Midnight Sun

THIRTY-ONE

It was almost six o'clock before he left for Stargrave. Dominic's mother followed him to the Milligans' house, trotting as fast as was safe for the plateful of cake she was bearing. He would have taken it from her to hurry her up, except that then she might have realised that he was more anxious than he was trying to appear. At least he had time to call home again while she searched for a container in which to pack the remains of the cake. But the phone in the Sterling house only rang and rang far away in the dark.

Mrs Milligan was securing the carton of cake with a festive bow when the rest of the family came home, Mr Milligan enthusing about Ben's performance at the shop. He wouldn't let Ben go until Ben had inscribed a copy of each Sterling book to the Milligans. "You'll have a coffee at least before you set off, won't you, Ben?" Mrs Milligan pleaded while he was struggling to think of a different inscription for each book, and he seemed to have no words left with which to explain a refusal. "We don't want the cold getting to you on your way home," she said.

While he sipped the scalding coffee as rapidly as he could she began to wonder aloud why Ellen wasn't answering. "Maybe she was out shopping, buying something special for the prodigal. Try her again if you like," she said, and when he had: "Maybe she's stopped to gossip. You know how we women are."

"We all of us talk too much and say too little," Mr Milligan said.

His wife took that as a rebuke. She turned her back to him and cleared away the dinner-plate and cutlery she'd set for Ben. Ben gulped the last gritty inch of coffee, grabbed his bag from beside his chair and stood up. "Thanks for having me. Next year you may see how grateful I am to all of you," he said, thinking of the book he planned to dedicate to them, but for an instant his plan seemed lost in a darkness which lay ahead.

Dominic carried the boxed cake out of the house and placed it on the passenger seat while Ben threw his bag onto the rear seat. Beyond the lit hall Ben saw Dominic's parents settling their disagreement before they came out arm in arm. "Give our love to your family," Mrs Milligan told him.

"Godspeed," Dominic said.

"So long as he doesn't exceed the speed limit," his father said, and was rewarded with a helpless grin from Dominic. As Ben swung the car away he saw the three of them beneath the leafless tree, standing so close together they appeared to be supporting one another. The sight stayed with him as he drove out of the lit streets.

The road wandered for hours before it reached the Al. It gave him no chance to think, but it couldn't stop him feeling. Whenever the headlights showed him a place-name which the family had enjoyed on their journeys to Stargrave – Swines-head, Stragglethorpe, Coddington, Clumber Park – he felt increasingly nervous. Not long after eight o'clock he had to stop for petrol near a pay telephone, shielded to some extent from the uproar of the motorway by a plastic hood which, in the glare of the lamps above the forecourt, looked like a giant helmet carved from ice. He dialled and poised the coin, which was chill even though it had come from his trouser pocket, and listened to the feeble pulse of the phone bell. Suddenly there was a lull on the motorway, and he heard the ringing isolated by a vast silence. All at once he could no longer fend off thoughts he had been afraid to think. He was hardly conscious of digging the edge of the mouthpiece into his lips while he tried to make up his mind what to do: ring someone in Stargrave, invent a story which would send them looking for Ellen and the children? He didn't know where the family might be or what to say to have them searched for: his imagination seemed to be out of his reach and fleeing towards Stargrave. He flung the receiver into its cradle and ran to the car.

Most of the vehicles on the motorway were lorries, which left the outer lane clear. He shouldn't be staying in it, he shouldn't be driving at over ninety miles an hour; suppose the police stopped him? He felt as if he was trying to leave his thoughts behind. He knew why last night he had fallen asleep thinking of the Milligans growing old together, and why the sight of Dominic and his family had followed him as he'd driven away.

He remembered hugging Ellen and the children in the Leeds bookshop, hugging them more fiercely than he had been able to explain to himself. Subconsciously he must have been afraid then, or even earlier – perhaps the October day he'd watched Ellen leading the children across the moor. Had the intensity of his emotions been preparing him for the day when he would lose them? The impression of loss felt like a wound at the centre of him, and yet at the same time it seemed infinitesimal beneath the endless dark.

