The people of Coldmere had always known there was something wrong with the woods. Nobody could have told you exactly what.
The trees themselves were ordinary enough: pine and fir and ash, and here and there an oak that looked as if it had spent several centuries regretting where it had ended up. The forest started at the northern edge of the village and climbed gradually towards a long ridge of Derbyshire gritstone. In summer people walked there. Children built dens, dogs vanished into the bracken and came back carrying things their owners preferred not to identify, and mushroom pickers drifted about between the trees. Nothing much happened.
Winter was different, and Christmas Eve most of all.
The oldest rule in Coldmere was a simple one: do not go into the forest after sunset on Christmas Eve. Nobody knew where it came from, which is generally how old village rules work. Ask anyone and they'd say their grandmother had warned them. Ask the grandmother and she'd blame hers. Somewhere along the way the reason fell off entirely, and only the warning was left.
Most people did as they were told. One man actually knew why.
His name was Edward Coldwell, but everyone called him Coldwell, because there were three Edwards in the village and nobody could face the admin of telling them apart. He had lived beside the forest all his life, in a cottage at the very end of North Lane, close enough that on winter afternoons the nearest trees laid their shadows right across his garden. He was a carpenter by trade, but half the village thought of him as the man to ask whenever something went wrong outdoors: a fox in the hen house, a tree down across the road, a missing sheep, a child who'd wandered too far. Coldwell knew every path in those woods, every stream and tumbledown wall, and every spot where the ground turned treacherously boggy without warning.
But on Christmas Eve, even Coldwell stayed home. The reason was the snowman.
He first saw it when he was nine, on Christmas Eve 1952. It had snowed heavily that week, and shortly before dusk his father went out to bring in more firewood, with young Edward trailing after him. They were heading back to the cottage, arms full of logs, when his father stopped dead.
"Don't move."
Edward froze. His father was staring into the trees, and when Edward followed his gaze he saw a snowman standing about fifty yards inside the forest.
There was nothing frightening about it at all. It was small, just three lopsided balls of snow, with two black stones for eyes, a carrot for a nose and a battered black hat. Its stick arms hung loosely at its sides.
Edward grinned. "Who made that?"
His father gripped his shoulder hard. "Inside."
"But Dad..."
"Now."
There was something in his father's voice that Edward had never heard there before, and it took him years to put a name to it. It was fear.
Indoors, his father locked the front door, then the back door, and drew every curtain in the house. When Edward's mother asked what on earth was the matter, he leaned in and whispered something to her, and she went white. It was the first Christmas Eve Edward could remember when nobody sang.
In the morning the snowman was gone. Edward asked about it, and his father wouldn't answer, and neither would his mother.
He saw it again when he was fourteen. It was Christmas Eve, in the same spot, with the same hat and the same carrot nose, and the odd thing was that it hadn't snowed for nearly a week. The ground under the trees was frozen mud, and yet there stood the snowman, perfectly formed. Edward didn't tell anyone.
He saw it at seventeen, and again at nineteen, and at twenty-three. Not every Christmas, but often enough, and always in the same place, always facing the village.
By thirty he'd stopped being frightened of it. He was never comfortable with it, but he'd become curious, and he started keeping notes: weather, temperature, snowfall, when he first spotted it, how long it stayed. He didn't bother noting the location after a while, because it never changed. It was always a small clearing about fifty yards beyond the edge of the woods.
Christmas Eve 1974: present. No snowfall for eleven days.
Christmas Eve 1977: present. Five degrees above freezing.
Christmas Eve 1981: present at 4.16pm, gone by 6.40am.
Reading back over those notes, Coldwell came to an uncomfortable conclusion. The snowman didn't turn up because it was winter. The winter turned up because of the snowman. On the nights it stood in the woods, the temperature around the clearing plummeted. Frost crept along the nearby branches, your breath hung in the air, and sometimes snow fell within a few yards of it and nowhere else.
He went up to it once, and only once.
That was Christmas Eve 1984. He took a lantern and walked into the woods a little before sunset, and stopped about ten yards short of it. Close up it was smaller than he'd expected, hardly bigger than a child. The brim of its black hat was torn, the carrot had shrivelled a bit, and three lumps of coal ran down its front for buttons.
Then he noticed the footprints. They weren't round the snowman but behind it: large prints of bare feet pressed into the snow, far bigger than any person Coldwell had ever met. They started at the snowman's back and led away deeper into the forest.
He followed them for perhaps twenty yards, and as he went, the woods fell silent. There was no birdsong, no wind, not so much as a branch stirring. And then, somewhere a long way ahead, a small bell rang once.
Coldwell stopped. Another bell answered it, closer this time. Then another.
He turned round and ran, and he never went looking into the snowman again. Not properly.
For the next ten years, nothing changed. Then came Christmas 1995.
