The Silent Forest

by Guy Sheppard

  ‘For fuck’s sake Thibaut, it’s just a few burns.’

  ‘Please, Mr Devaney, he needs an ambulance. He should go to hospital.’

  ‘You can’t be serious.’

  ‘What else is there?’

  ‘Plaster him with more lanolin.’

  ‘What if his wounds get infected? We don’t have any bandages.’

  ‘Then use newspaper.’

  ‘I beg you, Mr Devaney, you’re a sensible man. Summon someone on your radio or drive me to the nearest phone box.’

  ‘You know you’re not allowed to make any calls. Boss’s orders. That goes for you, too, Nora.’

  ‘That can’t be right – Raoul needs proper help.’

  ‘Remember what happened to Angela. You all saw her dip her tea mug in that tank before anyone could lift a finger to stop her. God knows why she did it. As if a bit of hard work ever hurt anyone! Now it’s as though she never existed. Like her, you are no one and nothing. You work for Mr Boreman and he owns you. Right? So keep your mouths well and truly zipped.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Devaney.’

  ‘Good, because I have to go now. Give Raoul plenty of Anadin and water to drink.’

  John signalled madly to Jo to rejoin him. Next minute, Devaney emerged from the caravan in a hurry, looking pale. He came down the steps and strode across the ice-covered yard, all the while sucking hard on his Bakelite pipe.

  ‘We should go,’ said Jo. ‘You were right. There is an Alsatian. It’s in the big trailer.’

  ‘What else did you see?’

  ‘Devaney may be living deep in the Forest but his home is all Persian rugs, cushions and even antique clocks. What are the odds that they’re stolen from bombed-out houses? He’s been robbing the dead, I reckon.’

  ‘That burnt worker we saw is seriously hurt. We should call for an ambulance.’

  ‘Now might not be the right time.’

  ‘From what I heard, he’s in agony.’

  ‘Tough call John, I admit, but Bruno is still saying his wife was murdered.’

  ‘I’m not forgetting. Actually I do believe it could be connected to James Boreman.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘I heard Devaney refer to someone called Angela. It seems she committed suicide. If so, James may be prepared to risk everything to cover his tracks, after all?’

  They beat a white, frosty path back to motorcycle and sidecar.

  ‘Well, we have something,’ said Jo, ‘even if it is something we didn’t expect.’

  ‘So what do we do next?’

  She lowered her goggles over her eyes.

  ‘We stick to Sarah. Who was the mystery last person she spoke to before her ‘accident’?’

  ‘You do know we have a cathedral to run, don’t you? We have to get ready for the Christmas Coffee Concert in aid of the choir on the 2nd of December.’

  ‘I’m sure it’ll be fine.’

  TWENTY-NINE

  Each gut-wrenching bump along the Forest trail shook Jo to the core, as she banged about behind her motorcycle’s pitching handlebars. The sooner they got away from here the better. There was no knowing if it was the scene they had just witnessed at the squalid caravan site that unnerved her so, or something else – she could only say that she was conscious of perceiving, or seeming to perceive, some other danger in the night.

  Next moment a stag broke cover to cross the track right in front of her. Its nostrils blew frosty whispers in the freezing air.

  The Brough Superior skidded downhill when she slammed on its brakes.

  ‘Christ, that was close.’

  John peered after the animal’s white rump as it bounded left and right among the pines.

  ‘Did you see its eyes?’

  ‘They were electric.’

  ‘I think we startled it.’

  ‘No, something else did.’

  What could she say? It didn’t make any sense. Her ribs were aching. Her stomach was heaving. Most of all her heart raced like a steam train.

  The Forest didn’t look any different.

  Not in that way.

  But she’d begun to feel differently about it. This time of year the stags battled for access to the does to mate. You often heard them bellowing and making fearsome grunts.

  But that other fear just now re-entered her soul.

  They were not only being observed but tracked?

  Don’t be ridiculous.

  She didn’t know any more.

  Did she hear that?

