Midnight Sun

FORTY-THREE

"We don't want you with us after you locked us in the house. I'm taking the children to Kate's and then you and I are going to have a long talk. I think you need treatment, Ben. Maybe you've been working too hard, but I think you'd better stay away from the children until you've seen someone who can help.”

Ellen heard herself say all of this, as though the silence had intensified to a point where her thoughts were audible; she could even hear the sob which she mightn't be able to smother. But she mustn't risk starting an argument now, when she was so close to letting the children out of the house. If she had to pretend that nothing was wrong in order to deliver them safely to Kate's, then she would. She hugged them swiftly and murmured "Not a word" and slipped her key into the mortise-lock.

The key hadn't finished turning when she hauled at it to move the door while her gloved hand grappled with the latch. Metal scraped metal, and the door swung inwards. Even the iciness which immediately reached for her felt like a release. When Johnny faltered, staring past her into the hall, she could have hit him; there was no reason to hesitate, nothing outside except snow. "Don't dawdle now, Johnny," she said low and urgently.

Margaret had already stepped over the threshold onto the footmarked marble path. He joined her, but looked back at once. "Daddy hasn't got his coat or boots on."

Ellen gestured Margaret to open the gate. "That's Daddy's problem."

Margaret's face stiffened as if her emotions were too violent or too confused to express. "He'll catch pneumonia if he comes out like that," she said.

Ellen felt grief swelling in her throat and behind her eyes, but she forced it back. "Then he'd better stay at home."

"I'll get dressed if it'll keep you all happy," Ben said in a voice which filled the hall like a parody of Christmas cheerfulness. "I'll catch up with you."

Ellen's grief withered as soon as he began to speak. Did he really believe he could keep them happy when it was his fault that they were the opposite? She marched down the treacherous path as if she was trying to break through the mist of her breath. She was at the gate when he called "We'll go along the common."

Ellen glanced back. He was leaning out of the doorway, his hands gripping the lintel. He looked poised to chase after her. Initially the route along the common would take her and the children away from the houses, but it was marginally the shorter route to Kate's. "Best foot forward," she told the children, and turned uphill.

The house and the snow image swollen by its huddle of worshippers went by, and then there was only an expanse of snow between her and the trees. The forest looked as if it was crouching, poised to move and change; it looked like an explosion of whiteness frozen in the moment before it engulfed everything around it. She had to turn her eyes away, because the depths of the forest drew her gaze, showing her rank upon rank of trees forming from the darkness as if they were advancing to meet her, disclosing shapes which must surely be tricks of her imagination. Now she'd glimpsed them she seemed unable not to see them; if she let her gaze rest on the common she couldn't fend off the impression that the forest was bordered by patterns on the snow, patterns which developed the shapes she thought she had distinguished in the forest. She tried concentrating on the sky, but its blackness was ominously close, not so much relieved by the unsteady stars as emphasised by them. "Doesn't matter, can't matter," she heard herself think, and squeezed the children's hands. Their gloves and hers made them feel more distant than she would have liked, but their trusting grasp helped her ignore everything except the need to see the children to Kate's. She didn't let go until she reached the corner of the allotments and turned along the narrow path above the town.

The view of the streets was less reassuring than she had hoped. The streetlamps and the lit windows seemed dimmer than they should be, and yet there was no sign of mist except for her breath and the children's. "Not now, Johnny," she snapped as he prepared to scoop a handful of snow from the top of an allotment fence. "Just keep your mind on where you're going. We don't want you wandering off the path."

She only meant that the longer grass beside the obscured path would slow him down, but Margaret glanced uneasily at the forest. Her glance seemed to bring it more alive, and Ellen felt as though an unseen presence was pacing them, keeping to the dark beneath the trees. Had Ben sneaked up there? But the presence seemed larger, not pacing them so much as staying abreast of them without moving. It was the forest itself, of course, because now she could tell that the presence was at least that large, and if it seemed vaster and yet somehow contained by the forest, she had to blame her overwrought imagination. Thank God, she and the children were nearly at the end of the allotments, in which the mounds and intricate spires of snow had assumed shapes almost impossible to relate to the growth they presumably hid. Just a few hundred yards and the family would be alongside Church Road, and she would be able to assure herself that the lights weren't as dim as they looked.

Johnny was picking up speed. She squeezed Margaret's shoulders and murmured "Don't slow me down." She didn't want the children straying out of arm's reach, though at least they weren't ouc of sight behind her. She was about to glance back to see if Ben was following when she realised fully what she was seeing ahead.