Coldwell was carrying logs in when he caught sight of the snowman through the trees, and he knew straight away that something was wrong, though it took him a moment to work out what. It was closer. Not by much, ten yards perhaps, but for more than forty years it had appeared in exactly the same clearing, and now it was standing nearer the edge of the woods.
He walked down to the boundary, though he didn't cross it, and the snowman stared back at him. He looked past it into the trees and saw nothing. But very faintly, somewhere deep among them, he heard a bell.
The next Christmas it was another ten yards closer, and Coldwell went to the parish council. That went about as well as you'd imagine.
"You're worried because a snowman has moved?"
"Yes."
"Has anybody owned up to moving it?"
"Nobody built it in the first place."
Somebody laughed. Coldwell didn't, and after a moment the councillors stopped laughing too. He told them everything he'd seen since he was a boy. Most of them put it down to village folklore, but one woman remembered her grandmother talking about "the Christmas watcher", and another remembered being told as a child never to follow bells through the woods in winter. That was enough for Coldwell. The snowman was there for a reason. He just didn't know what it was.
It kept coming, slowly, and only ever on Christmas Eve. In 1997 it was twenty-eight yards from the boundary. In 1998 it was twenty-one. In 1999 it was fifteen. After that Coldwell stopped measuring and started watching the trees instead. Sometimes he saw movement there, tall shapes slipping between the trunks, never clearly. Once he saw something pale standing behind a fir tree. He looked away, and when he looked back it had gone.
And every year, the bells got louder.
Christmas Eve 2001 brought heavy snow, and by sunset the whole village had gone quiet under it. Coldwell walked down to the end of North Lane. The snowman was five yards inside the trees now, and it had changed, or perhaps it had just worn out. The brim of its hat sagged, its carrot nose drooped towards the ground, and one of its stick arms had snapped. For the first time, Coldwell felt something like pity for it.
"You're running out of room, aren't you?" he said.
The snowman said nothing. Behind it, in the dark, the bells started up, and this time there were a lot of them.
Coldwell went home and didn't sleep. In the morning he found footprints outside his cottage, large and bare, and they stopped at his gate.
That was when he got in touch with Professor Barnabas Ravenwood.
Ravenwood came two days later and, to Coldwell's surprise, actually listened. Most people started interrupting the moment the snowman came up. Ravenwood just asked questions: dates, distances, the weather, whether the bells always came from the same direction. Then the pair of them went into the forest together and found absolutely nothing: no snowman, no footprints, nothing odd about the temperature. Ravenwood looked almost disappointed.
"Come back next Christmas," said Coldwell.
Ravenwood did. At 4.03pm on Christmas Eve 2002, the snowman appeared, and this time it wasn't in the forest at all. It was standing right on the boundary.
Ravenwood stopped talking mid-sentence, which Coldwell enjoyed rather more than he probably should have.
They walked over to it. The snowman faced them, and its coal eyes seemed darker than Coldwell remembered. Ravenwood walked slowly all the way round it.
"Fascinating."
"Is that your professional opinion?"
"Among others."
Ravenwood took out a thermometer. Right beside the snowman it read minus eleven. Ten feet away it was two degrees above freezing. He touched the snow on its shoulder. "That's not ordinary."
Coldwell raised an eyebrow. "You came all this way to find out supernatural snow isn't ordinary?"
Ravenwood ignored him. And then a bell rang, close by.
Both men turned towards the trees. Something tall and thin and pale was moving between the trunks. Another bell rang, and there was another shape.
"Inside," Ravenwood said quietly.
Coldwell stared at him. "My cottage?"
"The village."
"What are they?"
"I'd rather not speculate until we're behind a locked door."
Coming from Ravenwood, that was alarming enough to settle the matter.
Back in Coldwell's kitchen, Ravenwood spread books all over the table. Most were old and some were handwritten. One held an account from 1816, the Year Without a Summer, full of stories of winter spirits turning up out of season. Another, a private journal, described something it called the Pale Procession, which was supposed to walk during the longest nights of the year. Nobody seemed to agree on what they were. Some said dead travellers, some said winter spirits, and some said something a great deal older. But every account shared one detail: bells, small ones, tied round their wrists or ankles or necks.
"So you think these things are following the snowman?" Coldwell asked.
Ravenwood shook his head. "I think the snowman is retreating from them."
Coldwell looked towards the window. All those years he'd thought it was creeping towards the village, when really it had been backing out of the forest, one slow step every Christmas, with whatever stood behind it pushing forward.
"What happens when it can't go back any further?"
Ravenwood closed the book. "I suspect we're about to find out."
On Christmas Eve 2003, the snowman appeared in the village itself, standing in the middle of North Lane just outside Coldwell's gate. Some children found it first. Coldwell cleared the lane straight away, and people complained, and he ignored them.
