Then he was falling behind as the glittering passed through the hedge around the gap. A man's hand fastened on his shoulder, jerked with surprise, redoubled its grasp. "He's ice cold, poor little bugger," the man called, and Ben heard a woman — the purplish woman — emit a sympathetic groan. He saw a group of trees at the edge of the forest sparkle and grow dull, and then there was nothing to see beneath the trees except the greenish gloom. He felt abandoned and bewildered, and all he could do was shake.
TWO
The Stargrave police station was a cottage with a counter dividing the front room. A policewoman with large wrinkly hands took Ben into a smaller room next to the kitchen and brought him a glass of milk. "Straight from the cow, that. Drink it right up." The policeman who had found him in the graveyard questioned him with a slowness which Ben realised was meant to be kind, but which he found patronising. Did Ben know his own address? Had he come all this way by himself? Had he told anyone he was coming? Even if he'd left a note that told his aunt not to worry about him, didn't he think she would? "Suppose so," Ben muttered, feeling small and mean.
At least he wasn't shaking now, though his body felt so brittle that he thought a touch might set if off again. While the policeman went to a desk behind the counter to phone Ben's aunt, the policewoman held Ben's hand and told him about her daughter who wanted to be a train-driver when she grew up. Before long the policeman called him. "Just tell your aunt how you are, will you?"
Ben could hear her voice demanding a response as he trudged to the phone; she sounded like a tiny version of herself buried in the desk-top. He picked up the receiver in both hands and held it away from his face. "I'm here, Auntie."
"Thank God," she said, so tonelessly that he wasn't sure if she was telling him to do so. "Are they feeding you? Have you had nothing to eat all day?"
"I don't want anything," he said, and knew at once that honesty would do him no good. "I mean, I had something before."
"I'll be speaking to you when you're brought home. Put the policeman back on."
Ben dawdled back to his seat, feeling as if he had nowhere to go. "We'll look after him, don't you fret," the policeman was saying, and then his voice grew efficient and stiff. "Yes, ma'am, of course I know who the Sterlings were ... A sad loss to our town ... I'm sure we can, ma'am, and then I'll see to it that he's delivered safely to you ..."
By now Ben was squirming with embarrassment. Every time the policeman said "ma'am" he sounded like the children on the train. "I shouldn't like to specify a time just yet, ma'am ... He was in a bit of a state when we found him ..." Was that all? Could he really not have seen what Ben had seen in the graveyard, when he had been so close to him? "I believe the doctor's here now, ma'am," the policeman said.
The doctor was a dumpy rapid woman who smelled of mints, one of which rattled against her teeth as she shifted it into her hamsterish cheek. "What's his name?" she said as she peered into Ben's eyes and palmed his forehead, and he felt as if he wasn't there, as if the dance in the graveyard had carried him off. "What's his story?" she said.
The policeman had managed to terminate the phone call. "He just wanted to come back to Stargrave and pay his respects, 1 reckon — it's only been a few months since. Is that about right, son? Nowt wrong where you're living now, is there?"
"My auntie's good to me," Ben said with a guilty vehemence which left him short of breath.
The doctor was holding Ben's wrist and gazing at her watch. "Remind me why you called me. He seems right enough now."
"He was shaking like a leaf when I got hold of him," the policeman said, and Ben remembered the leaves turning white. "Shivering with cold on a day like this. The other thing was, I thought I saw — they must have been insects flying around him just before I got to him."
"They weren't insects," Ben protested.
The doctor glanced at him as if she'd only just noticed him. "Ah. Ah. Ah," she said, and stared at his mouth until he realised he was meant to echo her. "Wider, wider," she urged, and eventually met his eyes. "What were you saying?" she said, poising her thermometer as if she would use it to cut him off as soon as she'd heard enough.
While she had been peering down his throat he'd decided to keep his secret. "I didn't see any insects."
"They were there, son, a real swarm of them. They flew off into the forest when they saw my uniform." To the doctor the policeman said "I just thought you'd better know."
