The Memory of Trees (21 page)

‘There,’ Pete said, lifting an arm and pointing a finger westward.

‘All I can see is grey,’ Curtis said, squinting into the distance.

‘It cleared for a moment. I saw something, Tom. I saw a smudge on the horizon in that direction. What else could it be?’

So it was they found their bush, a thousand metres westward of where it had been when it had surrendered a shotgun and a clutch of spent shells and no clue whatsoever as to what had happened to Saul Abercrombie’s to-do guy on the ground, the previous day.

They strapped on their harnesses. The metal cylinders containing the jellied petroleum were heavy. The throwers gave off an acrid, oily odour when they tested the flames and the blossoming of radiant heat was wince inducing, even triggering a fraction of the full throw they possessed.

The two men were where they had parked their vehicle, still a good hundred metres distant from the closest reach of their intended target. Curtis could not have articulated a reason for stopping so far short. It was instinctive, this caution. He’d seen the bush shiver and bristle in the gloaming a few evenings earlier. He’d seen Freemantle’s shotgun abandoned beside it. He couldn’t help noticing, with a clutch of dismay at his stomach, that it had grown substantially since his last encounter with it.

‘It’s fucking huge,’ Pete said.

It was. Its thorns from this distance had the cruel enormity of rhinoceros horns or the beak on a giant squid. They emerged from limbs as thick as a man’s torso and they glittered blackly against the green tangle of the bush itself. They were of a number impossible to count.

‘Let’s go,’ Curtis said. ‘Don’t get too close to it, Pete.’ His voice was no more than a murmur. His eyes were locked on the bush. He reckoned it to be twenty feet high at its centre and at least eighty feet across. It looked wary and malevolent in its dense and intricate coils. Worse than that, it looked somehow poised.

They walked towards the thorn bush. They were fifteen feet away when it began to shiver and hiss audibly and Curtis saw the limb-thick tendrils closest to them begin to convulse and uncoil and reach across the ground.

‘Now,’ he said. Twin spurts of orange fire burst and bellowed from their flame throwers, burning and blackening everything in the ferocity of a thousand withering degrees of heat.

The bush screamed. It rose and scrabbled in a frenzy of movement, Curtis thought, like some great arachnid creature as its limbs were turned to carbon. The two men walked forward, steadily, methodically, scorching and destroying the thing writhing and shrieking in front of them.

They stopped only when it was entirely reduced to ash. Pete lifted the visor of his helmet. He was sweating, breathing heavily. Curtis could feel the heat of the thrower’s hose barrel through his asbestos gloves. He could feel heat rise from the smouldering ground. There was a sweetish stench from where sap had boiled and bubbled out of the thorn limbs and then been blackened to cinder by the heat of the flames.

‘It was alive,’ Pete said.

‘Of course it was fucking alive,’ Curtis said.

‘I mean it was animate,’ Pete said. ‘Fucking thing screamed.’

‘Calm down,’ Curtis said.

‘I’ll have a beer tonight,’ Pete said. ‘Reckon I’ve earned it.’

‘You have a beer every night.’

‘Tonight’s is justified.’

‘I’ll join you,’ Curtis said, ‘but we’ve got Dora’s Cavern Club excursion to come before then.’

The mist was clearing from the coastline as Dora approached Puller’s Reach. A couple of times en route she glanced southwards, to where the map had told her Gibbet Mourning lay. But it was too far away for her to see the macho pyrotechnics she knew Curtis and his dopy sidekick were indulging in there. On a clear night, she might have seen a distant flicker of orange fire. On a grey day the view was opaque and diminished. Curtis had described the thorn bush though and it hadn’t sounded like the sort of protagonist you’d take on in the darkness.

That was why she’d been so intrigued to see it, really. He’d made it out to be hazardous in a way that seemed to manifest deliberate malice. Plants were not malicious. Even a Venus Fly Trap took no pleasure in what it did. It was just a mindless evolutionary novelty. Giving plant-life human qualities was stupid. Thorns were sometimes described as vicious, it was true. But that was really no more than linguistic laziness. The barbed growth at Gibbet Mourning had got to Curtis, had rattled and provoked him.

