to himself that he wasn't just part of the invasion which had consumed the life of Stargrave. He gave the house a final glance, feeling as unreasonably hopeful as Ellen had been, but it was utterly still. Closing his grasp more firmly around the handles, ignoring the ache which felt like agonising frostbite, he started along the track.
The forest appeared to be ready for him. As he left the buried allotments behind, the spaces between the trees at the edge seemed to widen, the ranks beyond them retreated stealthily. It felt as if the reality underlying the snowscape was growing more aware of him. He could see layers on layers of crystalline patterns through the crust of snow underfoot – extending, he suspected, into the soil beneath it. He felt as if he was walking on the surface of a mind, each of his footsteps setting off some unimaginable thought of him. How far and how deep might the transformation have reached? He thought of the farmhouses beyond the railway, and glanced back.
The two buildings were so distant they looked shapeless, no more than dark blotches on the snow, but he could just distinguish a lit window in each. The sight felt like companionship. He was gazing at it so as to fix it in his mind when he saw that he must have been mistaken; the window of the nearer farmhouse wasn't lit, it was white as a cataract in an eye. How could it have appeared as yellow as the farther window? He squinted at it, trying to convince himself that his vision had been at fault, and then the window of the other farmhouse, almost at the horizon, dulled and iced over.
The transformation was spreading like negative fire across the moors. Every moment more of it surrounded him. Yet he didn't move immediately. From where he stood he could see the faintest glow through the ice on the workroom window, a glow which wasn't visible in the other windows on that side of the house. He felt as though the winter hadn't quite triumphed there, as though while there was light in the window there would be life in the room. Perhaps the idea was simply the product of desperation, but it sent him marching across the common, clinging to the idea as he clung to the plastic handles. He reached the trees and sensed their awareness of him.
It felt as if the entire forest had turned towards him while remaining utterly still. A shiver passed through him, and then he was calm as death. Nothing could touch him now that he no longer had Ellen and the children. He stepped over the threshold of the forest, and felt the trees close in behind him.
The paths had been erased by snow, the marker posts had grown into saplings of ice. The awareness of him which surrounded him would lead him to its centre so long as he didn't lose his nerve. He wished the petrol wouldn't slosh about inside the containers with every step he took – the sound was dismayingly loud, and he thought it was unmistakable – but there was nothing he could do to hush it. 'Just a little present I'm bringing you,' he said through his teeth, and strode along the invisible path.
The Christmas firs gathered around him, the pines stepped back to wait for him. The trees were almost unrecognisable as such; they were taking on shapes of which their wood was the merest skeleton, translucent filigrees embroidering the cracks of the bark, encasing the slender trunks and rising to the marble efflorescences overhead. He could distinguish so much because the forest was shining with its own light, each crystal of frost separate and distinct. Was he really proposing to spoil all this? 'Yes,' he snarled. The only light he wanted to see now, too late, was the light in Ellen's and the children's eyes.
Perhaps he shouldn't have declared his intentions so fiercely. At once he felt as if he was surrounded by a multitude of watching shapes poised to seize him. Every tree seemed to conceal a shape which was about to step from behind it or emerge from it. Panic swelled like ice in his guts, and he couldn't move for shivering. Was this the best that Ellen and the children, or the memory of them, could expect of him? He ground his teeth until his jaws throbbed, until the ache gave him back some sense of himself, and then he staggered forwards as though the weight of the petrol was dragging him. 'Do your worst,' he snarled, but his bravado didn't reassure him, it only demonstrated how effortlessly the silence extinguished his voice. Now the forest had taken on the aspect of countless legs reaching down from the black sky, or of the fingers of a member unimaginably like a hand, which the infinite dark was using to trap him. He could only head deeper into the forest at a stumbling run. He was across the threshold of the pines now, and felt as if he'd tricked himself into going on. Whichever way he headed, terror would be crowding at his back.
For the moment the forest, or its true nature, seemed content to lie in wait for him. By its pallid light he was able to see the layers of patterns beneath the snow. They were swarming, he saw – transforming as they crept towards the edge of the forest and out into the world. Otherwise there was no movement except the guttering of stars in the infrequent dark gaps overhead.