  She wasn’t sure. Whatever it was – this odd sensation – it wasn’t going away. It was so easy to feel stalked in a dark forest by some brooding, portentous presence. Something other than a stag was crashing through the Forest and pounding a parallel trail. Broken bracken shed showers of ice to indicate its otherwise invisible progress.

  ‘I really need to take the blackout tape off our headlamp to see better.’

  ‘What we need, Jo, is a jeep.’

  ‘Was this track really this bad when we drove it before?’

  Everything was thumps and bangs from the combination’s suspension. She feared grounding the sidecar on an icy rut at any minute.

  ‘Can’t be that far now to the main road,’ said John, holding onto his hat.

  ‘Don’t you get what I’m saying? I’m sure we’ve taken a wrong turn.’

  ‘I’m damned if I can see the wood for the trees.’

  ‘Oh drat.’

  ‘Maybe that stag was trying to tell us something.’

  Jo hit the brakes and performed an abrupt about-turn in a muddy clearing. Back at a snowy crossroads, they drove a different trail.

  ‘You’re right, John, it is all about seeing the wood for the trees. That goes for Sarah especially.’

  John clung madly to dog and sidecar.

  ‘Sorry, you’ve lost me.’

  ‘We can’t presume her death wasn’t an accident.’

  ‘Now you tell me.’

  ‘No, honestly, it might have been…’

  Jo broke off abruptly. Her driving mirror had lit up with light. She could disregard the chance proximity of some sort of truck behind her, but not such a persistent dazzle. This was phosphorescent. She was completely distracted. Her breathing quickened as her eyes burned in their sockets.

  ‘What the hell!’

  John gripped the sidecar’s mudguard and turning his body half way round, he tried desperately to see who was tailgating them.

  ‘They can’t be serious.’

  Jo came to the end of the tree-lined track in a slew of mud and pinecones. Sure enough, headlamps blazed again the moment both vehicles hit the paved road. One thought especially rushed through her head: those hostile lights should have been masked like hers. Too late now. Whoever was chasing them was just getting going.

  Ear-splitting blasts of the lorry’s hooter rent the air.

  ‘What are they hoping for?’

  John hugged Bella tighter on his lap.

  ‘They want to cut us off before the next bend.’

  ‘I believe you.’

  ‘Go faster!’

  ‘I can’t. That last lot of fuel I bought is rubbish. Full of grit. It’s a waste of my petrol coupons. Not enough fuel is getting through the carburettor.’

  ‘They could be just another very bad driver?’

  ‘Not to me they’re not.’

  Sweat broke out all over her body. There was no way she was going to let this idiot of a driver push them into the ditch. She leaned lower as she positively willed the Brough Superior through the next twist in the road, but she couldn’t reach full power. She could hear pinking and knocking as they ascended the hill. Really, the engine needed decarbonising. John threw his weight left and right to help them corner. A railway line appeared alongside them and then ran into a tunnel – otherwise trees crowded the verge with nowhere to go. Still their pursuers kept close to the motorcycle’s back wheel. They sped after them despite th
e B road’s increasingly severe, serpentine curves.

  Bella reacted to this human fun and games by doing what she always did – that’s to say, she flattened her ears and bared her teeth. It was not a pet’s prerogative to criticise her betters, but it did seem to her that some people could be guaranteed to get themselves into awkward scrapes. And they said a dog should always be kept on the lead in public.

  ‘Now what?’ cried Jo.

  John looked back again, aghast.

  ‘They’re still flashing their headlights like crazy.’

  ‘Someone must have seen us leave the caravan site, all right. They must have followed us through the Forest. Now they’re trying to scare the shit out of us, or worse.’

  ‘Look out,’ cried John. ‘They’re pulling round us.’

  ‘Right on the bend?’

  Jo gave a shriek as the truck driver drew level with her motorcycle’s front wheel. A blank, fixed smile creased his lips when he glanced her way.

  John squirmed in his seat.

  ‘He’ll push us into these trees if he doesn’t watch out.’