The allotments gave way to the back gardens of Church Road, most of which were crisscrossed with deep footprints, carvings in marble. Icicles turned clothes-lines into spiny half-translucent insect shapes; toothed slabs of snow overhung the roofs as if they might fall on anyone who strayed too close. That much was normal, but wherever she looked Stargrave appeared to be embalmed in snow and ice. Icicles had massed around each streetlamp, turning them into crystal fruit, and every window was thickened by frost. Where the rooms were lit, the muffled light showed the frost as a glass tapestry of patterns very similar to those she had tried not to see in the snow.

The appearance of the town mustn't matter, nor the silence. She was suddenly more afraid that unless the family kept moving, they would be unable to move for the cold, which was rendering her almost senseless. "Go on, Johnny," Margaret complained. "You're holding us up."

He was shading his eyes with one gloved hand like a boy explorer. "What is it, Johnny?" Ellen said, wincing as the cold twinged her teeth.

"Something funny at the church."

Before she could tell him to move, or focus her eyes on it, Ben said "Go and see what it is. We could all do with a laugh."

Ellen swung round and almost went sprawling. He was only a few paces behind her. As soon as their eyes met he gave her an apologetic smile whose tentativeness made it into a plea, but how could she respond to that when the trail of his footprints indicated that he had been dancing behind her, weaving a pattern of steps in the snow? She was furious with herself for having failed to be aware of his approach. "1 didn't mean that kind of funny," Johnny told him.

"You want to see though, don't you?"

"Yes," Johnny said as if he was almost sure he did.

"We'll race there," Ben declared, and was past Ellen so quickly and effortlessly that she didn't realise his intention until he grabbed Johnny's hand and ran with him towards the churchyard, Johnny squeaking and nervously giggling as he skidded along the path beside his father's trail of footprints, which were extravagantly large and oddly shaped. Ellen felt as if panic had kicked her in the stomach. She had to restrain herself from shoving Margaret aside and sprinting after Johnny to drag him away from his father. She would catch up with them at the church, and meanwhile she couldn't think of anywhere Johnny would be safer. "Let's go and see what the fuss is about," she said in Margaret's ear, and urged her past the school.

Was the pattern of the children's footprints in the schoolyard really as symmetrical as it looked? She couldn't spare it more than a glance, because Ben was already pushing Johnny through the gap in the churchyard hedge and following him through it. She dodged around Margaret, through snow and long grass which felt to her numb feet like a single hindering medium, and ran along the path, shattering Johnny's footprints. She flung herself through the gap in the hedge, dislodging a whispering trickle of snow – less of it than she would have expected, as if it was frozen fast to the twigs – and skated to a halt when she saw Johnny and his father.

They were standing hand in hand among the graves and gazing at the church, which was dark. At first she wondered why the stained-glass window with its image of St Christopher appeared to be glowing, and then she saw that the window was covered with frost, transformed by it. The boy perched on the saint's massive shoulder and supported there by his great hand was cocooned in whiteness; the girl who was holding his other hand was almost invisible except for the upper part of her face, in which her eyes gleamed with no light behind them. The saint's own face was hidden by a circular excrescence composed of icy filaments, a mask which resembled both a fungus and a parody of radiance and which appeared to be using his arms to reach for the children, and it made Ellen shudder. As soon as Margaret sidled through the gap in the hedge, Ellen hurried her towards the gates which led onto Church Road. "Too cold for standing, Johnny," she called, striding towards him and his father.

It wasn't only the sight of the inhumanly transformed saint which was making her anxious to be out of the churchyard. All the memorials were changed too: the stone crosses had become huge spiky jewels of marble and ice, no longer remotely like crosses; the statues of angels looked as if they were struggling to emerge from snowy chrysalids and reveal quite another form. She found one statue especially disturbing, a figure which seemed frozen in the act of fleeing or helplessly trudging towards the gap in the hedge. Beneath the frost its body was black as a priest's uniform, though its head and its outstretched supplicating hands were wads of white. She had no time to examine it more closely, not when Johnny and his father were heading for the open door of the church. "Don't go in there," she cried.

"Can't I just see if the crib's lit up?"

