Gill ran forward and knelt next to them, holding John tightly as the emotions bottled up by the stress of the previous few months came flowing out. For a moment, things were just as they had been. All John could feel was the bottomless well of love he had felt on his wedding day, and he could tell Gill felt it too. It washed out around them and swept them together, making them forget how they had drifted apart. It's not dead, John thought with a rush of relief, and then he looked back at Christopher and everything was driven from his mind.

It took half an hour before the chubby pinkness returned to Christopher's limbs. Soon he was chuckling and kicking on the mat in front of the fire as if nothing had happened. John and Gill felt emotionally drained and they flopped back on the mat with their son silently while they tried to make sense of what had happened. Nothing could account for the blue frost or the depth of cold his skin radiated. They couldn't bring themselves to discuss exactly what was the root cause, but in the privacy of their thoughts, they both turned to dark, unscientific things.

That afternoon John cleared all the junk out of the other bedroom and moved Christopher's cot in. He was convinced the nursery was the basis of the problem - "cold air currents circulating or something like that" - and he knew the spare room was always like an oven when the central heating was on.

It took them both a long time to get to sleep that night; they had returned to their old routine of repeated checks on Christopher's well-being, even though he seemed warm and relaxed in his new home. The worries persisted, even in their sleep.

Gill woke suddenly in the early hours. The clock radio glowed 3.15am, but she felt clear-headed and alert as if someone had slapped her across the face. The Green was dreamily silent, the only noise the soft thrum of occasional traffic along the dual carriageway half a mile away. John was fast asleep, his face frozen in an expression of worry and irritation. She remembered when he used to look like an angel when he was dreaming.

Something had woken her. There was a vague sense of irritation, like a bad taste in her mind, that had dragged her from her sleep and shocked her awake. A dream; nothing more. She eased out of bed and walked over to the window. The night was clear and bright with stars and a near-full moon, and there was a carpet of glittering frost across the road and lawns. She shivered.

On the way to the toilet, she paused outside Christopher's room. There, on the floor by the door, was the old dummy they had found when they first moved into the house, the one that had been hanging over Christopher's cot earlier that day. Why had John left it there? she thought with a brief burst of annoyance. As she bent to pick it up, she decided to look in on Christopher. His breathing had been coming through loud and clear on the baby monitor in the bedroom, but still, she thought. But still...

She pushed open the door.

Her eyes fell first on the cot and then on the figure next to it. Limned against the moonlit window, it resembled a giant spider, black and angular and hunched, boney hands resting on the edge of the cot, the rest of its upper body bent over into the pooling shadows around Christopher's sleeping form. Gill could not see her son or what was being done to him.

She caught her breath, frozen in fear and horror, and the tiny sound scythed through the silence of the room.

The figure stirred suddenly, then looked up. There was a slight stop-go motion to its movements like bad animation which detached it from reality as the head rose from the cot and turned to look at her. It was a man, an old man, but his great age seemed to have been magnified through some dark gla.s.s until it was far, far beyond the normal span of a human life. His face was a ma.s.s of wrinkles, not one square centimeter untouched, and the skin flapped loose under his jaw and pulled in hollowly around his cheeks so that the shape of the skull was visible beneath. His eyes ranged huge and white in the sagging folds around his sockets, and when he smiled, briefly and maliciously, he showed a row of chipped, brown teeth.

Before Gill could cry out, he moved, bounding with surprising, animal-like agility towards her. Then she did scream, loud and piercing, as she turned her head to the door to cover her face. A breeze from his pa.s.sing whipped at her hair, and she heard him vault over the banister and land on the hall floor far below. A split-second later Gill rushed to the banister to look after him, but the hall was empty. All the doors off it were tightly shut. She had heard none of them open.

Gill ran back to Christopher and pulled him out, clutching him tightly to her shoulder. She saw the familiar frosty bloom to his skin. He was rigid, as before, but he was still breathing.

It took several minutes for her to wake John and get his sluggish mind to comprehend what had happened. His first thoughts were for Christopher, but when he saw there was nothing he could do he went downstairs to search the house.

A nightmare, was his first thought. All this trouble with Christopher, it's starting to get to her. And then he thought sourly, Or maybe she's just going nuts.

Finding no sign of any break-in, he returned to the bedroom. Gill was back in bed with Christopher under the duvet next to her. She looked as pale as snow.