Now she was doing it. The provocation hadn’t been deliberate, had it? It couldn’t possibly have been. But he had been angered by the ugliness of the bush, by its squat density and size and by the grisly feathered trophies it unwittingly displayed. Destroying it had become a point of principle for him. She had never known him react so emotionally to a job as he was doing to the specifics of this one.

She was there. And there were three yew trees at the spot. She only became aware of this when she dismounted from the bike. The third yew, smaller than its fellows, had been hidden from her sightline on approach. It lay directly behind the yew Curtis had planted, equidistant between that and the edge of the cliff.

She got down on her hands and knees and examined the ground around its slender trunk, tracing the surface with her fingers and palms. It was not just unbroken but unblemished. The tree emerged from grass that would pale and wither and grow brittle in the future in its shade, but for now it was still healthy and undisturbed.

She stood and backed away from the small copse the trio of yews now amounted to. She sniffed salt air and looked out over the water, which had a glazed serenity under the seepage of sunlight the clearing mist allowed. She heard a snigger of laughter, as if at nature’s mysterious joke. And she realized that it wasn’t laughter but a trick of sound created as the wind whistled and soughed through the stones of the Puller’s Reach cairn.

She looked in that direction. And she saw that there was a figure standing still and watching her from beside the stone monument. She didn’t think it was the half-human interloper who had spooked Francesca Abercrombie in the small hours. The figure was slight, attired in a dark hooded shawl. Dora couldn’t see facial features – the hood concealed them. It was either an adolescent boy or it was a woman. She did not think that adolescent boys in rural Wales wore shawls.

Dora didn’t sense any danger. The descent to the shore was eighty or ninety feet. The drop was sheer. A lunatic could jump her in so remote a spot and send her toppling over the edge of the cliff to her death. But she was almost certainly physically stronger than the person in the shawl and she could not now be taken unawares. She approached the cairn. She felt only the impulse of curiosity in doing so.

‘Hello, Dora.’

‘You know my name.’

‘I know all your names.’

‘Then you have me at a disadvantage.’

‘Oh, the disadvantage is all mine,’ the woman said. She laughed.

She sounded quite young and completely relaxed to Dora, who had still not been able to make out her features, shadowed as they were by the hood. She’d thought the fabric black from a distance. This close, she saw that it was an intensely dark shade of green.

‘You’ll have to explain that remark.’

‘There’s some question over ownership, Dora. There’s a modern saying that possession is nine points of the law. Saul Abercrombie has possession, but this land will never belong to him.’

Dora didn’t think the saying sounded very modern at all. She thought it probably dated from property disputes at least as long ago as early Victorian times. She said, ‘You’re claiming an ancestral right to this domain?’

‘Historic,’ the woman said.

‘And you hate the idea of what we’re here to do?’

‘On the contrary, Dora, I love the idea of what you’re here to do. It’s utterly enchanting.’

‘Well, it will be,’ Dora said, glancing at the cairn, aware of having mentioned enchantment at that very place the evening before on first seeing it. ‘You lost your historic rights? Your title deeds were stolen or confiscated?’

‘We can’t right past wrongs, Dora. We can’t change history. No point dwelling on the past. We can only learn and try to profit from it. I think you of all people would appreciate that.’

Dora had certainly profited from history. Her family referred to her great-grandfather’s war service euphemistically as his European tour. He had brought back souvenirs from Paris and Moscow, paintings her father had sold at auction for spectacular prices in the fine art boom years of the eighties, in the period just before provenance started to become a problem for German collectors.

The money had changed their lives. She had been fourteen then. They had gone from living in a fairly modest Berlin apartment building to an estate with stables and a cherry orchard on the edge of the Black Forest. It was where her interest in what she did had first been sparked and formed her personal history but this woman couldn’t possibly be aware of it. Could she?

‘What’s your name?’

‘Amelia.’

‘It’s a lovely name.’

‘Yes, it is. By contrast Dora is an ugly name, but that matters little with you because its owner is quite beautiful.’

‘Thank you. Why are you here? I mean at this spot?’

‘I came to look at the yew trees.’

‘They’re a mystery, the way they’ve appeared to multiply.’

‘Regeneration is what nature does.’

Dora looked back towards the trees. ‘Yes, but I’m used to seeing that accomplished in less mysterious ways.’

