“You seen my grandpa?” I said.
“Eh?”
His face glowed with the cold. His eyes were shining with delight.
“Eh? Eh? My grandpa. You seen my grandpa?”
A snowball thumped into the back of his head. He screamed and giggled.
“Let me go, Kit! They’re coming for me!”
“You seen him?”
“Who? No. Not seen nobody. Get off me! Let me go!”
I shoved him away. He sprinted off with snowballs cascading all around him. The gang raced past me in pursuit.
“Come on, Kit!” one of them yelled. “Let’s get him!”
The snow intensified. I started to run, back and forward across the wilderness, all alone. I ran through knots of children playing. I bumped into snowmen, skidded on slides. I kept calling, “Grandpa! Grandpa!” I grabbed others as I ran. “You seen my grandpa?” I kept asking, but they were lost in themselves and their games. “Eh?” they said. “Eh? Eh?” I shoved them all away, ran again. I zigzagged, spiraled, yelled and yelled, and came to a halt, gasped for breath, stared uselessly across the wilderness and saw him at last. He was all alone, with his head bowed forward, snow gathering on his hair and cardigan.
“Grandpa!”
He just stood there as I went toward him, as I dusted the snow off him, as I took my coat off and laid it across him. I took his arm, tried to lead him away. He wouldn’t move.
“Come on, Grandpa,” I whispered.
There was nothing in his eyes as he looked at me.
“Come on,” I whispered.
He snarled. “Gerroff,” he said. His voice was harsh, thick, nothing like Grandpa.
I tugged him gently.
“Gerroff, I said.”
“Grandpa. It’s me. It’s Kit.”
He yelled, like an animal, or a baby.
“Aaaaaah! Aaaaaaah!” He yanked his arm away, tried to run, tumbled into the snow.
I knelt beside him.
“Get him off me! Help! Help!”
A few children gathered around us. They watched. I heard giggling.
“Tell my mum,” I said. “Go on. Run and tell her I’ve found him.”
Grandpa cowered. “Get him off me!”
“Go on!” I yelled, and at last someone sprinted away.
I held my arms around his shoulders. He squirmed, told me to get off. He started to cry like a child.
“Tell him to leave me alone!”
“Grandpa,” I whispered. “It’s Kit. You’ll be all right. We’ll be home soon/”
I wiped the tears from his cheeks with my fingers.
“Jeez, Kit.”
It was Allie, kneeling beside me. She glared at the watching children.
“Get lost!” she told them. “Go on! Go to Hell!”
Together, we tugged him to his feet. He was trembling with cold, whimpering with fright.
Allie stroked his brow. “It’s me,” she said. “Allie. Fairy Queen. The good bad girl.”
At last we saw Mum running through the snow. She held him with me and Allie.
Grandpa stared at our faces.
“It’s us,” Mum whispered.
“Gerroff!” he yelled. “Get them off me!”
Then the doctor came, carrying his bag through the snow. He gave Grandpa an injection that calmed him down. Grandpa let us lead him through the snow toward home. A snowball thumped onto his back and there were screams of delight as a gang of kids ran away. At home, Allie and I sat downstairs and heard them moving about above us. Melting snow seeped through my clothes. Bitter cold. Allie hunched forward with her chin resting on her fists and stared at the blank wall. Nothing to say. I thought of Lak moving across his wilderness and I feared for him and for the baby. I tried to stop thinking of this and to think of Grandpa instead, but I couldn’t stop the story from telling itself inside my head.
“Look at this,” said Allie at last.
She had a penny in her palm. She passed her other hand across it and the penny disappeared. She passed her hand across again and the penny appeared again.
“Magic,” she said.
“Do it again,” I said.
She did it again.
