Darkest Part of the Woods (24 page)

Sam peered across the clearing but could no longer identify the withered brownish fragments. He was in danger of growing entranced by the dance of trees and shadows, which looked cryptically ritualistic, when his aunt said "Ready to dig?"

He wasn't, but he didn't think he ever would be. "Here I go," he mumbled, and stepped over the bricks to clear earth off the surface under the mound. Sooner than he liked he finished exposing a stone slab, pallid where it wasn't blackened, about three feet square and lacking a large portion of one corner. He thrust the spade into the gap to the length of half the blade, and it fetched up against an obstruction that sent a shiver through his arms and then through him.

"We'll never get through there," Sylvia protested. "You need to lift it up."

Sam dropped the spade and dug his fingers under the broken edge. Earth gritted beneath his nails as he hauled at the slab. An ache spread from his shoulders to his skull, and he felt as if the clamour of the trees was invading his consciousness. Either it or tension almost deafened him before he straightened up. "Won't move," he gasped.

"Let me help."

"You don't want to strain yourself." He was aware of sounding even more like Marge or his mother as he said "Think of the baby."

"Natty would want me to help," Sylvia said, and crouched as though urged by the presence she'd named. "Try again, Sam."

When she poked her fingers under the slab he had to come to her aid. He rammed the spade past the broken edge and leaned all his weight on the shaft. In a moment he felt Sylvia adding her efforts to his, and then the blade started to bend. "No use," he panted, so relieved that he even managed to feign frustration.

"Once more."

Her voice was so low that he could have imagined she was addressing somebody other than him, especially since she was gazing downward. So long as lifting the obstruction was beyond them it would do no harm to indulge her. He tramped the spade deeper and levered a the slab until the blurred sounds of the forest seemed to close around him as though the trees were leaning towards the mound and chorusing encouragement. He saw his aunt's arm begin to shiver with exertion, and opened his mouth to suggest they had tried hard enough. At that moment the slab reared up.

Perhaps the final effort had dislodged the earth that had been tamped around its edge, but it felt to Sam as though the slab was being raised from beneath. He would have let go of the spade if that mightn't have left his aunt supporting the slab. He fell to his knees as the spade pivoted almost horizontal and the slab balanced on its far edge for a moment before thudding against the height of the mound. The opening it had revealed was full of earth. Sam found the sight so ominous that it seemed he might reassure himself by saying "You couldn't have been here, could you? You couldn't have got through."

"I must have been close, though, and you know what I think?"

"What?" Sam would rather not have said.

"Suppose he didn't want to bury me? Suppose he just wanted me to go down there?"

How that could please her was beyond Sam, unless she was more like her father than anyone cared to admit. "Don't stop now," she pleaded. "Make a way for us."

He wanted to refuse but couldn't think of a reason; his mind was overwhelmed by a shapeless mass of sound, the voice of the forest. He began to dig in something of a frenzy, flinging earth onto the canted slab until Sylvia intervened. "We may want to put that back," she said.

His bad leg was eager to demonstrate new ways to ache from treading on the spade. His shoulders seemed bent on giving the leg more ideas while clamminess that felt mixed with grit was well on the way to covering the whole of him. He disinterred one step and then another, and saw how they wound downwards. The second was partly blocked by the rest of the slab. He only wished it had made further progress impossible, but most of the earth in the hole had lodged against it, leaving the route all too clear. He was gazing unhappily the blackness into which the steps led when Sylvia ran down the steps to hug him.

"Well

done,

Sam."

When she smiled in his face he felt trapped-by her, by the narrow reddish passage that surrounded their calves, by the trees that creaked like a jaw in the process of rediscovering its use. The pressure of her swollen midriff against him brought him close to panic, as did her moist breath in his ear. He was suddenly terrified of being overtaken by an erection. "Will you go first?" she murmured.

At least that gave him an excuse to free himself and climb onto the mound. "I don't think either of us should."

"No need to be scared, Sam."

"I'm not," he said as a shiver-only an aftershock of his toil, he wanted to believe-travelled through him. "I just think we should have some more people with us."

