The Christmas firs gathered around him, the pines stepped back to wait for him. The trees were almost unrecognisable as such; they were taking on shapes of which their wood was the merest skeleton, translucent filigrees embroidering the cracks of the bark, encasing the slender trunks and rising to the marble efflorescences overhead. He could distinguish so much because the forest was shining with its own light, each crystal of frost separate and distinct. Was he really proposing to spoil all this? "Yes," he snarled. The only light he wanted to see now, too late, was the light in Ellen's and the children's eyes.
Perhaps he shouldn't have declared his intentions so fiercely. At once he felt as if he was surrounded by a multitude of watching shapes poised to seize him. Every tree seemed to conceal a shape which was about to step from behind it or emerge from it. Panic swelled like ice in his guts, and he couldn't move for shivering. Was this the best that Ellen and the children, or the memory of them, could expect of him? He ground his teeth until his jaws throbbed, until the ache gave him back some sense of himself, and then he staggered forwards as though the weight of the petrol was dragging him. "Do your worst," he snarled, but his bravado didn't reassure him, it only demonstrated how effortlessly the silence extinguished his voice. Now the forest had taken on the aspect of countless legs reaching down from the black sky, or of the fingers of a member unimaginably like a hand, which the infinite dark was using to trap him. He could only head deeper into the forest at a stumbling run. He was across the threshold of the pines now, and felt as if he'd tricked himself into going on. Whichever way he headed, terror would be crowding at his back.
For the moment the forest, or its true nature, seemed content to lie in wait for him. By its pallid light he was able to see the layers of patterns beneath the snow. They were swarming, he saw — transforming as they crept towards the edge of the forest and out into the world. Otherwise there was no movement except the guttering of stars in the infrequent dark gaps overhead.
He no longer knew how cold he was or how much he was shivering. His hands and arms and shoulders ached so badly that they felt locked into position, but he didn't dare put down the containers when that would entail halting. His stumbling body had taken over from his mind. He sensed a gathering behind him, as if the shapes the trees hid were emerging, but he wouldn't look. If it was only his fear which was driving him onwards, that no longer seemed to matter. He could see from the shapes of the trees ahead that he hadn't far to go. Each tree was crowned with an identical sphere like a moon composed of glassy filaments which had engulfed the foliage, and beneath each sphere a white form as large as himself was nesting.
He was stumbling forwards so fast that he was under the first of them before he was sure what the white forms were. They were faces, magnified human faces composed of ice and encased in a shell of it — faces of the townsfolk, displayed like trophies, like decorations in a cathedral where the worshippers had become part of the fabric. There was old Mr Westminster's face, there was Edna Dainty's. All of them looked frozen in a parody of calm, and Ben knew instinctively that their metamorphosis was only beginning. As he crossed the boundary they marked, another one formed on a tree to his left with a whisper of ice like a thin muffled scream. The process looked as if a swarming of the snow had rushed, or been chased, up the crystallised tree and been caught by it. The face was a child's face.
He couldn't put a name to her, though he might have seen her at the school. The spectacle of her face trapped in ice like amber and transformed into it appalled him. Were Ellen and the children among the trophies of the forest? He stared about him until his eyes trembled and stung, but he couldn't see them. He had to believe they weren't yet there. He was so intent on distinguishing who had been caught by the trees that he didn't realise how close to the centre he was until the sky gaped like an inverted pit ahead of him.
A violent shudder halted him. If one foot hadn't been planted in front of the other, the shakiness which seized his legs now that he was stationary would have thrown him headlong, a worshipper compelled to prostrate himself. The glade was deserted, glowing like a moon trapped just beneath the surface of the earth, and he had never seen anything so terrifying. He thought he knew why its emptiness intimidated him: because the glade no longer harboured the presence which had drawn the forest about it to conceal itself. The presence was all around him, wider than the horizon — how much wider, he dared not think.
