The dog was poised to run, ears cocked, left front paw raised. She wrapped the leash twice around her hand while she strained to hear, but even when she pulled the Balaclava away from one ear the silence of the woods seemed absolute. "It was just an old bird," she said loudly. "Don't you dare run."
Goliath looked cowed as soon as she opened her mouth, and more so once she raised her voice. She had to tug at the leash before he would trot beside her onto the path. "We'll go the green way," she said.
That was the shorter of the walks, and apparently the more popular: when the paths diverged, most of the few footprints stayed on it. The path was muddier than she'd expected, but at least the footprints made the forest seem more inhabited, not that loneliness need bother her when she had Goliath with her. "Let's put our feet forward," she told the dog as she marched along the edge of the path.
He wasn't pulling ahead today. Soon she began to grow impatient with having to urge him onwards. The path would bring them out of the forest in less than an hour, well before dusk, but they hadn't reached the halfway point when she caught herself wishing there was a short cut. Goliath had started to unnerve her by hesitating for no reason she could see and pricking up his ears, though to Edna the silence seemed more intense than ever, so much so that she had to restrain herself from tugging the Balaclava away from her ears.
The further she progressed into the forest, the fewer the. shafts of sunlight became. The mottled treetrunks gleamed darkly under their burden of snow, the weight and stillness of which felt like a snowstorm gathering overhead. If any part of it should give way and break the stillness, she was afraid she would make a fool of herself, though by now it felt too cold for any of the snow to shift. She considered turning back, but what on earth for? She ought to be ashamed of herself. "We're nearly on our way out," she said.
She felt compelled to raise her voice to relieve the oppressive stillness; but apart from causing Goliath to flinch, she succeeded only in emphasising it. Never mind, the path at the limit of her vision was beginning to curve away from the depths of the forest. She halted so as to wrap the leash more securely around her hand, because her voice seemed to have made Goliath more nervous. "I wasn't shouting at you, Golly. I don't know what I was shouting at," she said — and then she saw it hadn't been her voice which had disturbed him.
As she finished speaking and loosened her grip on the leash in order to adjust her glove, the dog turned his head and stared past her. His grey lips peeled back from his teeth, and he began to snarl and shiver. The next moment he bolted, snatching the leash out of her hand, and fled into the woods.
"Golly, come back," she cried in a voice so small she could hardly believe she had spoken out loud. As much as anything, it was the utter stillness behind her which made her terrified to look. The dog vanished among the trees, and she turned her head, though her neck was trembling.
At first she could see nothing to fear, which meant that everything around her seemed poised to reveal that it was to be feared. She was surrounded by the forest and its countless scaly legs, its green bones showing through its marble flesh. She felt as though the stillness was an elaborate pretence. The muddy path, the only sign of life, looked like an intrusion, a trail leading straight to her. The thought seemed to focus her terror; something else was wrong with the path, and she dared not see what it was. "Golly," she screamed, and heard the dog bark.
"Wait," she cried, and ran towards the sound, skidding on fallen needles. Clouds of her breath, and the flicker of sunlight and shadow, interfered with her vision as she ran. When Goliath barked again she saw him through the trees about a hundred yards ahead. "Stay," she shouted hoarsely, stretching out her gloved hand, so desperate for reassurance that she could feel the leash in her grasp.
He almost did as he was told. She was within a few yards of him when he bolted. This time he halted in sight of her, but only just. "Bad boy, stay," she screamed, and stumbled after him, flapping her hands to fend off the trees which were growing closer and more numerous and cutting off the sunlight with their vault of snow and ice. Surely he would wait for her this time; as he stared back towards her, he looked cowed enough. As she lunged for the leash he fled again and halted, sides heaving, at the limit of her vision ahead.
"It isn't a game," she wailed, and immediately realised that he didn't think it was. He must know where he was going — surely he was leading her out of the forest — but why couldn't he wait for her to catch hold of the leash? Perhaps he was afraid, in which case please let it be only of her. She lurched after him, too winded to shout, terrified to look anywhere but straight ahead.
