trees radiating from the glade were absolutely regular, not just the placing of the trees but the shapes of their trunks and their high spreads of branches, as if some force emanating from the glade had aligned them like iron filings around a magnet. Then he saw how nearly similar to one another the shapes of the dead oaks were, as though what had killed them had shaped them. He sensed there was another pattern which he was afraid to identify. He stared at the glittering trees, at the shadows which had turned on their axes and were reaching towards him from the side of the glade opposite that from which he'd entered, and then he looked down.
'God,' he whispered. The pattern was around him on the grass, a many-armed star of frost as wide as the glade. The outlines of the slender arms were awesomely intricate and yet symmetrical in every detail. He turned dizzily, feeling in danger of losing his balance, and saw that the star wasn't quite symmetrical: it lacked the three arms which would have pointed to the oaks he had failed to approach. The star showed where he had walked, as if a vast cold presence had paced behind him.
As soon as he thought that, he sensed it behind him or above him, waiting for him to be unable not to look. He couldn't move, but how would that help him? A snowflake settled on his trembling hand and lay between the tendons, a perfectly symmetrical snowflake like a feathery wafer of glass. He stared helplessly at it and saw that it wasn't melting but growing. Perhaps that was a sign of life – of the kind of life which the miles of forest hid.
Ben's trembling freed him from his paralysis. He staggered across the glade, slipping wildly on the frozen grass, and fled into the woods, trying not to see how even the ferns among the trees formed a regular pattern. He caught sight of a spider plucking at its web among the ferns in front of him, a spider striped like a tiger, and for a moment even that seemed welcome; at least it was a living creature. But the woods darkened around him as their denizen came after him. The ferns turned to marble as frost raced over them, and snowflakes whirled around him, bejewelling the trees. The spider paled and writhed into a shape which no living creature should form, and before Ben could suck in a breath after the cry that the sight wrenched from him, it was a crystal of flesh, the centre of a mandala of frost and web. Then the forest grew dark as a starless night, and something like an incarnation of that darkness, far larger than the glade, seized him.
