The Silent Forest

by Guy Sheppard

  ‘You wait,’ said Jo, wincing as she pulled on her cap and goggles. She’d forgotten her cut hand. ‘Bruno will be on the blower to me again in a minute bending my ear about not performing bloody miracles. You heard him. He thinks I’m not doing nearly enough to find Sarah’s alleged murderer, as if I should be his own private detective or something. It’s all bullshit.’

  ‘Yeah, he wants our help but won’t come clean.’

  ‘Not surprising since you were so nasty to him.’

  ‘Is that what you think?’

  ‘You as good as accused him of murdering his own wife, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘Is that so bad?’

  ‘….’

  ‘Okay, so I went too far.’

  ‘Susie was right about one thing, though.’

  ‘She was?’

  ‘Bruno was hoping for a threesome.’

  ‘In his dreams.’

  ‘He’s not necessarily all wrong. Sarah’s car could have been run off the road by a rival lover.’

  ‘You keep changing your tune, don’t you?’

  Jo looked hurt.

  ‘What? How do you mean?’

  ‘It’s not long ago you said her death was most likely an accident.’

  ‘I did say that, didn’t I.’

  ‘Both theories can’t be correct.’

  ‘What if they can? What if she was in such a hurry to get away from someone that she misjudged the bend in the road and crashed? What if she and her passenger argued about something?’

  John reached in desperation for a cigarette.

  ‘Now you’re really scaring me.’

  ‘The car was new to her and she might not have been wholly familiar with its steering. Nor was she, according to Bruno, a fast driver. So why speed in the blackout with masked headlights? There are no street lights in the Forest, but there is constant military traffic taking American troops to and from camps and rifle ranges. Not to mention the bulldozers and timber lorries that are working all hours of day and night felling trees. It’s a dangerous place for the best of drivers.’

  ‘My point exactly. So what do we do now?’

  ‘We go straight back to James Boreman’s factory in Lydney.’

  ‘I should say so. It’s about time we gathered more damning evidence of the flagrant abuse of workers’ rights?’

  ‘No, I need to pick up the newly chromed badge off my motorcycle.’

  THIRTY-SIX

  The closer Jim Wilde went to the abandoned pithead, the more his legs turned to lead. The best years of his life had been spent here, earning a reasonable living, until the day it nearly killed him. Since then he had convinced himself that it was not safe to descend into the adit alone ever again. He’d walked away for Freya’s sake twenty-six years ago, not long after she had entered this world. He was now seventy-two.

  Raising his daughter single-handedly had not been easy – nobody much had wanted to employ someone who was half-blind. No matter that tunnellers like him had once been afforded the greatest honours by medieval kings. Had not Edward I confirmed that the ‘customes and franchises’ of the miners had existed since ‘tyme out of mynde’? He’d given the Foresters special status to dig for minerals because their skills had enabled him to recapture Berwick-upon-Tweed in 1296 by undermining the city’s walls.

  His was quite a story. Most of the people he knew were employed in freemining, he reminded himself proudly as he picked his way over his pithead’s grass-covered remnants. He peered into the winching house, no more than a tin shack, to see where cobwebs and birds’ droppings coated its idle machinery. A cord strung on poles led to the coalface, somewhere out of sight down the slope behind him. The string worked a bell to control the movement of coal trucks in and out of the mine. One ring for STOP. Two for START. Three for ….

  He gave an involuntary shudder. He’d once tugged on that string for dear life. Cable drums, hawsers, lever brake, rails and coal trucks were all just as he had left them when he lost his eye. Even the tipper and its extendable chute looked ready to discharge the next lot of coal into sacks in the yard. He wasn’t bitter. His only regret was that he couldn’t help power the steam engines needed to keep Britain moving at this critical time.

  A rusty metal hawser stretched from roller to roller down the centre of the tramway he was treading. It had once hauled heavily loaded trucks from a hole in the hillside. Foxgloves grew here by the hundred in summer in a place largely invisible and secret. If you knew where to look you could find wild daffodils, too. Come winter, the flowers were long gone and even the grass and bracken were dying, which made it much easier to let the rotten wooden sleepers guide his feet through the dead weeds and leaves.

  Next, he struggled to unlock the heavy padlock on a metal gate which guarded another way underground.

  Was this honestly a good idea?

  What if it turned out to be true? What if someone really was down here? What would he say to that?

  But he had to do something.

  Immediately an overwhelming sense of cold, dank blackness closed over him. Total blindness ruled for a moment. He was all set to turn up the dial on his helmet and switch on its reserve lamp when he felt a wind hit his face.