But that wasn't the whole of his fear. However empty the glade appeared to be, he sensed that it was waiting for him.
Even if he couldn't stop shivering, he was able to think. If he didn't go to find whatever was there, it would come to find him. Any moment now the weight of the containers of petrol would cause him to drop them, and with them would go the last of his resolve. He stared across the glade at the ranks of iced faces, and suddenly they felt like a single mute accusation directed at
him. "I'm sorry," he whispered and then shouted, but there seemed to be no difference between the two in the midst of the silence. He couldn't expect a response. He was alone with what he had helped to awaken — alone with that, and with the memories of how he'd terrified Ellen and the children, of the ice overwhelming the house around them, of the dying light in the window. Disgust with himself, with the way he'd treated them and with his present cowardice, blazed through him. "I'm still here," he snarled, and tottered forwards, the plastic containers thumping him at every step.
He couldn't help faltering at the edge of the glade. He'd thought the open space was covered in snow, but now he saw that the grass was hidden by a sheet of ice several inches thick. Translucent patterns teemed from the centre and out through the forest, layer upon layer of waves like a blossoming of frost, a transformation whose hunger wouldn't be satisfied until it had consumed the world. The remains of the oaks crouched towards the glade like spiny giants whose skeletons were collapsing beneath the weight of their transparent flesh. The pines with their huge new faces crowded around it, worshippers neither human nor vegetable but something new and terrible, and Ben felt the centre drawing more of the world into itself with every moment he wavered. Did he really imagine that he could challenge such power? If he achieved nothing more than to declare himself separate from it, at least that would prove he was still human, still the person who would have defended Ellen and the children from it if he hadn't been blind to their plight. If that was all, it would have to be enough. He could see the centre, he could walk straight to it if he didn't lose his footing on the ice; what was there to stop him? Only the waves of terror he was suffering, and hadn't he ranted about going beyond terror? He'd expected that of the children, and now he couldn't do it himself. The thought was a fire in his guts. His shakiness couldn't stop him walking. He lifted one foot as if he was stepping into an abyss, and trod on the ice of the glade.
A shudder passed through him and made his scalp crawl. He could feel the patterns moving underfoot, an incessant vibration whose complexity threatened to fill his mind, leaving no room for thoughts. The movement felt as if he'd set foot on the surface of an appallingly alien world. He clutched one container of petrol between his shaky ankles while he struggled to unscrew the cap of the other, then he flung the cap across the glade. It skittered over the ice and came to rest against an oak.
He wasn't sure what he'd thought might happen to it, but it seemed to have demonstrated that he would be safe. He gripped the open container between his ankles and skated the other plastic cap across the glade. The surface was ice, whatever it felt like. He wished he could avoid seeing the patterns racing past him, because they made him feel as if the ice of the glade was drawing him in; they infected him with a dizziness like the beginning of an interminable helpless fall. He closed his aching hands around the plastic handles, the smell of petrol reminding him that the forest no longer smelled of pine or of anything else, and stepped across the last threshold.
The darkness overhead seemed to lower itself towards him. Somehow the glade felt more open than a mountain-top, and much closer to the infinite dark. The glade focused the dark, he thought, which was why he felt as though he was shrinking with every step he took. He was shivering with cold and with a terror he was battling to keep vague, but he mustn't let his feelings daunt him. Another few steps would bring him to the centre, and he'd do his best to make the inhuman stillness flinch.
He took one more step on the hectic ice, planting his foot as stably as he could on the surface which he could hardly bear to look at or to feel, and then he knew what he was doing — what he had once again allowed himself to be lured into doing. No wonder he felt as if he was dwindling. He'd let himself believe that he could affect the transformation, but that was only a final illusion. He was returning to the spot where he'd awakened the patterns, so that he could be fitted into them.
The thought shattered the last of his defences. He clutched at the plastic handles as if they were his only hold on the reality he knew, and shrank into himself, desperate to hide. He had felt himself dwindling because of the immensity which he'd sensed watching him.