She elbowed Ben's head onto one side and then the other so as to examine his neck. "Thinking of bites, were you? None here." She thrust the thermometer into Ben's mouth and tapped the linoleum with the heels of her scuffed boots until it was time to glance at the reading. "Nothing up with him. Too much travelling and running about on an empty stomach, that was all. I'd prescribe a big helping of bangers and mash."
She snapped her battered bag shut and marched out. "Will pie and chips with lots of gravy do?" the policewoman said to Ben.
"Yes." He was suddenly so exhausted that he found his encounter in the graveyard drifting away from him, becoming unreal — almost too exhausted to remember his manners. "Thank you," he added, and the policewoman patted his head.
When she brought him the food from the fish and chip shop, he found he was ravenous but hardly able to raise his leaden arms. He remembered an unexpectedly hot day when he'd felt like this. His mother had sat him on her lap and fed him soup. He remembered how she'd kept ducking her head to kiss him on the temple and smiling at him as if to deny the glimmer of anxiety in her eyes. He'd felt so drowsy and protected it had seemed he could stay like that for ever. For a moment he wished the policewoman would see how tired he was and feed him.
But she was answering the phone. "The doctor's pronounced him fit for the road, ma'am. The sight of food's woken him up ... I'm sure you feed him well, ma'am ... Someone from the county force is on his way here to bring him back to you ..."
As Ben was dipping the last of his chips in the gravy the officer arrived, a lanky unsmiling man whose jaw seemed to take up at least a third of his long face and whose peaked cap made the boy think of a chauffeur. "Whenever you're ready," he said to Ben.
"Take your time. We don't want you being sick all over the car on top of everything else," the policewoman said.
She saw Ben out to the car and buttoned his collar for him, and said to the long-faced driver, "Look after him. He's a good little chap who's had more bad luck than anyone deserves."
Ben was grateful to her, though he didn't mind that the driver seemed to regard him as a nuisance not worth talking to: silence and sitting passively might let him recapture what had happened in the graveyard. The car followed its own lengthening shadow onto the moors, and Ben felt as if he was leaving part of himself behind. When he glanced back at the forest, the sun hurt his eyes. He squeezed them shut and saw a shining blotch that grew as it darkened. He felt as if the sun had blotted out the memory he was unable to grasp. He put one hand over his eyes, trying to remember, but almost at once he was asleep.
He kept jerking awake. Whenever he did so, he felt as if the memory had dodged farther out of reach. He was beginning to think he'd lost it by not holding onto it. His blinks of consciousness showed him towns he couldn't name, a sky sliced open by a sunset, a road which appeared to lead to the edge of the world, an avenue of lamps like concrete dinosaurs whose heads turned orange in unison against a sky of dark-blue glass. Once he was shaken awake by the driver so that he could be transferred to a car from another police force. Once he awoke under a bare black sky, where the glittering of stars in the void seemed for a moment to sum up everything he was unable to grasp, to be a secret message intended solely for him. Then the moment was past, and try as he might, he couldn't stay awake.
The next time he was aware of wakening, he realised that the car had halted. When he heaved his eyelids open, he saw he was outside his aunt's house. The small paired houses and neat gardens and parked cars were steeped in darkness which made even the streetlamps look befogged and which seemed to cling to him. He fumbled with the door-handle and floundered out of the car.
A policeman who Ben couldn't recall having seen before was ringing the doorbell. Ben saw his aunt jump up beyond the front-room window and steady herself by grabbing her chair, in which she must have slept to wait for him. As he stumbled up the garden path, between shrubs tarred with night, she opened the front door. Her wiry black curls looked lopsided, her hornrimmed spectacles were crooked, the trademark tag of her cardigan was poking over her collar. She stared dolefully at Ben and folded her arms. "Never do that again unless you want to kill me," she said.
THREE
At first Ben thought she was exaggerating. She thanked the policeman and watched to make sure he closed the gate behind him. "Up with you" was all she said to Ben for now, waving her hands as if she was wafting him upstairs. He used the banister to haul himself to the bathroom, where the lid of the toilet was disguised by white feathers, and was sleepily brushing his teeth when he found himself peering at his face in the mirror. Just now it seemed unreal as a mask, his metallic-blue eyes underlined by tiredness, pale bitten lips precisely bisected by the shadow of his sharp nose on his thin face, silvery blond hair lolling in all directions above his large ears. He was still wondering what he felt the sight should tell him when his aunt bustled in to drag a comb through his hair. Even the scratching and yanking at his scalp was unable to rouse him. He staggered into his bedroom and buttoned his pyjamas haphazardly, and crawled under the blanket, his eyes closing before his head located the pillow.