She lost count of the times he waited until she was almost within reach. Soon she had no voice, and her lungs were labouring. In the midst of the silence which clung to her ears, the voice of her mind was incessantly repeating "Can't see the woods for the trees." It felt like an act of defiance, a last assertion of herself, an attempt to blot out some awareness which was capable of paralysing her. She was keeping her attention on Goliath, but she thought that the shapes of the trees above her, or the frozen snow which hung from them, had at some point begun to seem unnatural — so regular that she was afraid to look.
Now Goliath bolted before she was within twenty yards of him. She floundered after him, trying to call to him, but her mouth only gaped as though she was drowning. Then she gasped feebly, the nearest she could come to a sigh of relief. He'd halted almost at the upper edge of the forest; above the trees beyond him she could see hints of crags and moorland. Surely she'd imagined the symmetry of the forest; the trees between her and the dog appeared ordinary enough. Once she was out of the forest she would be able to look back.
It seemed that the Doberman was too exhausted to run any further, or else he was waiting for her now that he'd shown her the way out. Except for his panting, each breath etching his ribs, he was standing quite still, his head slightly cocked towards her. "Good dog. Good dog," she managed to croak as she stumbled up to him. She stooped, her back aching like a bad tooth, and coiled the leash around her hand.
She almost lost her grip on it, because she had begun to shiver violently. She could hardly see for her own white breath. "Go on, Golly," she said in a painful dried-up whisper, and then she saw he was shivering too. He was so cold that his black pelt was turning white.
In that moment, as he rolled his eyes and stared beyond her, she realised what she had avoided seeing on the path. All the muddy footprints leading to her had begun to freeze, frost sparkling on them as whatever had caused the dog to bolt had advanced through the forest. Goliath bared his teeth and emitted a snarl which sounded like his shivering made audible, and fled towards the moors, dragging Edna with him.
She tried to hold on and keep up with him — the alternative was too terrible to contemplate. But the world was turning blinding white, or her eyes were, and her face felt as though it was being fitted with a succession of masks of ice. She ran blindly, clinging to the leash, struggling to draw enough breath to tell Goliath to slow down until she could see. Then she fell sprawling, and being dragged over the pine-needles was so painful that her hand lost its grip on the leash. She heard the dog scrambling out of the forest, and then the silence came for her. Ice closed around her body, and she felt as if she was already dead and stiff. She had no words to fend off her sense of the presence which stooped to her, a presence so cold and vast and hungry that her blind awareness of it stopped her breath.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Ben seemed determined to be at his best in Leeds. The family hadn't been in the bookshop two minutes before he had charmed the staff, complimenting them on the window display for
The Boy Who Caught The Snowflakes,
one copy of which looked crystalline with silvery glitter. After that the generously chinned proprietress and her two assistants, both of whom were uniformed in overalls like hers which made them resemble fractions of her, couldn't do enough for the Sterlings, enquiring anxiously whether the chairs at the table where they were to sit were comfortable enough, bringing them and Johnny and Margaret drinks, making sure everyone who set foot in the shop knew there was a book signing, even a diminutive pink-eyed man who was trying to remain unobtrusive while straining on tiptoe to reach the erotica. As customers began to approach the table, Ben brightened further. "Is this for you? You look young enough to me," he told a grandmother who wanted the book inscribed to her grandson for Christmas. He talked to customers about the kinds of book their children liked or, if they were children, about the adventures which were snow and the lengthening nights. "They're our mum and dad, you know," Johnny informed anyone who came near him. Three of Ellen's students turned up to buy a copy each of the book, but it was undoubtedly Ben's show, and she felt happy for him.
The last people in the queue were a reporter and photographer from a local newspaper. The reporter wanted only to check that they lived locally enough to be of some parochial significance. "Let's have your brats in the picture to add a bit of interest," the photographer said, and Ben hugged the family so hard that Ellen gasped. When the photographer said "That'll do" Ben continued to hold on for several seconds, as if he was afraid to let go.