"Think how long this may have been hidden. Don't you want us to be the first living people to see?"

"It mightn't be safe."

"Only one way to find out, and someone has to." A blink ended her disappointed look, and she produced a flashlight from a pocket of her loose denim overalls.

"You could hold this while I go through, she said.

He saw there was no overcoming her determination. He tried to hold the flashlight steady while she planted her hands on the discoloured reddish walls and eased herself past the leaning chunk of the slab. She looked as though her midriff was dragging her through the gap.

"Thanks," she said briskly as her swollen shadow wobbled downward, and held out a hand.

Sam passed her the flashlight and watched her descend, her free hand supporting her on the left wall. She didn't have to do this, he told himself. He'd tried his best to dissuade her, but she was more than old enough to know her own mind.

Below her the light wavered as if betraying a nervousness she refused to admit, and then it shrank around the curve of the narrow passage, tugging her after it.

Within seconds there was no trace of her except a faint illumination that vanished into the depths. He couldn't even hear her footsteps for the

triumphant roaring of the forest. He was about to call to her when she spoke.

"Here's the first thing."

Perhaps it was only the subterranean passage that made her voice seem too low to be addressing him. "What?" he blurted, and heard the mound swallow the question.

"You'll have to see for yourself."

He felt his lips part well before they managed to pronounce "I'll need some light."

The darkness at the limit of his vision remained unrelieved long enough for him to wonder if she'd misunderstood him. Then a faint glow crept around the bend onto the dimmest of the steps. He was taking the light away from his aunt, he thought; he was leaving her and her baby in the dark. Disgust with himself sent him down the steps, pressing a hand against the rough damp wall as he edged past the fallen chunk of the slab. The surrounding trees seemed to crane to watch before they cleared the sky for the sun. Its light and their crowing dwindled as he hurried down to Sylvia, and he hadn't reached the glow of the flashlight when it began to withdraw from him. He took a breath to ask her to illuminate the steps, only to inhale a smell of something like decay but sweeter. By the time he expelled the worst of it he'd turned the curve, and her light was waiting for him.

Or rather, most of it was beyond a doorway off the steps. Just enough of it remained in the passage to show him that the wall above the doorway had at some time been blackened by a fire. It showed him his aunt's face too, intent on the room beyond the doorway. Nevertheless as he reached the step above her she swung the beam towards him, so that he barely glimpsed a shape huddled against the far wall of the room. He had a sudden uneasy suspicion that she was checking that he was who she expected. "I'm glad you decided to be brave," she said.

"Let's see, then," he urged, because having to imagine what was there might be even worse.

Sylvia shone the beam through the doorway at once. Sam had the impression that the darkness was refusing to give way until he saw that

the walls and low ceiling and even the bare stone floor were charred. The room was sufficiently extensive that the light grew fainter by the time it touched the far wall. About midway along the stone curve the solitary contents of the room had shrunk into the angle of the wall and floor, perhaps in a vain attempt to escape the fire. Its arms and legs were bunched together as if it had been struggling to return to not having been born. It was merely a skeleton smaller than a man's, but any reassurance that might have offered was negated by its shape. Sam tried to tell himself that the bones had been distorted as well as darkened by the fire, but there were too many of them, by no means all familiar.

The skull was the worst, because it was nearly human. Sam might have attempted to believe that it had somehow been robbed of a mouth by the fire, but that could hardly explain the eye sockets, which were more than twice the size they should have been in proportion to the skull.

Sylvia was watching him with an eagerness he didn't like at all. "What do you think it is?"

"Was," he corrected, and tried not to imagine meeting the creature in whatever flesh it might once have had. Could anyone have encountered it crawling on all fours up the steps, its huge eyes swelling out of the dark? Or would they have met it loping upright through the woods or peering around the trees? What expression would they have seen above the absence of a mouth? "We'll never know," he said, willing that to put a stop to his thoughts.

"Do you think it's what he wanted me to see?"

"How could it be?" Sam protested, and made himself turn away from the room to frown at her.

"You're right, there has to be more. Let's go find it," his aunt said and pointed the light down the steps.

