We got Mum into the house. By the time we reached the front door, she seemed to have come back to herself – not completely, but at least there was something in her eyes that I vaguely recognized. She was shivering with cold – so was Dad – and we took her into the living room where the fire had been kept smouldering pretty much constantly since Tomas and the children had left. Dad and I put Mum on the sofa and then Dad stoked the fire while I ran upstairs to find her some blankets. On the way back down I saw Dorothea standing near the covered hole at the bottom of the stairs.
“Could you make some hot chocolate?” I said. “My mum needs to get warm.”
The old woman eyed me with complete contempt.
“Please,” I said. “Or I can do it myself if you show me where everything is.”
She curled her lip and skittered away without saying anything. I went into the living room, almost too tired to be angry. Almost, but not quite. I figured I’d give Mum the blankets and then go and do exactly what I’d said I would – make the damn hot drinks myself. But as it turned out, I didn’t have to. Dorothea turned up a few minutes later with a tray. It crossed my mind that she found making the chocolate for us herself less trouble than having me poking around the kitchen. I’d still never been inside it. That was her domain, like the attic.
Dad gave up the idea of bringing any more wood in from the drying shed. “We won’t go out there again, Ingrid,” he said. “I should never have taken you out there in the first place.”
“We’ll just have to ration what we have,” he said to me, later that night, once Mum had gone to bed. His face was grey and faded. I realized that he had stubble on his face – he obviously hadn’t shaved for a couple of days, which wasn’t like him. “If we’re careful, we’ll be all right. We’ll close down most of the rooms, shutter up as many windows as we can against the wind. We can board up some of the external doors, too, if we need to. Just use the main ones. We’ll be all right.”
“Dad,” I said, “seriously, why can’t we leave? You said the police would evacuate us. Don’t you think we should take that offer and run with it? We can come back next year, can’t we? It wouldn’t be giving up.”
Dad clasped his hands together. “Look,” he said. “If it actually gets dangerous to be here, we’ll call the police. All right? But I really don’t want to do that until and unless it’s absolutely necessary. If the story gets around that we can’t handle the winter up here, getting reliable labour will be a nightmare. Give this a chance. Help me. Please?”
Well, what could I say to that? Except – “What about Mum?” I asked. “She’s really not well.”
Dad made a face. “She’ll be all right. She just needs quiet. Time to gather her thoughts. She was tired today, that’s all. She’ll be better tomorrow.”
I wasn’t convinced but I wasn’t the responsible adult, was I? What was I supposed to do? Flat refuse to lift a finger? There were only four of us in that house and apparently right then only two of us were capable of anything resembling sensible behaviour.
I went up to bed. I crawled under my duvet and sleep crowded in on me, making me feel heavy as soon as I hit the mattress. I think that might have been the fastest I’ve ever fallen asleep in my life.
I woke a little while later to a scratching sound. I lay still and listened. It sounded as though it was at the window. There was another storm blowing outside, so I put it down to that. But the scratching went on and on. Then I realized that it wasn’t just at the window. It was inside my room. It was coming from the floor. My heart immediately started banging in my chest, even though I told myself to stay calm. It’s probably just a mouse, I told myself, although I knew it’d have to be more than one to be making a sound that loud.
I reached out my hand to the lamp on my bedside table. Stretching it through the cold dark felt as if I was holding it out over an abyss. I flicked the switch and yellow light bloomed into the room, making me a little braver. I sat up and peered down over the side of my bed.
There was a tree sprouting through my floor. It had pushed its way between the boards and was growing bit by bit into my room. Then I saw that it wasn’t alone. More and more began to claw their way in, their branches scratch-scratch-scratching away at the wood as they burst through the floorboards. They grew faster and faster. Then I felt the bed move. They were underneath it, too. There was a creaking, springing sound. I whipped the duvet out of the way and there was a tree ripping its way up through the mattress. I scrambled back against the headboard, gasping and trying to scream to Mum and Dad for help but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make any sound. More and more trees were invading the room, splitting the walls and cracking the ceiling as they grew taller and taller, denser and denser. With them they brought the cold and the storm. I could see snow on their branches, feel it in the air, smell it, even. They brought shadows, too, that thick darkness that pooled around their trunks. It spread towards me. I was too terrified to move.
I felt a sharp pain in my side. I looked down to see spindly branches pushing through my belly, opening up my skin like bony fingers. I screamed again but I still couldn’t make a sound. I tried to rip myself away but the tree just kept growing, right through me, up and up towards the ceiling, tearing me to shreds as it went. Across what was left of the room I saw something move. A fluid shape shifted out of the shadows. It was a wolf but for some reason it also seemed to be a child, a girl. I tried to work this out as all the time the tree continued to tear me apart. I could see my blood spilling down in a thick river over the duvet on to the floor. I was trying to scream, the pain so huge that bright lights were sparking in my head like grenades going off.
The wolf padded silently across the room towards me and I knew it could smell my blood. Then the creature stopped and it wasn’t a wolf any more. It was a girl in a white nightdress.
“Please don’t,” I tried to beg her. “Please, please don’t…”
She opened her mouth in a smile but instead of teeth I saw fangs. Her eyes were yellow.
Then I woke up again, screaming louder than I ever had in my life.