"It won't be, Johnny." She would have said anything to prevent him from stepping into the lightless interior, because now she was close enough to the doorway to sense how cold it was in there: colder than death, she thought, colder than any church should be. She wanted to believe that she was only imagining movements beyond the stained glass, pale movements at least as large as the window, but she couldn't deny the sight of footprints leading from the church door to the unfamiliar life-size figure near the hedge. She was close to a panic which would either blot out her thoughts or render them unbearably clearer – so close that she had no idea what she would say if Ben wanted to know where she was taking the children in such a hurry. But as she wrenched at the gate to break it loose from the ice which had glued it shut he reached past her and heaved it open for her, causing it to scream.

Church Road curved downhill on both sides of her. It used to look as if it was embracing the haphazard streets, gathering them into an untidy bundle, but now she had the unpleasant notion that it was imprisoning the houses within its perimeter while the cold overtook them. How could the Christmassy prospect of the snowbound lamplit streets affect her that way? Perhaps she was reacting to the stillness which reminded her of a held breath larger than the snowscape, or to the streetlamps which resembled vegetation from another world, or to the sight of all the windows blinded by cataracts of ice. She felt as though the cold was about to overwhelm her, freezing her where she stood, but she mustn't let it do so. She clutched the children's hands with hands so numb they were indistinguishable from her gloves, and ushered the children across the road. "Nearly there," she would have murmured if she hadn't feared that even a whisper would be audible to Ben as he closed the gate.

As soon as she ventured into Hill Lane, the narrow street closed in. The houses seemed to lean towards her and the children beneath the weight of snow on the roofs. Since the buildings at the top of the lane had no gardens, she was close enough to see into any of the downstairs front rooms whose curtains weren't shut tight. Even where the rooms were lit and, in two instances, where the curtains were fully open as well, she could distinguish very little through the carapaces of frost except Christmas decorations hanging immobile against the glass. At least there were people in the rooms, for she glimpsed movements, however slow and pale they seemed – so slow that they reminded her of larvae stirring in their sleep. It was Ben's fault that she was thinking such things, his fault that the further she advanced down the lane, the more she felt as if the presence she had seemed to sense in the forest was behind the houses too.

She quickened her pace as much as she dared once she reached the curve in the lane and saw Kate's house a few hundred yards ahead, where the draped front gardens began. Even the sight of the house made her nervous. Of course, she was anticipating how Ben might react when he realised she was leaving the children with the Wests. She forced herself not to run down the slope with them, because they might fall on the frozen snow. Let Ben think he had no reason to give chase.

As she passed the curve she glanced back. He was halfway down the first stretch of the lane, strolling between the crystallised lamps and smiling to himself as he surveyed the vista of iced houses. Before he could catch her eye she steered the children out of sight, though she faltered for a moment as she noticed a figure at a bedroom window just ahead of her. The blanched face and hands were pressed against the whitened glass as if they were glued to it, and they seemed swollen out of proportion to the dim shape of the body. "Hurry," she said, tugging at the children, and ran with them to the Wests' gate.

She was first beneath the arch of roses, which had sprouted new translucent thorns. She stumbled along the path, her feet aching as if she was hammering them with ice, her nostrils stinging painfully with every breath, and leaned on the doorbell as the children waited by the arch. Their faces were so blue with cold that she pressed the bell again at once. She heard the ringing shrill through the rooms, but there was no other sound from the house.

She was hauling at the door-knocker when she realised it was frozen to its metal plate. The edge of the door was glittering dully, outlined by ice. Could the door be frozen shut? Even if it was, surely Terry would be able to open it if only he would come to it, and where else could the Wests be except in the house? "Keep ringing the bell, Johnny," she said, glancing nervously at the shadow which was swelling downhill towards the curve in the lane, and ran to the front window.

Between the orange curtains was a gap as wide as her hand. Through the luxuriant frost on the window she could just distinguish a group of figures beneath the light in the centre of the room. They could only be some or all of the Wests; why weren't they responding to the bell? She rubbed at the frost with her gloved palms, she scratched at it with her padded fingernails, but neither action cleared the glass. As Ben's shadow came dancing over the snow, she dragged her keys clumsily out of her pocket to scrape away the frost.

The screech of metal on glass formed a discord with the shrilling of the doorbell, which Johnny hadn't ceased for a moment to press. She had to grit her teeth until they ached while she continued with her task. Her wrist was tiring before she'd managed to clear a crosshatching on the glass, still whitish enough to blur the room. She rubbed the patch of glass vigorously with her knuckles. She was desperate to see, and then desperate not to believe what she was seeing. But now the ragged patch in the midst of the frost was too clear, and she could only stand where she was, paralysed by the sight beyond the window.

