Darkest Part of the Woods (33 page)

"A tree, I should think." When Margo's attempt at irony went unremarked she said impatiently "A tree, of course."

"But

it

moved."

"Obviously the camera slipped."

Heather found the spectacle it had captured disturbing enough itself. Margo seemed determined to hold her pose until the night swallowed her up. "You can laugh if you want, anyone," she said from her chair without taking her own advice. "I want you to be honest about how you feel."

"How did you?" said Sylvia.

Margo gazed for some moments at her past self before declaring "Peaceful. Really peaceful."

Heather was watching her grow more lost in the dimness of the woods or in her sense of them-she'd begun to wonder what audience Margo had thought she was performing for or trying to placate by imitation-when a shiver that suggested an imminent transformation passed through Margo and the tree, and at once the screen turned blank. "The battery must have run down," Margo said.

That would explain the shiver as well, Heather told herself. "I'll put the light on, shall I?" she said.

It revealed her family blinking as if they had just wakened from a dream. Sam peered at the screen, apparently to make sure nothing further would manifest itself, and then he mumbled

"When did you realise?"

"I'm sorry, what?" said Margo. "Realise what?"

"How long did you stay like that before you realised you weren't filming?"

"Don't laugh, but I really can't remember."

This visibly disturbed him-because, Heather concluded, he was becoming aware how age might affect his grandmother. "What were you after in the woods?" he said, barely aloud.

"I can't tell you that either. You know me. My work's about finding out if it's about anything, not knowing in advance. So is anyone going to risk an opinion of the footage so far?"

"I'd say it felt like the birth of something new," Sylvia said.

"Or something old," Sam muttered.

"As long as you're inspired, mummy," said Heather.

She didn't mean that to be patronising, but perhaps that was how it sounded. "I shouldn't have shown you," Margo said.

Heather hoped that wasn't aimed solely at her. "Who else if not us?"

"Nobody at all while I've nothing to show but work in progress. You won't know it when I've finished. Maybe you won't know me." Margo switched off the television and set the tape rewinding, then dug her fingernails into the arms of her chair and struggled to raise herself.

"Give me a boost, someone," she said.

"The old bones aren't what they were."

Sam limped across the room before anyone else could help and lifted Margo out of the chair by her elbows. She took some time over straightening up from a crouch.

Of course she wasn't having to emerge from the posture she'd adopted in the woods, although her performance there might explain why she was stiff. "Thank you for coming," she said.

"We can stay longer if you like," Heather said.

"I've bored you long enough. I want to have another look and see what I can make of it."

"We don't mind watching it again," Heather said, however dismaying a repeat of Margo's mime would be.

"You mustn't think I'm being hostile if I ask you to leave me alone with it. I truly believe that's what I need."

"All right then," Heather said, though it was more a question to the others. If they didn't agree, they must want to believe they did. In either case, she seemed to have denied herself the opportunity to demur further. She confined herself to hugging Margo, and had to restrain her affection from growing too fierce; her mother felt stiff and frail as a bunch of old thin sticks, and more knobbly than Heather remembered, with knuckles that put her in mind of knots in wood. 'We'll get together again very soon, won't we?" Heather managed to ask rather than plead.

"Of course we all will."

Margo insisted on making her way downstairs with them, though it was at least as laborious as Sylvia's. "Don't any of you worry about me," she said, waving a hand in front of her face to ward off either a smell of charred food from the ground-floor apartment or the humidity admitted by the front door. "I haven't nearly finished exploring."

Heather might have been happier if she had. Perhaps Sam and Sylvia felt the same-they were as silent as she was, at any rate. An intermittent wind set the hedges that boxed in the large discreet Victorian houses creaking and scraping their leaves together but failed to relieve the January heat that would have been premature even for April. The only other sounds were the footsteps of the Prices, isolated and diminished under the infinite dark. Sam's limp and Sylvia's plodding had brought them to the High Street, from which concrete bollards like standing stones or unnaturally regular tree-stumps barred traffic, when Sylvia said "Are you going to share your feelings with us?"

