Midnight Sun

SEVEN

On Guy Fawkes Night weeping willows of many colours appeared in the sky, blotting out the stars. Christmas was already in the shops, sprinkling the windows with imitation snow like a promise of the real thing. Christmas had come early to the school too, bringing little goodwill but multiplying the questions which the children had to answer instantly if they weren't to be shouted at or worse. It would be Ben's first Christmas without his family, and he felt as if his grief had been waiting for him to realise. Some nights as he prayed in front of the photograph, his lips were quivering so much he couldn't even whisper.

In the weeks before Christmas his aunt did her best to console him. During the first weekend in December she hung the decorations, wavering on top of a stepladder while Ben clutched the legs. For the first time in her life she bought a Christmas tree, a Norway spruce no taller than Ben. It lent the house a chilly scent of pine and sprinkled the carpet with needles as the trees from Sterling Forest had done in the Star-grave house, but it wasn't the same – Ben wasn't sure how. Nor were the Father Christmases she paid for him to visit in the department stores – a fat man who sneezed as often as he chortled and a thinner whose beard was too big for him – quite able to invoke the anticipation he'd begun to feel around this time of year in Stargrave, though both of them patted him on the head and murmured noncommittally in the manner of their species when he asked to be brought an astronomical telescope. He knew they were dressed up as someone who didn't exist, but that wasn't the difference; he would have known that last Christmas.

Soon Mr O'Toole set about preparing the school for the festivities. When they opened their presents and ate their Christmas dinner, he yelled, they should be thinking of the child God sent to earth to suffer because people were so sinful that nothing less could make up for their sins. He dabbed spittle from his lips with a large stiff handkerchief and glared red-eyed around the assembly hall. "Have you no souls?" he demanded, his voice rising almost to a shriek. "File past that crib, the lot of you, and think of Christ's blessed mother having to see her only son whipped and crowned with thorns and nailed to a cross to die with vinegar to drink. I'll see a few tears before this assembly's over, or I'll know how to get them."

The crib was the size and approximately the shape of a rabbit hutch. The cradle in the straw was surrounded by three identical sheep from a toy farmyard, two plaster shepherds and a Virgin Mary whose hair a trace of dust was greying. A star cut out of silver paper hung above the scene, one of its points drooping. The cradle and the swaddled baby it contained were too big for their entourage, and Dominic had claimed to Ben that if you picked the baby up it would cry ma-ma. When Dominic shuffled alongside the crib now, however, he emitted a loud sniff. "Use your handkerchief, boy," the headmaster snarled, low enough to suggest grudging approval of Dominic's performance. There were just three girls in front of Ben, sniffing almost in unison, and suddenly Ben knew that he would be the first child to fail to weep, unable to respond to the crib whose incongruities seemed to have been arranged as a test of faith. It wasn't just those that troubled him, it was the sight of the headmaster glaring across the crib. If what the crib represented were real, how could it need someone like Mr O'Toole to terrorise people into believing in it? How could it bear to have anyone act that way on its behalf? The questions frightened him even more than the headmaster did, and so he began, rather to his own bewilderment, to weep as he came abreast of the crib.

At first he thought he was weeping only for his family and from knowing he would never again spend Christmas with them. He remembered the snap of crackers as the family formed a chain with them around the laden table and pulled them all at once; his grandfather saying "To the season" as everyone raised a glass of wine; the long evenings when the boy would sit on his mother's lap by the fire while she and his grandmother sang carols that seemed somehow to embody the time of year, the icy sparkling of the vast night over Stargrave, the wind rushing down from the moors and through the forest and fluttering softly at the windows – and then he found himself observing himself. Perhaps this was the only way he could deal with the confusion of his thoughts. He felt as if he was looking down on the crib and the headmaster and himself from somewhere too high for his emotions to reach. This new clarity seemed to unlock his mind, and with disconcerting vividness he remembered learning to walk, his father and grandfather dancing out of reach and leading him deeper into the forest, their faces proud and a little nervous. The family had looked like that when he'd begun to realise that Father Christmas was a myth, but had there been a secret for him to realise in the forest? A sudden panic which he didn't want to understand jarred him back to full awareness of the crib, and for a moment it seemed to be the source of his panic rather than any kind of a reassurance.

During the last few days of that school term he felt as if whatever he had almost glimpsed was lurking at the edge of his thoughts. The days were growing colder, not with the clinging chill of mist but with a relentlessness which made him feel like frozen bones imperfectly insulated by flesh as he walked between his aunt's house and the school. He tried to distract himself with schoolwork and with the token party which Mr O'Toole conceded to the school – apparently at the request of the teachers – on the last day of term, but the schoolwork seemed as much of a game as the party. Wearing a paper hat and consuming sandwiches and lemonade and playing battleships with Dominic in squared exercise books all felt like putting off the inevitable, and he was afraid to know what it was.

"Enjoy your Christmas," their teacher said when the final bell rang, "but don't eat so much you won't fit behind your desks." Some of the children gave him Christmas cards, and Ben wished he had thought to bring one, not least so that he could linger in the classroom. But his aunt was waiting at the gates. Taking deep breaths and pinching his coat collar shut, Ben sent himself out of the school.