Ravenwood arrived before dark. The snow started at five. By six every road into Coldmere was blocked, and at seven the power went off. Then the bells began.
They came out of the forest by the dozen, perhaps by the hundred, drifting between the houses. All along the village, doors were locked and curtains drawn. Coldwell and Ravenwood stood beside the snowman in the dark lane.
It had changed again. There were cracks running all through it, one of its coal eyes was missing, and its hat had all but caved in.
"It's dying," Coldwell said.
Ravenwood nodded.
"What happens then?"
"I don't know."
"Marvellous."
The first figure stepped out from between the trees. It was tall and white and nearly transparent, with impossibly thin limbs, and a small bell hung from one hand. Then there was another behind it, and another, and they came out into the open. The temperature dropped and the snow thickened, and the snowman began to tremble.
Then Coldwell saw it move, really move, just slightly, but enough. Its one remaining arm lifted and pointed, not at the pale figures but at him.
He understood what it meant, and he didn't like it. "No."
The snowman pointed again.
Ravenwood looked from one to the other. "I think it wants you."
"Wonderful."
Coldwell stepped closer, and as he did the snowman started to fall apart. Its body slumped and the snow slid away in clumps, and inside it was something dark. Coldwell reached in, and a small wooden object dropped into his palm.
It was a carving of a man, simple and childlike, and he knew it at once. His father had carved it for him when he was a little boy, and it had gone missing the same Christmas he first saw the snowman.
And with it, a memory came back that he hadn't known he still had: his father, that night in 1952, leaning in to whisper to his mother. Coldwell had only caught one sentence of it.
"It's chosen Edward."
Now he understood. The snowman hadn't just been watching the village all these years. It had been waiting for him, holding the line until he was ready. His father had known. Maybe it had always worked this way, handed down from one keeper to the next: a boundary, a guardian, a promise.
Coldwell closed his hand round the carving. The nearest of the pale figures stepped forward, and a bell rang.
He looked down at what was left of the snowman. "I suppose I'm next, then."
Ravenwood frowned. "Next for what?"
Coldwell didn't answer. He stepped between the broken snowman and the forest, and the cold hit him at once. It wasn't ordinary cold. It went through skin and into bone, and his thoughts began to slow, and his breath stopped hurting because he could no longer feel it.
The pale figures came closer. Coldwell held up the carving.
"I know you're there," he said, and they stopped. "I know what you want."
Another bell rang. Coldwell glanced back at the village. Behind the curtains, candles and torches glowed faintly. There were families in there, Christmas trees and fires, children and warm kitchens, ordinary lives carrying on.
He smiled. "You're not having them."
The wooden figure cracked in his hand, and light poured out through the split, white and dazzling. The last of the snowman collapsed into the lane, and the Pale Procession recoiled.
Coldwell felt the cold come into him, and he fell. Ravenwood shouted his name. The bells went frantic, ringing over each other, and then they stopped. The pale figures were gone. They didn't fade away; one moment they were there and the next they simply weren't. The snow stopped falling, and for a few seconds Coldmere was completely silent.
Ravenwood found Coldwell lying in the snow, dead, with the wooden carving still in his hand. Beside him stood a new snowman, tall and blue-white, with two pale eyes and snow scattered across its surface. And for the first time in more than fifty years, the little snowman was gone.
Coldwell had taken its place.
The next Christmas Eve, people in Coldmere saw a tall blue figure standing at the edge of the forest, silent, with snow falling around him. It was Coldwell. The Pale Procession didn't come that year, and nobody heard the bells.
The years went by and Coldwell stayed. He never came into anyone's house, never frightened a child, never went near anyone at all. He just watched the woods. Now and then a tiny snowman would appear at his side, and Ravenwood thought that was important. Perhaps, he wrote, guardianship doesn't pass over all at once. Perhaps the little snowman hadn't died, but had simply become something else.
Whatever the truth of it, Coldmere still keeps its rule: don't go into the woods after sunset on Christmas Eve. Nobody laughs at it any more.
Ravenwood comes back every so often. Coldwell never says a word, but Ravenwood talks enough for both of them. One Christmas he asked whether the Pale Procession was still out there. Coldwell turned his head towards the trees, and far away a single bell rang, just once. Ravenwood packed up his equipment. Some mysteries are best studied from a good deal further off.
Coldwell still stands at the boundary every Christmas Eve, with snow gathering round his feet and the shapes of white trees seeming to grow across his ghostly body. Sometimes the little snowman stands beside him, the two of them watching and waiting together.
The people of Coldmere aren't afraid of either of them now. Every Christmas Eve they leave a lantern burning at the end of North Lane. It isn't an offering. It's a thank you.
Because somewhere beyond the trees, on Christmas Eve, the bells can still sometimes be heard. And every year, Coldwell makes sure that's where they stay.