Midnight Sun

TWENTY

The cold wakened him before dawn. He couldn't tell whether it was the night which was cold or only himself. When he put one arm around Ellen, she shivered in her sleep. Though he didn't feel the need to shiver, the cold was making him restless. He padded into the workroom and watched the stars flickering above the forest, and wondered how many of the crystal sparks were ghosts of dead stars, their light kept alive by the gulf they had to cross, just now, when the night was darkest, the mass of trees looked like a distillation of the space between the stars. He would have switched on the desklamp if he'd thought of so much as a phrase, but his nervous exhilaration seemed for the moment to have nothing to do with writing. He watched until the forest began to glimmer and then to glow faintly as the stars went out. It was the dawn, but it looked to him as though the starlight was settling into the forest, impregnating the silvery branches.

The click of the central heating reverberated through the pipes and brought him back to himself. Soon the family would be about, and he didn't want the bother of explaining why he had been sitting naked at the desk; he hadn't even realised until now that he was. By the time he'd bathed and dressed himself the family was still asleep. He brought Ellen a cup of tea, and sang softly in the children's ears to rouse them.

He was brushing his teeth after breakfast, gazing into his eyes as if they could tell him a secret, when he heard Ellen losing patience with the children. "Try and get a move on instead of arguing. You know I need to be quick on Mondays."

She taught an art class at a college outside Leeds twice a week. A niece of Sally Quick's was a student there and had persuaded Ellen to take the class. "I'll walk them to school," Ben told Ellen as he went downstairs. "I need to get away from the desk."

"Any joy this morning?"

"Nothing on paper to show for it. It's in here," he said, tapping his forehead. "I just need to give it room to breathe."

"If you go in the woods will you stay where we've marked?"

"If it keeps you happy," he said, feeling guilty as he saw how prepared she was to believe him. There was no point in troubling her when he knew what he was doing. He wanted to make sure nobody distracted him from his imagination, that was all.

When he opened the front door the October cold settled on him. The flowers in the garden were dusted with frost, the cobwebs on the spiky wall had turned into webs of spun glass. He felt entranced by the clarity of his surroundings, the cold made visible. When he reached the newsagent's and a newsboy with an empty shoulder-bag dodged into the shop, the furnace blast from the heater above the door almost shocked Ben into the roadway. Johnny was being a steam engine while Margaret strolled with two of her friends and pretended that her father wasn't there. As the horde of schoolchildren converged on the school, they seemed to him to be drawn towards the forest. The sight made him think of some fairy tale, perhaps one he had yet to tell.

At the school gates Margaret said goodbye with a kiss and a regal wave, and Johnny managed a hasty peck once he was sure that none of his friends would see. Ben watched as the two of them became part of the crowd in the schoolyard. He felt unexpectedly vulnerable, childlike. He wandered down Hill Lane to the main road, and was past the newsagent's again before he wondered why he hadn't made straight for the forest instead of heading for the end of the marked paths nearest the house. What reason could he have for putting off an exploration of the woods? He'd already explored the lower reaches of the forest with the help of Ellen and the children, after all.

Though the borough council was technically responsible for its maintenance, the terms of the original bequest meant that the Sterlings owned the forest. During the summer, at Ellen's suggestion, they'd begun to identify walks and paint arrows on the trees. Green arrows marked a path which curved from above the Sterling house to the edge of the woods nearest the stile on the moorland road, blue arrows led deeper into the forest and then returned across the green path to emerge onto the common above the church. Stan Elgin had erected marker posts along the paths, and the council was apparently proposing to gravel the paths if it ever had sufficient funds. "They'd rather argue about money than spend it," Ben told himself as he strode past the house.

When the track reached the common beside the allotments, it vanished. Only his shadow was there to lead him across the frosty grass to the start of the blue-arrowed path, where the earth showed black through a threadbare embroidery of moss. He halted there and stood listening. All he could hear was the silence of the trees, ranks of Norway spruce radiating away from him like centuries of Christmases until they met the pines which composed most of the forest. As he set out along the path he found he was instinctively trying to make no noise.

The silence closed around him like water, icy and gloomily green. He had taken only a few steps when he felt he was deep in the forest; the trees cut off all the sounds of the town. Soon they were towering over him, their spires of green branches perched high on mottled scaly trunks as tall as the spire of St Christopher's. While he'd been leading the family along the paths they'd marked, the forest had often seemed a refuge from the summer heat, a reservoir of wintry shadow, as though the trees had immobilised the seasons. Now he found they had trapped a chill which felt as if it might never recede. It made him breathless, and he walked faster, almost in a trance, until the sight of a marker post ahead told him that he was about to leave the path.

