Darkest Part of the Woods (3 page)

Heather was dismayed to find she couldn't breathe until he moved. He pushed himself away from the sill and twisted on the bed, swinging his legs across it, thumping the wall with his shoulders and perhaps with the back of his head.

Though Margo winced, he greeted them brightly enough. "Come and sit. Room for everyone."

Margo took Heather by the elbow to propel her forward as if overcoming some reluctance, Heather wasn't certain whose. When the doctor followed them, Lennox narrowed one eye at him. "You're not the family," he said, then shrugged, rubbing his shoulders against the wall, a? Dr Lowe shut himself in. "I guess you can't do much."

"It isn't like you to antagonise people," Margo said, stretching out a hand that stopped short of touching him. "You've always been polite."

"Frankie's the last thing you need to be nervous about. We're old friends, aren't we, doc?"

"I'd like to think so."

"He's going to up your medication if you don't behave yourself "Well, Mrs.

Price, I'm not sure I quite said-"

"That's okay, doc. Fine with me. I can use some sleep." Before Heather could decide if his sounding so American was intended as a joke, he patted the bed hard enough to make the mattress resonate.

"I'll start believing I'm not polite, sure enough, unless you all sit down," he said. "Let your momma have the chair and you sit next to me. Space on the bed for you too, doc, if you're joining the party."

"I'll stand if it won't disturb you."

"Takes a whole lot more than that. Maybe you've noticed." Heather sat within arm's length of him, though his vitality was somewhat disconcerting; she didn't know how long it might last or what its source might be. He grasped his knees to hitch himself around on the corner of the bed and gaze expectantly at her. "How are things shaping up?" he said.

"Much the same, which is fine."

"Is it?" He looked disappointed and then resigned, and seemed to feel bound to explain to the doctor "She's always been the cheerful one. Gets on with life and never complains." He cocked his head at Margo, who was sitting between and opposite them, her short legs drawn up beneath a chair with its back to the dressing-table mirror. "We haven't seen our grandson for a while, have we?"

"I'll tell Sam you were asking after him," Heather said, since Margo only shook her head. "I expect he'd like to come and visit if you want him to."

"Better do it soon," Lennox said, she wasn't sure to whom, then focused once more on her. "How are you making out at the university? You work there now, don't you?"

"I have for, oh, ages," she told him, not glancing at Margo in case that brought either of them to tears. "I'm in the historical archive now."

"I knew that," he said, remembering or convincing himself. "I could use a trip there.

Will that be all right, Frankie?"

"Let's see how you progress."

"Forget it. Nothing there I can't..." He turned to the window, beyond which insubstantial luminous shapes were scurrying up the trees across the bypass, and his movement released a faint musty smell that reminded Heather of the depths of the woods. "They can't have that book," he muttered.

"Tell me the title and I'll search for you," Heather offered.

He expelled a breath that, having misted the window, appeared to be absorbed by the woods, and then he peered at her faint reflection among the trees. "It'll turn up," he told her or himself, and raised his voice. "Did you see anything last night?"

The question made her feel oddly forgetful. "You and the people you took with you,"

she said, and felt as though she was reiterating Dr Lowe's version of events. "Why did you go out there?" she had to ask. "I don't think that's for you, Heather."

"I've had to cope with some things in my life," she protested, manufacturing a laugh.

"Let's see if I can cope with this."

"Don't feel slighted. Try not to think any less of yourself She resented his condescension, which she couldn't even grasp, and yet he sounded so like the father she hardly remembered having that she was unable to speak- She saw Margo sharing her feelings, and it was Dr Lowe who intervened.

"It's been coming for a while, hasn't it, Lennox?"

"You could say that. Why," Lennox said in what might have been genuine surprise and delight, "you did."

"I'm saying you've been growing restless for some time."

Lennox's enthusiasm faded. "More like ever since I was shut in here."

"It's been more apparent these last few months."

"Is that how long? Means more to you than me."

"Can you say what's been disturbing you?"

"Try looking in the trees."