The room she had visited that afternoon was practically unrecognisable. A thick pelt of frost covered the furniture, the carpet, the books on the shelves. Under the light, whose lampshade icicles had transformed into a chandelier, Kate and Terry and the children were kneeling in the space between the chairs. Whether they had done so to pray or to huddle together more closely, she couldn't tell; she had a horrible impression that they had been trying to form some kind of structure with their bodies, or that something had arranged their bodies into a grotesque symmetry. She wanted to believe they weren't her friends and their children at all, or even human. Though their clothes were just identifiable beneath the coating of frost, she couldn't see their faces. Their bunched heads were visible only as a blur within the object which surmounted their shoulders – a globe composed of countless spines of ice.

Ellen might have stood there until the sight and the cold froze her mind entirely if Johnny hadn't tired of ringing the doorbell. The abrupt silence sounded like a shrill echo. "Is anyone coming?" he demanded.

She'd been convinced that nothing could be more terrible than the spectacle beyond the window, but now she realised there was a worse possibility: that he and Margaret might see it. With an effort which made her feel so sick and dizzy she had to grasp the icy windowsill, she turned and smiled unsteadily at him. "Nobody's there. Never mind."

"But you said we could stay with them. Can't we wait a bit and see if they come back?"

The thought of the occupants of the room rising up to greet Ellen and the children, shambling crabwise under the weight of their new translucent head, almost choked off her words. "It's too cold for waiting," she said, and her voice jerked louder as she saw Ben in the shadow of the arch. "Let's get home."

When she pushed Johnny he moved away from the house, dolefully but readily enough. For a moment she thought Margaret was going to be more reluctant – an expression which showed she knew something was wrong had tweaked her mouth – but then, bless her, she walked ahead of Ellen without speaking. Ben had stepped forwards. While the children sidled round him he stared hard at Ellen. Had he overheard Johnny's plea? He seemed only to be scrutinising her emotions, discovering the horror she was fighting to conceal. What he read in her eyes sent him striding to the house to peer through the peephole she'd created.

If he let the children suspect the truth… She no longer knew what he was capable of. She was taking hold of the children to hurry them away when he turned from the window. He looked apologetic but not even slightly distressed. "Ready to come home?" he said.

She wanted to believe he was controlling himself as she was, for the children's sake, but wasn't he too convincingly unconcerned? What had his expression been when he saw the contents of the room? Her mind felt as if it was shrinking, refusing to accept anything further, contracting around the only plan of action it was able to produce – that she should go back to the Sterling house, because the car was there. "Do as your father says," she said for Ben to hear, and was pushing them under the arch, towards the slope to Church Road, when she saw the figure she had noticed earlier at the upstairs window. Its face and hands were huge now, and she could see that they were frozen to the pane.

Though her hands wanted to clench, she managed to steer the children away from the sight. "We'll go along Market Street," she said in a voice as tightened as her mind. If she kept quiet and did her best to seem as unconcerned as Ben appeared to be, if she managed not to wonder what they might be passing as they walked between the silent blinded houses, perhaps her fears would remain formless, a darkness surrounding the spark of her consciousness.

The family was on the slope which wandered down to the main road, Johnny holding hands with her and Ben while Margaret held tight to Ellen's other hand, when Johnny cried out. "Hey!" he shouted.

Ellen thought his father had caused him to cry out until she saw Ben's puzzled glance at him. Margaret was the first to realise that he was shouting at the stillness of the town. She gripped Ellen's hand as though she was securing herself, and launched her own cry. "Wake up!" she yelled.

Her shout seemed to disappear as swiftly as her white breath. There was no response, no sound or movement within the intricate icy shells which covered every window. "Don't," Ellen whispered, jerking the children's hands, feeling too much like a terrified child herself. The stillness appalled her, the sense that the four of them were alone in Stargrave, but even worse was the possibility that the shouts might awaken some other response. "Save your breath," she said, though the words made her inexplicably nervous. At least now they were at the main road – the route to the car.

It showed her more of the deadened landscape, the deserted square, the darkened shops sealed by ice, the tangles of footprints like a memorial to the townsfolk, preserving the pattern of a dance in which they had participated unaware. But it led to the bridge and out onto the moors, out to the world beyond. She mustn't let herself start wondering if there was life beyond the moors which were pale as the moon. Whatever had happened to Stargrave and its people, surely it couldn't have overtaken the world. There would be time for her to attempt to comprehend what had happened when she had taken the family somewhere safe.

