At the school gates Margaret said goodbye with a kiss and a regal wave, and Johnny managed a hasty peck once he was sure that none of his friends would see. Ben watched as the two of them became part of the crowd in the schoolyard. He felt unexpectedly vulnerable, childlike. He wandered down Hill Lane to the main road, and was past the newsagent's again before he wondered why he hadn't made straight for the forest instead of heading for the end of the marked paths nearest the house. What reason could he have for putting off an exploration of the woods? He'd already explored the lower reaches of the forest with the help of Ellen and the children, after all.
Though the borough council was technically responsible for its maintenance, the terms of the original bequest meant that the Sterlings owned the forest. During the summer, at Ellen's suggestion, they'd begun to identify walks and paint arrows on the trees. Green arrows marked a path which curved from above the Sterling house to the edge of the woods nearest the stile on the moorland road, blue arrows led deeper into the forest and then returned across the green path to emerge onto the common above the church. Stan Elgin had erected marker posts along the paths, and the council was apparently proposing to gravel the paths if it ever had sufficient funds. "They'd rather argue about money than spend it," Ben told himself as he strode past the house.
When the track reached the common beside the allotments, it vanished. Only his shadow was there to lead him across the frosty grass to the start of the blue-arrowed path, where the earth showed black through a threadbare embroidery of moss. He halted there and stood listening. All he could hear was the silence of the trees, ranks of Norway spruce radiating away from him like centuries of Christmases until they met the pines which composed most of the forest. As he set out along the path he found he was instinctively trying to make no noise.
The silence closed around him like water, icy and gloomily green. He had taken only a few steps when he felt he was deep in the forest; the trees cut off all the sounds of the town. Soon they were towering over him, their spires of green branches perched high on mottled scaly trunks as tall as the spire of St Christopher's. While he'd been leading the family along the paths they'd marked, the forest had often seemed a refuge from the summer heat, a reservoir of wintry shadow, as though the trees had immobilised the seasons. Now he found they had trapped a chill which felt as if it might never recede. It made him breathless, and he walked faster, almost in a trance, until the sight of a marker post ahead told him that he was about to leave the path.
The arrow carved and painted on the waist-high post indicated that the path wound sharply to the right, and Ben wondered why he'd sent the path in that direction. He mustn't have wanted it to lead any deeper into the forest. Several hundred yards ahead the Norway spruce gave way to pines, and he felt as if he was about to cross a threshold, not necessarily one that was visible to him. He went to the post and held onto it, trying to decide if he'd wanted to save the depths of the woods for himself or to protect Ellen and the children from them. Perhaps it had been the latter, because suddenly he felt reluctant to leave the path.
As his left hand clamped his right on top of the post, he was reminded of a game he and his mother used to play, piling their hands alternately on top of one another, faster and faster, towards some goal which he had always thought they'd failed to reach because of laughing. Infuriated by the childishness of the gesture, he shoved himself away from the post and off the path, onto a carpet of fallen needles which silenced his footsteps. He was heading for the centre of the forest, as far as he could tell. He wouldn't look back until he was certain that the path was out of sight. It was his forest more than anyone else's, and he felt as if it was poised to watch over him.
The pines multiplied around him with every step he took. He followed his shadow over mounds of decaying needles towards what appeared to be the edge of an infinity of pines, an edge which constantly renewed itself. Fallen needles surrounded him, green needles scattered on old gold and bronze and shards of ivory where frost had settled, and they made him feel as if the forest contained a pattern he was soon to distinguish. He looked over his shoulder at last and saw only pines leading away, he didn't know how long ago he'd left the spruce plantation behind. He was still walking as if he was under a compulsion to walk, and the next moment he lost his footing on a slippery root beneath the needles. He fell to his knees, his hands sinking into prickly decay, and was about to heave himself to his feet when it was borne in on him that his would be the only movement in the entire forest.,
He crouched there, hands on thighs, too awed to stir. The countless slender pines and the lattice of their shadows surrounded him with a calm which suggested to him that the very air had turned to ice. The avenues of bare trunks rose to a ceiling of gloomy green high as a cathedral roof, and he felt as if he were kneeling in a vast natural shrine to a stillness of which his surroundings were merely an omen. What might he find at the centre of such a stillness? Just as he wondered that, he heard a sound behind him.
It began above him, rattling through foliage, and came scuttling down a trunk. Ben gave a cry and twisted around, kicking up a heavy shower of needles. He was in time to see an object small and brown as a sparrow drop from the leaning trunk and land among the roots. For a moment, bewildered by the sound which had responded to his cry, he thought the object was a spider. It was a pine-cone, and he told himself that the sound had been the echo of his own voice; if it had been anyone else's, he would surely have been aware of its owner by now. All the same, he wished that he hadn't been making so much noise himself that he'd obscured the sound which, as he strained to recall it, seemed like a whisper which had come from several directions. "He could imagine that it had been the sound of the forest calling to him," he muttered as if making his impression more like a story would distance it from him.
A shiver sent him wavering to his feet. He stared about, trying to determine which way he'd been facing when he had looked over his shoulder, and then he saw that the forest itself was showing him: most of the shadows were pointing that way. His own shadow had joined them as he rose, and he went quickly after it, as though he could outrun it if he went fast enough.
There was another idea for a story. He must remember to write it down once he was home, and carry a notebook in future. That should help him focus his imagination, which seemed just now to be escaping his control. He was beginning to think that all the shadows around him and ahead of him were indicating the route he should follow, and that too many of the fallen needles were. Surely none of this need trouble him, because he could see open sky beyond the farthest trees. It had to be the edge of the forest, and he was bound to admit he felt a little relieved. He would welcome a few natural sounds once he was in the open. Until he was out of the forest, however, he would rather not hear anything beyond his breathing and his muffled footfalls which sounded like heartbeats in the earth.
He would have expected the patch of open sky to grow more quickly as he strode forwards. Even when he jogged towards it, it stayed frustratingly localised. The soft ground muffled his footfalls so completely that he felt as if the silence was intensifying, swallowing any sounds he made. Then he faltered. That wasn't the edge of the forest ahead; it was a glade deep within it. He knew that because he had already been there.
He remembered being taken to the glade on a day so cold his mother and grandmother huddled close to the fire in the house. Had the place looked then as it looked now? The pines around it glittered as though ice was crystallising faintly on their bark, and the grass at its centre resembled an explosion of frost yards wide. His memories were slipping away, because he'd realised what he must have been too young to realise then. This was the place where Edward Sterling had died.