He no longer knew how cold he was or how much he was shivering. His hands and arms and shoulders ached so badly that they felt locked into position, but he didn't dare put down the containers when that would entail halting. His stumbling body had taken over from his mind. He sensed a gathering behind him, as if the shapes the trees hid were emerging, but he wouldn't look. If it was only his fear which was driving him onwards, that no longer seemed to matter. He could see from the shapes of the trees ahead that he hadn't far to go. Each tree was crowned with an identical sphere like a moon composed of glassy filaments which had engulfed the foliage, and beneath each sphere a white form as large as himself was nesting.
He was stumbling forwards so fast that he was under the first of them before he was sure what the white forms were. They were faces, magnified human faces composed of ice and encased in a shell of it – faces of the townsfolk, displayed like trophies, like decorations in a cathedral where the worshippers had become part of the fabric. There was old Mr Westminster's face, there was Edna Dainty's. All of them looked frozen in a parody of calm, and Ben knew instinctively that their metamorphosis was only beginning. As he crossed the boundary they marked, another one formed on a tree to his left with a whisper of ice like a thin muffled scream. The process looked as if a swarming of the snow had rushed, or been chased, up the crystallised tree and been caught by it. The face was a child's face.
He couldn't put a name to her, though he might have seen her at the school. The spectacle of her face trapped in ice like amber and transformed into it appalled him. Were Ellen and the children among the trophies of the forest? He stared about him until his eyes trembled and stung, but he couldn't see them. He had to believe they weren't yet there. He was so intent on distinguishing who had been caught by the trees that he didn't realise how close to the centre he was until the sky gaped like an inverted pit ahead of him.
A violent shudder halted him. If one foot hadn't been planted in front of the other, the shakiness which seized his legs now that he was stationary would have thrown him headlong, a worshipper compelled to prostrate himself. The glade was deserted, glowing like a moon trapped just beneath the surface of the earth, and he had never seen anything so terrifying. He thought he knew why its emptiness intimidated him: because the glade no longer harboured the presence which had drawn the forest about it to conceal itself. The presence was all around him, wider than the horizon – how much wider, he dared not think.
But that wasn't the whole of his fear. However empty the glade appeared to be, he sensed that it was waiting for him.
Even if he couldn't stop shivering, he was able to think. If he didn't go to find whatever was there, it would come to find him. Any moment now the weight of the containers of petrol would cause him to drop them, and with them would go the last of his resolve. He stared across the glade at the ranks of iced faces, and suddenly they felt like a single mute accusation directed at him. 'I'm sorry,' he whispered and then shouted, but there seemed to be no difference between the two in the midst of the silence. He couldn't expect a response. He was alone with what he had helped to awaken – alone with that, and with the memories of how he'd terrified Ellen and the children, of the ice overwhelming the house around them, of the dying light in the window. Disgust with himself, with the way he'd treated them and with his present cowardice, blazed through him. 'I'm still here,' he snarled, and tottered forwards, the plastic containers thumping him at every step.
He couldn't help faltering at the edge of the glade. He'd thought the open space was covered in snow, but now he saw that the grass was hidden by a sheet of ice several inches thick. Translucent patterns teemed from the centre and out through the forest, layer upon layer of waves like a blossoming of frost, a transformation whose hunger wouldn't be satisfied until it had consumed the world. The remains of the oaks crouched towards the glade like spiny giants whose skeletons were collapsing beneath the weight of their transparent flesh. The pines with their huge new faces crowded around it, worshippers neither human nor vegetable but something new and terrible, and Ben felt the centre drawing more of the world into itself with every moment he wavered. Did he really imagine that he could challenge such power? If he achieved nothing more than to declare himself separate from it, at least that would prove he was still human, still the person who would have defended Ellen and the children from it if he hadn't been blind to their plight. If that was all, it would have to be enough. He could see the centre, he could walk straight to it if he didn't lose his footing on the ice; what was there to stop him? Only the waves of