  He knew that wind. The mine had been dug in a circle by Victorian workers to facilitate natural ventilation. Once upon a time a furnace had burned all day in the wall to draw fresh air through the labyrinthine workings; in very hot summers it had been a pleasant relief to feel the cool subterranean breeze on his cheeks this far from the sun.

  Yet today he could not but help feel that the icy blast was somehow unnatural. Not only was it cooled by cold rock deep underground, but it blew with a force that could have been driven by something living. The very lungs of the Earth heaved at him. His sightless eye began to throb. His feet slipped and slithered. It was as if he had never been into this adit before in his life. He wondered how it could be so, or if he was about to revisit his own terror.

  That unspoken reason for not returning.

  ‘Is this what happens when you bury your greatest dread for years,’ he wondered, ‘only to have it claw its way back to the surface of your mind?’

  Already the light at the mine’s entrance had shrunk to a small glow far behind him. It was like looking the wrong way through a telescope. This was the oldest part of the workings, predating his own modest efforts to hack out coal and for some reason the roof sagged low at this point. He had struck his helmet more than once on the stone ceiling with a loud clang. This ancient way into the hill was a minor work of art, however. Each stone pressed snugly against the other without mortar or cement whose unseen counter pressures kept it together like a vast Roman mosaic. Like a catacomb.

  With the continued rush of cold air came the gushing of water along the shallow channel beside his feet. He was treading the narrow ledge where pit ponies had once hauled coal, ready to load it into boats and barges at nearby Lydney Pill and Newnham. No animal would set off unless it was towing exactly the right number of wagons hooked together in the train behind it, so in tune were they with the demands of their daily toil. He’d nailed three rusty horseshoes, fished from the stream, to the tunnel wall as a reminder. He reckoned they had to be as old as 1840 or 1850.

  What with the bubbling water and the whistle in the wind, it was hard to say what else he was hearing; his overwrought imagination almost led him to believe it could be human voices.

  He couldn’t allow that.

  Every now and then his lamp lit up a bright, crimson rock face. That was because the Forest above him lay in a basin formed by carboniferous strata whose fields of black coal met red iron ore. But it was hard for a moment not to believe that these passageways were haemorrhaging real blood.

  ‘Okay, that’s enough crazy thoughts for now, Jim Wilde,’ he said sternly and lit himself a candle.

  He watched the wick’s flickering flame illuminate green slime on corrugated iron sheets that lined walls round eac
h corner, as he stood under the steel arches that kept up the roof. There was no ‘Blue Boy’, no methane, in this mine and so no risk of any explosion. Even after all these years the safety routine felt second nature to him.

  If the candle failed to burn, then he was in big trouble.

  He was testing for blackdamp.

  Should he fail to get up again within a few minutes after a fall he would almost certainly die, since carbon dioxide was so much heavier than air.

  But it was okay, the candle burned brightly in his hand – there was plenty of oxygen to breathe right now as he kept going forwards.

  Water dripped and air moved, otherwise the beam from the light on his helmet penetrated a dark stillness quite unknown on the surface.

  He frequently ducked this way and that as he put his ear to the passage ahead. The more pressing the absence of light, the greater the strangest of all possibilities – that he was not alone down here.

  His thoughts raced.

  His heart did the same.

  A mine as old as this was a living, breathing thing. Timbers were keyed in a certain way to enable them to ‘yield’ slightly under pressure without pushing out the opposite wall. But the longer he stood at this fork in the tramway, the longer he sensed other just as subtle murmurs.

  For it was also true to say that a mine like this had seen more than its fair share of the dead. He could run his fingers over rock once blown by black powder. But the only light available back then had been candles, not lamps. Sometimes a flame had sparked an explosion in miners’ faces with terrible results. Did those eyeless and lipless ghosts wait for him now, in the depths below?

  Was it they who silently screamed in this netherworld?

  Their sweat filled his nostrils?

  Their boots sounded in his ears as they shuffled towards him?

  Soon he began to fancy that the drip, drip, drip that seeped from the sandstone was the blood of these mutilated men from a hundred years ago. He could still touch the gouges left by their hammers and chisels in the walls.

  ‘It’s been a while,’ he thought nervously. ‘How shall I put it? Am I afraid of my own ghost?’

  In reality the adit was simply wetter and its drips noisier than he remembered, now that big mine towards Cinderford had finally closed. That was because a deep pit like that required so much pumping that it lowered the water level everywhere else quite drastically.

  Which way should he go? One tunnel curved steeply to his left, the other carried straight on. He breathed a sigh of relief – here, at least, there was room to stand straight under the ceiling.

  That’s when he truly heard them.

  Those awful whispers.

  Not close at hand. In fact, they had to be beyond reach down the track that dipped to his right.

