Darkest Part of the Woods (19 page)

the cupboard of anything unwelcome, but she wanted to discover if the hidden contents of the tree had made themselves apparent. She followed her fading shadow away from the house and unbolted the gate. As she pulled it open she raised the flashlight beam.

At first she saw only her breaths hovering above the grass, and then far too little else.

There was no trace of the tree except a flattened path through the grass. When she sent the beam rather less than steadily along it, the faintest edge of the light appeared to stir the nearest trees like the dim vanguard of a stealthily advancing multitude of bones.

She was feeling compelled to use the light to hold them still when Sam came to stand by her. His silence was almost as eloquent as the words he finally spoke.

"It looks as if it dragged itself back where it came from."

19

The Reconfiguration

A man was leading Heather and Sylvia by their hands into the depths of the forest. His chant was lost amid the uproar of the trees, a vast creaking chorus that sounded like their failure to pretend to be composed of wood, hardly a deception they could maintain while clutching in unison with the same repeated gesture at the sky, which was darker than any night she would have hoped to see.

Nevertheless there was light from the trees themselves, which appeared to be snaring from beyond the dark a glow too lurid to own up to any colour. The illumination focused on the object that rose from the earth in the midst of a clearing ahead. At first she thought it was the essence of the forest, though it was bare of branches and perfectly round, and then she saw it was a tower as cracked and stained as an old tree. The two windows that were visible were stuffed with soil. As the tower heaved itself up, or the ground sank to reveal more of it, the top window began to scatter earth down the scaly wall. Hands, or objects related to them, were groping into view. Her escorts urged her forward, calling out a name.

She didn't know whether she was wakened by her efforts to distinguish the denizen of the tower or to avoid seeing it. She only knew she was glad to be out of the dream and surrounded simply by the

dimness of her room-except that more than the dream had roused her. Something was at the window.

She heard its enormous irregular breaths as it fumbled for a way in. Her lungs were stiffening around her own held breath before she grasped what it was.

Strong winds had been forecast, but this was at least a gale. She mustn't be fully awake, because she heard it start to form itself into voices-Sam's and Sylvia's. She had to drag the quilt away from her face in order to convince herself that they were in the house.

A chill was waiting for her shoulders as she pushed herself up from the refuge of the bed and blinked in time with the colon of the bedside clock, which showed almost four in the morning. She located her slippers on the carpet by the bed and managed to insert her feet so as to stumble to the door. As she poked her hands into the twisted sleeves of her dressing-gown and captured the ends of the errant cord to tie it more or less at her waist, she heard Sylvia say

"And pretty soon the rest of her caught up."

Heather felt sly for easing the door ajar, but less so once she saw that while both Sam's and Sylvia's rooms were open, no light was to be seen. She paced onto the landing and caught sight of her son and her sister. They were at his window, beyond which the dim woods were in the throes of a convulsion. The gale conveyed their creaking, a distant version of the sound in her dream. She was nearly in Sam's room when the intent silhouettes turned, though only for a moment. "Yes, come and see, Heather," Sylvia murmured. "You don't want to miss this. They won't be the same woods when the sun comes up."

"Why won't they?" Heather demanded, feeling as if she hadn't left her dream.

"What will they be?"

"She means we've been watching the wind blow them down."

For an instant that felt like still being unable to waken, Heather wondered if Sylvia had indeed meant that or if Sam hoped she had. Then an onslaught shook the windows and she heard roof tiles smash nearby, and a second later the forest emitted an agonised creak. She couldn't judge which tree had fallen, although Sam and Sylvia were peering through the glass as if they could. "How long has that been happening?" she supposed she wanted to know.

"Hours at least. I guess we rather lost track of time, Sam."

"You're saying you've been up that long?"

"Sam didn't seem to mind."

Heather could see nothing in the violent gloomy antics of the trees to justify so much attention, let alone invading Sam's room, even if now she had done so herself. Another issue troubled her more, however. "What were you saying just before I came?" she said.

