'Not now, Johnny,' she snapped as he prepared to scoop a handful of snow from the top of an allotment fence. 'Just keep your mind on where you're going. We don't want you wandering off the path.'
She only meant that the longer grass beside the obscured path would slow him down, but Margaret glanced uneasily at the forest. Her glance seemed to bring it more alive, and Ellen felt as though an unseen presence was pacing them, keeping to the dark beneath the trees. Had Ben sneaked up there? But the presence seemed larger, not pacing them so much as staying abreast of them without moving. It was the forest itself, of course, because now she could tell that the presence was at least that large, and if it seemed vaster and yet somehow contained by the forest, she had to blame her overwrought imagination. Thank God, she and the children were nearly at the end of the allotments, in which the mounds and intricate spires of snow had assumed shapes almost impossible to relate to the growth they presumably hid. Just a few hundred yards and the family would be alongside Church Road, and she would be able to assure herself that the lights weren't as dim as they looked.
Johnny was picking up speed. She squeezed Margaret's shoulders and murmured 'Don't slow me down.' She didn't want the children straying out of arm's reach, though at least they weren't ouc of sight behind her. She was about to glance back to see if Ben was following when she realised fully what she was seeing ahead.
The allotments gave way to the back gardens of Church Road, most of which were crisscrossed with deep footprints, carvings in marble. Icicles turned clothes-lines into spiny half-translucent insect shapes; toothed slabs of snow overhung the roofs as if they might fall on anyone who strayed too close. That much was normal, but wherever she looked Stargrave appeared to be embalmed in snow and ice. Icicles had massed around each streetlamp, turning them into crystal fruit, and every window was thickened by frost. Where the rooms were lit, the muffled light showed the frost as a glass tapestry of patterns very similar to those she had tried not to see in the snow.
The appearance of the town mustn't matter, nor the silence. She was suddenly more afraid that unless the family kept moving, they would be unable to move for the cold, which was rendering her almost senseless. 'Go on, Johnny,' Margaret complained. 'You're holding us up.'
He was shading his eyes with one gloved hand like a boy explorer. 'What is it, Johnny?' Ellen said, wincing as the cold twinged her teeth.
'Something funny at the church.'
Before she could tell him to move, or focus her eyes on it, Ben said 'Go and see what it is. We could all do with a laugh.'
Ellen swung round and almost went sprawling. He was only a few paces behind her. As soon as their eyes met he gave her an apologetic smile whose tentativeness made it into a plea, but how could she respond to that when the trail of his footprints indicated that he had been dancing behind her, weaving a pattern of steps in the snow? She was furious with herself for having failed to be aware of his approach. '1 didn't mean that kind of funny,' Johnny told him.
'You want to see though, don't you?'
'Yes,' Johnny said as if he was almost sure he did.
'We'll race there,' Ben declared, and was past Ellen so quickly and effortlessly that she didn't realise his intention until he grabbed Johnny's hand and ran with him towards the churchyard, Johnny squeaking and nervously giggling as he skidded along the path beside his father's trail of footprints, which were extravagantly large and oddly shaped. Ellen felt as if panic had kicked her in the stomach. She had to restrain herself from shoving Margaret aside and sprinting after Johnny to drag him away from his father. She would catch up with them at the church, and meanwhile she couldn't think of anywhere Johnny would be safer. 'Let's go and see what the fuss is about,' she said in Margaret's ear, and urged her past the school.
Was the pattern of the children's footprints in the schoolyard really as symmetrical as it looked? She couldn't spare it more than a glance, because Ben was already pushing Johnny through the gap in the churchyard hedge and following him through it. She dodged around Margaret, through snow and long grass which felt to her numb feet like a single hindering medium, and ran along the path, shattering Johnny's footprints. She flung herself through the gap in the hedge, dislodging a whispering trickle of snow – less of it than she would have expected, as if it was frozen fast to the twigs – and skated to a halt when she saw Johnny and his father.
They were standing hand in hand among the graves and gazing at the church, which was dark. At first she wondered why the stained-glass window with its image of St Christopher appeared to be glowing, and then she saw that the window was covered with frost, transformed by it. The boy perched on the saint's massive shoulder and supported there by his great hand was cocooned in whiteness; the girl who was holding his other hand was almost invisible except for the upper part of her face, in which her eyes gleamed with no light behind them. The saint's own face was hidden by a circular excrescence composed of icy filaments, a mask which resembled both a fungus and a parody of radiance and which appeared to be using his arms to reach for the children, and it made Ellen shudder. As soon as Margaret sidled through the gap in the hedge, Ellen hurried her towards the gates which led onto Church Road. 'Too cold for standing, Johnny,' she called, striding towards him and his father.
It wasn't only the sight of the inhumanly transformed saint which was making her anxious to be out of the churchyard. All the memorials were changed too: the stone crosses had become huge spiky jewels of marble and ice, no longer remotely like crosses; the statues of angels looked as if they were struggling to emerge from snowy chrysalids and reveal quite another form. She found one statue especially disturbing, a figure which seemed frozen in the act of fleeing or helplessly trudging towards the gap in the hedge. Beneath the frost its body was black as a priest's uniform, though its head and its outstretched supplicating hands were wads of white. She had no time to examine it more closely, not when Johnny and his father were heading for the open door of the church. 'Don't go in there,' she cried.
'Can't I just see if the crib's lit up?'
'It won't be, Johnny.' She would have said anything to prevent him from stepping into the lightless interior, because now she was close enough to the doorway to sense how cold it was in there: colder than death, she thought, colder than any church should be. She wanted to believe that she was only imagining movements beyond the stained glass, pale movements at least as large as the window, but she couldn't deny the sight of footprints leading from the church door to the unfamiliar life-size figure near the hedge. She was close to a panic which would either blot out her thoughts or render them unbearably clearer – so close that she had no idea what she would say if Ben wanted to know where she was taking the children in such a hurry. But as she wrenched at the gate to break it loose from the ice which had glued it shut he reached past her and heaved it open for her, causing it to scream.
Church Road curved downhill on both sides of her. It used to look as if it was embracing the haphazard streets, gathering them into an untidy bundle, but now she had the unpleasant notion that it was imprisoning the houses within its perimeter while the cold overtook them. How could the Christmassy prospect of the snowbound lamplit streets affect her that way? Perhaps she was reacting to the stillness which reminded her of a held breath larger than the snowscape, or to the streetlamps which resembled vegetation from another world, or to the sight of all the windows blinded by cataracts of ice. She felt as though the cold was about to overwhelm her, freezing her where she stood, but she mustn't let it do so. She clutched the children's hands with hands so numb they were indistinguishable from her gloves, and ushered the children across the road. 'Nearly there,' she would have murmured if she hadn't feared that even a whisper would be audible to Ben as he closed the gate.
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.
