She gave him and Dominic an apron each so that they could duck for apples in a washing-up bowl placed on a bath towel in the front room. The water and the apple which Ben eventually snagged with his teeth tasted of soap and of the smell of the candles which illuminated the room. Afterwards Mrs Milligan brought in sausages protruding from snowdrifts of mashed potatoes on large oval plates, followed by conical cakes meant to resemble snouts of rats, from which one had to pull the inedible whiskers. Ben's aunt kept glancing unhappily at the shadows of the sausages, flexing on the tablecloth like fingers threatening to shape a silhouette, and she wouldn't touch the snouty cakes. Mrs Milligan cleared the table and came back into the room, her shadow billowing after her as though the dark of the hallway had sent part of itself to join them. "Time to tell some tales," Mr Milligan said.
"Nothing unsuitable," Ben's aunt warned.
"Nothing to turn anyone's hair any whiter."
"Tell us about the man who found the whistle on the beach at Felixstowe," Dominic said.
The boys sat on either side of the fire, their backs against the fireplace, which felt to Ben as if the snatches the heat made at him kept being thwarted by the chill of the tiles. Mr Milligan told them about a whistle that called a ghost which was dressed in a sheet, except that when it got between the man and the only door out of his bedroom he saw that nothing was wearing the sheet. Ben listened enthralled, feeling that he was sitting at the feet of giants with firelit faces, and watched their shadows merge and part and merge on the ceiling, a shifting centre of deeper blackness drawing them together. When Mr Milligan finished, having let the man escape from the room, Ben heard his aunt breathing hard with distaste. "It's just a story someone made up, boys. It didn't really happen," Mrs Milligan said to placate her.
"That's mean. You didn't have to say that," Dominic complained.
"It sounds to me as if your mother did," Ben's aunt said.
"Do you know any stories, Beryl?" Mrs Milligan suggested.
"If you mean about the supernatural, there are plenty in the Bible."
"It's Ben's turn now," Dominic said.
Ben wasn't sure if Dominic meant to aggravate the tension in the room, and he didn't care. He felt oddly excited, as if Mr Milligan's storytelling had awakened a story in him. "I'll try," he said.
"We'll have to be going shortly," his aunt announced.
"You'd better have the storyteller's seat, Ben," Mr Milligan said, and relinquished the lopsided armchair to him. Ben gazed into the flames and felt as if he was sitting by a camp fire, as if the dark behind him were bigger than the world. A story which he had to speak in order to know it seemed to be gathering inside him, but he didn't know how to begin. Mr Milligan brought a dining-chair from the next room and sat on it beside the fire. "Try 'once upon a time', Ben."
"Once upon a time ..." Ben said, and felt the phrase bring the story alive. "Once upon a time there was a boy who lived at the edge of the coldest place in the world. It was so cold that the ice there had never melted since there was ice in the world. The boy's father went out hunting every day while the boy and his mother tended all the fires that people had kept burning since before anyone could remember, because if even one fire should go out the spirits that lived beyond the flames would come down the mountain where they lived in the ice and through the pass the fires were guarding and capture the rest of the world. The boy's father told him that his father's father almost let a fire go out when the father's father was a little boy, and he'd seen the spirits come walking. Their eyes were like ice that nothing could melt, and each of their breaths was like a blizzard, and their footsteps sounded like all the snow as far as you could see in every direction squeezing itself together. Just looking at them had made his own eyes begin to turn to ice. Only
his
father had grabbed a burning log from the next fire and driven the spirits back and thrown the log on the fire that was nearly out, and they'd never let a fire burn down that low again.
"Well, hearing about that frightened the boy the story is about, but he wished he could see one of the spirits just to know what they looked like. Only he couldn't see up the mountain for the mist and fires, and whenever his mother or his father caught him looking they would beat him. Then one day his mother told him she was going to have a baby and he would have to tend the fires by himself for as long as it took the baby to come, and she made him promise that he wouldn't let a single fire get low and wouldn't look beyond them for even a moment..."