At last the westbound motorway appeared, a curve of white and yellow lights racing above a curve of red – a luminous blade hovering above the gash it had opened from horizon to horizon. He followed the raw stream to Leeds and drove as fast as he dared through streets which felt somehow lifeless despite crowds of people, many of them dressed as if there wasn't frost on the ground, outside pubs and clubs. Whenever he passed a phone box he had to restrain himself from braking.

Darkness began to interrupt the outlying streets, and then it overcame them. Patches of snow gleamed like exposed bone on the moors; cold glints hovered in the headlight beams. When at last the bridge rose overhead, a faint grey outline around darkness yawning like a fallen jaw, one word struggled past his stiff lips: "Please…" The bridge squeezed the headlamp beams bright and released them, and he saw Sterling Forest beneath the crags which gnawed the sky. The forest appeared to be borrowing the glow of the town, like the second-hand light of a moon. Against the forest the Sterling house was dark.

Ellen and the children could be at home; it was almost eleven o'clock, late enough for them all to be asleep. As he swung the car onto the rough track, the jerking of the headlight beams sent shadows of misshapen stones capering over the front of the house and made the snow figures behind it appear to greet him with a grotesque dance. He parked clumsily beside the garden wall and ran to the front door, keys jangling in his hand. He turned the mortice key and then the Yale, and shouldered the door open.

Silence met him – total silence. Only a muffled echo of his shouts responded to him. He trudged through all the rooms, starting on the ground floor. The children weren't in their beds, but couldn't the family be on the top floor, the three of them in his and Ellen's bed? Certainly he felt as if he wasn't entirely alone in the dark, as if he was climbing towards some form of life. When he pushed his and Ellen's bedroom door open, however, their bed was flat as an altar. He turned to the workroom, knowing Ellen and the children had no reason to be in there, hating the trick his unwillingness to give up hope was playing on him: it was making him feel that he was awaited beyond the door. He clenched his fist on the doorknob, twisted it, held onto it as the door swung inwards. He stepped into the room, and Sterling Forest came to meet him.

It seemed to fill the window even when he'd crossed to the desk. Perhaps it was by contrast with the darkness of the house that the miles of shrouded forest appeared to shine from within like a cloud, but the illumination meant more to him. The forest was where he had been heading as he climbed the stairs – because, he thought, it must be where Ellen and the children were.

He didn't question how he knew. His sense of needing to be in the forest was overwhelming; it felt so like a call that he could almost hear their voices. It sent him downstairs and out of the house, pausing only to lock the building before he sprinted up the track.

When he reached the trees he ran along the blue-arrowed path until it began to curve away from the depths of the forest, and then he left it and continued running. A white blur which he assumed to be mist hovered just above the laden trees, blotting out most of the sky, but his vision was improving. The slender treetrunks and the massive pattern of fallen needles gleamed as if they were tapping the light of the stars overhead. He felt he could run unerringly until he arrived at his destination. But he faltered suddenly, for he'd heard Ellen's voice, unquestionably her voice. It was far away behind him.

He staggered to a halt, grabbing a treetrunk which felt like a ruined pillar, scaly and chill. As his ears throbbed with the breath he was holding he heard Margaret and Johnny protesting about something, and then Ellen quietening them. A minute or so later he heard another sound, tiny with distance but unmistakable: the slam of the front door. The family had been out somewhere, and now they had come home.

They were safe. The thought seemed to unlock his mind. All his fears fell away except one which was too large to define, so large that it felt as much like exhilaration as fear. Perhaps his anxiety for Ellen and the children had been nothing but a means of attracting him back to Stargrave. He was still hearing the miniature sound of the front door; it made him think of having crossed a threshold. He'd done so once before, here beyond the marked paths, but the experience had been more than his memory could cope with. Now he was as ready for it as he ever would be, he promised himself.

He pushed himself away from the slippery treetrunk and strode into the forest. He was walking through a vast silent starlit cathedral which had built itself. It was nearly complete now; its elaborate decoration of snow and icicles was taking shape. It had been planted for Edward Sterling, not just to commemorate him but to conceal where he had died, to protect the site from the world.

Ben felt as if he was using something larger than his own mind to think with, something large as the terror which was robbing him of breath and at the same time opening his mind wide. The pattern was fitting together at last. Edward Sterling's death had been only the beginning. The forest concealed what his death had liberated – what had accompanied him beyond the restraint of the midnight sun.

