terror he was suffering, and hadn't he ranted about going beyond terror? He'd expected that of the children, and now he couldn't do it himself. The thought was a fire in his guts. His shakiness couldn't stop him walking. He lifted one foot as if he was stepping into an abyss, and trod on the ice of the glade.
A shudder passed through him and made his scalp crawl. He could feel the patterns moving underfoot, an incessant vibration whose complexity threatened to fill his mind, leaving no room for thoughts. The movement felt as if he'd set foot on the surface of an appallingly alien world. He clutched one container of petrol between his shaky ankles while he struggled to unscrew the cap of the other, then he flung the cap across the glade. It skittered over the ice and came to rest against an oak.
He wasn't sure what he'd thought might happen to it, but it seemed to have demonstrated that he would be safe. He gripped the open container between his ankles and skated the other plastic cap across the glade. The surface was ice, whatever it felt like. He wished he could avoid seeing the patterns racing past him, because they made him feel as if the ice of the glade was drawing him in; they infected him with a dizziness like the beginning of an interminable helpless fall. He closed his aching hands around the plastic handles, the smell of petrol reminding him that the forest no longer smelled of pine or of anything else, and stepped across the last threshold.
The darkness overhead seemed to lower itself towards him. Somehow the glade felt more open than a mountain-top, and much closer to the infinite dark. The glade focused the dark, he thought, which was why he felt as though he was shrinking with every step he took. He was shivering with cold and with a terror he was battling to keep vague, but he mustn't let his feelings daunt him. Another few steps would bring him to the centre, and he'd do his best to make the inhuman stillness flinch.
He took one more step on the hectic ice, planting his foot as stably as he could on the surface which he could hardly bear to look at or to feel, and then he knew what he was doing – what he had once again allowed himself to be lured into doing. No wonder he felt as if he was dwindling. He'd let himself believe that he could affect the transformation, but that was only a final illusion. He was returning to the spot where he'd awakened the patterns, so that he could be fitted into them.
The thought shattered the last of his defences. He clutched at the plastic handles as if they were his only hold on the reality he knew, and shrank into himself, desperate to hide. He had felt himself dwindling because of the immensity which he'd sensed watching him.
He felt as though layers of protection were being peeled away from his consciousness – as though an aspect of his mind of which his imagination had been merely the seed was flowering uncontrollably. He was being watched by something capable of swallowing the stars. More than the glade was the focus it used to perceive, more than the forest which felt for an instant like a single organ, emotionlessly aware of him. The transformation spreading out into the world was itself a medium which the inhabitant of the dark beyond the stars was using to perceive the world. The world and the stars had been less than a dream, nothing more than a momentary lapse in its consciousness, and the metamorphosis which was reaching for the world was infinitesimal by its standards, simply a stirring in its sleep, a transient dream of the awful perfection which would overtake infinity when the presence beyond the darkness was fully awake.
It would have reached for the world eventually, whether or not he had helped it take hold. Even if he could have saved Ellen and the children, and too many others for him to bear thinking of them, just by resisting the pull back to Stargrave, in a sense it didn't matter; the vast other was lying in wait for the universe. Perhaps it already occupied the same space in some way – perhaps the existence of the universe was all that prevented its awakening. He couldn't hope to oppose it. The containers of petrol were dragging him forwards to stumble his last few mindless steps, and then he would let fall the containers and himself.
Then a thought, like a spark which was almost too dim to see but which wouldn't quite go out, occurred to him. If he was unable to affect what was happening, why had he been enticed back to the glade?
He'd told the children that they had been chosen because of who he was. In retrospect his presumption seemed worse than grotesque, it seemed unforgivable, but might it have touched on the truth? Even if he was no more than a fragment of the pattern, that seemed to mean that the transformation needed him. He was bearing the last trace of Edward Sterling's legacy back to its kind. No wonder he seemed less than an atom to the watcher in the dark – but all at once that perception of himself was liberating, because it no longer seemed to matter what he did to himself. He was more than a fragment if he could choose not to be one.
He staggered to a halt a few paces short of the centre of the glade. Dropping the right-hand container, which struck the ice with a dull flat thump that the silence instantly erased, he dug in his pocket for the book of matches on which Howard Bellamy had scribbled his address, and closed his throbbing fist around them.
As soon as he halted, the dark grew more aware of him. The sky seemed to lower itself spiderlike, the entire forest turned inwards to him. He felt like an insect which had roused a carnivorous plant. He'd worried it, he thought wildly, but he hadn't even started. He tipped the open container of petrol towards himself, thrusting his fist underneath it as his grip on the handle wavered, and the liquid spilled with a gulping sound over his legs. When the container was lightened enough for his shaking arms to lift it higher, he poured petrol over his chest and then, closing his eyes and holding his breath, over his head.
Nothing seemed about to stop him. The smell of petrol, and his sense of what he meant to do, were threatening to make him sick. He couldn't stop now, he'd committed himself. He shied the empty container into the trees and managed not to lose his balance as he stooped to heave up the full one from the teeming ice. As he straightened up, the container began to empty itself over his stomach with a gulping which sounded dismayingly eager. He raised it further as soon as he could, and forced himself to hold his arms high until the last drops of petrol had trickled over his scalp. He dropped the container and kicked it away blindly, and opened his stinging eyes to find a match.
His fist had kept the book dry. One match would do the trick. He lifted the cover with a glistening wet finger and tore off the nearest match. He struck it, thinking of the time he'd spent away from Ellen and the children, when he'd sped home to protect them, never realising that he was being lured to do the opposite. The surge of guilt which overwhelmed him wasn't quite equal to the panic he experienced as the match flared. He shook it and flicked it away from him, and it landed with a hiss.
It sounded as though the ice was mocking him. 'Don't be so sure,' he snarled, and ripping out another match, set fire to the book.
He knew what he was doing – knew that there was no taking it back. Both his hands caught fire as the matches burst into flames and he dropped the book between his feet. At once flames raced up his body and reached his face before he could draw breath to scream.
The forest seemed to emit the cry for him. The snow between the trees rose up and flocked towards him with a screech of ice on ice. In the moments before the fire which was himself blinded and deafened him, he saw the swarming patterns reverse their direction and rush towards him as though to extinguish him. He felt the flames boiling his eyes and entering his skull through every orifice, and he thought he would go mad with agony before he died, an agony which felt as if it might never end.
And then the agony fell away from him, although he was still conscious. He seemed to be borne away by the icy flock, lifted into the endless dark. He felt he was merging with the blizzard, but it was more than that: he was expanding like a galaxy. Perhaps his consciousness was doing so at last; perhaps his terror of the presence he'd glimpsed in the forest had been a symptom of his failure to grasp the awesomeness of it. Perhaps this insight was all he could expect, the nearest to a resolution of a lifetime of expectancy he could hope for, or perhaps it was only the beginning.
EPILOGUE
Though the restaurant near Covent Garden was new, it tried to seem older. Beneath the half-shell of the pediment, the front door was of stout oak and sported a heavy brass knocker, the face of a jovial chef with a ring between his teeth. Beyond the latticed windows whose panes resembled flat transparent breasts set in glass, a few blurred shapes of diners were silhouetted against a fire. On the pavement by the doorway, one of a pair of blackboards supporting each other and staggering a little whenever the wind found them announced that for the duration of the Christmas holidays a magician would be performing at lunchtimes and in the early evenings. 'We