Ben's aunt had begun to shift uneasily in her chair when he mentioned having a baby, but the story had taken over; Ben was as eager as the Milligans visibly were to discover how it came out. "The day his mother took to her bed the boy got up before dawn and put some of the wood that he and his father had brought from the forest on the fires, and then he stood with his back to them and only looked round to see if they needed feeding. He watched his shadow turn with the sun, and when it looked almost as long as a tree is tall he heard a voice behind him. It sounded like the ice cracking in the heat from the fire, which was a sound you always heard in that place, but he knew it was a voice because it was calling his name. So he ran to get more wood and throw it on the fires, and he didn't look at anything but them until his father came home from hunting. But he didn't tell his father what he'd heard, because he was afraid of being beaten for letting the spirits get so close.
"That night he kept getting up to make sure none of the fires were going out because his mother and father were sleeping so soundly from waiting for the baby to come. And the next day he was up before dawn to tend the fires. He made them so hot he had to stand twenty paces away and couldn't look at them for more than a breath at a time. So he watched his shadow turning east and growing longer than yesterday's as the sun began to go down, and then he heard someone calling his name beyond the fires in a voice like a stream turning into ice. So he ran to the forest for wood and threw it on the fires until they were so hot he had to stand thirty paces away, where he couldn't hear the voice. But he could feel the eyes of ice watching him over the flames.
"He might have told his father about that, because they frightened him more than the thought of being beaten, except that just as his father came home with a deer across his shoulders his mother started having the baby. She cried out all night, and in the morning it still hadn't come, so because they had enough meat for a week the father stayed with her and the boy had to tend the fires even though he'd had no sleep. So he made them so high he thought they must be able to melt the ice on the mountain, and then he watched his shadow turning and listened to his mother crying out, until his shadow looked like a giant that could swallow his father in one mouthful, because that was the shortest day of the year and the sun was lowest. And just when the sun touched the horizon he heard someone calling his name in a voice that sounded like a snowfall talking, and the fires were so hot and he was so tired that it hushed him to sleep.
"He didn't wake until he started shivering, and as soon as he did he knew that one of the fires had gone out. He ran to the forest to get some wood, but there was just one branch left from all the wood they'd cut, because he'd been building the fires so high. And when he ran back with it he saw that the fire wasn't just out, it was covered with frost as thick as a finger.
"So he ran to the hut to tell his mother and father, but he couldn't hear his mother crying out or his father singing to her, it was quiet as a snowdrift in there. And when he looked in he thought he saw two white bears that must have eaten his mother and father, but they were really his mother and father covered with frost that had caught them when they'd tried to run. The only living creature in the hut was a baby as white as a cloud. So the boy went to pick it up, but when it opened its eyes he saw they were made of ice. Then he was going to kill it with the branch, but it started to cry, and its breath was like a blizzard so fierce it cut his skin and froze his blood when he started to bleed, and the last thing he ever saw was the world turning white. So that's one story about what happens when the ice comes out of the dark ..."
Ben's voice trailed off. He felt light-headed with talking, and awkward now that he'd finished. The fire was almost out, he saw. Then Mr Milligan came to himself with a start and shovelled coal from the scuttle onto the embers until the fire flared up. "That was a tour de force, Ben," he said. "If I were you I should write all that down and try sending it to a publisher."
Ben's aunt slapped her knees and pushed herself to her feet. "Come along, Ben. I've let you stay longer than you should have. I'll put the light on if I may. I like to see where I am."
The Milligans were still narrowing their eyes at the light when she brought Ben's coat from the hall and caught his arms in the sleeves. She said nothing further to him until the Milligans had closed the front door. "Where did you get that from?"
She meant the story. "Granddad told it to me," Ben said, which seemed as if it might be close to the truth.
"Well, I hope you'll forget it. You shouldn't be dabbling in such things at your age. You'll be giving yourself nightmares, and me as well. I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to ask your teacher what kind of books he thinks you should be reading." "Mummy and Daddy wouldn't mind what I read." "Don't you be so sure about your mother," she said, and more gently: "I can't look after you properly if you keep making me afraid for you, can I? You've been through enough without putting silly stories into your head. You can read them when you're older if you must, but I'm sure you'll have grown out of them by then."
She was wrong, Ben thought, in more ways than one, though he wasn't sure which. Even if she told him what to read, she couldn't reach the stories that were in his head. There were others which would tell themselves to him in their own time, he was sure. The mist was extinguishing the streetlamps around him, turning the distance into a dark mystery which he couldn't reach by walking. The sight and his thoughts made him feel breathlessly expectant. Perhaps he didn't need to find Edward Sterling's last book. Perhaps he had leafed through it so often that its burden was inside him, waiting to be understood.