Sylvia hesitated. "You mightn't like to hear."

"I'd like it even less if I didn't hear it when it was in my house."

"It used to be my house too. I thought maybe it still was."

"You know it is, and your baby's, but shouldn't that mean you don't keep me in the dark?" That prompted her to add "Does anyone mind if I switch the light on?"

Another paroxysm shook the woods, and she appeared to glimpse the wake of the ferment racing across the common towards the houses. Nothing but the wind was in the grass, she told herself as she pressed the light-switch down. She saw the forest vanish into Sam's and Sylvia's reflections before they turned, blinking in unison. They looked so resentful she could have imagined she'd wakened them or interrupted them in the process of sharing a secret. "So enlighten me," she said.

The woods seemed to respond with a noise suggestive of an enormous rearrangement in the dark before Sylvia said "I was just telling Sam a story."

"In the dark?"

"That added to it, didn't it, Sam?"

He closed his eyes as though to relive some aspect of the experience while he muttered

"Must have."

"Why don't we find out how it lives up to a bit of light?"

"I ought to say I've Sam to thank for it."

"It was in the book he gave you for Christmas," Heather guessed. "A legend, then."

"More than that. There's a chapter on incidents that are too recent to be legends."

"I'd have thought the process was pretty fast like just about everything else these days."

"It was in the thirties." As if revising the sentence aloud, Sylvia said "It was in our woods. A woman got lost for nearly a week."

The window shuddered, and Heather seemed to glimpse the entire forest raising itself towards the black depths of the sky. "What kind of person could do that?" she objected.

"She had a reputation for being strange if that's what you mean. Some people thought she was crazy but most of them said she was some kind of witch because she kept being seen near our ruins, walking round them and talking to someone nobody else could see. You realise they believed in witches round here right up till when they started being scared of drugs instead.

I expect the stories about her were why nobody bothered searching for her."

"But you're saying she turned up."

"She came out on a Sunday. She was changed, wasn't she, Sam That was the part that got to you."

"She looked as if she'd been praying so hard," Sam said, "nobody could move her hands apart."

"She couldn't have lived very long, then, or did they feed her for the rest of her life?"

"There wasn't much of that. She wouldn't let anyone feed her, said Sam.

"Then I expect there wouldn't be," Heather retorted, irritated by his speaking so quietly he might have feared to be overheard.

"Not because she wouldn't eat. She wasn't much older than me but when she came out of the woods saying words nobody could understand her hands were an old woman's hands.

And when the rest of her caught up she died."

"I believe starving makes you look as if you've aged. And who knows what else she may have been up to in the woods," Heather immediately regretted having said.

"Sylvia and me won't be, don't worry. We'll make sure we're always out before dark."

Heather was thrown by his revealing her anxiety, not least to her. "I wouldn't mind if you didn't go at all."

"You don't have to be frightened, Heather," Sylvia said.

"I'm not. I should have thought if anyone was you might be after that tale."

"Why would you want me to be?"

"Of course I don't," Heather protested, though her feelings seemed increasingly hard to grasp. "But I can't help thinking you're in danger of becoming obsessed with the woods."

"It's like mom says, I need to come to terms. You'd understand if you'd been there."

Heather glimpsed the treetops straining themselves skyward in the tumultuous night and imagined how Sylvia would have needed to heave herself up from the earth. "Anyway," said Sylvia, "I'll have Sam to keep an eye on how I go."

"Are you sure you'll have time, Sam?"

"I will now. Andy says he doesn't need me or Dinah so many days at the shop."

"Sounds as if you should start looking for a better job."

"There's nothing wrong with it. I don't like letting people down."

"You can always tell me if you get bored with me in the woods," Sylvia said.

"I won't be. There'll be lots of stuff to see. There are things I wouldn't mind seeing again."

Heather wasn't about to ask what; she felt uneasy enough. "I'm going to try and catch up on my sleep," she said.

"I'll watch a while longer. I can from my room if you're ready for bed, Sam."