Darkness rushed across the room and through the doorway to join the darkness at Sam's back. Just a few steps up would take him into daylight, but how could he abandon his pregnant aunt down here? Her condition was affecting her judgement, he thought-there could surely be no other explanation for her enthusiasm. He might have said as much, but the illumination had already ushered her around the bend below him. When he followed, it felt altogether too much like hurrying to outdistance the dark and the misshapen skeleton. As he caught up with the edge of the light it halted, and he was able to believe it was waiting for him until he saw that Sylvia had found another room.

She kept the light out of it until he ventured down to her, and so he was able to observe that the wall above the doorway was scorched. Anything beyond it must have burned, he told himself, but that didn't help him breathe as Sylvia sent the beam into the room. It was much like the first one: the same size and shape, and as blackened. Its occupant lurched forward from the far wall as the light discovered it, but only shadows were rousing themselves. Their prone source was dead and charred and fleshless, which offered little in the way of relief. If the remains of its face had been turned away Sam might have thought it had once been a child with an outsize head. Its long legs were drawn up almost to the elongated chin, and its hands were clenched on the ankles. All this made it seem dismayingly human, even if it had far more teeth than enough. Sam did his best to persuade himself that most of the round holes in the upper half of the skull could hardly have contained eyes, but he didn't know if any other possibility might be worse.

Sylvia had returned to watching him. He faced her in a rage that was both provoked by and attempting to overcome his dread. Before he could demand what she was looking for, she reached up to cross out his lips with a finger. "Did you hear it?" she whispered.

When she released his lips they almost didn't work. "What?" he barely said.

"Something further down."

"What?" he felt worse than stupid for repeating.

"Moving about," said Sylvia, aiming the flashlight down the steps as though to summon whatever was there.

"If there's anything it'll be rats."

She flashed him a reproachful grimace of the kind a child might give someone who'd attempted to rob them of a belief. "We'll find out," she said, and followed the light.

For a painful heartbeat the idea that it was about to discover or call forth something at large in the dark paralyzed Sam, and then the notion of her encountering that by herself sent him after her, into a luminous stone cell whose walls and ceiling he would have been able to touch-a cell that jerked downwards, dragging him deeper with each step his aunt took. A hint of decay and sweetness drifted up, one of the reasons he was holding his breath when the beam fell on another stretch of charred wall. Sylvia hurried down to send the light through the doorway below it, and he saw her mouth widen in shock.

He had to force himself to peer around the doorway. While the sight beyond it seemed to bear no immediate relation to his fears, it failed to do away with them. In the middle of another curved stone room stood a jagged black pile several feet high. At first he thought it had been composed of bodies or parts of bodies, and then he identified the objects that resembled bones protruding from the mass as the spines of old-very old-books. He was taken aback to hear Sylvia murmur "That's awful."

"What is?" Sam responded, barely audibly.

"Can't you see?" she said with unexpected fierceness. "Just imagine how much knowledge may have been destroyed."

"Depends what kind, doesn't it?"

"No, it doesn't. If you don't have knowledge you have ignorance. I thought you were supposed to be working on a book."

That struck him as so inappropriate that he wondered how little sense she had of the situation they were in. If the contents of the books had been in any way connected with the creatures whose remains he'd seen, he was glad the volumes had been reduced to lumps of ash.

He was about to say as much when Sylvia advanced into the room.

Darkness flooded down the steps and up them to close around Sam, but he wasn't anxious to follow her and feel even more trapped. He watched her stoop to the heap of ash and pull out remnants of bindings. "Of the embodiment of the spirit of a place," she intoned, "of the raising of the dead," and he realised she was reading titles or translating them aloud. None of the spines retained more than charred scraps of pages. Sam wished she wouldn't concentrate so much of the light on examining them, especially when he heard something dart out from the far side of the heap. His aunt swung the light after it in time to catch a whitish shape the size of a man's hand vanishing into a hole at the foot of the wall. "Like you were saying-just a rat," she said, turning herself and the beam towards the doorway with a smile he thought was intended to convince not only him. Then the beam jerked to one side of him, and he took her to have noticed something he couldn't see within the room until he heard a sound behind him.