Darkest Part of the Woods (5 page)

"Just drove," he said with a frown that looked oddly like a struggle to remember, "and walked."

"Did visiting your grandfather upset you, Sam?"

"Maybe."

He turned to gaze past her into the woods, ranks of trees marching backwards as if to reconfigure a secret pattern, though the depths of the forest appeared not to move. She refrained from disturbing him again until they were past the Arbour, where she glimpsed her father at his window, holding the curtains wide with both hands. Abruptly Sam muttered "He said you asked him something in the woods. You never told me what you found there."

Her answer hardly seemed worth the effort of recalling. "I'm sure I did. Just your grandfather and some of the others."

"And you helped bring them back, but did anything else happen?"

"I asked him a question, apparently."

"He says the answer's Selcouth."

"I've no idea what that means. I'll have to look it up."

She saw trees rear up in the mirror before shrinking under the sun; she saw a truck lurching from lane to lane beside them, although there was no wind. For a change the motorway came as a relief; it gave her more of a reason to concentrate and leave behind the glimpse of Lennox at his window. She sensed Sam's impatience, presumably with her speed-it could hardly have to do with the word she needed to research.

Beyond the city streets mined with children bound for school, the university brandished its towers at the graveyard crown of Mercy Hill. She drove past the campus into the dilapidated Victorian streets that had become the student quarter. As she wondered unhappily whether Sam would ever be able to walk without a limp they came in sight of Worlds Unlimited, and she gasped on his behalf. His colleagues were on the pavement outside the shop, and so was most of the glass of the window.

Blonde long-haired Andy trudged to the car. "Has much been taken?" Heather said.

"Just about nothing. They didn't even care enough for books to steal them."

"Chucked a few about and did some other things with them," Dinah said, wrinkling her nose, an action that involved her whole small oval face.

"Police been?" said Sam, climbing with some awkwardness out of the car.

"We've called them," Andy told him. "We can't clear up till they come in case there are prints."

"I'll leave you to it, shall I?" Heather felt a little guilty for saying. "I'll pick you up after work, Sam, if I don't see you there."

So now she had another worry to add to the pile, she thought as she drove off: whether he would be forced to quit this job before he found something more permanent. That took its place on top of the question of what he was going to do with his life, not to mention whether he shouldn't have decided that by now, though was any of the problem how she herself had clung to the first steady job she could find? These thoughts and a gang of their friends kept up with her as she parked the car and made her way across the sunlit frost-bleached campus.

The echoes of her footsteps dulled as she left the sandstone corridor. All the computer terminals on the library tables were showing fog. She dropped her handbag on her desk and headed for the reference section; though she could have looked the word up on the computer, she still preferred to hold a book.

selcouth (sel-couth) strange, marvellous, wonderful, [from OE seldan seldom, cuth known]

More than one dictionary said approximately this, but it didn't seem much help.

"Seldom known," she heard herself murmuring. She [45 bore the fattest dictionary away from a table back to its weight conscious relatives, then on an impulse continued down the aisle of shelves to find her father's book.

Lennox Price's The Mechanics of Delusion was leaning against a stout Freudian tome on a shelf higher than her head. She climbed down from a stumpy ladder and turned to the date label. Quite a few people had borrowed the book in the sixties and early seventies, when her father's research in the woods had made headlines, but since then the book had seldom left the shelf. It began with a history of popular delusions, brought up to date by an account of myths then prevalent about drugs. The bulk of it related fringe beliefs to ones more widely held and demonstrated their interdependence, while the final pages compared skepticism with the beliefs it sought to overturn and showed they were products of the same psychological mechanism.

The book reminded her how keen his mind used to be, and revived memories that distressed her-his bouts of walking up and down the house as though desperate to leave behind some intolerable contents of his brain, his sudden bursts of introverted mirth, his demands for absolute silence that might be expected to last for hours while he appeared to listen for some sound outside the house, his staring at toddler Sylvia as if he couldn't quite recognise her and must do so... Heather shelved The Mechanics of Delusion and made for the art books.