Amelia took down her hood.

‘Goodness. And you call me beautiful.’

‘I want you to do something for me, Dora,’ Amelia said. ‘I want to ask of you a favour. It won’t compromise your work here in any way, but it’s important to me. And if you can help me, I’ll be a good friend to you in return. Please feel free to say no. If you can find it in your heart to say yes, however, I’ll be enormously grateful.’

Dora was mostly amused at the formal quality of this enigmatic little speech. But she was also intrigued. She liked adventures and she enjoyed surprises. She replied with an English phrase she’d heard but never used before. She said, ‘I’m all ears.’

There was an argument before their departure over guns. Since none of them was held legally, Curtis felt they should be left under lock and key in the armoury. He reasoned that their ownership was a crime compounded by carrying them around loaded with the possible intention of using them.

Saul Abercrombie disagreed. He said that since they had the guns, they might as well take them. If the creature Pete had heard in the cave was still there, they would inevitably corner it on their approach. It might become hostile and dangerous and if it did, the guns would be necessary.

‘We’ll be unschooled marksmen, firing off rounds in a confined space with the real danger of blue on blue hits and the hazard of bullets ricocheting anywhere off granite walls,’ Curtis said.

‘Except I’m not unschooled,’ Francesca said.

Dora said, ‘Neither am I.’

Abercrombie looked at Pete. He said, ‘Well?’

Pete looked at Curtis. ‘Sorry, chief,’ he said, ‘I’m all for arming ourselves. I’m with Saul on this. It’s just foolhardy not to, a total no-brainer.’

They travelled in two Land Rovers. Abercrombie judged the spot Pete had described to be about three miles inside the northern border of his land. When they reached terrain that looked like a giant golf links, Pete nodded, recognizing it. A few minutes after that they could smell the sea, then the shoreline came into view and they swung right along the strew of sand and pebbles parallel with the water.

They passed the cave entrance three times, backtracking laboriously, before Pete finally spotted it, crouching across the rear seats of the vehicle he was in with his head at the height it would be if he were seated astride his bike. In its oblique facet of rock, the entrance, even when visible, looked more like a shadow than an opening.

Each of them had a big Maglite torch, the sort that doubled as a club when used by police forces in America – heavily knurled metal housing long-life batteries and boasting a piercingly powerful beam.

They became silent as they progressed along the cave’s length. They crept more than they walked. They were on a shallow descent, Curtis realized. After five or six hundred metres they had descended far enough underground for his ears to pop. He listened for Pete Mariner’s flapping monster, but all he could hear was Saul Abercrombie’s breathing, shallow and laboured. He’d looked shit that morning, as Pete had rightly observed. He really shouldn’t have come.

Francesca said, ‘Can anyone smell anything?’

‘Only soot and petroleum from our two action heroes,’ Dora said. ‘They smell like a gas station forecourt on a hot day.’

‘You smoke too much to possess any sense of smell,’ Pete said.

‘And you should have showered, both of you.’

Abercrombie said, ‘All continentals, Dora, are obsessed with personal hygiene.’

To Curtis, despite his levity, Pete had sounded nervous.

Francesca said, ‘I can smell something. There’s a dead odour, like decomposition.’

‘You’re right,’ Dora said, after a pause.

A dozen more metres further on, the odour had become so sharp and pervasive that Curtis thought they all must be aware of it. His feet slid on something. He crouched and looked and Francesca banged into him from behind. He was almost tipped into the puddle of slime on the cave floor in front of him. Be thankful for small mercies, he thought. At least her bloody gun didn’t go off.

‘Ugh. Sorry. What is that stuff?’

‘It has the same viscosity as the mucus that comes off a slug. But it smells of the sea.’

‘A sea slug?’

‘There’s about a gallon of the stuff down there.’

‘Nothing’s that slimy,’ Pete said. He giggled. The giggle sounded nervous.

Francesca said, ‘Well, clearly something is.’

Pete said, ‘Dora’s Rottweiler.’

Curtis rose and they pressed on.

He began to think about Gregory, the warrior from Cornwall who came here to despatch monsters millennia ago. He didn’t know how much of the legend to believe. It bothered him that Francesca had described the account as a chronicle rather than a saga.