Midnight Sun

FIFTEEN

Market Street was deserted. In many of the houses, televisions flickered like will-o'-the-wisps. The temperature had dropped further while he was in the hotel. The cold and the solitary sounds of his footsteps excited him, made him feel almost childlike, out by himself on a night near Christmas. Beyond the streetlamp which stood outside the newsagent's at the edge of Stargrave, the glinting tarmac led past a few cottages. They seemed to sink into the night as the Sterling house came into view, a shape like a monolith crowned with stone and stars. All the windows were unlit, indistinguishable from the bricks, and the house seemed darker than the night to him, as dark as the forest which loomed at its back.

A floodlight on the wall of the new bungalow on the main road whitened the hedge and the garden around the bungalow and lit up the end of the rough track. A friend of his grandmother's had lived where the bungalow now stood; he wondered why her house had needed rebuilding. He picked his way past it along the track, over chunks of rock and their elongated shadows which looked as deep as the ruts frozen into the earth.

A frosty wind came down through the forest to meet him. He heard its long slow breath like the sound of a wave on an invisible beach, and saw the forest stirring wakefully, a dim movement which appeared to spread to the outline of the house. The forest creaked like a great door. His breaths glimmered in front of him, ghosts leading him towards the house, and their appearance made him feel close to recovering a memory. That sense of imminence, and the need to walk carefully on the uneven track, preoccupied him until he was nearly at the gate. As soon as he looked up at the building, however, the sight drove everything else out of his mind. The face was still at the window.

Or was it a face? As he gazed up, clouds like rags of the moon, which was rising beyond the forest, streamed between the stars above the top-heavy roof, and the house seemed to topple towards him. Surely the pale shape must be a mark on the glass; no face could be so perfectly circular, and besides, it was in exactly the same place where he had seen it earlier. He gazed at it until the crescent moon and its globe of blackness were clear of the crags, and the darkness of the house appeared to solidify around the shape at the window. With a start like awakening from a trance, he stepped into the shadow of the house and opened the rusty gate in the chest-high stone wall.

He couldn't really be feeling the shadow, but he felt suddenly colder. He ventured along the cracked path bordered by weedy flowerbeds and stood on the doorstep between the secretively narrow window of the cloakroom and the unwashed bay window beneath a lintel the colour of lead. The front door used to seem like the entrance to a giant's domain, and it was still several heads taller than he was. Paint fell from it, exposing the oak, while he groped for the keyhole. As he jiggled the key into the lock he smelled the old wood and heard flakes of paint whispering down. He twisted the key back and forth, but it failed to engage the mechanism. He gave the door an angry shove, and it swung inwards as though it had been opened from within.

All he could see beyond the doorway was darkness so deep that it appeared to have no end. Dropping the key into his pocket, he waited for his eyesight to catch up with the dark. He felt more childlike than ever, as if he'd risen in the middle of the night to see the house transformed, and almost unable to breathe for the pulse in his throat. Eventually he began to distinguish hints of outlines: a thick banister which began in mid-air several paces ahead of him and which slanted upwards to vanish in the gloom, the edges of two ajar doors and their frames to his right. He would have seen more if the kitchen door were open at the far end of the hall, but he'd retrieved enough of a sense of the layout to step forwards, reaching for the brass light-switch outside the cloakroom. It resisted momentarily, then clicked down, its lever skewing almost imperceptibly leftwards in its housing. All this was as he remembered, but the light above the hall stayed dark.

He could just see the bulb, a hovering bulge of dimness. He paced forwards over the worn carpet and pushed the first door wide open. Beyond it was a shadeless bulb over a barren room twenty feet square. He groped around the door-frame and found the chilly switch, but it had no effect on the bulb. The electricity must be turned off. He couldn't recall where the main switch was, and it might be dangerous to search for it without a flashlight. Sighing, he stepped away from the room, and the front door slammed shut.

"All right, if that's what you want," he said. It had been the wind, of course – he thought he heard the forest creaking faintly beyond the kitchen door – but it felt as if the house had told him to stay. He held onto an upright of the banisters while his heart slowed down, and gazed at the patterns of light on the floor of the room, long oblique glowing slabs so indistinct that he wasn't sure he was seeing them. The promise of light enticed him into the room.

The echoes of his footsteps made the room sound considerably larger than it was. If it hadn't been for the circle of plaster from which the light-bulb hung, plaster carved into a pattern which looked elaborate even in the dark and which put him in mind of snow frozen halfway to melting, he could have imagined that the ceiling was tall as the trees in the forest. By the time he was beneath the pattern he felt as if he'd taken as many paces to cross the room as he would have when he was a child. That impression, and the view of the lights of Stargrave beyond the window to his right, sent a shiver through him, so violent that it made him feel he was shaking off a burden. "My God," he whispered.