Two volumes were called just Margo Price, a catalogue of her London retrospective in the eighties and a coffee-table book representing her work up to five years ago. Since then she'd concentrated on carving sculptures from deadwood she found on the edge of the forest outside Goodmanswood-the construction of the bypass had provided her with plenty of material-but Heather liked her paintings best, one in particular. She lifted the catalogue down and rested its spine on the edge of a shelf. The glossy pages fell open at Margo's Arizona paintings, desert landscapes relieved only by solitary flowers under an almost shadowless sun. Heather turned pages until she reached The Light through the Thorns, the first canvas Margo had painted after committing Lennox to the Arbour.

It showed an arch of thorns so thickly entangled that only minute stars of light as spiky as the prickles managed to struggle through, but the longer one gazed at them, the more the thorns appeared to be partly an illusion. Did some of them rather consist of slivers of sky and a distant greenish horizon? When seven-year-old Heather had asked what was there her mother had told her it was whatever she could see. Perhaps the enigma helped explain why it was Margo's most reproduced painting, available as a poster, but sometimes it made Heather feel close to glimpsing a peace too profound to be expressed in words. Just now she seemed unable to grasp that impression. She returned the collection to the shelf and found herself heading for the folklore books.

Someone had replaced Sylvia's with the pages facing outward. Heather almost managed to suppress the thought that it was hiding like its author. Sylvia didn't need to stay home when Heather had chosen to, and it wasn't as if she didn't keep in touch, even if her letters had grown less frequent recently-none for months since a card from Mexico, where she was apparently researching a new book. Heather opened The Secret Woods: Sylvan Myths at random, to be confronted by a Chinese folk-tale about a boy who climbed trees in search of birds' eggs and found a nest of baby birds, headless yet alive. The image, or her reading it where she couldn't see most of the room, disturbed her more than made any sense.

Snorting with impatience at herself, she took the volume and her flock of echoes to her desk.

The book contained stories she liked, but she seemed to have forgotten where they were.

The preface pointed out that woods had been regarded as secret places ever since stories were recorded. They were the locations of many fairy tales, though the chapter on Germany opened with a Bavarian tradition that if you walked through certain forests at night with a baby on your back, by the time you emerged from the woods the child would have been replaced by something whose ancient voice would croak in your ear. As for America, here was a Burkittsville legend of a misshapen cottage said to have been visible from a woodland road-a cottage that shrank as travellers approached it, then grew as they tried to flee.

Heather looked up Britain and was met by a Derbyshire tale about a woodwose, a satyr that emerged from a wood on Midsummer Eve in the guise of some local youth, whose betrothed it then seduced. In other versions it appeared as a brother who bedded his sister or a father who did so to his daughter. Heather had begun to wonder why she was continuing to read-perhaps in an attempt to demonstrate that not all Sylvia's interests were so dark- when someone came into the room.

She was a sum young woman in denim dungarees and a black polo neck, with a large dilapidated canvas bag dangling from one shoulder. Perhaps she wasn't quite so young, to judge by the traces of grey that were apparent in her carelessly cropped reddish hair as she turned to close the door. "We aren't really open until nine," Heather said, but wasn't about to make an issue of it. She was leafing through The Secret Woods when she heard footsteps approach the counter.

"May I help?" she said, not quite looking up.

"Hey."

The voice was American. If the word was an answer, Heather didn't understand it.

The Secret Woods had just turned up a spread of fairy tales. She splayed one hand on the pages and glanced vainly about for a bookmark. "I'll be with you in just a few moments,"

she said.

"You've always been with me, Heather."

Heather raised her slow astonished head to see large dark eyes opening wide to her, thin pink lips growing pale with the vigour of their smile, a small snub nose widening its nostrils as if scenting her. She stood up so fast her chair struck Randall's desk with a clatter whose echoes sounded like the fall of a branch through a tangle of boughs. "Sylvia," she cried.