"Anything?" she asked edgily. He shook his head. "G.o.d, John, you should have seen him. There was something about him that wasn't right..." She shook her head, unable to find the words that could describe what she had seen.

"An old man?" John asked incredulously. "Who jumped the bannister and landed in the hall? I'd like to find out what pills he's on."

"That's what I mean." She bit her lip. "It was like I was dreaming, only I wasn't dreaming, John. I saw him, and I saw the look in his eye. I felt something from him that made my stomach turn." She knew what she wanted to say, what she sensed on a very basic level, but she couldn't bring herself to give voice to it. "He didn't look real, John."

"What do you mean?"

She paused, wrestling with a thought that was too big for her. Then she said, "I'm frightened."

"Come on. Come on!" John hammered the steering wheel impatiently. The traffic was b.u.mper-to-b.u.mper along the main road into town, creeping along at such a snail's pace that he would be late for work by at least fifteen minutes, if not longer. In his mind's eye, John saw the look on Gordon King's face when he walked through the door; tardiness was King's major bugbear, and it would just give him another opportunity to make John's time between nine and five more difficult.

Carefully, he edged his way out into the stream, ignoring the blare of a horn from a red-faced man in a BMW. Out of the corner of his eye, John could see him mouthing some expletive. John smiled to himself, taking some small pleasure from the irritation he was causing. These days it seemed to be the most enjoyment he could get.

He glanced down at the pa.s.senger seat. The dummy was there, on the old bit of ribbon, looking worn and out-of-date. He didn't know why they had kept it. Gill was the one who had believed it was a good omen, but now she seemed to have changed her opinion. Since her experience with the intruder in Christopher's room, she had changed all round; more nervous, inclined to jump at the slightest sound, Introspective, even depressed. John had tried to comfort her, but he had got little response.

That morning she had handed him the dummy and said simply, "Get rid of it."

"Why?"

"Just dump it. I don't want it around any more."

And that was that. Gill had decided. He would throw it in the bin outside the office and G.o.d forbid her if she changed her mind and phoned up later asking for it back.

The traffic came to a halt. There was some kind of disturbance ahead; he could see people craning their necks out of windows and he could hear raised voices. A shunt. That was all he needed. He increased the tempo of his beat on the steering wheel and tried to think of a song to hum to himself, but nothing would come to mind apart from the words: I'm going to be late.

Why did Gill keep the stupid dummy in the first place? It was so unlike her. A good luck charm! Sure, they'd had lots of good luck, hadn't they? The thing that was happening to Christopher. They'd had him checked out by specialist after specialist and all of them had found nothing. Some of them had been so surprised by the symptoms, they virtually implied that John and Gill were making it all up, addicted to wasting doctors' time like those hypochondriacs who became hooked on operations.

There was a man walking up the other side of the road from the direction of the hold-up, clutching at his face as if he was crying or in pain. His path was erratic. The raised voices seemed to have grown louder, barking angrily, yelping like caged animals.

They had had their problems before they moved into the house, he and Gill, but they had grown infinitely worse since. Now they could hardly bring themselves to touch each other. It wasn't even just the two of them. It was the atmosphere in the house too. The erratic heating, the sudden snaps of coldness, had become more than irritating. Gill's encounter with the old man - or 'the thing' as she called him - had had a dramatic effect as well, and John had to admit that it was starting to influence him as well; he never quite felt alone in the house any more.

He looked down at the dummy.

It was starting to bother him for some reason, or perhaps it was just his paranoid thoughts. As he stared out of the window, he could sense it on the seat next to him.

Stupid. Stupid. He looked down at it. Just a dummy.

Was that a whisper? A paper-thin rustle of sound?

He could hear sirens. Someone was screaming, the sound rising and falling, rising and falling, in sync with the siren. On the street corner opposite, a woman was rigid like a statue, staring in the direction of the hold-up, her mouth frozen in a giant O. That was it. He would be there forever.

There was something else. A feeling, like the one he had in the house. His skin p.r.i.c.kled and a flush crept slowly up his back. Someone was watching him. He could sense the eyes, the concentration; he could almost feel the emotions behind it. He shuddered.