Midday sunshine and the rusty notes of a huge music-box wakened him. He laid his forearm over his eyelids and enjoyed his unhurried return to consciousness, his feeling that it didn't matter how long it took him to recognise the sound as the call of an ice-cream van. It receded gradually, dwindled, went out at last like a spark, and only then did he realise that he couldn't hear his aunt in the house.
He pushed himself out of bed so hard that his arms shivered, and clattered downstairs, hoping the noise would make her respond. She wasn't in the kitchen, where the stove and the metal sink gleamed as though she had just polished them, nor in the dining-room, where black chairs stood straight-backed around the bare black table overlooked by framed browned photographs of old Norfolk seaside views, nor in the front room, where the radio sat on top of the revolving bookcase.
Usually the radio put him in mind of an outsize toaster made of off-white plastic, but just now it seemed to crystallise the silence of the house; it made him think of a heart which had ceased beating. He was staring at it, afraid to move, when he heard a sound upstairs: a choked snore, suddenly cut off.
She must have slept as long as he had. He wasn't supposed to go in her room, but surely she wouldn't object if he made her a cup of tea. He took the kettle to the kitchen sink and listened to the clangour of water in it growing less hollow. He watched the kettle boil, grasped the handle as soon as the lid began to twitch, poured the water onto the tea he'd spooned into the pot, forcing himself to keep hold of the handle when the steam made his fingers flinch. Surely now she wouldn't be so cross with him. Placing one foot and then the other on each stair so as not to spill the brimming liquid, he bore the fragile cup on its saucer to her door and knocked timidly on a panel. When a longer knock brought no response, he set the cup and saucer down and inched the door open.
The room felt muggier than his, as if its contents — the quilt which hung down to the floor on both sides of the bed, the dwarf cushions bristling with hatpins on the dressing-table, the fat-bottomed chair confronting itself in the mirror beyond the pins — had soaked up the heat. His aunt was huddled under the quilt, looking smaller than she ought to. Her face was greyish, pulled out of shape by her slack drooling mouth. He couldn't tell if she was breathing.
Then she snorted and closed her mouth, and her eyes wavered open. As soon as she saw Ben she sat up, wrapping the quilt around her and wiping her chin furiously with the back of one hand. "I've brought you some tea, Auntie," he stammered.
By the time he reached the bed with it she had put on her bed-jacket and spectacles. Her squashed curls were springing up, but she still looked greyer than she ought to. "Leave it on the little table," she said when he attempted to hand her the cup and saucer. "Go and be a good boy while I get up."
Perhaps she wasn't fully awake, but the blurring of her voice unnerved him. "Are you all right, Auntie?"
She placed one hand over her heart as if she was examining herself. "I hope I will be this time. But you must never upset me like you did yesterday, do you see?"
"I won't ever," Ben said, and retreated to his room. If she died he would be wholly alone, and where would he have to go? He set about tidying his room to take his mind off the possibility, lining up his Dinky toys on the windowsill, one model car for each Christmas since he was three years old. They made him think of frost at the windows, sparks flying up the chimney as the wrapping-paper blazed.
He carried the bundle of his books down to the front room. When he untied the string from around them the books seemed to expand with relief, the Hans Andersens his father had given him and the boys' adventure annuals his aunt had. Best of all, because it was still mysterious, was Edward Sterling's last book,
Of the Midnight Sun.
He had only begun to leaf through it when his aunt came downstairs. "Don't put too many books in my bookcase or you'll be making it lean. We don't want people thinking we bought our furniture off a cart, do we?" she said, and frowned at the book in his hands. "What's that musty old thing? You don't want that. It might have germs."
Ben hugged it. "I do want it, Auntie. It's the book Great-Granddad wrote. Granddad gave it to me and said I should keep trying to read it until it made sense."