5

The Return

WHEN Heather raised the flap in the massive counter it seemed to have grown almost weightless. She might have imagined that the substance of the oak had been transformed if she hadn't realised her sister was lifting it too. As they embraced, it fell with a thud like the stroke of an axe, cueing a team of smaller blades among the shelves. Heather hugged her sister with a fierceness meant to counteract her not having recognised Sylvia at once-because of the accent, she told herself-only to feel the waist of Sylvia's dungarees collapse inwards. She wasn't much less thin than sticks. All Heather's years of big sisterhood surged over her, and she clutched Sylvia as if she might never again let her stray. At last she controlled herself enough to take Sylvia by the shoulders and gaze into her eyes, which appeared to be brimming with memories too. "What have you been doing to yourself?" Heather demanded.

Sylvia tilted her smiling head. "Do you mean with?"

"I mean to. What have you been eating, or haven't you?"

"There wasn't much choice for veggies in Mexico."

"You're still a herbivore, then."

"Still eating like a wild thing, right."

"I wish you were. We'll have to see you do."

"You're still my old sister sure enough." Sylvia stepped back, breaking her sister's hold, as echoes and Randall came into the library. "Listen, am I keeping you from work?"

"If you do I'll take the day off. I'll take however long we need to catch up.

Randall, this is my baby sister Sylvia."

"They must be delivering them fully grown these days," he remarked, then planted the back of his hand on his lips like a reproving slap while he cleared his throat. "Delightful to meet you."

"It's been years since she's been home," Heather told him. "I expect we won't stop talking while we've got any breath left."

He set his hoary bulging briefcase on his desk and scratched his eyebrows with a sandpapery sound. "I'll cover if you want to slip away. Our assistants should be here soon."

"Maybe we'll take a long lunch. You can sit with me now and we'll talk while I resurrect some old books, Sylvie."

"Sounds like magic."

"Which I'm guessing you still like."

"Ever since you used to read to me."

"We're both too old for stories, do you think? What I'm doing now is just technology."

Sylvia followed her behind the counter as Randall held up the flap, and then she pointed with all her fingers. "What are you doing with my book?"

"I was just glancing through it."

"For

what?"

"Nothing in particular," Heather said, surprised by the urgency of the question.

"I thought I'd read it since I hadn't for a while, that's all."

"You know what that means then, don't you?"

"I'm not sure I do."

"That you sensed I was coming, of course," Sylvia said, and trailed her fingertips across the tales of seduction in the woods before closing the book.

"Did you say you're going to resurrect it?"

"No, only because it isn't old enough. The books I'm putting on the computer are a lot older." Heather sat in front of the machine but didn't switch it on. "Do you mind if I ask..."

"Anything."

"You know I don't mean this in any nasty way, but what's brought you back so suddenly?"

"I never felt good about leaving you to cope. Maybe you looked after me so much when we were kids I ended up thinking of you as the caring one."

"I try to be. I don't complain much, do I, Randall?"

He looked away from his computer screen, his face red as if he'd been caught eavesdropping. "Never that I've noticed."

"He's being kind, but anyway we're talking about you, Sylvie."

"I guess I felt I ought to use how I'd learned to research at university, and maybe I wanted to write a book like dad."

"You're still apologising. All I asked was why you've come back now."

"I felt I was needed. Aren't I?"

"Don't wonder," Heather said, hugging her until she was rewarded with a bony embrace.

"I was thinking more of dad. You and mom wrote some of how he's been, but how is he now?"

"His mind's been more active these past few months."

"Are you pleased?"

"I meant he's been mostly disturbed. He's asked after you more than once."

"Maybe he sensed like you did I was planning to come home, or maybe he made me."

"If

either."

Sylvia looked disappointed for as long as it took her to blink. "How about mom?"

"She's doing well. She has an exhibition coming up in London. Haven't you been in touch?"

"Not since I got back to England yesterday. I wanted to see you first. We were always closest, weren't we?" Hardly waiting for Heather to smile at that, she said "Shall I call her now?"