He wasn't seeing Stargrave, just the lights. The view of the town seemed no more than a symbol, a key to unlock his memory. At about this time of year the room had been full of lights, crystal blossoms shining in the tree the Sterlings brought out of the forest, and the sight of Stargrave made him feel that everything the room had seen was still present around him in the dark. He could almost hear his grandfather's voice telling wintry tales which had seemed to invoke the dance of snow on the crags, the winds that roamed the forest and the moors under the stars. Those tales had been taken from Edward Sterling's books, Ben thought, and he'd told some of them in his own books; they'd become so much a part of him that he hadn't realised where they came from. Now he felt as if he'd missed the point of them – he felt as if something in the dark was close to making itself clear to him. Suddenly too nervous to stand still, he retreated to the hall.

It seemed less dark, or more familiar. He strode to the kitchen door and pushed it open. Cupboards packed with darkness hung open on the walls; outlines of a sink and a cooker glinted in the light of the bony scythe above the forest. Helping in the kitchen had been an adventure, especially near Christmas: he'd been allowed to pierce the fowl with a giant fork, and his grandfather had promised to teach him how to decorate the solstice cake, which the old man had iced with designs so intricate that gazing at them had made Ben dizzy. How could he have forgotten that? For a moment he was sure that if he looked around him he would see the design gleaming somewhere in the dark. He swung away from the moonlight and shoved the dining-room door open.

The large room was denuded of furniture, but he could imagine that the huge round oak table was still there in the darkness – could imagine that his family was waiting there for him to join their circle, to pull their Christmas crackers all at once to signal the beginning of the dance which his grandfather led three times each way around the table. At the end of the meal his grandfather would cut the cake and present Ben with the first slice, saying "Put some winter inside you." Ben gave a loud uneasy laugh at himself for having forgotten so much. When the room laughed with him, he made for the hall.

This time he noticed a door under the stairs. Of course, the cupboard contained the fuse board and the main switch. He could turn on the lights, but now he chose not to; his memories would guide him through the house, and he thought it was partly because he couldn't see the rooms in detail that his memories of them were so vivid. The memories were beginning to seem important only as a means to an end, but what end? He had yet to determine what he'd seen at the window of his old room.

As he climbed the stairs, keeping hold of the frosty banister, he felt as if the darkness of the stairwell was rising above him. He imagined himself climbing a slope beneath the night sky with only the dim ghost of his breath for company. He hauled himself onto the landing and found he was reluctant to let go of the banister. "Grow up," he shouted, but his voice sounded lost in the dark. He flung himself away from the banister and shouldered open the door, of his old bedroom.

It was bare except for a carpet and a tattered lampshade tilted rakishly over the lightbulb. From the landing, he could see the sky above the moors beyond the railway. Could those stars be the very ones he'd watched between the curtains as he'd lain in bed in this room, stars like promises of dreams too enormous to imagine while he was awake? But something was confusing his view. His eyes focused on the window. What he'd seen earlier was still there: a circular mark on the upper sash, a mark which resembled a patch of ice more than double the size of his head.

He hadn't realised it was so large. He must have perceived it as smaller because at first sight he'd taken it to be a face. He was tiptoeing across the room, holding his breath. The closer he approached, the more like ice it looked – cracked ice, in which thousands of delicate lines composed an abstract mandala so nearly regular that it took his breath away. What could have caused such a flaw in the glass? He gripped the window-sill and craned to touch the mark. Just as his fingertips brushed the edge of it, he saw that the lines went all the way through the pane. The next moment the entire cracked patch collapsed.

Most of the shards fell outwards, jangling among the weeds under the window, as he dodged back. He was left staring at an almost perfectly circular hole in the glass and feeling like a destructive child who couldn't be trusted to behave himself alone in the house. He went in search of some material with which to plug the hole. At the far end of the landing, on the bathroom floor beside the pale dim open coffin of the bath, he found a mat so disreputable that he shuddered as he snatched it up, though in fact there were no insects underneath. He stuffed it into the hole in the pane and wiped his hands on his coat, feeling as if he'd robbed the house of the magic it had offered him.

The next bare room had been his grandparents' bedroom. He remembered hearing his grandmother wheezing in the bed to which she had been increasingly confined in the months before the car crash. She had apparently been sewing a present for him, but he had never seen it. "Shouldn't have been such a perfectionist," he muttered sadly as he climbed the stairs.

The first room on the top landing had been his parents' room. Its barrenness made him feel close to tears, especially as he remembered how his mother would come down to him when he cried out with whatever dreams the stars above the moor had given him. His aunt had slept in the adjacent room when she was visiting, and next to that one was the attic. This had been his favourite room, full of broken toys so old they were fascinating, crippled furniture, incomplete books whose pages had crumbled at the edges when he'd tried to read them. Now it looked pillaged; four dents in the carpet beneath a skylight obscured by night and grime showed that it had recently been used as a bedroom. Nevertheless he went in, because it seemed to be the brightest room in the house.

It must be, for him to have distinguished the marks in the carpet. He wouldn't have expected the room to be so visible under such a thin moon. As he crossed to the dormer window, pines the colour of the moon appeared to rise to meet him. He was at the window before he realised that the moon was out of sight above the house; it was the forest that was shining.

