Midnight Sun

TWENTY-NINE

"It's colder when you're not here," Ellen said, and kissed the chilly mouthpiece. "Here you are, Johnny, if you want to say hello."

The boy ran out of the dining-room, brandishing a handful of the cutlery he was placing on the table, and she took the dessert spoons from him to distribute them herself. She was touched and amused by how carefully he'd set the table; he'd already placed the knives and forks, and the settings on the round table were exactly equidistant, or as near to it as her eyes could judge. Children and their rituals, she thought, smiling. She closed the heavy floor-length curtains, shutting out the lights of Stargrave. "Hurry up with those plates, Peg," she called.

By the time Margaret had brought the plates and Ellen had ladled beef in red wine out of the casserole, Johnny was saying goodbye to his father. "Daddy says it hasn't snowed much there," he told them as he wriggled onto his chair. "When are we going to have more snow?"

"Johnny would like it to snow in his room," Margaret said.

"I would not," Johnny said indignantly, then admitted "Actually, I wouldn't mind."

"You'd feel it kiss you to sleep."

"That'd be good."

"It would feel like the heaviest blanket in the world," Ellen put in.

"It'd be so cold you wouldn't know you were."

"You'd be able to have snowmen around your bed," Johnny said. "If you woke up in the night you'd see them all there."

Ellen was unable to find that idea appealing; indeed, it made her shiver. After dinner, as she carried casserole and plates into the kitchen, she noticed snow in the air beyond the window, motes dancing in a wind which hissed down from the forest.

"You've made it snow, Johnny," she was about to call, but the thinness of the snow would only disappoint him. Besides, she found the sight of the faint icy auras sparkling around the snow figures oddly disturbing. She let the blind down and lifted the apple pie out of the oven, and felt grateful for its warmth.

Johnny saw off more than half the pie. Feeding him was like feeding a black hole, she often told him. The children were helping her at the sink when she said "Would you like me to read you the new book?"

"Yes please," Johnny cried, but Margaret hesitated. "Won't Daddy mind?" she said.

"I'm sure he'd want to hear what you think of it," Ellen said, and fetched the typescript from the workroom. Snow, or the imminence of it, whispered at the windows of the darkened rooms. As she crossed to the desk, a wind so large and cold it felt like a breath of the forest came to meet her at the window. Despite the wind, the trees appeared to be quite still. She thought the forest resembled an immense insect, its body hidden under a glimmering carapace and supported by countless thousands of legs. For a moment she imagined it moving all at once, but how would it move or change? "Just you stay where you are," she told it with a nervous giggle at herself.

The children snuggled against her legs while she sat on the front-room sofa and read The Lady Of The Heights aloud. Ben had joked about writing a version Alice Carroll would find acceptable, but it seemed to Ellen that he'd forgotten he had been joking; the more she read, the more the book read like a handbook for young climbers, a collection of do's and mostly don'ts rather thinly disguised as fiction. As for the spirit who saved climbers lost on the heights, she never quite came to life, and each reappearance of her made Ellen feel sadder. "And they lived happily for a while," she read at last, the spirit having fallen in love with a mortal and set up house with him where they could keep an eye on inexperienced climbers. She let the last page fall face down beside her on the sofa. "Is that the end?" Johnny said.

"Shouldn't it be?"

"S'pose so," Johnny said, clearly dissatisfied.

"So what did you think of the rest of it?"

"Good," Johnny said, so automatically that he contradicted himself.

"I don't think it'll mean as much to anyone but us," Margaret said.

That seemed so perceptive it stayed in Ellen's mind after she had put the children to bed. Rather than feel cold and lonely at the workroom desk she took the typescript to the dining-table and read through it again. Before long she found herself visualising the lady of the heights: eyes grey and bright as sunlit slate, pale skin smooth as untrodden snow, a long dress which looked intricately woven out of heather but which didn't hinder her barefoot climbing. She thought of sketching the images, but scribbled them down instead for Ben to consider, together with a few ideas for bringing the character alive in prose. That done, she felt ready for bed.

She bolted the front door and locked the mortise-lock, though none of that seemed necessary in Stargrave, and checked the downstairs windows and the back door. As she switched off the kitchen light she heard a thin whisper of snow beyond the blind. When she glanced out of Johnny's window, however, the air above the moors was clear. She gave the sleeping children each a kiss and brushed back Margaret's hair from her forehead which was frowning at a dream.

It took her a while to get warm under the duvet, and by then she was almost asleep. Perhaps that was why her dreams were cold, though they hardly seemed like hers at all. The only familiar image, which they kept repeating like a refrain, was Sterling Forest, crouching beneath its white shell. Beyond it and around it was icy blackness. If she didn't go into the forest she would have to venture under the bridge or into the unlit town, but she was afraid to move in any direction until she had determined where the whispering was coming from, or what the vast thin voice was saying from its throat which might be as wide as the sky – so afraid that she started awake.