“I have to do it in the play,” she said. “The Snow Queen teaches me magic. She shows me how to get rid of little things at first, like this penny. Then she shows me how I can use the magic to get rid of the things that get on my nerves. I get rid of things I don’t like, little irritations like cabbage and math books. Then I start on living things: a dog that barks too much, a bird that wakes me up in the morning. Then I get more evil and I turn on my brother, who keeps telling me to stop being bad and to be good. I just magic him away. It’s only when I start to miss him and to see how cruel I’ve been that I learn how to make the lost things appear again.”
Allie held the penny in her palm. It disappeared and appeared beneath her hand.
“It’s really good,” I said.
Soon Dad came in out of the snow and gave us a grim smile and went upstairs. Then an ambulance with its spinning blue lights pulled up in the lane. They brought Grandpa downstairs with a blanket across his shoulders. His face was gray and his eyes were blank and his feet shuffled. As they took him out, Allie went to him and kissed his cheek.
“Hurry home,” she said.
Dad went off with him in the ambulance. Mum came back in and sat beside us.
“He’ll be all right,” I whispered.
“Yes, son.”
“Show Mum your trick,” I said to Allie.
Allie put the penny on her palm.
“Now it’s gone,” she said. “Now it’s back again.”
“It’s from Allie’s play at school,” I said. “She learns how to make things disappear, then she learns how to find the lost things again.”
“Do it again,” said Mum.
The penny was lost and then found again.
Mum lay back in her chair. She clenched her fists. Tears streamed from her closed eyes.
“Do it again,” she said. “Do it again. Find it again.”
Lak worked quickly. The sun rose slowly into the eastern sky. A gift like this in these bitter days could not be left behind. There was skin enough here to clothe all his brothers and his sisters. He used his grandfather’s axe to skin the bear. He first stripped the skin off the beast’s arm and wrapped it fur side in around his baby sister. He made a long incision down the front of the bear’s chest, others around its throat and across its shoulders. He edged the skin away, exposed the flesh beneath. He sweated, he was smeared in blood. He made incisions down its legs and its other arm and continued cutting and peeling. As he worked, a dog came to his side. It looked shyly at Lak, then lapped at the blood that oozed from the bear.
“Take what you need,” whispered Lak. “There is enough in this great beast for all of us.”
He worked all morning, until the sun had reached its meager limit. The baby cried, and Lak dipped his finger into a wound, then gently pressed the finger into her mouth, and the blood dissolved and brought her some nourishment.
“Soon you will be with our mother again,” he told her. “There will be milk for you again.”
He hurried. He cut away the final stretches of skin. He heaved the naked bloody bear aside. Only its head and paws bore fur now. Lak bowed his head and paid homage to the spirit of the bear. He gave thanks to the gods for the cunning and strength that had caused him to defeat such an adversary. He prayed to his dead grandfather and gave thanks for the gift of the axe that had been handed down through the generations. He looked toward the sun and said the prayer that all of his people prayed now, that the God of the Sun would look kindly upon the people of the ice, that he would come closer to them, that he would fill the air with warmth, would melt the ice and make the valleys green as they had been in ancient days. Then Lak cut away a piece of the bear’s forearm and chewed it. He cut away another piece, and another. Bear was sour meat, but it would give him the strength needed for the return to his family. He gave more
fingers of blood to the baby. Then he folded the great skin, hung it across his shoulders, lifted his sister into his arms and headed back toward his family. The dog followed, close behind. Already the sun was sinking, the day was ending.
Lak retraced his path: through the rock passage, across the crags. He moved slowly down toward the great valley of ice. All around, the air continued darkening. The sky began to sparkle with the first stars. Ice began to form on his hair. He held the baby close, he whispered comforts to her.
“Ayeeee! Ayeeee!” he called, wanting to call out the family from the cave.
“Ayeee! Ayeee!” he called out in his exhaustion and triumph.
“Ayeee!” he cried. “Come out! See Lak again! See our sister Dal brought home safe again!”
No one appeared.