Had frost gathered on the trees while he was exploring the house? Surely it took more than moonlight to turn the forest so pale that the trees resembled great feathers of ice. As he gazed wide-eyed at the spectacle, the forest seemed to brighten gradually, and he thought the room did so. There was movement among the trees near the edge of the forest, an approaching glow. He fumbled at the catches of the window and pushed its two wings open. The chill of the night gathered on him as he saw what was out there. Snowflakes luminous with moonlight were dancing beneath the trees.

How could it be snowing there and not above the forest? Indeed, it appeared to be snowing only in an area about as wide as the house. He strained forwards, trying to understand the sight, scarcely aware of the steep slope of the roof below him. It seemed to him that the silent luminous dance was constantly about to form a pattern in the air – that if he could only distinguish the pattern, unimaginable revelations might follow. He'd almost seen it once before, he remembered at last, when he had run away to Stargrave, but this time there was nobody to prevent him from following it into the woods.

He didn't know how long he gazed entranced from the window until a shiver roused him. He closed the window and ran downstairs, the echoes of his footsteps racing ahead. He dragged the front door closed behind him and shook it to ensure it was fastened, and was hurrying around the outside of the garden when a clock chimed in a nearby cottage.

Ben listened to the microscopic sound and shook his head, bewildered. It couldn't really be two o'clock. He bared his wrist-watch and peered at its face until he had to believe it. Somehow he'd spent over four hours in the house. What might Ellen be imagining had happened to him? Dismayed for her, he nevertheless went up the track past the house to a point from which he could see Sterling Forest. The trees and the shadows beneath them were quite still, and there was no sign of snow in the air.

He felt profoundly disappointed, but he had to admit that he was also experiencing some relief. If expectancy was what he valued, hadn't he preserved it by allowing the mystery to stay mysterious? Now that his trance was broken, the depths of the forest seemed more ominous than alluring; even the trees were no longer so luminous. All the same, as he made for the floodlit end of the track, he stopped and closed his eyes to let the dazzle fade from them, and turned for a last look. He hadn't opened his eyes when he realised what his trance had caused him to forget. Whatever had cracked the window, it wasn't just a flaw in the glass. He'd seen it appear there as he had arrived in Star-grave, and that was why he had mistaken the appearance for a face.

His eyes snapped open, perhaps not quite swiftly enough. For a moment he was sure that he was being watched; he thought he might have glimpsed the watcher withdrawing into the dark, but where? His impression of the glimpse seemed to expand as he glanced from the house to the forest to the sky. Nothing moved except the flickering of the stars. Surely all he'd seen was the blind Cyclopean eye of the plugged window, he told himself as he retreated to the main road – but he felt as if he was descending from a height and losing all sense of what he had in fact experienced.

Once he came in sight of the market square, all he felt was embarrassment at having to rouse someone to let him into the hotel. A porter whose left eye seemed unable to waken trudged to the doors in response to the night bell. "Sterling from room six," Ben explained awkwardly. "Has anyone been wondering where I am J"

The man gave him a suspicious look, the more concentrated for being monocular. "If they have, they've not told me."

Ben thanked him and sneaked upstairs. Ellen was asleep in the middle of the double bed, one arm stretched out as if she'd reached for him. He was both touched by the sight and grateful that she wouldn't want him to explain his absence. When he slipped in beside her, she shivered and mumbled a drowsy protest and retreated to her side of the bed. He lay awake trying to fix in his mind his experiences at the house, but the harder he tried, the more elusive they seemed. He wasn't aware of falling asleep. If he dreamed, his dreams were too large to remember.

The children wakened him, bouncing on the bed and clamouring for breakfast. "And then can we go to the house?" Margaret pleaded.

"We'll see," Ben said, no longer sure how much of the night he had dreamed. At breakfast he gulped several cups of coffee and then agreed to visit the house.

Families were strolling up the eccentric streets to church. As he reached the beginning of the track to the Sterling house, Ben had the fleeting impression that the churchgoers had taken the wrong route. Of course he would, he thought, as a lapsed believer. The house looked shabby and abandoned, its isolation emphasised by the gloomy forest and pale sullen sky. "What happened to the window?" Margaret wanted to know.

"Someone must have broken it," Ben said nervously.

"It was like that yesterday," Ellen said. "I thought there was something wrong with it. That's what I saw, whatever it's mended with."

Ben felt guiltily secretive, but what could he say? Only "Stay with your mother and me" as he unlocked the front door. As soon as he stepped over the threshold he was sure that he didn't need to be uneasy on their behalf; it was just an old house where he used to live, a house empty of everything but daylight. He thought this disappointment might have been what he was afraid of, why he'd been loath to agree to visit the house, even though it hadn't felt quite like that kind of fear.

Once he'd gone through the motions of exploring all the floors he let the children run shouting through the rooms. "It's going to need some money spent on it," Ellen said, but otherwise kept quiet, presumably out of respect for his memories. When the children were tired of playing he led the family back to the hotel and checked out, wishing he could stay another night and go back to the house after dark. He drove out of Stargrave, trying to think of an excuse to return soon. As the car raced under the bridge he saw darkness fill the driving mirror, swallowing his last sight of the house. The car sped onto the moor, and he saw Johnny nudge Margaret, who leaned forwards to meet her father's eyes in the mirror. "Daddy, could we come and live here?" she said.