"Which?" Sam sounded forced to ask.

"Not yours right now, Sam."

"I'd have to ask which too," said Heather.

"Whichever you want us to hear about, but I was thinking of the show mom put on for us."

A wind awoke the scrawny trees that stood guard in front of the bright deserted shops, and bony shadows capered around the roots. "I don't think she made it just for us, did she?"

Heather said.

"I believe you got that right, sure enough."

"So long as she doesn't make it too much for herself and loses more of her audience."

"Poor Heather," Sylvia said, and looked pitying. "You've no idea what we're talking about, have you?"

Heather was primed with a retort when Sam glanced hastily away from her. "Who's we?" she asked instead.

"The family, Heather."

"All right," Heather blurted as anger caught up with her. "If everyone knows so much more than me, you tell me some of it, Sam.'

At once she was sorry for turning on him. He was looking anywhere except at her, as if they were surrounded by companions visible only to him. "Or you can, Sylvie," she said.

"Why don't you try? Tell us what you feel and you'll be right if you let yourself."

"I feel..." Heather had to quell an impression that Sylvia was prompting her to admit she felt both watched and hidden from. "I hope mother will finish in the woods soon and then we can all start to forget about them," she said.

"Not

likely."

She didn't know who'd spoken in a whisper that barely owned up to itself; she seemed less to have heard it than to remember having heard. It made her feel more watched than ever, so that she couldn't help glancing behind her. There was no concealment in the paved street lit by display windows and white globular lamps-at least, the occasional benches would hide nothing larger than a child, and the saplings not even that. Those bore no relation to the woods outside the town, and there were no more bony shadows than there ought to be, nor did their twitching betray the presence of shapes too gaunt to live that were about to scuttle into view.

She faced forward, only to be confronted by half a dozen trees, their shadows clutching at the pavement as though to help them or some aspect of them rear up. "Sometimes," she muttered before she knew she would, "I wish I hadn't been born here."

"Someone had to be."

Perhaps she wasn't hearing the high thin whisper, since neither Sam's face nor her sister's even hinted at having released it. If the imagination Heather was said to lack had determined to prove her accusers wrong, she would have preferred it to find another time and place. She held back from walking faster than Sam could limp and Sylvia plod, but when they turned the corner towards home she stifled a sigh of relief. She did her best to ignore the unquiet hedges and dimmer shrubs on the way to the corner shop.

The door of J's & J's was open, revealing Joe alone behind the counter. As the Prices came in sight he ceased speaking to three women, who swung round to follow his gaze.

Apparently they recognised the Prices, though Heather barely knew them. "Has Jessica left you to it, Joe?" she called.

"She's

at

home."

His initial pause made Heather consider not enquiring and then ask "Anything wrong?"

"She's looking after the granddaughter."

"Rosemary's all right though, is she?"

The women appeared to feel expected to look hostile on his behalf. "She's been having nightmares about you," he admitted.

"What

about

me?"

"One of your family. I don't think it was you." He clearly wished they didn't have an audience. "Nightmares or seeing things, one of the two," he said with some defiance.

Heather stepped through the doorway. "Which things?" she was determined to hear.

"I couldn't tell you. You'd have to talk to Jessica. We found the child wandering out the back, it looked like in her sleep. We won't be leaving her in bed at home again if her parents even let her stay."

This sounded more accusing than confessional. "Was she in the woods?" Sylvia asked, having followed Heather into the shop.

"No." He stared at her as if to rebuke her interest-stared almost as hard as the women were staring-but couldn't quite sustain his harshness. "She'd have gone in if we hadn't woken her," he said. "I know you're not supposed to wake anyone that's walking in their sleep, but we didn't know she was till we did."

"So long as you kept her out of there," said a woman with a tin of cat food in her hand.