Lak gripped his axe. He crept into the shallow cave. No one. Footprints and the outlines of bodies in the dust. The ashes of a fire. Then he saw against the wall some sticks and a flint. He knelt down and sparked a little fire to life. By its light he saw a little pile of berries and a tiny bird’s egg. He squeezed the berries, trickled their juice into Dal’s mouth. He sucked the egg from the shell as he had seen his mother do. He mixed it between his teeth. Then he dribbled the mixture from his own mouth to the baby’s. He wrapped her close in the bearskin and held her to him. He covered both of them with the rest of the skin. He lay close by the fire. Outside, the darkness deepened, the stars intensified. Tears ran from his eyes. He looked up and saw the charcoal drawing on the cave’s wall: a family of stick figures heading south toward the sun. Lak held his sister tight. He felt the dog snuggling against the bearskin. He tried to pray for strength but he was overwhelmed by sleep. He knew that they had been given up as dead.
Allie picked up a pebble, brushed the snow off it, put her evil face on and did her trick. She laughed.
“Just as well you’re not playing my brother, Mr. Watson, or I’d have to practice getting rid of you.”
We walked on, as far as the river; then we turned right and headed in the direction of Bill Quay.
“Burning Bush says it was the start of magic,” she said. “A simple trick: you make something disappear, then you make it appear again. Even the cavemen did it. The first magicians. They used pebbles and stones like this. They made the people sitting round the fire think that they could send things out of the world and bring them back again.”
I nodded. She put up with my silence. She knew I was preoccupied by Grandpa, but my head was also filled now with storytellers and magicians in dark caves.
“People were scared stiff of them,” said Allie. “But they honored them as well. They believed that their magic was a way to conquer death. ‘Bring the spirit of my mother back,’ they’d say. ‘Bring my husband back. Bring my child back.’ They gave gifts to the magicians. They even gave them special caves. And the magicians developed bigger tricks, better tricks, and they made the people believe in them and fear them even more.”
The water slopped below us. The ice had reached further from the fringes. Back in Stoneygate, the lights of Christmas trees burned in the windows. A haze hung over the wilderness, icy and sparkling, with children rushing through it. I squinted and saw just ordinary children, children from now.
We passed the place where Askew’s den had been. There was just a heap of icy earth that the bulldozer had shoved across it.
“Someday in the far future they’ll open up the den,” I said. “They’ll make up stories about what happened in there, just like we make up stories about what happened in the past.”
We walked on.
“Any news?” said Allie.
“Nothing. A couple of days back they said he’d be home for Christmas. Then another day they said he’ll never get home again. Who knows?”
She squeezed my arm. “Jeez,” she whispered. “All that life in him. All that brilliance, Kit.”
“It’s like the world in winter,” I said. “Like somebody’s made everything disappear, and it’ll never come back. Like there’ll never be enough heat or light again, like nothing’ll ever grow again. But it does, like magic.”
She shuddered.
“Brr. Hope it does, Kit. This icy winter’s fun, but won’t be long till I’ve had enough of it.”
She put up her hands like claws. She hissed and put her evil face and her evil voice on.
“This is the season of the ice girl. This is the season of evil. This is the season when ice is in the eye and snow is in the heart and frost is in the soul. Protect your soul, for here comes the ice girl.”
“The season of evil,” I echoed. “Protect your soul.”
“You believe in it?” she asked. “That there’s evil in the world? That it can pursue you and trap you? That we need to be protected?”
“Yes, we need to be protected. There’s light and joy, but there’s also darkness all around and we can be lost in it.”
“You’re making me shiver. Jeez, Kit.” Then she flinched. “What’s that?” she hissed.
“What?”
“What’s that in the haze beside the river?”
“Where?” I whispered.
“There, Kit. There!”
And we saw them, the skinny children, and we saw the single child from today among them, making his way through the haze toward us.
“Him,” I said.
“Jeez,” she whispered. “Here comes true evil. Bobby Carr.”
He came out from the haze. He stopped before us.
“Askew’s gone, you know,” he said. His eyes were wide, excited.