"I know," Margo said, sounding determined as much as inspired. "You mean the people who lived in them to try to stop the bypass. Sam was one."

"When did you see them, dad? They were half a mile away up the road."

"They were on the radio, weren't they," Margo said, "and in the papers."

Lennox met Heather's reflected gaze, and his eyes seemed to glint from the dark of the woods. "Maybe you're the one who'll get it, Heather."

"They've been trying to build the bypass all year," she was prompted to say. "Was it just that they were taking some of your view?"

"Last night did you want to see they hadn't done too much damage?" Margo suggested.

Lennox crouched towards the window. Heather saw the woods brighten and grow insect-legged with shadows that merged with the depths steeped in fog and darkness as two pairs of headlamp, beams were dipped. "You've tired me enough now," he said. "Maybe I'll even sleep."

"We'll come and see you again soon," Margo said as Dr Lowe opened the door.

"And I expect Sam will," said Heather.

Lennox's reflection was swallowed by a blur composed of his breath and the woods. He spoke so low she had to strain to hear him. "Wait till it's all of us."

3

A Meeting in the Forest

The rotund crewcut boy halfway through his teens wore a T-shirt over a shirt over a sweater.

The T-shirt made it dear what he would ask before he did. First he wandered through the shop, using a finger and thumb to pluck from the shelves a very few paperbacks, at whose covers he gazed before turning them over as if that might transform them into something more attractive.

Having returned a last disappointment to its place and his hands to the pockets of his faded piebald jeans, he confronted Sam across the counter. "Got any Star Wars videos?"

"We don't sell videos, sorry."

"How about model kits?"

"Not those either."

"Comics?"

Sam was beginning to feel like one confronted with an unsympathetic audience.

"We're for books."

The angry rash at the corners of the boy's mouth appeared to drag them down.

"What's Worlds Unlimited supposed to mean, then? I don't see any Star Wars books."

"That's because you can buy those anywhere," Andy was anxious he should know.

"Can't be a sci-fi shop without them."

"We're more science fiction," Dinah told him as Andy winced at the abbreviation.

"And fantasy and even horror."

The boy was almost out of the shop when he delivered his verdict, "Old people's stuff."

Andy sat down at the coffee table between the counter and the shelves, so hard that the middle-aged armchair was audibly distressed, "Twenty-three," he said, sweeping a lock of blonde hair back from his lightly ruled high forehead and trapping all his tresses in a rubber band at the nape of his neck, "and ready for recycling."

"Gives me and Sam another year," said Dinah, pensively pinching the chin of her small oval face. "Seriously, maybe he just meant a lot of the writers are dead."

"Their books weren't last time I read them."

Sam was about to concur when Andy, as he often had when the) were at university and indeed at school, switched positions. "Anyway there goes someone else who didn't buy a book."

"Quite a few have today," Sam pointed out.

"Less than half. We're selling more on the net than we do over the counter. Most of my dad's collection has gone."

Sam had discovered that local jobs of any worth and permanence were hard for even English literature graduates to find, but he said "Say if you can't afford me any more."

"I need you both. Imagine me sitting in here all day with nobody to talk to about books."

"That's what the customers want with their coffee." Sam heard himself making Dinah redundant too, and changed the subject hastily. "You were saying last night I could go early to visit my grandfather."

"I hadn't forgotten. The hash hasn't screwed up my memory yet. Go ahead."

Sam fetched his ankle-length Oxfam overcoat from the less than horizontal row of hooks outside the dauntingly basic toilet, and was limping streetward when Dinah turned from arranging magazines in the window. "I haven't had a chance to say sorry, Sam."

"I didn't think you needed to."

"I was wrong last night. You couldn't have done any more to stop them cutting down the trees when you were hurt. It's not as if I did anything at all. I expect I would have if I'd known you then."

Until last night Sam had assumed she and Andy were living together. Though she lived in the same faded Victorian house, Andy was sharing his bed with a man.

