The snow wasn’t just a flurry. It carried on all evening and through the night. When I woke up in the morning, there was a thick white layer over everything. I opened my eyes so early that it was pretty much still the middle of the night. I could tell, without even looking out of the window, that the snow was there. The house felt pensive, as if it were waiting for something. It felt, for a minute or two, like I was the only person in that house, as if there were nothing else here except silence and space. Even when I flicked on my beside lamp, the light seemed thin and barely there.
I looked at my phone. It was only just 5 a.m. I don’t think anyone else was awake, but I already knew there was no way I was going to get back to sleep, so I got up. I didn’t put the main light on. Instead, I picked my way across the floor, avoiding the crate that I still hadn’t unpacked or even bothered to move, and made for the window. Pulling back the curtain, I could see five centimetres of snow on the window ledge. For a while, I didn’t look further than that layer of white on the other side of the glass.
It’s going to sound crazy but it took me some time to pluck up the guts to look at the forest. Stupid, right? But there was something about that silence that had filled my head, made me afraid – of what, I wasn’t even sure. I just kept thinking about what it had been like to be out there among the trees and right then the fact that I was safe indoors didn’t make me feel any better at all.
When I did look up, the trees were a black mass, so thick that at first I couldn’t see anything but the darkness. After a few seconds my eyes began to adjust and it became easier. I could see no stars and then stars, which showed where their tops finished. I could also see that it was no longer snowing. Then, as I stood there peering out, I began to see the white.
It outlined the trees as though they’d been drawn in chalk on a dark surface. The snow made their tops seem even more jagged than I’d noticed the day before. It was almost like a kid’s drawing of a Christmas tree – triangles upon triangles, sharp, simple lines at an angle to the ground.
Every tree was completely still. They stood there like a line of soldiers at attention, shoulder to shoulder, so close together that there was no space between them at all. Their heads were still and straight with their chins up. They were staring at the house. I don’t know why I thought that. They could have just as easily been facing away from it. I could have been looking at their backs. But I wasn’t. They were facing me, looking at me, one tiny figure standing in front of all those trees and the house I was in might as well not have been there at all.
People go missing in this forest all the time…
I thought about that tangle of ancient woodland I’d found myself in the day before. I thought about that horrible scar in the middle of it, the way the trees around its edge seemed to be in mourning. I thought about that dying tree, how the others around it seemed to be holding it up, protecting it. Scratching at the back of my mind, I heard those whispers again, the ones that had chased me back here as if they were made by something alive and angry. I heard that other sound again, too, piercing and haunting and hunting. Hunting what, though?
Hunting what?
I looked and I looked and I looked. As I did I felt that I was fading away into that darkness between the firs.
Then the children woke up.
Now let’s all take a moment here to hail the all-conquering power of Iron Man. Unlike me, they obviously hadn’t had any trouble at all putting Dorothea’s nastiness of the previous evening out of their tiny minds. I knew this because their vocal hysteria at the sight of proper snow was probably audible from space. It woke the house – I don’t only mean Mum and Dad and Tomas and Dorothea, although they probably didn’t get any sleep after the first munchkin shrieked, either.
I blinked. I moved. Suddenly the gluey feeling in my ears was gone. I had the sensation that the house had moved, too, like a dog waking up and shaking itself. I looked down at my phone again. It was after 7 a.m. I’d been standing at that window staring out at the forest for two hours.
Downstairs, with the sun a little higher in the sky, the snow didn’t look as bad as it had in the dark. Probably just as well, because I think Tomas would have had a heart attack if it had. He stood with my parents on the steps outside the double doors. I went out to see what they were talking about. As I crunched into the snow with my boots it hardly even reached over the treads.
“The coach will be here tomorrow,” Tomas said. “As long as we don’t get any more snow today and as long as the temperature doesn’t drop too drastically tonight, we should be fine to get away.”
“That’s good,” said my mum, sounding anything but happy about it. “I saw the local forecast this morning and it didn’t say there would be any more.”
“They didn’t predict this, either,” Tomas said, with the same ominous tone he’d adopted yesterday.
“Look, there’s no need to worry,” said my dad, in his brisk ‘I can solve everything’ voice. “If there is more snowfall, we can tell the coach to wait at the main road. They’re sure to have cleared that, at least. Even if it snows another ten centimetres our 4x4 will make it that far. We can fit six of the kids in at a time.” He clapped the tree-hugger on the back and grinned. “We’ll make sure you escape this evil we heathen southerners have brought, Tomas, don’t worry.”
Tomas didn’t smile, but then Dad’s joke wasn’t that funny.
I wondered how much petrol Dad had and whether he’d thought about that before making his offer. I was willing to bet that it hadn’t occurred to him that, even if the kids got away, we’d better have a damn fine plan for getting out ourselves unless we were ready to be stuck here permanently. But I reckon he was convinced that the snow was going to disappear in a day or two and that by the end of the week he’d be sitting cosily in our ridiculously big and empty house, gloating at how pathetically stupid Tomas had been to get so worked up.
I didn’t contribute to the conversation. They hadn’t listened to me when I’d said coming here was an insane idea, so they clearly weren’t going to listen if I told them I thought we should leave while we still could. Anyway, what did I know? Maybe Dad was right and Tomas was the idiot in this situation. Stranger things have happened.
No, I didn’t really think so, either.
The firs were moving again. Thick globs of snow teetered on the ends of their branches and then slid slowly off as the wind moved them. They hit the ground with a soft whumping noise, one after the other. Whhhump-whhhump-whhhump.
I stuck my hands in my pockets and went back inside in search of breakfast.