Darkest Part of the Woods (21 page)

"Would you like to leave a message?"

"I didn't say I wouldn't wait."

Heather considered that she had, and didn't think Merilee was entitled to sound so resentful. She stepped over the bag Merilee had planted on the carpet and closed the front door.

Hospitality required her to add "Come and sit down. I take it you've walked some way."

Merilee let her continue assuming that and trudged after her into the front room, where she glanced sharply about as if in search of some item either she or Heather couldn't see. She arranged herself in the exact centre of the couch, resting the bag against her toes and yanking her coat over a bony knee that had momentarily exposed itself. "Can I offer you something to drink?" Heather said.

"Water. I'll get it," Merilee told her, grabbing the bag.

She scrutinised the glass she was handed in the kitchen until Heather wouldn't have been astonished to receive it back unused and with some rebuke too. Merilee ran the cold tap for at least half a minute before chancing a third of a glassful, which she carried into the front room and set on the floor as a preamble to a detailed recreation of her previous ritual of seating herself.

Heather sat opposite and did her best not to watch too closely, even when Merilee unzipped her bag a scant few inches and dug two gnawed fingers through the gap to extract a pillbox. Snapping off the plastic cap, she shook a piebald capsule onto her palm and zipped the pillbox into the bag before feeding herself just enough water to send the capsule down. This done, she gazed defiantly at Heather, who was searching for a neutral subject of conversation when Merilee said "Is she still better?"

It was instantly clear to Heather that she had to seem to know what she was being asked and to choose her words with extreme care despite the sudden tightness in her guts. "Why wouldn't she be?" she risked saying.

"She came back here."

"She did."

Merilee's left eye began to pucker, and Heather was afraid she'd revealed she understood the answer less than was expected. Her words must have passed the examination, since Merilee said "She was scared to."

"I don't know why she would be."

"It was something to do with her father, wasn't it? Were they, you know, too close?"

"How do you mean?"

Merilee appeared to take Heather's sharpness as an admission. "Did he mess with her when she was a kid? I never told her, but that's what screwed me up."

"I'm sorry," Heather barely had time to say before declaring "Our father wouldn't have harmed either of us. Even if he'd wanted to, and I don't believe for a moment that he did, he never had the chance."

"Then it was some other man back here."

Heather could find nothing more informed to ask than "Who you're saying did what?"

"Maybe just called her."

"And

said..."

"She didn't tell me that. Seems like just hearing him scared her. She said once he was mixed up with all the stories in her head and kept turning himself into people in them."

"He didn't call her on the phone, then."

At once Heather feared she'd betrayed her ignorance, but Merilee was more amused than suspicious. "Why would she have committed herself over some guy just phoning her?"

"You're right, of course," Heather said, feeling as if she'd been punched in the stomach.

"Do you mind my asking how you know all this?"

"Because we shared a room. She told me a lot more than she told our doctor."

Heather's skull was clamouring with thoughts and less than thoughts, and yet she couldn't think of a response. "So where is she?" Merilee demanded.

"Out walking with my son."

"I saw that. It said you knew where."

"With any luck, on their way home by now."

"You still aren't telling me where."

"That's true. There'd be no point."

Merilee met that by trying on various shapes of her eyes. When none of them provoked a response she exposed one unsunned arm a good deal too thin for its sleeve, then glared at Heather as though holding her responsible for the absence of a wristwatch. "How long have you kept me talking?"

"Not as long as it feels like," Heather couldn't refrain from saying.

"You don't know how it feels to anyone like me. You aren't the type." Even more accusingly Merilee said "How long?"

Her intensity forced Heather to glance at her own watch. "I'm'! afraid I didn't check when I met you," she said, willing the woman to leave her alone with her thoughts.

"You can say what time it is now, can't you?"

"Ten to three."

"That's too late." Merilee appeared to have forgotten how to sound other than distrustful when she admitted "I don't know how long I was outside. Long enough for the shadows to come round."

She meant moved around the house by the sun, Heather thought, only to realise that Merilee might not have. "Can I run you somewhere?" she said, not least to be rid of her visitor.