Sam had been the only one to decline Andy's Moroccan hashish pipe, which had provoked Dinah to suggest that his having abandoned the protest had been another failure of nerve. He'd already gathered that arguing was her way of getting close to people, but he hadn't said much in his own defence, because he felt that in some way he'd broken faith with the woods. "Wish you had," he told Dinah awkwardly, and made his escape from the shop.

His green Volkswagen was parked on rubbly ground behind Worlds Unlimited and a takeaway whose rear emitted fumes and an outburst of Cantonese chatter. Having indulged in a fit of coughing, the car found its way out between two Victorian family houses that seemed to be competing over how many students they could accommodate. In less than a minute he was passing the university, where the students crossing the lawns already looked young to him. He remembered feeling unengaged last year by anything he read or wrote, however much his work pleased his tutors, as if some unidentified aspect of him had yet to be enlivened. His vigil at the edge of the woods had seemed potentially far-more fulfilling-still did, so that he had to remind himself that he was on his way to visit his grandfather, not the woods.

Ten minutes took him out of Brichester and along the motorway to the bypass, beyond which the woods appeared to bristle with stillness beneath a stretch of low white clouds that resembled an elaborate skeleton the length of the horizon.

The trees extended shadows to finger the car as he sped through the gap in the safety barrier and across the bypass to the Arbour. A shiver overtook him, though the afternoon was hot enough for several patients and two male nurses to be sitting in the grounds. One patient was lying on a recliner midway between the hospital and the gates. As Sam cruised past he saw it was his grandfather.

Sam parked between a Bentley and a minibus and hobbled across the grass. He wasn't sure if Lennox was asleep; his eyes might be shut or only nearly. His right arm was propped on its elbow, while the hand seemed to be mimicking the shape of a tree across the road. Sam tiptoed lopsidedly to gaze down at the long slack wrinkled face, and was disconcerted to imagine that he was seeing himself in his seventies. At that moment Lennox squeezed his lips together at the pain of flexing his upheld hand, and his eyes flickered open. Though he seemed to be peering past Sam, he murmured, "It's Sam, isn't it? You look uncomfortable."

Sam hoped that referred to his injury. "Just my ankle," he said.

"Here's a place." Lennox sat abruptly up and patted the recliner. "So you won't have been getting about too much with that."

"I should have been coming to see you more often before."

"So long as it counts now," Lennox said, half turning his head away from the woods as Sam sat beside him. "Care to start off with a promise?"

Sam found his directness as unsettling as the proposal, but felt bound to say "If you like."

"Answer me a question when I ask it and I'll tell you some things."

"Go ahead." When Lennox only cocked his head towards the woods as though listening, Sam had to assume he was meant to prompt him. "How are you?" was the most he felt able to risk.

"Conscious."

"Well, good." He hoped to be able to leave it at that, but Lennox gazed in open disappointment at him. "Isn't it?" Sam said.

"Of what should be the question."

"Of

what?"

"Of the dark there wouldn't be any light without. The dark that's above all this and under it too." As though the relevance ought to be obvious he added "Do you use drugs?"

"I tried pot the first year I was at university. Too scary for me."

"What

scared

you?"

"Felt as if I might see things I wouldn't be able to handle."

"Once you see you go on seeing."

Sam took that for agreement, and felt he had to respond. "You mean since you touched that stuff in the woods."

"Most of forty years." Lennox met Sam's dismay at this with a wry grin. "Tell me what you think you know about it," he said.

"You came to England to research it. You were, you're an authority on mass hallucination. You taught courses on the psychology of popular delusion."

"Sounds like I must have been damn sure of myself."

"You wrote a book about it. If you haven't got a copy here I can bring you one."

"I'm touched. I'll be telling Heather she should be proud of how she brought you up, or you can tell her yourself, but don't waste your time with that book." Lennox cocked his head at a wryer angle still and said "Remind me what I was up to in your town."

"A professor at the university read your book and wrote to you about all the stuff people were seeing in the woods. And then didn't he die, so you got his job as well?"

"Are we talking about old Longman? That's who brought me, sure enough. What did everyone think I was doing here again?"