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 every 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.