He couldn't stay there all day. He had to find a short cut or his neck would be on the chopping block. He glanced up the street opposite and remembered a route; long, through, winding streets, but it would get him to town quicker than if he sat where he was. Ahead of him, he could see they had started to wave the oncoming traffic through. An enormous lorry was beginning to build up speed. He would have to move quickly or he would never get across the road. He could just about do it. He yanked at the steering wheel, revved up and popped the clutch.

His car shot out of the queue of traffic, halfway across the road, and then stopped dead. It didn't stall or judder to a halt. The power simply disappeared in the blink of an eye.

In that split second, as his mind raced, John caught sight of something in the rear view mirror. Eyes framed in the gla.s.s, staring and wide, surrounded by sacks of wrinkled skin. He smelled something like stale tobacco smoke and heard that rustling whisper once again.

Then the shadow of the lorry fell across the bonnet.

"Are you going to be okay?" Donna gave Gill a comforting hug.

Gill dried her eyes and forced a smile. "I'll be fine. I just need some time to get on top of this. It was such a shock..."

"It's bound to be a shock. Lord, if the police had told me Mike had been in an accident like that I would have gone to pieces. You've just got to focus on what the doctor said, Gill. He's going to be okay."

"He might not be able to walk..."

"He might not be able to walk, but he might be able to. n.o.body knows yet. There's no point in worrying about what might not happen. And you know John. If there's a slim chance of fighting his way through, he'll do it."

Gill nodded. Donna always had been a comfort, ever since school when she became adept at soothing hearts broken during those pa.s.sionate teenage romances. She couldn't get her own life together however much she tried, but she was a carer for others.

"Are you going to be okay looking after Christopher until John's home? I could always stay over to help."

"Thanks, Donna, I'll be fine. Mum and dad are coming tomorrow for a while. I just hope he doesn't have any more relapses with, you know, what's been wrong with him." An image of a wizened face and a hunched, spindly body flashed across her mind. She pa.s.sed a hand over her eyes and blacked it out. "Things have been so bad since we moved in here. Sometimes I think there's a jinx on us. All these problems with our relationship, and then Christopher, and now this. I feel there's something sucking the life right out of us."

"You musn't say those kinds of things, honey. It'll only make it worse. You've got to concentrate on the good."

Donna didn't understand - how could she? - but Gill put on a brave face. "I'm going to give Christopher his afternoon nap now. Do you want to come up with me? Then we can have a cup of tea in peace." She poked a finger into Christopher's tummy and made him chuckle.

They harmonised on Rock-a-Bye Baby as they climbed the stairs and then Donna took the teddy bear while Gill opened the door to Christopher's new room. She paused in the doorway and then looked back at Donna with a puzzled expression. "Where's his cot?"

She found it in the nursery in its old place under the light. "John must have moved it back here this morning. I wish he'd talked it over with me. He's always doing things without consulting me."

Donna saw the concerned look on Gill's face and attributed it to thoughts of her husband in hospital, drugged up on painkillers, unable to raise even a smile.

"And I told him to take that thing with him and dump it. Why doesn't he listen to me?"

Over the cot, hanging from the light, was the old dummy.

Gill laid Christopher down and tucked the blankets around him. "Oh well, no point in thinking about that now. Let's get that tea."

Gill selected a get well card for John from the newsagents on the edge of the estate. It seemed like such an insubstantial, pathetic thing, but she wanted to feel like she was doing something and at least it would show she had been thinking of him when she visited that evening.

Christopher squirmed in his cuddlepack as Gill went up to the till to pay for the card, but he calmed down when the newsagent, a ruddy-cheeked woman with tight brown curls, began to coo over him.

"Are you settling in all right, love?" she asked between the baby talk.

Gill said they were. She couldn't bring herself to tell her about John's accident, the gruesome details that would have to be recounted, the gossip and constant checks on his health that would ensue.

"Because you've been there a few months now, haven't you. Makes a nice change."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, people don't seem to stay there long. A few months. A year at the most. When I was younger, kids used to move into a house and stay there all their life. Now they're always on the go, always trying to get bigger and better places. Their lives suffer, but they can't see it at the time. That's why we don't have communities these days, you see. No one stays around long enough to know their neighbour's first name."

Gill agreed with her, but there was something in what she said that sent tremors running through her mind. "Did an old man ever live in our house?" The words sounded innocent, but to Gill the question hung in the air like a threat.