Afterwards they walked through the premature Advent of the city streets. Though Johnny was beginning to entertain doubts about Father Christmas, he wanted to visit his avatar. Ben and Ellen took the children into a department store and waited outside the grotto, whose evergreen plastic entrance was emitting scrawny carols, while Johnny queued and Margaret went off to look at clothes by herself, feeling grown-up. "What do you think?" Ellen asked Ben. "Have we started off well?"
He was looking bemused by the thin singing which seemed to hover in the air. "Are you pleased?" he said.
"I thought we did rather well for beginners."
"If you're pleased, then I am."
"More to the point, the bookshop and the public were, particularly with you."
"The world's ready for me, you think? Wherever I go there'll be children around me? Ben Sterling, magnet of imagination, Pied Piper of the collective unconscious. Myths restored while you wait, tales retold which you'd forgotten you knew, dreams dreamed on your behalf while you sit closer to your fire ..."
He was gazing across the cosmetics counter, at his reflection framed in an oval of seasonal glitter, and Ellen felt as if he was scarcely aware of her — as if, perhaps, he was taking refuge in the kind of almost automatic response which he'd produced for the customers at the bookshop. "Just do the best you can on your walkabout next week," she said, "and then it'll practically be Christmas."
"I can't take any responsibility for that."
"Not even for making our first Christmas in Stargrave special? I mean to, for all of us."
"I'm sure this year will be special."
Johnny came out of the grotto just then, wearing his grin which meant he had a tale to tell his parents, and he reminded her so much of his father that her love for both of them seized her deep inside herself. Ben grinned like that sometimes, like a little boy with a secret to share, and she hoped he always would. He was still the person she'd fallen in love with, and she mustn't let herself feel lonely if sometimes that person had to go into hiding inside him. "What was so funny?" she said.
"Father Christmas kept sniffing," Johnny giggled, "and the boy in front of me asked him if he was sniffing the glue that kept his beard on."
"That's how you can tell he wasn't real," Ben said. "A real
Father Christmas wouldn't need chemicals to give him visions. He'd spend the year dreaming of flying over the snow and ice under the stars, dreams like snowstorms that take all year to gather until the days are shortest and it's time for him to rise."
"That could be a book," Ellen suggested.
"What could?" Margaret said, emerging from among the teenage fashions.
"I've already told it once," her father said.
Disappointment and rejection and a shaky resolve not to show her emotions in public flickered across Margaret's face until Ellen came to the rescue. "If your father keeps telling it he may lose the urge to write it," she explained. "It was just the idea that Father Christmas spends nearly all year dreaming of when he'll wake up."
The idea stayed in her mind as she drove out of Leeds. The snow on the moors had all but melted, renewing the colours of the vegetation, shades of moist green which put her in mind of spring. Having at least two books to complete made her feel secure. If by any chance Ben proved not to be inspired by the idea he'd thrown out, she might have a go at writing it herself.
By the time they reached Stargrave, the first stars were glinting above the bridge. The miles of Sterling Forest were composed of night and ice, and seemed somehow to dwarf the lights of the town. The heat of the house welcomed the family, fending off the chill and effacing their breath. After dinner they played Monopoly, using a battered old set of the game, its banknotes crumpled from years of figuring in shops the children pretended to run, one tiny plastic hotel permanently crippled by being chewed and almost swallowed by two-year-old Johnny. Before the game was over, Margaret and Johnny were trying not to shiver. They were overtired, Ellen thought as she hurried them to bed, though perhaps the house was also chilly with a cold which seemed to settle on it from above. Only Ben was unaffected by the chill, unless that was why he grew randy once the children were out of the way. She pulled the duvet over his shoulders as he slid bulging into her, then she rubbed his body hard, trying to keep the chill at bay. When he subsided she held onto him. That didn't seem to keep the chill outside their bed, but soon she was so drowsy that it didn't bother her. She drifted into sleep which felt soft as snow, only to be wakened by a small voice in the dark.