That wasn't the kind of dream to waken from alone in the dark. Nevertheless she relaxed almost at once, because Ben was home. She hoped he wouldn't leave the front door open long; an icy draught was reaching all the way up to her. She was awaiting the slam of the front door when she wakened enough to realise that he couldn't have let himself into the house. Both the front and back doors were bolted on the inside.

She had just imagined he was there because she needed comforting, she told herself. She was all right now, the dream had gone away. But so had the last of her sleepiness, yet the impression which had greeted her as she awoke was growing. She was sure that she and the children were no longer alone in the house.

The thought of the sleeping children jerked her out of bed. She grabbed her dressing-gown from the duvet, where she'd spread it for extra warmth. She dug her fists into the sleeves and tied it around her as she padded shivering to the door. She closed one hand around the doorknob, which felt like a sculpted lump of ice, and snatched the door open. A white blur the size of her head rose out of the dark in front of her face.

It was her breath. The landing was so much colder than her room that she couldn't help flinching. The cold seemed to bring the darkness alive below her, a solid icy mass waiting for her to touch it unawares. She'd left the bedroom light turned off, but now she fumbled for the switch on the landing wall and pressed it, holding her breath to keep down the cry she was suddenly afraid she would have good cause to utter.

The stairs were deserted. The children's doors were ajar as she had left them, but she could hear no sound from either room. By craning over the banister she saw that the front door was still bolted. Surely the house couldn't be so cold unless a window or an outer door was open. Her mind was frantically cataloguing the contents of the workroom, but she could think of nothing in there that would be of any use to her as a weapon. She darted back into her room and seized an empty wooden coat-hanger from the wardrobe, and ran on tiptoe down the stairs.

She was shivering so much she had to hold the coat-hanger away from the wall and the banisters. Even her heartbeats felt shivery. "Don't you touch my children," she hissed through her chattering teeth. She reached the middle landing and stared into the dark of Margaret's room.

Margaret was in bed. As Ellen made out her shape the girl shifted beneath the duvet, her hair spilling over the edge of the mattress. Ellen tiptoed to the adjoining room and peered around the door. That must be Johnny under his duvet, however oddly flat it looked. She took a nervous step forwards and saw that the shape was a faint shadow on the duvet. Johnny wasn't there.

She sucked in a breath which felt like a shudder, and made herself step into the room, praying that the sight meant what she thought it did, afraid to switch on the light until she knew. But yes, it was Johnny's shadow on the bed. He was leaning out of the open window, his head and arms reaching for the dark.

He must be sleepwalking; otherwise, why didn't he move when she spoke to him? "You'll catch your death, Johnny," she said, and put one arm around his waist to pull him back while she closed the window, beyond which she glimpsed a hint of snow, eddying around the corner of the house towards the forest. Under the pajama jacket his body was dismayingly cold. She carried him to his bed, trying to persuade herself that she'd felt him begin to shiver but knowing that the shiver had been her own. She deposited him gently on the bed and then, before she made for the light-switch, she dared to look directly at him. Whatever she had been trying not to admit she was afraid to see, it wasn't this. His hands and face appeared to be glittering dimly like ice.

She ran to the switch. The light dazzled her. As she blinked, the traces of crystal melted from his hands and face, leaving his stiff features looking as though they had just been washed. Then his mouth twitched unhappily and, thank God, his eyes flickered open momentarily. "Where's Daddy?" he mumbled. "When's he coming home?"

"Soon, Johnny, soon. Let's get you warm." She sat him on the edge of the bed and set about rubbing him from head to foot with a warm towel from the bathroom. "You gave me such a fright," she murmured. "We'll have to ask Mr Elgin to put a lock on your window if you're going to start sleepwalking."

He seemed not to have heard anything she'd said. His mouth twitched again as though it was stiff. "When's Daddy coming home?"

"We'll see him on Saturday." She pressed her mouth against his to warm his lips. "Why do you keep asking? What were you dreaming?"

"Wanted to know."

"Of course you did. 1 understand. He's never been away from us like this before. Don't fret, he'll be back."

The boy shook his head impatiently and let out a loud breath. "Wanted to know."

The breath sounded so like an unspoken word that Ellen blurted "Who did, Johnny? Someone in your dream?"

His face crumpled as if he wasn't sure how the memory affected him. "The big white," he said.

She thought of an enormous butterfly, and wondered why the vague image caused her to shiver. "It's gone now. You were dreaming."

She finished warming him at last, and dabbed away drops of moisture which lingered in his hair. When she laid him on his side on the mattress and covered him with the duvet, he was almost asleep. She fixed the catch of the window as immovably as she could. "No more roaming, Johnny," she murmured, kissing his forehead, and left his bedroom door open. As she tiptoed to her own room she glanced at the front door, and couldn't avoid wishing it had already let Ben into the house. "Come back soon," she whispered, hugging herself.