"I wouldn't want a child going anywhere near."

"There's been a few too many seeing things round here just lately," said another, digging her fingers into a sliced white loaf.

'These last few months," the third said, inserting a humbug between lips wrinkled almost colourless.

None of them had looked away from Sylvia, who sighed. "Since I came home, are you saying?"

"Nobody was talking to you," the woman choking the loaf informed her.

"The town hasn't been the same since any of you came here," said her friend, absently scratching the label off the tin of cat food.

"Since someone started messing about in the woods," their companion added in a voice blurred and rendered hollow by the sweet that clicked against her teeth.

Joe was ready to protest, but Heather overtook him. "If you mean our father," she said with a calm she was far from experiencing, "he came here to help you. You already had the problem and he tried to sort it out."

"Ended up as part of it instead," declared the woman with the improvised toy drum.

"Till half the world knew all about it," agreed the strangler of bread.

"No wonder nobody round here can sell their houses," said their friend amid a further bout of clicking.

"Believe me," Heather took some pleasure in saying, "we wish you could."

At first Sylvia seemed willing to let that serve as her own riposte. She was on her way out of the shop when she remarked, "Well, now we know what it feels like to be witches, Sam."

"I expect we'll see you soon, Joe," Heather said, and turned her back on the women to see Sam already limping homeward. Once she and Sylvia were out of earshot of the shop, Heather murmured, "Did you need to bring up witches?"

"Seems like I must have since I did." Sylvia looked slyly amused by that or with anticipation. "I didn't tell you about the Goodmanswood witch yet, did I?" she said.

"No," said Heather, and even less enthusiastically "Get it over with."

"She lived in the cottage nearest to the woods. After Selcouth died she started spending most of her time in them until people saw her with, well, they said her familiar. Something like a child except it was too tall and thin and with hardly any face you'd want to call one. They got her arrested by the witch-finders, and she told them being in the woods had changed her. She'd grown another nipple-maybe that's where that idea originally came from. Only hers didn't stay in one place."

"Sounds as if a psychiatrist would have been in order."

"No, she showed them how it wandered all over her body. The story is she was glad they hanged her before she could change any further. They burned her cottage down and buried her at the crossroads in the High Street, but something's supposed to have dug her up and taken her back to the woods."

If all this came from the book Sam had bought his aunt for Christmas, Heather would have preferred him to have found Sylvia a different gift. He was opening their gate, having limped ahead as if to stay out of reach of the tale. Heather was about to follow him when she saw a youngish couple, presumably Rosemary's parents, hurrying along Jessica's front path. "I'll just see if Jessica wants a word," she said.

"Are you better off without me?"

"Never usually, but maybe till we find out..." When Sylvia tramped into their paved garden, Heather left her. "Jessica," she called.

Jessica was admitting the couple to her house. "Heather. I don't know if you ought-"She moved aside for the visitors and took a step onto her path. "She's in the front room," she told them. "I'll be there in a minute."

Heather didn't speak again until she was close enough to keep her voice low.

"What happened? Is it our fault somehow?"

"Have you all been out?" Jessica asked, peering along the street to Sylvia and Sam. "

"We've been at mother's watching her, her latest experiment."

"What was that?" said Jessica, more sharply than Heather liked.

"More of the art she brings out of the woods."

"You might want to let her know people have been talking."

"They do, don't they? And they've said..."

"You've all been seen going in and out of there all the time. Everyone except you at least," Jessica said and cocked her head towards a burst of comforting murmurs in the front room. "I'm not saying it is, but that could be why Rosemary imagined whatever she did."

"Is she getting over it?"

"She's stopped screaming. She started when we woke her. I know it's meant to be dangerous to."

The murmurs tailed off, and a small voice protested "I wasn't asleep."

"You must have been, Rosemary." Jessica gave Heather the sort of look adults shared about children as she confided "She said she was following somebody too tall for words."