"I can walk," Merilee said and demonstrated, having grabbed her bag so fast she almost knocked over the remains of the water. "I know where the bus goes from to the train. You don't need to follow me."

Heather was merely seeing her to the front door. The encounter had left her so confused that it took the sight of Sylvia's note to suggest she ought to ask "Don't you want to leave a message at least?"

Merilee stared at the note as though it might tell her how secret anything she wrote would stay. She said nothing on her way to clawing at the latch, and remained silent as she hurried to the gate, from outside which she surveyed Woodland Close altogether too hard to be looking only for Sylvia. It wasn't clear to Heather what made Merilee trust her enough to whisper "Say if I can get better, anyone can."

Heather closed her fingers around the metal bars of the gate. Their solidity was by no means as reassuring as she needed it to be. She watched Merilee tramp away, her bunches of curls wagging like unkempt antennae, her bag thumping her right side with every step and eliciting a wince so automatic it looked like a tic. Once she was gone Heather shut herself in the house, wishing Sylvia and Sam home, then not just yet. The contradictory wishes switched themselves on and off in her skull like a faulty fluorescent tube, and felt as if they were buzzing like one. They were only making it more difficult to think what she could say to her sister.

21

The Steps to the Dark

PERHAPS it wouldn't be a novel but a book of fairy tales, Sam thought, and the tale of Bosky would be one of them-of how Bosky was born in the immeasurable woods and had to see beyond. Sam didn't think a novel would be capable of incorporating all the ideas that were coming to him; the screen was more than full of those he'd typed so far. There was a black and white timbered cottage whose sections appeared to bulge away from one another as though it was an illustration in a story book, only to curve inwards like an optical illusion and then rearrange themselves with the motion of foliage in a wind. He wasn't sure what would happen to anyone who strayed into that cottage, nor to whoever thought they were heading out of the forest towards a church that revealed itself as an autumn tree in exactly the shape of a steeple deep in the woods. Or they might encounter someone in the dusk whose face grew suddenly paler and larger and blurred while the wayfarer experienced a tickling as of insects on or under the skin. Elsewhere in the woods the wanderer might feel icy drips on the back of their hand and eventually glimpse a minute translucent globe sinking into their flesh-a drop that contained their own peering reflection or else a tiny face on its way to resembling theirs. Could all these be things Bosky took for granted?

Sam was unable to grasp what that would imply. It seemed more important to record the ideas, even if he had no inkling where they were coming from-the very act of making them appear onscreen felt like continuing to dream them. Now here was the notion that if you called a name in the depths of a forest it would bring the owner of the name to you, a fancy that felt as if he'd heard it somewhere. He was trying and failing to determine if that was the case while he typed when a movement drew his attention to the window.

Nothing appeared to have stirred. Beyond the common, where every blade of the long grass seemed fixed on demonstrating its individual stillness, the elongated skeleton that was the forest looked as implanted in the bare blue sky as in the earth. January shadows reached from the edge of the woods for the town, and Sam had a sudden impression that the trees or the shadows weren't quite as they should be. He was gazing at them, and feeling as if the mass of them had advanced to settle over his mind, when he heard a chirping on the windowsill.

So that was the movement he'd noticed: the arrival of an insect outside his window. He leaned across the desk, and the microscopic chirping rose to meet him. He barely glimpsed its source before it darted away. He fell back into his chair, growing less certain by the moment that he'd seen not an insect but a bird as multicoloured as a forest and smaller than a grasshopper, with its face averted from him. As the speck of it flew towards the woods and vanished, he heard a tapping behind him.

It was at the door, but the wooden sound made him feel surrounded by the forest-by the waking dream in which he hadn't realised he "was so immersed. When he called "I'm here" he might have been attempting to convince himself.

"Would you like to be elsewhere?" Sylvia said.

"I

might."

He heard the door inch open. "Is it okay for me to come in?" she murmured.

"There's nothing you can't see."

He didn't sense how close she was until her fingertips perched on his shoulders.

"I didn't know you were busy," she said.

"I think it's gone for now."

She was silent while she read the screen, perhaps longer. "You'll be like me before you know it, Sam."