He felt as though layers of protection were being peeled away from his consciousness — as though an aspect of his mind of which his imagination had been merely the seed was flowering uncontrollably. He was being watched by something capable of swallowing the stars. More than the glade was the focus it used to perceive, more than the forest which felt for an instant like a single organ, emotionlessly aware of him. The transformation spreading out into the world was itself a medium which the inhabitant of the dark beyond the stars was using to perceive the world. The world and the stars had been less than a dream, nothing more than a momentary lapse in its consciousness, and the metamorphosis which was reaching for the world was infinitesimal by its standards, simply a stirring in its sleep, a transient dream of the awful perfection which would overtake infinity when the presence beyond the darkness was fully awake.
It would have reached for the world eventually, whether or not he had helped it take hold. Even if he could have saved Ellen and the children, and too many others for him to bear thinking of them, just by resisting the pull back to Stargrave, in a sense it didn't matter; the vast other was lying in wait for the universe. Perhaps it already occupied the same space in some way — perhaps the existence of the universe was all that prevented its awakening. He couldn't hope to oppose it. The containers of petrol were dragging him forwards to stumble his last few mindless steps, and then he would let fall the containers and himself.
Then a thought, like a spark which was almost too dim to see but which wouldn't quite go out, occurred to him. If he was unable to affect what was happening, why had he been enticed back to the glade?
He'd told the children that they had been chosen because of who he was. In retrospect his presumption seemed worse than grotesque, it seemed unforgivable, but might it have touched on the truth? Even if he was no more than a fragment of the pattern, that seemed to mean that the transformation needed him. He was bearing the last trace of Edward Sterling's legacy back to its kind. No wonder he seemed less than an atom to the watcher in the dark — but all at once that perception of himself was liberating, because it no longer seemed to matter what he did to himself. He was more than a fragment if he could choose not to be one.
He staggered to a halt a few paces short of the centre of the glade. Dropping the right-hand container, which struck the ice with a dull flat thump that the silence instantly erased, he dug in his pocket for the book of matches on which Howard Bellamy had scribbled his address, and closed his throbbing fist around them.
As soon as he halted, the dark grew more aware of him. The sky seemed to lower itself spiderlike, the entire forest turned inwards to him. He felt like an insect which had roused a carnivorous plant. He'd worried it, he thought wildly, but he hadn't even started. He tipped the open container of petrol towards himself, thrusting his fist underneath it as his grip on the handle wavered, and the liquid spilled with a gulping sound over his legs. When the container was lightened enough for his shaking arms to lift it higher, he poured petrol over his chest and then, closing his eyes and holding his breath, over his head.
Nothing seemed about to stop him. The smell of petrol, and his sense of what he meant to do, were threatening to make him sick. He couldn't stop now, he'd committed himself. He shied the empty container into the trees and managed not to lose his balance as he stooped to heave up the full one from the teeming ice. As he straightened up, the container began to empty itself over his stomach with a gulping which sounded dismayingly eager. He raised it further as soon as he could, and forced himself to hold his arms high until the last drops of petrol had trickled over his scalp. He dropped the container and kicked it away blindly, and opened his stinging eyes to find a match.
His fist had kept the book dry. One match would do the trick. He lifted the cover with a glistening wet finger and tore off the nearest match. He struck it, thinking of the time he'd spent away from Ellen and the children, when he'd sped home to protect them, never realising that he was being lured to do the opposite. The surge of guilt which overwhelmed him wasn't quite equal to the panic he experienced as the match flared. He shook it and flicked it away from him, and it landed with a hiss.
It sounded as though the ice was mocking him. "Don't be so sure," he snarled, and ripping out another match, set fire to the book.
He knew what he was doing — knew that there was no taking it back. Both his hands caught fire as the matches burst into flames and he dropped the book between his feet. At once flames raced up his body and reached his face before he could draw breath to scream.