Perhaps it had been waiting for as long as there was ice there, waiting for someone it could ride beyond the light. Perhaps that hadn't been Edward Sterling who had come back, but only a shell of him compelled to walk and talk. It must have been the source of the strength which had driven him north again in search of somewhere it could hide, but his body had fallen before it reached anywhere secret enough. The forest had hidden it while its power grew during the long nights, and now it was awakening.

Ben had tried to tell himself a garbled version of this without consciously realising it had any basis in truth, but there was no avoiding that awareness here, surrounded as he was by signs of the truth. The icicles which hung like frozen starlight from the branches high above him all pointed deeper into the forest in defiance of gravity. They were pointing to the unseen glade, as if whatever the forest hid was transforming it into a shrine of ice.

His terror had passed beyond awe into a kind of breathless calm. He was scarcely aware of walking or of how long he had been doine so since he'd left Ellen and the children behind. He must be near the glade, because the ice which sprouted from the trees was becoming more elaborate, forming shapes he couldn't find words for. It looked as though the trees were undergoing an identical mutation, revealing forms of which the foliage and slender trunks were merely skeletons. Though they were absolutely motionless, he sensed that their stillness was an omen of growth. Besides, all was not motionless in the forest. He could see pale movement beyond the trees ahead.

The movement was so large that he would have turned tail if he had had any control over his gait – but the compulsion which had brought him to the forest was in charge of his limbs now, and all he could do was scurry forwards. The trees parted ahead of him and closed in silently behind him. For a few steps he managed to believe that he was seeing a snowfall ahead, even though the flakes were falling only in the glade; but although the movement was within the glade, he sensed that it was nevertheless awesomely vast. As soon as he realised that, he was unable to avoid knowing that whatever he was seeing was aware of him. A shiver which felt like terror and anticipation and his body somehow preparing itself passed through him, sending him to the edge of the trees at a helpless stumbling run.

Perhaps he was seeing only ice and snow, or perhaps his mind was unable to cope with the reality after all. Certainly thick snow was dancing just within the glade, though it appeared to be rising triumphantly from the ground rather than falling from the sky which it blotted out. Within the snow, or forming from it, or both, something else had taken shape. He thought of a spider whose squatting body almost filled the glade and whose restless limbs were far too numerous, or a gigantic head obscured by tendrils of white hair or of its own white flesh, tendrils between which its many eyes were watching him. He could see that it was perfectly symmetrical; it must have eyes on every side to see the world into which it was emerging. All this was only a hint of its nature, he thought numbly. It was using the snow to hint at itself.

Because the snow obscured the sky as well as the far side of the glade he couldn't judge how tall the shape was, but that wasn't at all reassuring; it made him feel that in some sense it went on for ever. He had to look up, because pale tendrils were hovering above him, and he was afraid they were reaching for him. But they were only playing in the air around their body – playing with shapes which they were forming and reforming, letting them grow recognisable and then turning them perfectly symmetrical. They were human faces, he saw: masks composed of snow, except that to judge by their expressions and their desperate trapped fluttering as the tendrils toyed with them, some human consciousness was associated with them. The one above him, which appeared to be trying to scream as its halves were rendered identical, was Edna Dainty's face.

To Ben the sight was a promise of more wonders, of greater transformations. All that he was seeing was another metaphor, he realised, and even that was proving too much for him. His mind was going to forget again in order to preserve itself. He felt tears or snowflakes on his cheeks. He gazed at the appearance in the glade and its juggling of frozen souls for as long as he could bear, then turned shakily away. At best his experience would resemble a half-remembered dream before he was out of the forest, and tomorrow there would be so little left of it that he would mistake the remnants for another story waiting to be told. As he thought that, he heard its voice behind him.

It wasn't a sound he would ordinarily have called a voice: a whisper of snow, audible because it was both immense and isolated by stillness – the whisper of patterns forming and elaborating. Nevertheless his instincts were able to decode its message. He could contrive a tale about the midnight sun if he liked, to keep his imagination alive and under control, to let his mind grow towards the presence in the forest. He wouldn't have long to wait now. His shivering carried him away from the glade in a kind of helpless festive dance. All the stories he had told were scarcely even hints of the story he would soon be living.