Darkest Part of the Woods (17 page)

Heather refrained from wondering if Sylvia was reminded of having been buried herself.

She stooped to snatch up a handful of earth and cast it on the coffin.

Margo grabbed a handful and shook her hand free of it over the lid, and once Sam and Terry had imitated her, the other mourners did. The quintet from the Arbour stepped forward in a circle to drop simultaneous portions of earth that seemed to provoke a muffled creak, no doubt carried out of the forest by the wind.

Heather saw Margo consider objecting to their gesture, only to rub her mouth with her fingertips as the coffin began to sink into the grave. At that moment the five turned to gaze at the woods.

Heather thought she saw the woods respond. She saw the treetops opposite the churchyard writhe and grow spindly as insect legs with the effort of producing a light they held up. Just as it became too intense to face, she identified it as the sun, creeping from behind the dark grey sky-wide bank of cloud. The cloud and the woods squeezed it small, concentrating the light until it resembled an impossibly protracted flash of lightning, relentless and chill. The wind had dropped as though frozen by the light or seized by the thousands of filaments of shadow that had come alive, stretching themselves across the deserted common towards the churchyard.

The only sound was the faint hum of the mechanism that was lowering the coffin into the grave, which had deepened with blackness. Before the coffin could touch bottom, a shape fluttered into the graveyard.

It slithered over the turf, humping up grublike whenever it reached a headstone, and appeared to vanish into the open grave. When Heather squinted towards the light, whatever had cast the shadow had disappeared. Of course that made sense.

If she felt vibration underfoot, heading for the forest and immediately gone, that must be an effect of the mechanism of the platform. If she'd seemed not so much to hear as feel a muffled voice or voices, no doubt they belonged to some of the quintet, all of whom were gazing at the sky. It was Sylvia however, who said either eagerly or nervously "What was that?"

Heather rubbed her stiffened hands together and felt as if she was ridding them of a glaze of ice. The five were shivering and grinning through the mist of their breaths. She was about to declare that it had been nothing but a shadow when Timothy said "It was birds. Maff birds."

"I thought it was the face I used to see," said Nigel. "The face that flies."

"I saw a face, but it was crawling on the ground," Delia said, tugging at her eyes from beneath.

"And growing," Phyllis added, clasping her hands together so hard they shivered more than ever.

"It's nearly his time, then," Vernon said as best he could for shaking Dr Lowe gestured to the nurses to help him intervene, but Sylvia was faster.

"Say

whose."

"The one your father kept telling us about."

"The one that told Lennox his name."

"Gave him his name and a lot more you need-"

Neither Timothy nor Nigel nor Vernon waited for one another to say any of this, and the women's impatience with them was too great to let them finish. Delia and Phyllis drew breath in chorus and bellowed "Sel-"

Margo clapped her hands so fiercely that she winced. "That's enough. The end," she said as if she were rebuking children, Sylvia included. "Whatever Lennox did, he's gone now. Show him some respect and let him rest."

The five covered their mouths, and might have appeared chastened if Timothy hadn't proved unable to contain a snort of mirth. "He just went all right, true enough."

"We heard him go," Phyllis said behind her hand.

"But there won't be much rest for him," spluttered Vernon.

"Nothing rests in the woods," Nigel mumbled.

If Delia had anything to add, Terry headed her off. "Look, that really is more than enough," he said, his face reddening with every phrase. "You ought to be able to have some sense of the occasion, otherwise you shouldn't be here at all.

It never hurts to know when to be quiet," he appealed to the doctor.

"Come away now, Sylvia," Margo said. "You'll have had your fill of burials, I should think."

At once she looked upset by her own choice of words, which had made Heather feel a little sick. Sylvia moved away from the inmates of the Arbour and supported herself on Sam's arm. "Okay, I'm finished here," she said.