  The ugly throbbing grew to a drumbeat in Jo’s head and everything turned into a perilous blur.

  How much longer could this go on? John was her only friend; she couldn’t let anything happen to him, or Bella.

  Side by side with them, the lorry kept coming within inches of the Brough’s handlebars. John hung out the sidecar again to help steer through the next corner.

  ‘Damn it, he’ll wreck us all.’ Jo glanced through her goggles at the juggernaut’s cab in which a thin-faced, grey-haired driver clung like crazy to his steering wheel. The long sideburns, the thin moustache, the slightly built arms and shoulders suggested, if not some maniac then a very impatient man. She didn’t know the half of it. Or did she? That had to be someone she knew?

  Next minute the Vulcan 5 ton, dropside truck had gained a slight lead. Its driver worked its Gardner 4LK diesel engine very hard. He kept up his attack yard by yard in small advances while resuming ear-splitting blasts on his horn. The very road swayed to and fro at each squeal of a wheel.

  And so they entered the next hairpin bend neck and neck, but not before he squeezed past.

  ‘Thank God, he’s leaving us behind,’ said John, rolling his sore neck in his hand.

  Seconds later they saw why. A US army jeep tore past them in the opposite direction with an urgent wail of its horn.

  Jo eased her grip on the Brough’s throttle, aware of the steep bank down which they had been about to plunge.

  ‘Wow, that was scary.’

  ‘Was the truck driver at the caravan site, do you think?’

  ‘Like to think not. Our road hog has the luck of the Devil, though. Had that jeep not come along just at the right moment he would have pushed us off the road for sure.’

  ‘But what if he did recognise us? What if he tells Boreman?’

  ‘What matters is that I’ve seen both lorry and driver before.’

  ‘You have?’

  ‘I should say so. Its rear number plate is broken but has 442 on it. That’s the same truck Sarah took so much trouble to photograph in the Forest.’

  ‘You saying we were about to suffer the same fate as her?’

  ‘Tell me I’m wrong.’

  THIRTY

  Nothing Sam saw quite explained that curious whispering that hung in the trees. Each murmur spat, hissed and rattled at him from dark branches. It wasn’t just the falling snowflakes. His ears imbued the gloomy silence with language, but what could be better than a walk through the Forest with his grandfather while the old man explained its secret ways? Any other child his age might have been frightened, but Jim Wilde knew a lot of good things. He was so easy to listen to, unlike other people. That’s how he saw it anyway.

  Right now they were following the course of an old tramway that led to a hole in the side of the hill. They trod the square stone blocks that once supported the rails – they hopped from one to the other like stepping stones as they imagined wagons of freshly dug coal being hauled along by tough little ponies a hundred years ago.

  ‘Tell me again about the magic boar, granddad.’

  Jim Wilde sat down on a log to rest his weary legs at the mine’s barricaded entrance. He scratched his long white hair somewhat thoughtfully. Many a day he sat here eating his lunch and watching snakes sunbathe on the rails as he remembered his time in the underground workings. This part of the Forest in particular was honeycombed with abandoned adits. Where anyone else might hear nothing, he detected the slightest cracks of post and sling, or the faintest creaks from the wooden chocks supporting a tunnel’s roof. Occasionally he envisaged legions of dead men toiling forever in their very own kingdom of inky darkness not far beneath his feet; sometimes he made out the sound of tapping and shovelling.

  By comparison with Hades, a tale or two about wild boars was nothing.

  ‘Well Sam, in Irish folklore you could ride a wild pig from this world to the next and return unharmed.’

  Sam dipped his toe in a stream that gushed from the coal mine like a small river.

  ‘Is that where uncle Simon went when he got blown up by a bomb?’

  ‘I like to think so. Anyway, as I was saying, even swine herders were considered magicians. Once upon a time the lord of the otherworld was depicted with a pig on his shoulder. Druids and Wiccan still worship wild boar as the protector and giver of plenty. Sometimes when the Celts buried a loved one they placed boar bones in their grave.’