Allie turned her face away.
“Some say he’s taken his life,” said Bobby. “That’s what the game was all heading for. In the end he’d take his own life, and it wouldn’t be a game.”
“Rubbish,” whispered Allie.
“They say he’ll be found in the river. They say that Jax has ripped him limb from limb.”
He moved closer, spoke quieter.
“They say his dad’s done it, that he’s done what he’s threatened to do, and killed his own son.”
“You moron,” said Allie.
“Kit doesn’t think so,” said Bobby. “Do you, Kit?”
“You’re a disease,” said Allie.
“He wouldn’t,” I said. “And his dad wouldn’t. And if I were you I’d stop spreading stupid tales.”
Bobby grinned. “Tales!” he said. “But I bet you can’t walk by the river now without looking to see if Askew’s body’s floating there. And I bet you know that Askew’s dad could do anything if he was drunk enough.”
He sneered at Allie.
“You,” he said. “You don’t know nothing. You’re just an airhead. That’s what Askew said.”
She raised her claws and stepped toward him and he sprinted away.
“Disease,” she hissed. She shook her head. “If Askew’s got any sense he’ll just have got himself away from this stupid place.”
We walked on in silence, kept turning our eyes to the water, hoping to see nothing there. Behind us, skinny children whispered in fright.
I began to dream. I began to blend with Lak. I crouched in the cave, by the fire. The bearskin on my back was heavy. I felt the bear’s dried, decaying blood against my skin. My throat and nostrils were filled with the reek and sting of smoke. The walls were covered with great beasts, tiny humans moving in fear around them and flickering in the firelight. The magician wore a string of teeth around his throat. Blue tattooed gashes streaked his face. A bear was painted in red upon his chest. He carried a skull in one hand, a thigh bone in the other. He glistened with sweat. Somewhere someone thumped a drum, and he raised each foot in turn and stamped it on the earth. He grunted, whimpered, groaned. The people around the fire trembled in fear of him but held out their hands to him. Lak’s mother was at my side. She held a clutch of shining colored stones in her filthy palm.
“Bring my son back,” she asked. “Bring my baby back.”
The magician rocked and his eyes swiveled. He c
rouched and swept his bare hands slowly through the flames. A dish of berries appeared in his hand. We picked the berries as he handed them to us and we ate them, hard bitter juiceless things that caught in our throats as we swallowed them. The magician danced again.
“Bring my son back,” said Lak’s mother. “Bring my baby back.”
My head rocked and my senses reeled. The magician threw dust into the fire and it flickered, flared; pink smoke filled the cavern. We stood up and danced with the magician around the fire. I held the ammonite out to him.
“Bring my grandpa back,” I said.
Lak’s mother tugged my arm. I met her eye.
“Bring my son back,” she said. “You. Bring my baby back.” She pressed the shining stones into my hand. “Bring them back to me,” she said.
I tugged away from her, and then I knew no more until I opened my eyes to the white light of my room, snow falling yet again, Mum calling, “Kit! Come on! Allie will be here soon!”
I held the ammonite in my fist. Beneath it on my skin were the impressions left by Lak’s mother’s tiny colored stones.
Midwinter. The dark days of December. Short bright days, long dark nights. The Christmas lights intensified. Pyramids of lights on Christmas trees. Strings of colored lights that flashed, flickered, danced, chased each other around the edges of the windows. They hung in naked garden trees beneath the stars that shone and trembled in the endless sky. Snow stopped falling but the bitter cold remained. The snow on the wilderness turned hard as stone. Our footprints and our snowballs lay out there like white fossils. Snowmen stood like ancient statues. On the river, the ice continued to inch out from the edges. Carols drifted through the air from radios and hi-fis. We practiced them at school: “Good King Wenceslas,” “Silent Night,” “The Holly and the Ivy.” In the evenings, children moved through Stoneygate in little groups, and sang in our gardens.
“In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter,