The Book of Lost Things (2006) (9 page)

David covered his mouth so that he would not be sick. The sight of two corpses in as many minutes was making his stomach churn. He stepped away from the body and turned back toward his tree. As he did so, the great hole in the trunk disappeared, the tree shrinking to its previous size and the bark seeming to grow over the gap while he watched, entirely covering the passage back to his own world. It became just one more tree in a forest of great trees, each hardly different from the next. David touched his fingers to the wood, pressing and knocking, hoping to find some way of reopening the portal back to his old life, but nothing happened. He almost cried, but he knew that if he began crying, all would be lost. He would be just a small boy, powerless and afraid, far from home. Instead, he looked around him and found the tip of a large, flat rock erupting from the dirt. He dug it free and, using its sharpest edge, he chipped at the trunk of the tree: once, then again, over and over until the bark fragmented and fell to the ground. David thought that he felt the tree shudder, the way a person might if he had suddenly experienced a severe shock. The whiteness of the inner pulp turned to red, and what looked very much like blood began to seep from the wound, flowing down the channels and crevasses of the bark and dripping onto the ground beneath.

A voice said: “Don’t do that. The trees don’t like it.”

David turned. There was a man standing in the shadows a short distance from him. He was big and tall, with broad shoulders and short, dark hair. He wore brown boots of leather that came almost to his knees and a short coat made from skins and hides. His eyes were very green, so that he seemed almost like a part of the forest itself given human form. Over his right shoulder, he carried an ax.

David dropped the stone. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

The man regarded him silently. “No,” he said at last. “I don’t suppose you did.”

He advanced toward David, and the boy instinctively took a couple of steps back until he felt his hands graze the tree. Once again, it seemed to shiver beneath his touch, but the feeling was less pronounced than before, as though it were gradually recovering from the injury it had received and was certain now, in the presence of the approaching stranger, that no such hurt would be visited on it again. David was not so reassured by the man’s approach: he had an ax, the kind of ax that looked as if it could sever a head from a body.

Now that the man had emerged from the shadows, David was able to examine his face more closely. He thought that the man looked stern, but there was kindness there too, and the boy felt that here was someone who could be trusted. He began to relax a little, although he kept a wary eye on the big ax.

“Who are you?” said David.

“I might ask you the same question,” said the man. “These woods are in my care, and I have never seen you in them before. Still, in answer to you, I am the Woodsman. I have no other name, or none that matters.”

The Woodsman approached the burning airplane. The flames were dying down now, leaving the framework exposed. It looked like the skeleton of some great beast, abandoned to the fire after the roasted meat had been stripped from its bones. The gunner could no longer be seen clearly. He had become just another dark shape in a tangle of metal and machine parts. The Woodsman shook his head in wonder, then walked away from the wreckage and returned to David. He reached past the boy and laid his hand upon the trunk of the wounded tree. He looked closely at the damage David had inflicted upon it, then patted the tree as one might pat a horse or a dog. Kneeling down, he removed some moss from the nearby stones, which he packed into the hole.

“It’s all right, old fellow,” he said to the tree. “It will heal soon enough.”

Far above David’s head, the branches moved for a moment, even though all of the other trees remained still.

The Woodsman returned his attention to David. “And now,” he said, “it’s your turn. What is your name, and what are you doing here? This is no place for a boy to be wandering alone. Did you come in this…
thing
?”

He gestured toward the airplane.

“No, that followed after me. My name is David. I came through the tree trunk. There was a hole, but it disappeared. That was why I was chipping at the bark. I was hoping to cut my way back in, or at least to mark the tree so I would be able to find it again.”

“You came through the tree?” he asked. “From where did you come?”

“A garden,” said David. “There was a little gap in a corner, and I found a way through from there to here. I thought I heard my mother’s voice, and I followed it. Now the way back is gone.”

The Woodsman pointed again at the wreckage. “And how did you come to bring that with you?”

“There was fighting. It fell from the sky.”

