Ben stepped between two pines and halted at the edge of the grass, wondering how he knew. This might not be the only glade in the forest, after all. But Edward Sterling had been found in a grove of oak trees, and there were the remains of oaks among the pines which encircled the glade. Ben walked to the middle of the open space and gazed around him.
The glade was circular, about thirty yards in diameter. Within this, roughly equidistant from the centre, were four dead oak trees. He assumed that the pines had stolen their light and their nourishment, because the oaks were withered, little more than a scattering of twisted limbs around collapsed trunks. They reminded him of huge dead spiders. He stood on the grass which yielded stiffly underfoot like a frozen pond about to give way, and tried to see what else he should be noticing. Whatever it was, he felt as if it was waiting for him to notice.
He peered through the veils of his breath at the trees radiating from the edge of the glade, and thought he saw. Could the glade really be as perfectly circular as it appeared to be? He positioned himself as close to the exact centre of the glade as he could judge, then paced to the perimeter, placing the heel of each foot against the toe of its follower.
Forty-six paces brought him to the edge. A foot was a foot long, he thought, but now he had forgotten precisely where he'd started from. He took forty-six paces back and dropped a pound coin on the patch of frosty grass, then he continued in a straight line to the far side of the glade. Forty-six paces again. He'd managed to locate the centre by instinct, and he felt as if he had unlocked an unsuspected aspect of himself.
He went back to the coin and paced along a diameter at right angles to the first. Forty-six paces brought him level with the pines. He grunted with surprise, retreated to the coin and set out along the other half of the diameter. The toecap of his right shoe reached the edge just as he counted forty-six, and he couldn't help shivering with excitement or nervousness or the growing chill. No glade could be that regular, he told himself, and he meant to prove it. Until he'd walked a line across the glade which didn't measure ninety-two paces, or even a radius which wasn't precisely half that length, he wouldn't let anything distract him.
He didn't know how long he spent at the task, no longer looking at his feet as he mouthed the count rather than break the silence, trusting his instincts to find the diameters which bisected the angles between those he'd already paced, as if such obsessive precision would lead sooner to an irregular measure-ment. Here was one – the distance from the centre to an oak. He turned away from the snarl of whitened branches, towards the marker coin, which was so frosted it resembled a tiny moon. The oaks deformed the glade, he thought, and that would have to do; how much longer did he propose to trot back and forth like a puppet? If he didn't head for the moors soon he might be in the forest when darkness fell. Just walk to each of the other three oaks, he murmured, just to be tidy. At least, he thought he'd spoken, almost too low to be audible. Certainly a soft voice had.
It was his unsureness which broke his trance enough for him to realise that something around him had changed. At once he was afraid to look away from the icy moon of the coin, and afraid not to. A shiver which seemed to begin underfoot before shooting through his body raised his head for him.
At first he thought it might be only his awareness which had changed, because he saw immediately that the avenues of trees radiating from the glade were absolutely regular, not just the placing of the trees but the shapes of their trunks and their high spreads of branches, as if some force emanating from the glade had aligned them like iron filings around a magnet. Then he saw how nearly similar to one another the shapes of the dead oaks were, as though what had killed them had shaped them. He sensed there was another pattern which he was afraid to identify. He stared at the glittering trees, at the shadows which had turned on their axes and were reaching towards him from the side of the glade opposite that from which he'd entered, and then he looked down.
"God," he whispered. The pattern was around him on the grass, a many-armed star of frost as wide as the glade. The outlines of the slender arms were awesomely intricate and yet symmetrical in every detail. He turned dizzily, feeling in danger of losing his balance, and saw that the star wasn't quite symmetricaclass="underline" it lacked the three arms which would have pointed to the oaks he had failed to approach. The star showed where he had walked, as if a vast cold presence had paced behind him.
As soon as he thought that, he sensed it behind him or above him, waiting for him to be unable not to look. He couldn't move, but how would that help him? A snowflake settled on his trembling hand and lay between the tendons, a perfectly symmetrical snowflake like a feathery wafer of glass. He stared helplessly at it and saw that it wasn't melting but growing. Perhaps that was a sign of life – of the kind of life which the miles of forest hid.
Ben's trembling freed him from his paralysis. He staggered across the glade, slipping wildly on the frozen grass, and fled into the woods, trying not to see how even the ferns among the trees formed a regular pattern. He caught sight of a spider plucking at its web among the ferns in front of him, a spider striped like a tiger, and for a moment even that seemed welcome; at least it was a living creature. But the woods darkened around him as their denizen came after him. The ferns turned to marble as frost raced over them, and snowflakes whirled around him, bejewelling the trees. The spider paled and writhed into a shape which no living creature should form, and before Ben could suck in a breath after the cry that the sight wrenched from him, it was a crystal of flesh, the centre of a mandala of frost and web. Then the forest grew dark as a starless night, and something like an incarnation of that darkness, far larger than the glade, seized him.
TWENTY-ONE
When Ellen arrived at the college that morning she learned that the model for her art class had called in sick. "She's off with a bug," the college secretary said. Nobody else was available, and so Ellen introduced her students to the drawing of still-lifes, improvising a theme from random objects in the classroom – an apple, a bunch of keys strung on a safety-pin, a handbag, a headscarf, a copy of The Boy Who Let The Fire Go Out which one young mother had brought for Ellen to autograph. Ellen encouraged them to look for the details which made each object unique at the moment of looking – the lopsidedness of the apple, the irregular mark which gave its crest the appearance of a miniature yellow beret with a frayed brown stalk, the hint of a bruise on its bright green cheek… You couldn't capture how the handbag smelled of unlit cigarettes and a dry perfume which tickled the nostrils, but that was reality for you: there was always more to any aspect of it than you could reproduce, and that was what made it real. She strolled up and down between the desks occupied by her eighteen students and talked about selecting the details which brought the subject alive for you. Here and there controversies were flaring, a pensioner who never let her bag out of her reach insisting that the objects Ellen had chosen were too ordinary to be called a still-life, a Pakistani chef maintaining that one had to master all the skills of draughtsmanship before one could produce anything original – a claim which provoked support and disagreement and which vanished into a larger argument. Despite all this, everyone had a picture to show by lunchtime. Ellen was struck by the care quite a few of the students had taken in drawing the book, the ways the pages of the propped volume leaned, the random pattern of the text, the light and shadow of her illustration on the left-hand page; she wished Ben could be there to see. "Keep looking," she told her class as they straggled out of the room.