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 had caused him to break the light-switch. Words were useless. He raised one hand and pointed at the face behind them.
He stayed like that as a shiver passed slowly through him. The figure which had risen from the forest had lifted a pale hand and was pointing at him. He let his hand sink, and its hand disappeared into the snow, then reappeared as he made to touch his face. The children were sobbing, and Ellen was hanging onto them as though she wasn't sure if she was protecting them or herself. His hand faltered short of his chin, because he'd understood they were seeing what he was seeing: the face breaking out in patterns like frost, like music rendered visible in ice — his own face, which he could see reflected in the window.
It was just another metaphor, another sign of the imminent transformation, but he couldn't quite bring himself to touch his face and discover what exactly was there. Ellen and the children were to blame, shrinking away from the sight of him in such terror that he was beginning to lose his nerve. He couldn't stand them any longer. They screamed as he lurched towards them, and he thought they might topple across the desk and through the window. He no longer cared what happened to them. He'd moved away from the door so as to open it, to get away from them. He turned his back on them and seized the doorknob, frost flowering across the panels of the door as he did so, and strode out of the room.
He heard the children snivelling as he went downstairs, and Ellen murmuring to them. Let her say what she liked, about him if it improved her mood. Soon she and the children would be beyond such reassurances, ready or not. He flung open the front door and stepped into the embrace of the night.
He was stepping onto the track when he heard Ellen turn the key in the mortise-lock. He would have expected to hear the bolts, but they must be frozen open. He smiled sadly — apparently his face still could. Try as she might to keep him out, she was only wasting time in being afraid of him.
He slowed his pace as he continued along the track. Though he felt like running to find whatever was awaiting him, he wanted to see everything there was to see, every stage of the metamorphosis of Stargrave. Nothing moved except him, but he sensed that the frozen stillness was aware of him. He went forwards deliberately, relishing his anticipation, watching the forest begin to reveal its glimmering depths. Then a tiny sound from behind and above distracted him, and he looked back.
Ellen and the children were at the workroom window, gazing down at him. The sight of the family, so distant and yet so clear within the rectangle of brightness, took him off guard. Despite their fear of him, he could see that they were still concerned for him. The thought reawakened memories: Ellen saving him on the mountain, Margaret and Johnny appearing from within her in the delivery room, sleepless nights he and Ellen had spent worrying about childhood diseases, the years they'd struggled to make ends meet, the times they'd laughed together because at least they had one another ... There was no going back to all that, nor to the family itself, but he was reluctant to turn away from this last view of them; he found himself willing them to step back out of sight so that he could move on. Then he sucked in a breath which made his lungs ache, because the cold was spreading swiftly up the outside of the house like flames of ice.
He'd taken one inadvertent step towards the building when the whiteness blotted out the windows. The workroom window turned opaque, and the only sign of Ellen and the children was a muffled short-lived scream.
FORTY-FIVE
"Don't be afraid," Ben shouted. "Stay together so you'll always be together. It won't hurt. It won't take long." His voice was dwarfed by the sky, where the stars looked like crystallised loneliness. The house gleamed, a sepulchre whose marble was proliferating, merging with the snowscape. Surely his voice could penetrate the windows, however encysted they were, but there was no response from within. Perhaps the family was too afraid of him to respond, but he didn't even know who'd screamed, how many of them had, or why. "You'll be fine, you'll come through it so long as you look after one another," he shouted, and the stillness displayed his words to him. For all he knew, he might be talking nonsense. He wanted to believe that he was trying to reassure the family when in fact he was trying to reassure himself.
He stared at the workroom window as if the burning of his eyes could melt the whiteness. He'd seen the kind of transformation which would overtake Ellen and the children; the Wests had shown him. He'd found it awesomely beautiful, but what else could he say about it? Only that the Wests were dead, killed by a visitation which appeared to have used their living bodies to construct a symbol of its presence, and that Ellen and the children soon would be — their bodies would, at any rate. It was inevitable, he tried to think, but that didn't absolve him. They were dying because he'd brought them to Stargrave — because of who he was. They would die because his return had somehow brought about the awakening.
He hadn't known it would. Perhaps it had been the trace within him of whatever Edward Sterling had brought beyond the restraint of the midnight sun which had compelled Ben to return in the first place. Perhaps the compulsion of that buried trace to return to its origins had used his yearning for his parents and grandparents to bring him back, to set about sketching the basis of the patterns which allowed the presence in the forest to take hold of the world. The presence was pitiless, devoid of emotion, with no other purpose than to reproduce itself. Now it had Ellen and the children, and they meant nothing to it except as material it could use. The death of Star-grave hadn't appalled him — it was too large a concept to be anything other than awesome — but suddenly this did. He drew a breath which felt like a lump of ice in his chest. "Ellen," he shouted so loudly that he must have been audible on the far side of Stargrave if there was anyone to hear him, "tell me you're still there."
Silence. Stars flickered as if the dark had snatched at them, but that was the only movement above him. He sensed a vast stirring behind him, in or of the forest. "Stay away," he muttered, wondering if Ellen could be refusing to answer him because he'd terrorised the children. "Let me hear you, Ellen, or I'll break into the house," he shouted, dismayed to think that the threat might work.
Dead silence. All at once his words seemed less of a threat, more like the family's last hope. He sprinted towards the house, falling and bruising his forearms, bruises which felt as if he was pressing ice to them. He shoved himself to his feet and ran to the kitchen window. He thumped the glass with his bare fists, not caring if he cut himself so long as the window gave. But the encrusted glass scarcely even vibrated; the sole visible effect of his blows was to disturb the patterns of frost, which flooded back immediately, elaborating themselves further wherever they were disturbed.
He glanced about wildly in search of something he could use to break the window. There was the kettle, an icicle dangling from its spout. He grabbed it from the hollow it had thawed and ran back to the window. He was several feet away when he slipped and fell towards the house, the kettle striking the window with all his weight behind it. Even that had no effect beyond another restructuring of the translucent patterns. The house was impregnable as an iceberg and, he thought, as devoid of life.
The thought came close to paralysing his mind. He found himself staring at the kettle in his hand as though the dull grey object could inspire him. He flung it away from him, and it landed near the car with a sound like a tinny knell.
He stared in meaningless hatred at the gaping car, the useless kettle, the dent it had thawed in the snow its only achievement. He remembered Ellen using it on the car, refusing to despair, the children staying near her as though her hope could keep them warm. He lunged at the kettle, intending to kick it further away from him, a futile expression of his rage and heplessness — and then he saw why it had seemed to suggest the possibility of action. Even if he was too late to save Ellen and the children, perhaps he had the means to destroy what had destroyed them.
He'd forgotten that the lock of the car boot would be frozen. When he thrust in the key and turned it, it snapped. This further triumph of the ice enraged him. He kicked savagely at the boot until the lid buckled sufficiently to afford him a handhold, then he dug his fingers under the lid and wrenched at it, snarling through his gritted teeth. By the time it gave, the metal to the right of the lock bending back all at once with a screech, his fingers were raw and throbbing. They could still close around the handles of the two five-litre containers of petrol and lift them out of the car.
Ten litres might seem infinitesimal compared to the presence in the forest, but he felt instinctively that he needed only to destroy its centre, just as the kettle had destroyed the snow. Only! He had to try — he had to prove 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.