The newsagent wrinkled her nose and thought. "There've been so many and I haven't really known them all. I think there was, just after it was built, but I can't think of his name for the life of me."

"What happened to him? Did he die?"

"I don't know, love. He..."

"Yes, he died." The voice was cold and hard. Gill turned round and faced a woman who had been flicking through the magazines when she came in. She had bitter, dark eyes and a face that had grown comfortable in a sour expression. "What do you want to know about him for?"

"I just wondered..."

"n.o.body mentions his name any more, the ones who remember him." She looked at the newsagent. "You know who he was. I came in to tell you when the police came for him."

The newsagent turned slowly red. "Oh," she said quietly.

The woman turned back to Gill. "He was a pervert. An old, sick b.a.s.t.a.r.d." She caught at her breath and composed herself. "He used to get the children to go to his house for toffees and cakes and to watch his TV. Then one of them went missing, a boy, a little boy. Never did any harm to anyone. And two more, twins, a boy and a girl, the cutest little pair, just six years old." Tears came up into her eyes and she blinked them away. "We knew it was him. The police got him before we could. They took him off in a van and we never saw him again. The b.a.s.t.a.r.d died before he got to court." She heaved in a lungful of calming air. "It was nearly 25 years ago now. They never found them, the kids. They never found my Tommy..." Her voice trailed away along with the bitterness and she suddenly looked as if she had been beaten about the face.

"I'm sorry," Gill said weakly. She hugged her arms around Christopher and hurried out into the cold, fading light.

Gill had to know more, although her rational mind was screaming at her to leave it alone. For hours she scoured the estate, talking to anyone old enough to remember that dreadful time. No one could recall the man's name, or if they did, they wouldn't speak it aloud; but no one had forgotten what he did. He had moved into the house when it was first built, a sour, irascible man who never spoke to his neighbours. He smelled of cigarettes and sweat; they all remembered that. No one found out where he had come from, what his job had been, if he had had a wife, or what he did in the curtained house all day. He was a blank slate, and eventually he slipped into the background so people barely noticed him on the occasions when he trawled along the streets. Even when the first child disappeared, no one thought of him. When the twins went, neighbours suddenly made a connection. "You're just blaming him because he doesn't fit in. There's no evidence at all," the police said, until they were chided into investigating and discovered a lock of one of the twins' hair. The old man never admitted it, gave no clue as to what had happened. They found him dead of a heart attack in the cells one morning. The police had already torn up the garden and checked the floors of the house for disturbance; there was no sign of the missing children, nothing to put their parents' memories to rest. "But who was he?" Gill pleaded. "What motivated him?" No one could give her an answer.

As twilight drew in, Gill became lost to her brooding. She tried to convince herself the old man was merely a terrible part of her home's history, lost to time and best forgotten. The frightened child at her core refused to accept it. She wondered about the nature of evil and its longevity until her head was swimming.

The visit with John had been harrowing, but ultimately hopeful. The doctors were a little brighter about their prognosis; after an intensive and grueling period of physiotherapy they expected him to walk again. But it almost killed her, watching him lie in that hospital bed, in constant pain, disorientated through the drugs. It awakened feelings that had been buried so deeply Gill thought they would never see the light of day again. She loved him and she would die if she lost him. Before she left, she had wheeled the portable payphone into his room and insisted the nurses leave it there in case he wanted to talk to her at any time of the night or day.

The house was silent apart from Christopher's regular breathing on the baby monitor. Donna had babysat during visiting hours and Christopher had been as good as gold. Through the open curtains, Gill could see huge flakes of snow drifting down through the blackness to lay a white film over The Green. Inside it was warm and cosey - she had turned the central heating up a notch - but she couldn't relax without John there. The TV was an irritation. She couldn't bear to put on any music. She guessed she wouldn't be able to sleep that night.

It was quiet, so deathly, unnervingly quiet.

She closed her eyes to listen to the sound of nothing.

The morphine was a snow-white highway that led John away from the real world. Occasionally he would surface from the coc.o.o.ning warmth, but the harsh light from the corridor outside his room and the thousand razor cuts of shattered bone and torn muscle forced him back under. In the white world of his dreams he saw faces and thought thoughts and everything made perfect sense. He knew why and he knew who.