There was no mist. The first star hung low in the sky as if it had crystallised out of the deep blue. The star was so bright, and the unblemished sky so glassy, that he felt as if the blue was about to shatter and let the starry night appear. The roofs of buildings and the bare branches of trees looked as though they had been outlined with a razor, and to Ben that seemed a sign that everything was about to grow still clearer. Buildings and trees were absolutely motionless against the sky, which appeared to solidify as it darkened, holding fast the luminous peaks of roofs, the sunlit tips of branches. As he walked home the glowing branches turned grey, and he remembered this was the shortest day of the year.

When his aunt opened the front door, a draught followed her in. Ben heard pine-needles scattering on the carpet, and fetched the brush and dustpan from beneath the kitchen sink. As he cleared up the needles he saw his reflection in a silvery globe on the tree, his head swelling as he shuffled closer on his knees, until he thought he looked like a tadpole held by ice. His grandfather had had to be pleaded with to decorate the trees they brought into the house from Sterling Forest; he'd seemed to believe that the trees, or whatever they signified, were enough.

His aunt gave him sausages and Christmas pudding for dinner, and found a carol concert on the radio to accompany the meal. Afterwards, while she put away the dishes, she sang along with the last carols as if she hoped Ben would. However, when he told her well before his bedtime that he was going up to his room she only said "I'm here if you need me."

He didn't switch on the light above the stairs as he climbed towards the stars which he could see beyond his bedroom. From his window he gazed at the stars, which barely pierced the blackness in whose depths galaxies floated like snowflakes. The blackness was no more than a hint of the limitless dark in which the world was less than a speck of dust. He imagined seeing a star move as the Christmas story said it had. The idea disturbed him, and he didn't think he wanted to know why. He switched on his bedroom light and knelt in front of the photograph.

But praying was no use: the words meant nothing to him. Had the headmaster robbed them of meaning, or had it been Father Flynn? Even the photograph unnerved Ben – not so much the frozen smiles of the women as something about the eyes of his father and grandfather and even his own eyes. He turned off the light so as not to see the eyes, and returned to the window.

A star blinked, and then another. For a moment he was sure he was about to see one move. Downstairs his aunt had tuned the radio to a comedy show to which he often listened with her. He thought she was turning the volume higher in case that would tempt him to join her, but the signature tune might as well have been trying to reach him from another world, because he'd understood at last how reassuring the sight of a moving star would be: it would mean that however dark and cold and empty it appeared to be, infinity cared.

He felt as if he was falling off the world. The endless dark seemed to be reaching for him with its swarm of stars, with light which, felt as bleak as the space between them and which might be older than the world. He thought he could feel how the light was travelling towards him, unthinkably swift and yet slower than snowflakes when set against the expanse of time. All at once he was sure the headmaster was right to suggest that the truth which the crib made appealing was far more terrible and awesome. He realised he was shivering uncontrollably when he shoved himself away from the window, towards the light-switch. But the dark and the stars were in the mirror too, and so was he, beside the photograph. The dark was gazing back at him out of his own eyes.

The sight paralysed him. He thought of the eyes of the old man with the drum in Edward Sterling's book, but he sensed that something far older – so old that the fleeting thought of it stopped his breath – was watching him. He didn't know how long he crouched in front of the mirror, unaware of resting his weight on his knuckles on the dressing-table. As he leaned inadvertently closer his breath whitened the mirror, which sparkled as if the stars around the silhouette of his head were settling on the glass. He felt as if he himself was only an illusion that would flicker for an instant in the vast darkness, as if he was gazing through himself deep into the dark. He was afraid to move, but if he didn't he would see what was watching him out of the lightless depths.

Someone was calling his name. The voice was too distant to reach him, but it was distracting him. It was his aunt who was calling him, standing at the foot of the stairs and raising her voice to be heard over the music at the end of the comedy show. She must be wondering why he had stayed so long in his room, though as far as he was concerned no time at all had passed. When he didn't answer, she would come to find him.

She would find him in the dark, gazing entranced at himself, and it would kill her. His running away to Stargrave almost had, and he was sure that she would find the sight of him as he was now at least as dismaying. The thought made him squirm with concern for her, scraping his knuckles on the rough wood. The inane music finished its scurrying, and he heard her start up the stairs, calling anxiously to him.

A surge of panic stiffened his arms and flung him away from the mirror. He gulped a breath and flailed at the light-switch. "I'm here, Auntie," he stammered. "I was only resting." Then, terrified of what she might be able to see, he forced himself to turn to the mirror.

There was nothing to see but his own face and the photograph, nothing in his eyes except bewilderment and fading panic, nothing secretive about the faces in the photograph. Whatever had made him see what he'd seen, surely it had gone back into the dark. "I'm coming now, Auntie," he called, managing to keep his voice steady. When he heard her stop and eventually descend the stairs, he let out a shaky breath. He went downstairs as soon as he was able to conceal his nervousness, vowing that Christmas would mean everything to him that it meant to her. He mustn't ever see anything like that again, please God, for her sake.