He seemed to have overestimated her. Her face pinched tight around her mouth as if she didn't trust herself to answer him. She glanced past him, so fleetingly that he knew she was considering a bid to sneak the children out of the room. He leaned hard against the door, his body stiffening with impatience. "I'm not saying we'll end up like that," he said. "I don't know how we'll end up, but I'm eager to find out. Aren't you, just a little? You know we'll all be together – they were, you saw." A sudden idea brought a smile to his lips. "If you ask me, I think we just now heard them and the rest of them letting us know they're waiting for us."
He kept the smile up for as long as he could, but when even putting an appeal into it didn't win him a response he felt his mouth droop clownishly. He could sympathise with her for being confused earlier, but how could he express himself any more clearly? Was she deliberately resisting the truth? Observing her and the children, all of whom had turned so pink with the heat of the house that they looked unshelled, he was positive she couldn't ignore it; these raw soft shapes weren't how life was meant to be. She'd had her chance, and he couldn't afford to waste any more time on her when he still had to reach the children. At least up here she wouldn't find it so easy to prevent him from talking to them, and surely at their ages they must be more open to newness than she was. "Have either of you any idea what your mother and I are talking about?"
"Of course they haven't," Ellen cried.
His impatience was suddenly almost uncontrollable, and seemed to twist his body into a new shape under the skin. "Let them speak."
Margaret was visibly struggling to do so, and he produced a smile to help her. But all she said was "Stop it, Daddy, you're frightening us."
"You aren't frightened, Johnny, are you," Ben said, so certain of the answer that he didn't bother to make his words sound like a question. The boy shook his head and moved closer to his mother, looking shamefaced. He hadn't grabbed her arm before in order to stop her replacing the receiver; he had been afraid to hear. All at once Ben was disgusted with the three of them, and with his own efforts on their behalf. "I'm not trying to frighten you. I'm trying not to," he said through his teeth.
The children huddled against their mother. The three of them stared at him. At least he had succeeded in holding their attention, and perhaps they would keep quiet now; they appeared to have run out of words. Behind them the forest stirred again like a spider sensing movement in its web, though of course it wasn't really like that; his mind was simply clinging to old metaphors. "You can't just go on being frightened," he said urgently. "Unless you look at what you're afraid of you'll never see how much more is there until it's too late for you to appreciate it. I want us to share it, don't you understand? You don't want to be alone with it, do you?"
They were staring at him as though they couldn't believe what they saw or heard. What was wrong with them? "Your mother has an idea what I'm talking about even if she won't admit it," he said, hearing his voice grow thin and cold. "It isn't so hard to understand if you let yourself dream it instead of trying to force your mind to work. Think of it as a story that's truer than anything you thought was true. What's happened to Stargrave is only a sign of what's coming, an image that's simple enough for us to grasp, like a picture in a baby's first book."
He thought they might laugh at that and by laughing realise how accurate it was, but it didn't seem to appeal to them. "If you're wondering why Stargrave has begun to change and yet we haven't," he said, doing his best to put some warmth into his voice because surely this was the moment which would bring the four of them together, "I think it's because the Sterlings have been part of what's happening ever since Edward Sterling came out of the midnight sun. I think we've been left until last because we were already closer to it. Come on now, that must make you feel happier, knowing we've been chosen because of who we are."
"Chosen for what?"
"Shut up, johnny," Margaret wailed, lashing out at him. "I don't want to hear."
"You won't have to," Ellen promised fiercely, hugging them both and glaring a challenge at Ben, and abruptly Ben had had enough. He was trying to think why the spectacle of the children cowering into the protection of their mother's refusal to use her mind should seem familiar, and then he knew: the three of them were exactly like the brainless woman and her brainless children who'd hindered his return to the family grave and the forest the day he'd run away from Norwich. He stared at their eyes moist as a cow's and their sniffling raw nostrils in their stubbornly stupid faces, and disgust overwhelmed him. "If you won't listen, you can look," he snarled, and punched the light-switch so hard that the plastic cracked.
The forest surged towards the house while standing absolutely still, and its glow reached into the room. He hoped that would draw their attention to the window, because there was certainly something to see: a pale shape which could only be a face, though it was broad as several trees and composed of swarming filaments, had appeared in the midst of the forest. Although he couldn't see its eyes, he knew it was staring into the room.
It was there for the family to see, a sight whose existence even they couldn't deny, but they wouldn't see it until they stopped gazing aghast at him. He wasn't threatening them with violence, it had been frustration which had caused him to break the light-switch. Words were useless. He raised one hand and pointed at the face behind them.
He stayed like that as a shiver passed slowly through him. The figure which had risen from the forest had lifted a pale hand and was pointing at him. He let his hand sink, and its hand disappeared into the snow, then reappeared as he made to touch his face. The children were sobbing, and Ellen was hanging onto them as though she wasn't sure if she was protecting them or herself. His hand faltered short of his chin, because he'd understood they were seeing what he was seeing: the face breaking out in patterns like frost, like music rendered visible in ice – his own face, which he could see reflected in the window.
It was just another metaphor, another sign of the imminent transformation, but he couldn't quite bring himself to touch his face and discover what exactly was there. Ellen and the children were to blame, shrinking away from the sight of him in such terror that he was beginning to lose his nerve. He couldn't stand them any longer. They screamed as he lurched towards them, and he thought they might topple across the desk and through the window. He no longer cared what happened to them. He'd moved away from the door so as to open it, to get away from them. He turned his back on them and seized the doorknob, frost flowering across the panels of the door as he did so, and strode out of the room.
He heard the children snivelling as he went downstairs, and Ellen murmuring to them. Let her say what she liked, about him if it improved her mood. Soon she and the children would be beyond such reassurances, ready or not. He flung open the front door and stepped into the embrace of the night.
He was stepping onto the track when he heard Ellen turn the key in the mortise-lock. He would have expected to hear the bolts, but they must be frozen open. He smiled sadly – apparently his face still could. Try as she might to keep him out, she was only wasting time in being afraid of him.
He slowed his pace as he continued along the track. Though he felt like running to find whatever was awaiting him, he wanted to see everything there was to see, every stage of the metamorphosis of Stargrave. Nothing moved except him, but he sensed that the frozen stillness was aware of him. He went forwards deliberately, relishing his anticipation, watching the forest begin to reveal its glimmering depths. Then a tiny sound from behind and above distracted him, and he looked back.