Sometimes when he found himself back in his broken body it was still difficult to tell if he was hallucinating or not. The quality of light didn't seem quite right; sounds were distorted. And once he thought there was someone standing in the room on the periphery of his vision. It could have been a black smear on the wall, or a shadow, but he thought he saw it move. An enormous spider, dark and angular.

The pain churned in his gut, and as he slipped back into semi-consciousness, he had the sudden, alarming feeling that there was something he had to do. Someone he had to warn.

And then he thought of his son, Christopher, and his blood ran cold.

Gill pulled herself sluggishly into waking from dreams of snow. She was shivering. The curtains were still open and the world outside was white, crisp and unmarked by footprint or tyre track. As she rubbed her arms to warm her, the fuzziness in her head cleared enough for her to realise that it shouldn't be cold; they had been leaving the central heating on all night since Christopher's problems had begun.

Her immediate thought was for her son. The baby monitor was still broadcasting the sound of his breathing, although it seemed a little slower which she attributed to a deep sleep. Satisfied he was okay, she walked over and felt the radiator, her muscles aching from the uncomfortable position in which she had been slumped on the sofa. It was stone cold.

She swore under her breath and went to the kitchen to investigate. The pilot light in the boiler had gone out, the first time it had ever done so, and although she followed the instructions to the letter, she couldn't get it to re-ignite. Finally, her tiredness turned to irritation and she gave up; she would have another attempt in the morning when she was refreshed.

Wandering into the dining room, she realised how hard John's accident had hit her. Her head was thick like she was walking through oil, and an almost dreamlike quality pervaded everything, in the sparkling of the lights or the m.u.f.fled sound her feet made as she shuffled across the floor. She slumped into a chair, her eyes wandering to the clock without registering the time - 3.30am - as a powerful feeling of regret for all the lost hours of argument swept over her.

She sat there for what could have been ten minutes or an hour wrestling with her complex emotions when her gaze randomly fell on something glistening. It was above her, on the ceiling. She stared at it blankly for a while, watching it curiously without even thinking what it was. Suddenly her mind snapped to awareness.

It was an icicle. There was another one nearby, and another, each about three inches long, the light from the standard lamp sparkling off their frozen surfaces. Icicles. Her mind jumped and stumbled. In the dining room? It was cold, but not that cold. On the ceiling. Coming down from above.

Her mind stumbled once more before the terrifying realisation dawned on her, and then she was up and running, through the house, up the stairs, along the landing. She paused for the briefest instant outside Christopher's room before she steeled herself and swung open the door.

The blast of cold air hit her like a howling wind across the arctic wastes. Her skin went numb, her teeth chattering instantly. The room was sparkling, the walls and ceiling and floor alive with glittering pinp.r.i.c.ks of light. It took Gill a second to realise that everywhere was covered in a sheet of ice. Every square inch of Christopher's room had been frozen, and in some areas the ice was almost half an inch thick.

Christopher's cot stood in the centre, its wooden bars shiny with a sheath of h.o.a.r frost. Over it, the ice-covered dummy spun slowly, glittering in the rays of the landing light.

"Christopher!" Gill shrieked as she propelled herself across the threshold. She stopped almost instantly. It was like being in a meat freezer; the cold sapped the energy from her limbs. Despite her violent shivering, her only thought was that Christopher was dead, frozen rigid in his sleep.

It was only then that she saw it - for it was certainly not a him. It was sitting against the wall staring at the cot, its long, thin arms supporting it as it leaned forward slightly. When Gill broke the silence, its huge, white eyes flicked in her direction and then, slowly, it started to laugh. The noise was high-pitched and reedy and it set her teeth on edge. Those spindly arms folded around its knees, and then it rocked backwards and forwards, the laugh slowly subsiding into a perverted giggle. She could feel the waves of black emotion radiating out from the thing hunched on the floor - the loathing, the malice, the perverse glee in suffering.

Her legs felt like lead as she stumbled across the room. Inside her there was a little voice questioning whether she could do it, but somewhere she found that little bit of strength she needed to keep going. The cold enveloped her like a dip in a winter sea.

"You can't have my son," she said, almost to herself.

The giggling increased a notch.

By the time she had reached the cot, Gill felt as if she had trekked across Antarctica. Her skin felt leeched of warmth, red and raw, and she could barely stand as she leaned over the edge and looked in. Christopher was still alive. Despite the cold, he looked almost normal. Gill leaned in and pulled him out, the effort almost bringing her to her knees.