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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