himself as she switched on the landing lights; they wouldn't need those for much longer. He opened the workroom door and stood aside for the family to precede him.
Ellen hesitated once she had switched on the light and stepped into the room. For a moment he thought she'd seen what he had seen: a vast swift movement beyond the window, as if the frozen forest had betrayed its stillness for an instant, though he knew it was rather that the disguise of the forest had slipped momentarily as it or its denizen watched her. But she was only bracing herself to pick up the telephone, praying silently that it would work. Never mind: she had brought the children into the room, and he closed the door and leaned against the inside. 'See what you can raise,' he said.
He watched her approach the desk, the children trailing after her. From where he stood, the room and the desk and her drawing-board and the rest of the contents looked like an entrance to the forest, a last symbolic clutter to be left behind on the route to the truth. He saw that the forest was beginning very gradually to shine, ranks of trees in its depths growing dimly visible as if they or what they hid were inching towards the house. Wasn't there the faintest pallor of frost on the interior wall around the window? Ellen gained the desk and stood staring at the phone, visibly keeping a final prayer unspoken so that it wouldn't dismay the children, and then she thrust out her stiff hand and fumbled the receiver up to her face.
She dropped the receiver at once. It clattered like a bone across the desk until its cord jerked at it, swinging it round with a screech of plastic on wood. Margaret cried out as it fell, and Johnny did when it struck the desk. It was the loudness of the sound which it was emitting that had caused Ellen to lose her grip on it, and at first even Ben thought the sound was only static. Then, as Ellen reached shakily to cut it off, he heard that there was more to it. 'Ellen,' he shouted.
She had already depressed the receiver rest, but it didn't matter; the sound returned unchanged. It was a mass of whispering, so many whispers that it seemed to fill the room – a sound like wind through a forest, except that it was more elaborate and more purposeful. 'Listen, all of you,' Ben said in a voice which he heard merging with it. 'Hear what it's saying.'
Ellen stared uncomprehendingly at him, then her expression became one of loathing. She was trying to pick up the receiver to silence it, her fingers growing clumsier with rage, when Johnny cried 'I can hear something.'
He'd learned the secret, and Ben was proud of him, though it didn't take much effort to decipher the message – it was rather a matter of relaxing and allowing the sound to make itself clear. 'It's calling us,' Johnny said, clutching at his mother's arm.
That was why it sounded so elaborate: it was pronouncing all their names at once with its voices like an endless snowfall. Ben saw Margaret begin to hear them, her eyes widening and trembling. Then Ellen managed to seize the receiver and slammed it onto its rest. 'What are you trying to do?' she whispered, glaring at him.
He had to speak plainly, he reminded himself. 'Give you an idea what's on the way,' he said, 'so that it won't be so much of a shock.'
She looked capable of creating trouble when there was no more time for it. He ought to remember that she hadn't had his advantages – that she'd been confronted unexpectedly with part of the truth when he had been anticipating it all his life – but he mustn't allow her to deny it, even if, given more time, that might have been her first step towards comprehending it. The forest, or the entity it symbolised, stirred again restlessly beyond her and the children, and he felt himself losing patience. 'You've already seen more than they have,' he told her, lowering his voice to show her this wasn't meant for the children to hear. 'Won't you help me get them ready for it? We only saw a tiny hint of what's in store for us, and I know they were your friends, but even so, didn't you think it was beautiful?'
He seemed to have overestimated her. Her face pinched tight around her mouth as if she didn't trust herself to answer him. She glanced past him, so fleetingly that he knew she was considering a bid to sneak the children out of the room. He leaned hard against the door, his body stiffening with impatience. 'I'm not saying we'll end up like that,' he said. 'I don't know how we'll end up, but I'm eager to find out. Aren't you, just a little? You know we'll all be together – they were, you saw.' A sudden idea brought a smile to his lips. 'If you ask me, I think we just now heard them and the rest of them letting us know they're waiting for us.'