If the Woodsman was surprised by this information, he didn’t show it.

“There is the body of a man inside,” said the Woodsman. “Did you know him?”

“He was the gunner, one of the crew. I’d never seen him before. He was a German.”

“He is dead now.”

The Woodsman touched his fingers to the tree once again, lightly tracing its surface as though hoping to find the telltale cracks of a doorway beneath his skin. “As you say, there is no longer a door here. You were right to try to mark this tree, though, even if your methods were clumsy.”

He reached into the folds of his jacket and removed a small ball of rough twine. He unraveled it until he was satisfied that he had the correct length, then tied it around the trunk of the tree. From a small leather bag he produced a gray, sticky substance that he smeared on the twine. It didn’t smell at all nice.

“It will keep the animals and birds from gnawing upon the rope,” explained the Woodsman. He picked up his ax. “You’d better come with me,” he said. “We’ll decide what to do with you tomorrow, but for now we need to get you to safety.”

David didn’t move. He could still smell blood and decay on the air, and now that he had seen the ax at close quarters, he thought he spotted drops of red along its length. There were red marks too on the man’s clothing.

“Excuse me,” he said, as innocently as he could, “but if you care for the woods, why do you need an ax?”

The Woodsman looked at David with what might almost have been amusement, as though he saw through the boy’s efforts to conceal his concerns yet was impressed by his guile nonetheless.

“The ax isn’t for the woods,” said the Woodsman. “It’s for the things that
live
in the woods.”

He raised his head and sniffed the air. He pointed the ax in the direction of the headless corpse. “You smelled it,” he said.

David nodded. “I saw it too. Did you do it?”

“I did.”

“It looked like a man, but it wasn’t.”

“No,” said the Woodsman. “Not a man. We can talk about it later. You have nothing to fear from me, but there are other creatures that we both have reason to fear. Come now. Their time is near, and the heat and the smell of burning flesh will draw them to this place.”

David, realizing that he had no other choice, followed the Woodsman. He was cold, and his slippers were damp, so the Woodsman gave him his jacket to wear and raised David up onto his back. It had been a long time since someone had carried David upon his back. He was too heavy for his father now, but the Woodsman did not appear troubled by the burden. They passed through the forest, the trees seeming to stretch endlessly before them. David tried to take in the new sights, but the Woodsman moved quickly and it was all David could do to hang on. Above their heads, the clouds briefly parted, and the moon was revealed. It was very red, like a great hole in the skin of the night. The Woodsman picked up the pace, his long steps eating up the forest floor.

“We must hurry,” he said. “They’ll be coming soon.”

And as he spoke, a great howling arose from the north, and the Woodsman began to run.

THE FOREST PASSED in a blur of gray and brown and fading winter green. Briars tore at the Woodsman’s jacket and the trousers of David’s pajamas, and on more than one occasion David had to duck down to prevent his face from being raked by high bushes. The howling had ceased, but the Woodsman had not slowed his pace, not for a moment. Neither did he speak, so David too stayed silent. He was frightened, though. He tried to look back over his shoulder once, but the effort almost caused him to lose his balance and he did not try again.

They were still in the depths of the forest when the Woodsman stopped and seemed to be listening. David almost asked him what was wrong but then thought better of it and remained quiet, trying to hear what it was that had caused the Woodsman to pause. He felt a prickling sensation at his neck as his hairs stood on end, and he was certain that they were being watched. Then, faintly, he heard a brushing of leaves to his right, and a snapping of twigs to his left. There was movement behind them, as though presences in the undergrowth were trying to close in on them as softly as possible.

“Hold on tight,” said the Woodsman. “Almost there.”