She wouldn't leave Ben behind if she could persuade him into the car. Surely he wouldn't stay in the dead town, and surely even in his present mental state he wouldn't try to prevent her from taking the children away from Stargrave. Nothing could, she told herself – certainly not the stillness, even if it felt like an icy presence which seemed to lean closer as she and Ben led the children past the first of the outlying cottages. It felt as if the dead town was rising up and looming over her, waiting for her to look up and see its vast new face. There was nothing to see, and she wouldn't be forced to look, though not looking made her feel as though the enormous silent presence was herding her and the family towards the track to the forest. She needn't be afraid of the forest when they would reach the car first. She forced her numb indeterminate hands to grasp the children's hands more firmly as she came to the beginning of the track.

The car looked like a shell dwarfed by the forest – like a snow sculpture less convincing than the figures behind the house. It would take minutes to clear the windscreen and the windows. She would never be able to conceal her intentions from Ben, and she had to believe that there was no need, that however calm he was managing to seem, they were united in distress. "We've got to start the car," she said.

He was gazing up the track, and his face remained blank as he spoke. "Give it a try," he said in a tone which could mean anything.

"You and the children clear the glass while I start the engine." She relinquished Johnny's hand so as to grope in her pocket for her keys. Her finger and thumb felt impossibly distant from each other and from her as she used them to lift out the keys. She couldn't help remembering how Ben had taken the keys from her handbag, but that mustn't matter now; only driving mattered. She ran to the car and scraped the lock of the driver's door clear of snow, and succeeded in fumbling the key into the slot. Her gloved hand was so clumsy that she twisted the key too hard, then let go of it for fear it would snap. She could feel that the lock was frozen. "Come in the house while I fetch some hot water," she said, quickly enough to keep her shivering out of her voice.

She was talking to Ben as well as to the children, but he stayed by the car. She ran up the slippery path to the front door, where the key skittered over the lock until she managed to control her panic. She pinched the key between her finger and thumb, which felt like a rag doll's, and slid it shakily into the lock.

The dark hall met her with a feeble surge of heat which reminded her unpleasantly of a dying breath. She slapped the light-switch and sprinted along the hall, trying to ignore the dark which towered overhead. The faceless guardian appeared at the kitchen window as the fluorescent tube fluttered alight. There was a kettle of water waiting to be heated on the stove, and at least her gloved hand was capable of turning the control. "Don't take anything off," she told the children, "we'll be out again any minute." She couldn't tell if she was hot or cold or if the house was, she wasn't even sure if she was seeing her breath. "Didn't anyone close the door?" she cried, and ran back along the hall, trying to identify the soft flat thuds beyond the door. Ben was punching the windscreen to crack the snow. "Don't do it too hard," she called to him, and heard him say "Don't worry" as she closed the door. She raced to the kitchen again, but the kettle wasn't yet steaming. "Walk about to keep your circulation going," she said, and led the children round and round the kitchen until she felt trapped in a ritual dance. When the kettle began to spout mist, she seized the handle with her fattened hand and urged the children out of the house. Ben had almost cleared the windscreen and the other windows of the car, except for faint patterns which she preferred not to examine too closely but which she prayed wouldn't interfere with her vision while she was driving. She poured a little of the boiling water on the lock and around the edge of the door, and placed the kettle on the snow, which shrank back from it, cracking. She aimed the key at the lock and found the aperture at once, an achievement which seemed like a promise. She turned the key and pulled at the handle, and the door opened with a creaking of dislodged ice. Bending her legs in order to sit behind the wheel was agony, but she had to bear it, telling herself that it would lessen once she was driving, once the vehicle heated up. She poked the ignition key into its slot and turned it, turned it again, turned it while treading on the accelerator, turned it when she'd pulled out the choke. The engine remained silent as the snowscape.

She tugged at the bonnet release and climbed out of the car, biting her frozen lip. The bonnet hadn't lifted as it should, but that was because of the snow weighing it down. She swept the bulk of the snow off the bonnet and heaved it open, and stared into the exposed machinery. She felt her eyes prickling with tears which felt as if they were turning into shards of ice. Even if she succeeded in unfreezing the electrical components, the vehicle was useless. The radiator had burst, and icicles hung out of it like teeth in a spitefully grinning mouth.

Of course the town was full of cars, but there was no reason to suppose they weren't in at least as bad a state. She was standing helplessly, feeling as if she had somehow let the family down and wondering what she could possibly say, when she felt a cold arm hug her and turn her towards the house. "We're here to stay. There never was anywhere else for us," Ben said.