SEVEN
On Guy Fawkes Night weeping willows of many colours appeared in the sky, blotting out the stars. Christmas was already in the shops, sprinkling the windows with imitation snow like a promise of the real thing. Christmas had come early to the school too, bringing little goodwill but multiplying the questions which the children had to answer instantly if they weren't to be shouted at or worse. It would be Ben's first Christmas without his family, and he felt as if his grief had been waiting for him to realise. Some nights as he prayed in front of the photograph, his lips were quivering so much he couldn't even whisper.
In the weeks before Christmas his aunt did her best to console him. During the first weekend in December she hung the decorations, wavering on top of a stepladder while Ben clutched the legs. For the first time in her life she bought a Christmas tree, a Norway spruce no taller than Ben. It lent the house a chilly scent of pine and sprinkled the carpet with needles as the trees from Sterling Forest had done in the Star-grave house, but it wasn't the same — Ben wasn't sure how. Nor were the Father Christmases she paid for him to visit in the department stores — a fat man who sneezed as often as he chortled and a thinner whose beard was too big for him — quite able to invoke the anticipation he'd begun to feel around this time of year in Stargrave, though both of them patted him on the head and murmured noncommittally in the manner of their species when he asked to be brought an astronomical telescope. He knew they were dressed up as someone who didn't exist, but that wasn't the difference; he would have known that last Christmas.
Soon Mr O'Toole set about preparing the school for the festivities. When they opened their presents and ate their Christmas dinner, he yelled, they should be thinking of the child God sent to earth to suffer because people were so sinful that nothing less could make up for their sins. He dabbed spittle from his lips with a large stiff handkerchief and glared red-eyed around the assembly hall. "Have you no souls?" he demanded, his voice rising almost to a shriek. "File past that crib, the lot of you, and think of Christ's blessed mother having to see her only son whipped and crowned with thorns and nailed to a cross to die with vinegar to drink. I'll see a few tears before this assembly's over, or I'll know how to get them."
The crib was the size and approximately the shape of a rabbit hutch. The cradle in the straw was surrounded by three identical sheep from a toy farmyard, two plaster shepherds and a Virgin Mary whose hair a trace of dust was greying. A star cut out of silver paper hung above the scene, one of its points drooping. The cradle and the swaddled baby it contained were too big for their entourage, and Dominic had claimed to Ben that if you picked the baby up it would cry ma-ma. When Dominic shuffled alongside the crib now, however, he emitted a loud sniff. "Use your handkerchief, boy," the headmaster snarled, low enough to suggest grudging approval of Dominic's performance. There were just three girls in front of Ben, sniffing almost in unison, and suddenly Ben knew that he would be the first child to fail to weep, unable to respond to the crib whose incongruities seemed to have been arranged as a test of faith. It wasn't just those that troubled him, it was the sight of the headmaster glaring across the crib. If what the crib represented were real, how could it need someone like Mr O'Toole to terrorise people into believing in it? How could it bear to have anyone act that way on its behalf? The questions frightened him even more than the headmaster did, and so he began, rather to his own bewilderment, to weep as he came abreast of the crib.
At first he thought he was weeping only for his family and from knowing he would never again spend Christmas with them. He remembered the snap of crackers as the family formed a chain with them around the laden table and pulled them all at once; his grandfather saying "To the season" as everyone raised a glass of wine; the long evenings when the boy would sit on his mother's lap by the fire while she and his grandmother sang carols that seemed somehow to embody the time of year, the icy sparkling of the vast night over Stargrave, the wind rushing down from the moors and through the forest and fluttering softly at the windows — and then he found himself observing himself. Perhaps this was the only way he could deal with the confusion of his thoughts. He felt as if he was looking down on the crib and the headmaster and himself from somewhere too high for his emotions to reach. This new clarity seemed to unlock his mind, and with disconcerting vividness he remembered learning to walk, his father and grandfather dancing out of reach and leading him deeper into the forest, their faces proud and a little nervous. The family had looked like that when he'd begun to realise that Father Christmas was a myth, but had there been a secret for him to realise in the forest? A sudden panic which he didn't want to understand jarred him back to full awareness of the crib, and for a moment it seemed to be the source of his panic rather than any kind of a reassurance.