SIX
On Halloween night the streets smelled of mist and charred leaves. All day Ben had felt surrounded by signs too secret to interpret: the dance of decaying leaves in the air, the long shadows where the autumn chill lurked like winter biding its time, a sun which looked swollen with blood as the mist dragged it down beyond the unconvincing cut-out shapes the houses had become. He was almost able to believe that the anticipation with which the growing nights affected him was only the excitement he could see on the faces of the children around him, but then why was it making him nervous?
The Milligans invited him and his aunt to spend the evening with them. After dinner Ben's aunt led him through the streets, gripping his arm harder whenever they met figures wearing masks or pointed hats. "They're just children dressed up," she kept muttering, unaware that he was nervous of them only in case they might jeer at his costume, a sheet which she had reluctantly lent him and which he had to bunch in his fist to prevent the skirt of it from tripping him up. At long last they reached their destination, where a grinning pumpkin flickered in the front-room window, and Mr Milligan opened the door. "Why, here's a Roman senator," he shouted. "Hitch up your toga, Bennius, and come in."
Mrs Milligan bustled out of the kitchen, carrying two aprons and an apple from which she took a loud bite. "He looks more like a little old pagan priest," she said and then, so forcefully that she spat bits of apple, "You don't really, Ben. You're the best ghost I've seen tonight. It makes me shiver just to look at you."
She gave him and Dominic an apron each so that they could duck for apples in a washing-up bowl placed on a bath towel in the front room. The water and the apple which Ben eventually snagged with his teeth tasted of soap and of the smell of the candles which illuminated the room. Afterwards Mrs Milligan brought in sausages protruding from snowdrifts of mashed potatoes on large oval plates, followed by conical cakes meant to resemble snouts of rats, from which one had to pull the inedible whiskers. Ben's aunt kept glancing unhappily at the shadows of the sausages, flexing on the tablecloth like fingers threatening to shape a silhouette, and she wouldn't touch the snouty cakes. Mrs Milligan cleared the table and came back into the room, her shadow billowing after her as though the dark of the hallway had sent part of itself to join them. "Time to tell some tales," Mr Milligan said.
"Nothing unsuitable," Ben's aunt warned.
"Nothing to turn anyone's hair any whiter."
"Tell us about the man who found the whistle on the beach at Felixstowe," Dominic said.
The boys sat on either side of the fire, their backs against the fireplace, which felt to Ben as if the snatches the heat made at him kept being thwarted by the chill of the tiles. Mr Milligan told them about a whistle that called a ghost which was dressed in a sheet, except that when it got between the man and the only door out of his bedroom he saw that nothing was wearing the sheet. Ben listened enthralled, feeling that he was sitting at the feet of giants with firelit faces, and watched their shadows merge and part and merge on the ceiling, a shifting centre of deeper blackness drawing them together. When Mr Milligan finished, having let the man escape from the room, Ben heard his aunt breathing hard with distaste. "It's just a story someone made up, boys. It didn't really happen," Mrs Milligan said to placate her.
"That's mean. You didn't have to say that," Dominic complained.
"It sounds to me as if your mother did," Ben's aunt said.
"Do you know any stories, Beryl?" Mrs Milligan suggested.
"If you mean about the supernatural, there are plenty in the Bible."
"It's Ben's turn now," Dominic said.
Ben wasn't sure if Dominic meant to aggravate the tension in the room, and he didn't care. He felt oddly excited, as if Mr Milligan's storytelling had awakened a story in him. "I'll try," he said.
"We'll have to be going shortly," his aunt announced.
"You'd better have the storyteller's seat, Ben," Mr Milligan said, and relinquished the lopsided armchair to him. Ben gazed into the flames and felt as if he was sitting by a camp fire, as if the dark behind him were bigger than the world. A story which he had to speak in order to know it seemed to be gathering inside him, but he didn't know how to begin. Mr Milligan brought a dining-chair from the next room and sat on it beside the fire. "Try 'once upon a time', Ben."
"Once upon a time…" Ben said, and felt the phrase bring the story alive. "Once upon a time there was a boy who lived at the edge of the coldest place in the world. It was so cold that the ice there had never melted since there was ice in the world. The boy's father went out hunting every day while the boy and his mother tended all the fires that people had kept burning since before anyone could remember, because if even one fire should go out the spirits that lived beyond the flames would come down the mountain where they lived in the ice and through the pass the fires were guarding and capture the rest of the world. The boy's father told him that his father's father almost let a fire go out when the father's father was a little boy, and he'd seen the spirits come walking. Their eyes were like ice that nothing could melt, and each of their breaths was like a blizzard, and their footsteps sounded like all the snow as far as you could see in every direction squeezing itself together. Just looking at them had made his own eyes begin to turn to ice. Only his father had grabbed a burning log from the next fire and driven the spirits back and thrown the log on the fire that was nearly out, and they'd never let a fire burn down that low again.
"Well, hearing about that frightened the boy the story is about, but he wished he could see one of the spirits just to know what they looked like. Only he couldn't see up the mountain for the mist and fires, and whenever his mother or his father caught him looking they would beat him. Then one day his mother told him she was going to have a baby and he would have to tend the fires by himself for as long as it took the baby to come, and she made him promise that he wouldn't let a single fire get low and wouldn't look beyond them for even a moment…"
Ben's aunt had begun to shift uneasily in her chair when he mentioned having a baby, but the story had taken over; Ben was as eager as the Milligans visibly were to discover how it came out. "The day his mother took to her bed the boy got up before dawn and put some of the wood that he and his father had brought from the forest on the fires, and then he stood with his back to them and only looked round to see if they needed feeding. He watched his shadow turn with the sun, and when it looked almost as long as a tree is tall he heard a voice behind him. It sounded like the ice cracking in the heat from the fire, which was a sound you always heard in that place, but he knew it was a voice because it was calling his name. So he ran to get more wood and throw it on the fires, and he didn't look at anything but them until his father came home from hunting. But he didn't tell his father what he'd heard, because he was afraid of being beaten for letting the spirits get so close.
"That night he kept getting up to make sure none of the fires were going out because his mother and father were sleeping so soundly from waiting for the baby to come. And the next day he was up before dawn to tend the fires. He made them so hot he had to stand twenty paces away and couldn't look at them for more than a breath at a time. So he watched his shadow turning east and growing longer than yesterday's as the sun began to go down, and then he heard someone calling his name beyond the fires in a voice like a stream turning into ice. So he ran to the forest for wood and threw it on the fires until they were so hot he had to stand thirty paces away, where he couldn't hear the voice. But he could feel the eyes of ice watching him over the flames.