  ‘If only I had a boar of my own,’ said Sam, with a sigh. ‘Then things might be different.’

  Jim Wilde dipped his face to his grandson with a smile because he did not want to frighten him with any overt look of concern. Once alarmed, the boy became totally unmanageable – he would retreat into himself. He’d buzz like a bee if disturbed. Always.

  ‘Then you would be like the reborn son of the Welsh goddess Cerridwen.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘People called her The White Lady of Inspiration and Death. Her son Taliesin rode a wild boar. Like the Roman Diana. Like the Norse goddess Freya.’

  That rushing water that flowed past his feet suddenly grew louder, Sam realised. The stream was coming from deep, deep in the Earth, from its most hidden places; its feverish bubbling filled his ears with cries, moans and mysterious laughter. It was not unlike those whispers he’d heard high in the trees a moment ago.

  ‘Freya, as in my mother?’

  ‘Your grandmother and I chose that name because Freya belongs to the Vanir. They were gods and goddesses who represented forests and other untamed places, animals and secret realms. What do you think of that?’

  ‘I think it’s very cool.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear you say it.’

  It was also true that Freya was a goddess of wild love-making. No man could resist her advances when she was wearing her magic necklace called the Brisingamen. This piece of enchanted jewellery had been made for her by four dwarves. As repayment she was honour-bound to spend a night with each of them. None of this was very suitable for a ten-year-old boy’s tender ears, however, so he kept that part of the story to himself.

  But his daughter had cast a spell on James Boreman all right, thought Jim Wilde. There were other dangerous parallels, too. Although the Norse goddess loved many people, she refused to desert her husband. Even when she discovered that he had become an ugly sea monster, she stayed at his side and became enraged with the gods when he was murdered.

  Again, he said none of that to Sam.

  Instead he winked.

  ‘Freya had a magic cloak made of feathers which meant she could fly. She could shape-shift into a bird and go anywhere she wished. Isn’t that cool, too?’

  Sam turned to the mine and shook its flimsy metal gate. Beyond the bars, night drank up the day inside the rocky tunnel. It was a special kind of blackness, profound, absolute. He imagined it might lead to hell.

&nbs
p; ‘You don’t know anything, granddad. You’re making it all up.’

  Jim Wilde flexed his arthritic knee.

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘No one can ride a wild boar. They’re too savage.’

  ‘Not to say bristly. But Freya did. Her boar’s name was Hildisvini. It means battle swine. She also rode a chariot hauled by two blue cats given to her by Thor, but that’s another story.’

  ‘I wish my mother was a real goddess. Then we could fly away together.’

  Jim Wilde wished the same, but Freya would never leave James Boreman, not unless she could rescue her son as well. In that respect she was as stubbornly loyal as her namesake, though he very much doubted if she would shed tears of gold should her husband ever be hacked to pieces.

  He had never liked James Boreman. That man’s obsessive passion for his daughter had cast a long shadow over them all. And he was far too old for her. It was hard to say who had bewitched whom.

  ‘Better get going now, Sam.’

  ‘But you said you’d take me down the mine today.’

  ‘We’ll do that another time. Besides, I don’t have the key on me to unlock the gate right now.’

  ‘But it’s already open.’

  ‘No way! That’s not possible.’

  Jim Wilde hobbled over to the mine’s entrance and tugged at its padlock. Sure enough it fell apart in his hand. A rusty spade lay at his feet – someone had used its metal blade to strike hook from hasp.

  ‘Maybe that’s a good sign,’ said Sam. ‘Maybe one of those supernatural boars has come up from the underworld?’

  But Jim Wilde was staring speechlessly into the adit. He literally had the impression that someone was down there at this very moment. That voice of icy cold water that exited from deep underground just grew more urgent; he tried to hear it all the way to the centre of the Earth.

  ‘There must be some mistake,’ he said firmly and clamped one hand on Sam’s shoulder. ‘Come away at once. It’s not safe.’

  ‘I say we investigate.’

  ‘Why?’