He kept the smile up for as long as he could, but when even putting an appeal into it didn't win him a response he felt his mouth droop clownishly. He could sympathise with her for being confused earlier, but how could he express himself any more clearly? Was she deliberately resisting the truth? Observing her and the children, all of whom had turned so pink with the heat of the house that they looked unshelled, he was positive she couldn't ignore it; these raw soft shapes weren't how life was meant to be. She'd had her chance, and he couldn't afford to waste any more time on her when he still had to reach the children. At least up here she wouldn't find it so easy to prevent him from talking to them, and surely at their ages they must be more open to newness than she was. 'Have either of you any idea what your mother and I are talking about?'
'Of course they haven't,' Ellen cried.
His impatience was suddenly almost uncontrollable, and seemed to twist his body into a new shape under the skin. 'Let them speak.'
Margaret was visibly struggling to do so, and he produced a smile to help her. But all she said was 'Stop it, Daddy, you're frightening us.'
'You aren't frightened, Johnny, are you,' Ben said, so certain of the answer that he didn't bother to make his words sound like a question. The boy shook his head and moved closer to his mother, looking shamefaced. He hadn't grabbed her arm before in order to stop her replacing the receiver; he had been afraid to hear. All at once Ben was disgusted with the three of them, and with his own efforts on their behalf. 'I'm not trying to frighten you. I'm trying not to,' he said through his teeth.
The children huddled against their mother. The three of them stared at him. At least he had succeeded in holding their attention, and perhaps they would keep quiet now; they appeared to have run out of words. Behind them the forest stirred again like a spider sensing movement in its web, though of course it wasn't really like that; his mind was simply clinging to old metaphors. 'You can't just go on being frightened,' he said urgently. 'Unless you look at what you're afraid of you'll never see how much more is there until it's too late for you to appreciate it. I want us to share it, don't you understand? You don't want to be alone with it, do you?'
They were staring at him as though they couldn't believe what they saw or heard. What was wrong with them? 'Your mother has an idea what I'm talking about even if she won't admit it,' he said, hearing his voice grow thin and cold. 'It isn't so hard to understand if you let yourself dream it instead of trying to force your mind to work. Think of it as a story that's truer than anything you thought was true. What's happened to Stargrave is only a sign of what's coming, an image that's simple enough for us to grasp, like a picture in a baby's first book.'
He thought they might laugh at that and by laughing realise how accurate it was, but it didn't seem to appeal to them. 'If you're wondering why Stargrave has begun to change and yet we haven't,' he said, doing his best to put some warmth into his voice because surely this was the moment which would bring the four of them together, 'I think it's because the Sterlings have been part of what's happening ever since Edward Sterling came out of the midnight sun. I think we've been left until last because we were already closer to it. Come on now, that must make you feel happier, knowing we've been chosen because of who we are.'
'Chosen for what?'
'Shut up, johnny,' Margaret wailed, lashing out at him. 'I don't want to hear.'
'You won't have to,' Ellen promised fiercely, hugging them both and glaring a challenge at Ben, and abruptly Ben had had enough. He was trying to think why the spectacle of the children cowering into the protection of their mother's refusal to use her mind should seem familiar, and then he knew: the three of them were exactly like the brainless woman and her brainless children who'd hindered his return to the family grave and the forest the day he'd run away from Norwich. He stared at their eyes moist as a cow's and their sniffling raw nostrils in their stubbornly stupid faces, and disgust overwhelmed him. 'If you won't listen, you can look,' he snarled, and punched the light-switch so hard that the plastic cracked.
The forest surged towards the house while standing absolutely still, and its glow reached into the room. He hoped that would draw their attention to the window, because there was certainly something to see: a pale shape which could only be a face, though it was broad as several trees and composed of swarming filaments, had appeared in the midst of the forest. Although he couldn't see its eyes, he knew it was staring into the room.
It was there for the family to see, a sight whose existence even they couldn't deny, but they wouldn't see it until they stopped gazing aghast at him. He wasn't threatening them with violence, it had been frustration which