He sprinted to his right, leaving the easy ground and breaking through a thicket of ferns, and instantly David heard the woods erupt into noise behind them as the pursuit recommenced in earnest. A cut opened upon his hand, dripping blood onto the ground, and a large hole was ripped in his pajamas from the knee to the ankle. He lost a slipper, and the night air bit at his bare toes. His fingers ached with the cold and the effort of holding on tightly to the Woodsman, but he did not release his grip. They passed through another patch of bushes, and now they were on a rough trail that wound its way down a slope toward what looked like a garden beyond. David glanced behind him and thought he saw two pale orbs gleaming in the moonlight, and a patch of thick, gray fur.

“Don’t look back,” said the Woodsman. “Whatever you do, don’t look back.”

David faced forward again. He was terrified, and was now very sorry that he had followed the voice of his mother into this place. He was just a boy wearing pajamas, one slipper, and an old blue dressing gown under a stranger’s jacket, and he did not belong anywhere but in his own bedroom.

Now the trees were thinning, and David and the Woodsman emerged into a patch of lovingly tended land, sown with row upon row of vegetables. Before them stood the strangest cottage that David had ever seen, surrounded by a low wooden fence. The dwelling was built of logs hewn from the forest, with a door at the center, a window on either side, and a sloping roof with a stone chimney stack at one end, but that was where any resemblance to a normal cottage ended. Its silhouette against the night sky was like that of a hedgehog, for it was covered in spikes of wood and metal, where sharpened sticks and rods of iron had been inserted between, or through, the logs. As they drew closer, David could also make out pieces of glass and sharp stone in the walls and even on the roof, so that it shone in the moonlight as though sprinkled with diamonds. The windows were heavily barred, and great nails had been driven through the door from the inside, so that to fall heavily against it would be to risk instant impalement. This was not a cottage: this was a fortress.

They passed through the fence and were approaching the safety of the house when a form appeared from behind its walls and advanced toward them. It resembled a large wolf in shape, except that it wore an ornate shirt of white and gold on its upper body and bright red breeches on its lower half. And then, as David watched, it rose on its hind legs and stood like a man, and it became clear that this was more than an animal, for its ears were roughly human in shape, although tufted with points of hair at the tips, and its muzzle was shorter than a wolf’s. Its lips were drawn back from its fangs, and it growled at them in warning, but it was in its eyes that the struggle between wolf and man was clearest. These were not the eyes of an animal. They were cunning but also self-aware, and they were filled with hunger and desire.

Other similar creatures were now emerging from the forest, some wearing clothing, mostly tattered jackets and torn trousers, and they too rose up and stood on their hind legs, but there were many more who were just like ordinary wolves. They were smaller and stayed on all fours, and looked savage and unthinking to David. It was the ones who bore traces of men upon them that frightened David the most.

The Woodsman lowered David to the ground. “Stay close to me,” he said. “If anything happens, run for the cottage.”

He patted David on the lower back, and David felt something fall into the pocket of the jacket. As discreetly as he could, he allowed his hand to drift toward the pocket, trying to pretend it was the cold that made him seek its comfort. He put his hand inside and felt the shape of a large iron key. David closed his fist upon it and held it as though his very life depended on it, which, he was starting to realize, might very well have been the case.

The wolf-man by the house regarded David intently, and so terrifying was his gaze that David was forced to look to the ground, to the back of the Woodsman’s neck, anywhere but into those eyes that were both familiar and alien. The wolf-man touched a long claw to one of the spikes on the cottage’s walls, as though testing its power to harm, and then it spoke. Its voice was deep and low, and filled with spittle and growls, but David could clearly understand every word that it said.

“I see you have been busy, Woodsman,” it said. “You have been fortifying your lair.”

“The woods are changing,” the Woodsman replied. “There are strange creatures abroad.”

He shifted the ax in his hands in order to improve his grip upon it. If the wolf-man noticed the implicit threat, he did not show it. Instead he merely growled in agreement, as if he and the Woodsman were neighbors whose paths had crossed unexpectedly while walking in the woods.

“The whole land is changing,” said the wolf-man. “The old king can no longer control his kingdom.”

“I am not wise enough to judge such matters,” said the Woodsman. “I have never met the king, and he does not consult with me about the care of his realm.”