The lowering mechanism had quieted, having placed the coffin. As Heather linked arms with Margo and turned away from the grave, a wind followed them. This time it brought no smell of earth, only a few distant bars of Silent Night. It had always been Heather's favourite carol, and she was letting it recall to her how childhood Christmases had felt when she wondered who could be singing in the woods. The wind must be confusing her sense of direction, just as it began to distort the voices. In a moment she could no longer hear them, but in that moment the high voices sounded as much like birds as children. They sounded almost as if they were mocking both the similarities and the carol.

18

The Uprooted

WHEN Heather heard Sam cross the landing to the bathroom she waited to be sure that the oven almost full of turkey fired itself up, and then she went upstairs to tap on the bathroom door. "Sam?" she murmured, and had to say more loudly "Sam?"

"What?" he demanded in a voice that sounded not much less than drowned.

"Happy Christmas, to begin with."

A few seconds passed before he slid back the bolt. "Happy Christmas," he offered as an apology.

"You look as if you've dressed for the event."

She was referring not to his unclothed top half that he'd edged around the door but to the moustache and beard of foam he'd donned. "Why are we whispering?" he whispered, licking not just his lips but the foam around them.

"Don't do that. You'll put yourself off my Christmas dinner," she said and reached to clean his nervous lips with a thumb. "No need to wake Sylvie. I was wondering if I could use your computer while I have a few minutes to myself and look something up on the net."

"I'll have to put you online," he said, not much short of a complaint, and shut the door in order to emerge wrapped from the waist down in a pink bath-towel.

"You could tell me the password if you wanted to save yourself trouble."

He didn't respond before switching on the computer and typing a word she had the grace not to read, glimpsing only that it began with f and o and had an e in it as well. "There's the web for you," he said as the modem began burbling to itself.

His room was the mess she expected: the hi-fi piled with overlapping compact discs and crowned with headphones, the computer that appeared to have borne a litter of floppies, the office chair in front of it, dressed in a selection of his clothes as though understudying Sam- and yet she had an odd notion that the room wasn't quite as chaotic as it appeared, that it was rather too reminiscent of her previous sight of it. Beyond the common, beneath a sky the colour of thin ice over black water, the bones of the forest were twitching in a wind. She sat forward on the cluttered chair and pulled down a search engine from Sam's menu of favourites and typed Selcouth in the narrow rectangular space.

She had no idea what she might be calling up. She wasn't expecting to be shown more than a dozen sites, even if some of them were repetitions. Websters Dictionary 1913, p .1384...

Game of Obscure Words... Financial Services, Portland, Oregon... Word of the Week... She was about to follow up a lead to Middle English verse when the last retrieved site scrolled into view.

Aleister Crowley, Peter Grace, Roland Franklyn, and John Strong were among those who regarded Nathaniel Selcouth as the most far- seeing...

As frequently happened, the search engine displayed just the start of the opening sentence to be found on the site. Heather closed her hand around the mouse and rested her forefinger on the left button. The name Nathaniel had to be a coincidence, or might Lennox have mentioned it to her sister? She clicked the button hard rather than waste time on wondering. The incomplete sentence that was printed m bright blue turned black, and the bottom margin of the window set about filling with blue from left to right as if the essence of the sentence was concentrating itself there. Though it was in no hurry to finish, she did her best to keep her attention on the screen, but eventually she had to rid herself of the impression that someone had come to the edge of the forest to watch her. There was nothing to be seen except the skeletal gestures of the trees and the message the computer sent her. Connection timed out, it said.

She backed up to click on the sentence, which had stayed blackened. The blue band had crawled less than a third of the length of the window when the computer declared The page cannot be displayed and suggested she open the home page of the server. That brought her the same message, and so she clicked once more on the charred sentence. The blue band had scarcely commenced oozing like a chemical into its tube when the window turned utterly blank.

At that moment the woods dragged down a vague pale shape from the sky to merge with them and then swell forward out of them. It was Sam's reflection as he stooped to gaze over her shoulder. "What did you do?" he said in a tone he might have used on someone younger than himself.

"Just looked for something that seemed not to want me to find it."

