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 from 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