The arrow carved and painted on the waist-high post indicated that the path wound sharply to the right, and Ben wondered why he'd sent the path in that direction. He mustn't have wanted it to lead any deeper into the forest. Several hundred yards ahead the Norway spruce gave way to pines, and he felt as if he was about to cross a threshold, not necessarily one that was visible to him. He went to the post and held onto it, trying to decide if he'd wanted to save the depths of the woods for himself or to protect Ellen and the children from them. Perhaps it had been the latter, because suddenly he felt reluctant to leave the path.

As his left hand clamped his right on top of the post, he was reminded of a game he and his mother used to play, piling their hands alternately on top of one another, faster and faster, towards some goal which he had always thought they'd failed to reach because of laughing. Infuriated by the childishness of the gesture, he shoved himself away from the post and off the path, onto a carpet of fallen needles which silenced his footsteps. He was heading for the centre of the forest, as far as he could tell. He wouldn't look back until he was certain that the path was out of sight. It was his forest more than anyone else's, and he felt as if it was poised to watch over him.

The pines multiplied around him with every step he took. He followed his shadow over mounds of decaying needles towards what appeared to be the edge of an infinity of pines, an edge which constantly renewed itself. Fallen needles surrounded him, green needles scattered on old gold and bronze and shards of ivory where frost had settled, and they made him feel as if the forest contained a pattern he was soon to distinguish. He looked over his shoulder at last and saw only pines leading away, he didn't know how long ago he'd left the spruce plantation behind. He was still walking as if he was under a compulsion to walk, and the next moment he lost his footing on a slippery root beneath the needles. He fell to his knees, his hands sinking into prickly decay, and was about to heave himself to his feet when it was borne in on him that his would be the only movement in the entire forest.,

He crouched there, hands on thighs, too awed to stir. The countless slender pines and the lattice of their shadows surrounded him with a calm which suggested to him that the very air had turned to ice. The avenues of bare trunks rose to a ceiling of gloomy green high as a cathedral roof, and he felt as if he were kneeling in a vast natural shrine to a stillness of which his surroundings were merely an omen. What might he find at the centre of such a stillness? Just as he wondered that, he heard a sound behind him.

It began above him, rattling through foliage, and came scuttling down a trunk. Ben gave a cry and twisted around, kicking up a heavy shower of needles. He was in time to see an object small and brown as a sparrow drop from the leaning trunk and land among the roots. For a moment, bewildered by the sound which had responded to his cry, he thought the object was a spider. It was a pine-cone, and he told himself that the sound had been the echo of his own voice; if it had been anyone else's, he would surely have been aware of its owner by now. All the same, he wished that he hadn't been making so much noise himself that he'd obscured the sound which, as he strained to recall it, seemed like a whisper which had come from several directions. "He could imagine that it had been the sound of the forest calling to him," he muttered as if making his impression more like a story would distance it from him.

A shiver sent him wavering to his feet. He stared about, trying to determine which way he'd been facing when he had looked over his shoulder, and then he saw that the forest itself was showing him: most of the shadows were pointing that way. His own shadow had joined them as he rose, and he went quickly after it, as though he could outrun it if he went fast enough.

There was another idea for a story. He must remember to write it down once he was home, and carry a notebook in future. That should help him focus his imagination, which seemed just now to be escaping his control. He was beginning to think that all the shadows around him and ahead of him were indicating the route he should follow, and that too many of the fallen needles were. Surely none of this need trouble him, because he could see open sky beyond the farthest trees. It had to be the edge of the forest, and he was bound to admit he felt a little relieved. He would welcome a few natural sounds once he was in the open. Until he was out of the forest, however, he would rather not hear anything beyond his breathing and his muffled footfalls which sounded like heartbeats in the earth.

He would have expected the patch of open sky to grow more quickly as he strode forwards. Even when he jogged towards it, it stayed frustratingly localised. The soft ground muffled his footfalls so completely that he felt as if the silence was intensifying, swallowing any sounds he made. Then he faltered. That wasn't the edge of the forest ahead; it was a glade deep within it. He knew that because he had already been there.

He remembered being taken to the glade on a day so cold his mother and grandmother huddled close to the fire in the house. Had the place looked then as it looked now? The pines around it glittered as though ice was crystallising faintly on their bark, and the grass at its centre resembled an explosion of frost yards wide. His memories were slipping away, because he'd realised what he must have been too young to realise then. This was the place where Edward Sterling had died.

Ben stepped between two pines and halted at the edge of the grass, wondering how he knew. This might not be the only glade in the forest, after all. But Edward Sterling had been found in a grove of oak trees, and there were the remains of oaks among the pines which encircled the glade. Ben walked to the middle of the open space and gazed around him.