"You can stay if you want. I haven't finished watching." Heather tried to tell herself that wasn't further evidence of an obsession with the woods. Sylvia's might be understandable, but Sam's? Perhaps once she'd slept she would be better able to address that. "Turn out the light,"

Sylvia said as Heather reached the door, and she could find no justification for refusal that made sense. As she turned away she saw the treetops rise up as though to greet the silhouettes at the window.

20

The One That Called

A LEISTER Crowley, Peter Grace, Roland Franklyn and John Strong were among those who regarded Nathaniel Selcouth as the most far-seeing of their predecessors.

Joseph Curwen is known to have visited England in search of Selcouth's journals but failed to locate them. As a young man Selcouth travelled the world extensively and met both Paracelsus and Agrippa in the early stages of his research. Anecdotes suggest he was impatient with them and with John Dee, who later consulted him. Selcouth is said to have commented that none of his contemporaries dared gaze into the dark, let alone beyond it, even Count Magnus "de la Gardie", whom he attempted without success to meet in Sweden. He spoke openly of having participated in witches' sabbaths in Europe and of gaining insight into necromancy from a study of the Broucolack, the vampires of the Greek volcanic island Santorini.

While he was born in London and spent his youth there, on his eventual return to England he built his final dwelling in woodland between Bristol and Gloucester, on a site he had identified as the focus of powerful occult forces. The large high building was perfectly round, and he declared it "rooted in the earth as any tree". Its shape was designed to allow observation of every aspect of the woods. His plan for his mature years is said to have been to create a messenger or servant that would mediate between him and the limits of the universe, both physical and spiritual. A series of experiments was only partially successful. Sightings of the results in or near the neighbouring village led to his arrest for witchcraft, and necromancy was added to the charge when it was discovered that he had transported his mother's corpse from London, apparently hoping to revive it. He was executed in 1567, and the bravest of the villagers tore down the round house. He remains one of the most mysterious English occult pioneers. Record of his birth have proved untraceable, Selcouth being the name he adopted to signify himself.

The website called itself the International Foundation for Occult Research.

Heather didn't know if its initials were an attempt to make the organisation sound friendlier or an inadvertent sign of how humourless its members were. She was inclined to assume the latter given the credulity the anonymous writer appeared to take for granted.

Perhaps readers were expected to understand that the account didn't necessarily endorse Selcouth's beliefs, but Heather had her doubts. Nevertheless the site was helpful if it gave her an idea how Selcouth had become lodged in her father's head.

Lennox must have uncovered some hint of him while looking into the history of Goodmanswood. If that fell short of explaining why Selcouth had taken on such significance for him, at least it seemed clear that he'd communicated his obsession to his fellow patients a the Arbour. That wasn't all she'd hoped to learn by visiting the university this Sunday morning rather than wait to return to work in the new year, however. She'd wanted to find some way of confronting Sylvia with the morbidity of her obsession with the woods.

If Lennox had become aware of Selcouth here in the library, it would presumably have been in the occult section. Heather shut off the computer and ventured among the shelves, which cut off her echoes and shrank her footsteps. Such books as were indexed betrayed no trace of Selcouth, and her leafing through the others failed to reveal his presence either. If her father had found any reference in one of the volumes from the locked case-tomes originally restricted because of their content and then for their extreme rarity-she wasn't about to discover it. Not long after Lennox had been hospitalised, a Muslim student had been given access to the contents of the case, only to spray them with lighter fluid and set fire to them. Heather hadn't been sure how much she regretted the destruction of items she had never cared to open-the Necronomicon, the Revelations of Glaaki, De Vermis Mysteriis, and other tides as ominous-but she wished she had a chance to read them now, though perhaps not while she was on her own. The clunk of each book she returned to a shelf sounded wooden, while the smell of old paper reminded her of decaying vegetation. She couldn't pretend she wasn't glad to finish her search, even though it had turned up nothing. She collected her handbag from her desk and switched off the lights before locking the library and hastening down the shrill corridor.