"Nothing wrong with that, is there?" he had to say.

"So long as Heather doesn't think so," said Sylvia and brought her musky perfume closer. "If you call someone in a wood they'll come to you-that's a really old belief. Maybe we should try."

Not only the fallen or leaning trees alongside the common put him in mind of the night of the gale, when he and Sylvia had watched the forest reshape itself in the violent dark. Once again he felt as though the woods were a secret they shared without understanding it, certainly in his case and, he suspected, hers too. "Who would you call?" he said.

"Nobody you couldn't bear to see. Nobody at all if you don't care for the idea, but I do feel like walking over there today. Would you want to walk with me?"

"I should," he said and shut down the computer. "You oughtn't to be in there alone."

He was saying that because she was pregnant, but he felt as if he could have meant more. The notion grew no clearer as he watched his aunt find a message pad on his cluttered desk and write his mother a note, which she let fall like a leaf on the stairs. After that he could only follow her out of the house.

They used the front door rather than leave the back gate open. As they made for the common from the end of Woodland Close, the low sun sank into the clutch of the forest. "It feels like the start of more than a year, doesn't it?" Sylvia said.

She was talking about the unseasonable warmth, Sam decided-the warmth that seemed to emanate from the woods because of the position of the sun. As they tramped through the long moist grass and its

underlying secret chill, she rested a hand on his arm, so lightly that he couldn't tell whether she was supporting herself or guiding him. The trees were motionless as a painting of themselves, but were their shadows on the common almost imperceptibly shifting? It must be heat haze, he reflected as he saw the appearance retreat into the forest, causing rank after rank of trees to flicker, only to insist they hadn't stirred. By the time he and his aunt reached the edge of the forest, the restlessness had hidden in its depths. "Ready?" Sylvia said.

They were at a gap between two leaning trees whose resemblance to the columns of an ancient ruined entrance was almost too considerable. Her question made him feel about to cross a threshold vaster than he could see. "For what?" he blurted.

"For

me."

"Course I am." Honesty forced him to add "How do you think you'll be?"

"Not too embarrassing, we hope. You can always walk away if I get to be too much."

He had to acknowledge that he thought Margo or his mother might be better at handling Sylvia's emotions, but that was no excuse to let her down. "I won't do that," he said.

"Then I'm as ready as you are," his aunt said as though proposing a game, and held his arm while they passed through the entrance.

Stillness closed over them at once. It felt like being caught in the web of the innumerable shadows of the woods, except that he and Sylvia were moving freely forward, not enmeshing themselves more deeply in a web. Admittedly they were forced to follow a devious route by tangles of windblown branches, quite a few of which resembled bones that had been splintered and discoloured by some process of digestion. More than one fallen tree and its scattered branches came close to shaping an entire skeleton, though Sam found he preferred not to imagine those in the flesh. His thoughts rendered the forest oppressively present around him and in particular behind him. He glanced back to see that the common was more distant and less visible than he expected; he couldn't make out the houses at all. Sylvia gripped his arm as if to recall him or distract him. "Do you feel it too?" she said.

He didn't want to own up to any unease when she must surely be on edge. "How still it is, you mean."

"That's part of it."

If that was his cue to ask about the rest, he couldn't quite, but felt compelled to search for it around him. Could she have in mind the way the yielding of the ground underfoot suggested some medium other than earth and leaves? He would have liked to see more sky than was trapped in the nets of branches. Trees kept creeping into view, but only because he was moving, and nothing else as grey and scaly and as thin or even thinner was pretending to be the same as them. He was beginning to feel he'd encountered much or all of this at some time in the past, and might he have forgotten more? He felt less than eager to remember, instead peering about for creatures like the one he'd glimpsed on his windowsill, but the trees seemed to have only themselves to offer in the way of life. He recalled that while opposing the bypass he'd seen birds fly over the woods rather than alight in them, yet the bareness of the trees revealed nests in the treetops, even if they looked composed of bones and sprouting from the trees instead of built in them. Now that he'd noticed them he saw them everywhere overhead, greenish with decay or growth. He was limping to keep up with Sylvia's determined belly-heavy trudge when she said "We're close."