The glade was circular, about thirty yards in diameter. Within this, roughly equidistant from the centre, were four dead oak trees. He assumed that the pines had stolen their light and their nourishment, because the oaks were withered, little more than a scattering of twisted limbs around collapsed trunks. They reminded him of huge dead spiders. He stood on the grass which yielded stiffly underfoot like a frozen pond about to give way, and tried to see what else he should be noticing. Whatever it was, he felt as if it was waiting for him to notice.

He peered through the veils of his breath at the trees radiating from the edge of the glade, and thought he saw. Could the glade really be as perfectly circular as it appeared to be? He positioned himself as close to the exact centre of the glade as he could judge, then paced to the perimeter, placing the heel of each foot against the toe of its follower.

Forty-six paces brought him to the edge. A foot was a foot long, he thought, but now he had forgotten precisely where he'd started from. He took forty-six paces back and dropped a pound coin on the patch of frosty grass, then he continued in a straight line to the far side of the glade. Forty-six paces again. He'd managed to locate the centre by instinct, and he felt as if he had unlocked an unsuspected aspect of himself.

He went back to the coin and paced along a diameter at right angles to the first. Forty-six paces brought him level with the pines. He grunted with surprise, retreated to the coin and set out along the other half of the diameter. The toecap of his right shoe reached the edge just as he counted forty-six, and he couldn't help shivering with excitement or nervousness or the growing chill. No glade could be that regular, he told himself, and he meant to prove it. Until he'd walked a line across the glade which didn't measure ninety-two paces, or even a radius which wasn't precisely half that length, he wouldn't let anything distract him.

He didn't know how long he spent at the task, no longer looking at his feet as he mouthed the count rather than break the silence, trusting his instincts to find the diameters which bisected the angles between those he'd already paced, as if such obsessive precision would lead sooner to an irregular measure-ment. Here was one – the distance from the centre to an oak. He turned away from the snarl of whitened branches, towards the marker coin, which was so frosted it resembled a tiny moon. The oaks deformed the glade, he thought, and that would have to do; how much longer did he propose to trot back and forth like a puppet? If he didn't head for the moors soon he might be in the forest when darkness fell. Just walk to each of the other three oaks, he murmured, just to be tidy. At least, he thought he'd spoken, almost too low to be audible. Certainly a soft voice had.

It was his unsureness which broke his trance enough for him to realise that something around him had changed. At once he was afraid to look away from the icy moon of the coin, and afraid not to. A shiver which seemed to begin underfoot before shooting through his body raised his head for him.

At first he thought it might be only his awareness which had changed, because he saw immediately that the avenues of trees radiating from the glade were absolutely regular, not just the placing of the trees but the shapes of their trunks and their high spreads of branches, as if some force emanating from the glade had aligned them like iron filings around a magnet. Then he saw how nearly similar to one another the shapes of the dead oaks were, as though what had killed them had shaped them. He sensed there was another pattern which he was afraid to identify. He stared at the glittering trees, at the shadows which had turned on their axes and were reaching towards him from the side of the glade opposite that from which he'd entered, and then he looked down.

"God," he whispered. The pattern was around him on the grass, a many-armed star of frost as wide as the glade. The outlines of the slender arms were awesomely intricate and yet symmetrical in every detail. He turned dizzily, feeling in danger of losing his balance, and saw that the star wasn't quite symmetrical: it lacked the three arms which would have pointed to the oaks he had failed to approach. The star showed where he had walked, as if a vast cold presence had paced behind him.

As soon as he thought that, he sensed it behind him or above him, waiting for him to be unable not to look. He couldn't move, but how would that help him? A snowflake settled on his trembling hand and lay between the tendons, a perfectly symmetrical snowflake like a feathery wafer of glass. He stared helplessly at it and saw that it wasn't melting but growing. Perhaps that was a sign of life – of the kind of life which the miles of forest hid.

Ben's trembling freed him from his paralysis. He staggered across the glade, slipping wildly on the frozen grass, and fled into the woods, trying not to see how even the ferns among the trees formed a regular pattern. He caught sight of a spider plucking at its web among the ferns in front of him, a spider striped like a tiger, and for a moment even that seemed welcome; at least it was a living creature. But the woods darkened around him as their denizen came after him. The ferns turned to marble as frost raced over them, and snowflakes whirled around him, bejewelling the trees. The spider paled and writhed into a shape which no living creature should form, and before Ben could suck in a breath after the cry that the sight wrenched from him, it was a crystal of flesh, the centre of a mandala of frost and web. Then the forest grew dark as a starless night, and something like an incarnation of that darkness, far larger than the glade, seized him.