"I've never seen that happen before. Would you like me to try?"

"You might want to get dressed first," Heather said, since he was still sporting the towel, though apparently unaware of a chill that had come to the window. "I'll have a last shot," she said and backed up, to discover that the listing for Selcouth had vanished. "Never mind. I'll look it up when I get back to work."

Sam turned away from the view of the forest as they heard a door open. "Are we having Christmas yet?" Sylvia called.

She'd asked that every Christmas morning when they were little.

The memory and a sense of more loss than she could quite define brought tears to Heather's eyes. "A happy one," she promised. "Even happier now you're up."

"Then I'd better stay that way. Do I get to give my nephew a seasonal kiss?" Sylvia said and ventured into the room, her voluminous bathrobe flapping, only to retreat at once. "Sorry, I didn't realise you weren't decent."

"He's not far off it, do you think? You may as well get used to that kind of sight now you're a mother. Worse than that to come, Sylvie."

"I'll be making coffee if anyone else wants some," Sylvia said.

Heather gave Sam's thin shoulders and pale ribbed torso and proudly hairy chest a further glance that reminded her of when they had been thinner still and entirely innocent of hair. He looked so uncomfortable that she left him to it and closed the door. "I'll keep you and the turkey company," she told her sister.

A piney smell met her on the stairs, and she thought how things would have started growing as the nights began to shrink. Sylvia was filling the percolator while she gazed at the livid cracks in the sky that were the crest of the woods.

"Are you through in the kitchen," she said, "or can I help?"

"There's a few vegetables to be dealt with and then we won't have mother doing her best to be helpful and getting in the way."

"Let me fix the potatoes. I always liked scraping them."

If the earth on them didn't rouse unpleasant memories, Heather wasn't about to do so.

She confined herself to washing the sprouts and dropping them into a saucepan with a sound that used to make her and Sylvia giggle, more uncontrollably when Margo had asked why. The bubbling of the percolator was completing the trio of sound; when Sylvia said "Want to promise me something?"

"I can't think why not."

"Don't let me tease Natty. Tell me if I ever start."

Heather looked for Sylvia's reflection but could see only the wood not quite hiding beyond the hedge. "Could anyone have mentioned that name to you recently?"

"Such

as

who?"

"I was wondering about dad."

"Maybe. I can't remember. If he did it's something he gave me I can keep," Sylvia said, and without a pause "So will you promise?"

"Why should I need to stop you teasing anyone?"

"I've been lying awake thinking what a bitch I used to be."

"Oh, Sylvie, you should have come and talked to me instead of being by yourself.

When were you ever one of those?"

"I was to you when we were kids."

"It couldn't have been very serious, because I don't remember."

"I'm only starting. I've been remembering when we were in the woods."

"Everything comes back to them, does it?"

"I think we do," Sylvia admitted, lifting her head as if the claws of the forest had indicated it should rise. "Remember when I used to say we had to hit the ground with sticks."

"Vaguely," Heather said. "Were we playing at being primitive? The first people in Goodmanswood, and we thought they'd drum on the earth."

"The earth inside the foundations. We didn't just hit it, we did that and then we ran away."

"That's children for you."

"Screaming."

"I think that was mostly you being little. I can hardly remember."

With gathering impatience Sylvia said "Then maybe you remember the quiet place."

"You'll have to remind me."

"Where we used to watch the shadows moving all around us but where we were it was as still as the trees are now."

Presumably she'd glanced out of the window to check, though Heather hadn't noticed; the treetops were indeed so motionless they -night have been supporting the sky while draining it of colour. "It must have been very sheltered," Heather heard herself say.

"It wasn't, Heather. It was the same place, inside the foundations, you have to remember."

Heather felt more as though she was striving to recall a dream from many years ago when Sylvia said "And the black pool we threw sticks n and hoped nothing pulled them down or got wakened by them. That was on top of the mound when it started to fall in one time, and.

hen we were too scared to go back."