  He immediately began to make his way past a stationary coal truck. More recollections flooded back. A fellow miner had once pushed a tub by its top instead of its coupling. He’d crushed his hands on the low ceiling. He’d had to let the truck run back to release his fingers. Lost his toes.

  It was the same with your elbows. If you weren’t careful you soon crushed them on the props that shored up the roof.

  But this danger was something else. The hairs rose on the back of his neck as he prepared to round the next bend on his way to the place where he had last cut coal.

  Someone or something hissed at him from the gloom.

  In an instant he was on his back in the side of the tunnel, years ago; he was lying in an undercut in thirty inches of coal as he chipped black slabs from a seam with his pick. The tap, tap, tap of his axe drummed in his head when he heard the jagged roof crack and crash against his skull. He had only managed to crawl out at all because he had already dug himself an escape hole that looped back to the main bore. That was the trouble with slicing into an adit’s side, all the pressures immediately wanted to seal the gap.

  Such forces rose from below not from above; it was contrary to logic, given the weight of rock over his head, but it was so.

  ‘I’ll just go a bit further,’ he told himself cautiously.

  For coal mines were not the only tunnels down here, he remembered. Many centuries ago, men digging for iron ore had exhausted all deposits near the surface. Then subsequent miners had dug deeper still to gouge out huge caverns hundreds of feet below. Now one labyrinthine set of workings sat on top of the other and acted as a soundboard to whatever else it was he could hear right now.

  The Earth itself could resorb its own sounds. Next minute whispers metamorphosed into snorts and growls. One snarl echoed another.

  He lifted his head and peered steadfastly into the baleful darkness.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  The snorts stopped, or rather they became by repetition and imitation the echo of his own fierce breathing.

  ‘My name is Jim Wilde. This is my mine. Show yourself, at once!’

  He squinted and peered past the light from his lamp when it lit eyes, nose, jaw…

  ‘What the devil!’

  Next minute he knocked his helmet askew as he tripped on something that lay on the rails. He should never have forgotten to duck his head to miss the post and sling in the roof. He was on the floor, confused. He gave a loud groan. Hard, cold tramway bent his back – he was too shaken to stand. That stupid stumble of his left him totally breathless; his chest tightened; he was badly winded.

  Then, from out of the black, impenetrable night a pair of red-rimmed eyes gleamed at him with a certain malevolence. Their owner towered over him, curious and calm, commanding his undivided attention, only to lose momentum – the ghastly threat changed to caution. That said, he made out a large head, white bristly hair and a powerful back that was humped or hunched in the confines of the tunnel.

  Whoever confronted him this far below the Forest jumped to his blindside. Not that he could stop him. Nor could he bend his left leg. A sharp pain hit his thigh, like the slash from a weapon. He cried out from the depths of his soul – he thought he might have snapped his hip in half when he fell.

  An odd noise confounded him as he felt dizzy.

  It had to be the grinding of teeth?

  Possibly.

  ‘Wait! Don’t you see? It’s me, Jim Wilde.’

  The shadow did not answer him, only stepped back behind its veil of darkness.

  But he felt stricken by his own predicament.

  He lay there unable to move.

  Damn it.

  His unwelcome companion was abandoning him to his own devices? It was neither a good act nor a dire one. Rather, there hung in the air a strange mixture of cruelty and indifference in the midst of mutual astonishment.

  Icy drops of water that dripped from the roof hit his face like the jabs of a knife. Each skin-bursting splash sent a shiver through his cramped body while, at the same time, he was breathing fast and already sweating. It was the pain. The awful pain.

  He did his best to straighten the lamp on his brow, after which he braced one hand against a metal rail.

  That blood-curdling scream was his own. He heard it carry for miles along the abandoned passageways to infinity, deep underground; he heard it die somewhere in the back of beyond. Like a pebble down a well. Cupped in his hand lay the head of a young woman. There was a gaping hole in her face where skin had peeled to reveal white skull beneath. Fingertips were absent from each hand as if they, too, had been devoured by sharp teeth.

  Or someone had done their best to erase her identity?

  Why?

  To hide it from people like him.

  Congealed flesh had the consistency of mud or clay. Then he realised. It was melted and burnt, but not by fire. That’s when an almighty blow hit him full in the face.

  After that, black nothing.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  No one had better disturb him while he sketches like crazy, thought Sam – he sits cross-legged on the floor with his back pressed hard against the bedroom door so that
no one can open it. His pencil hits paper and his pupils dilate, his breathing quickens and he feels butterflies in his stomach.

  His compulsion to draw stems from some unlit place deep within himself; it’s like trying to depict darkness itself.

  Each stroke of black lead is an investigation by experiment.

  He first traces snout and ears.

  Next he adds the outline of a massive head. Every pattern is a projection of the thing in the Forest and the thing in his thoughts – every heartfelt squiggle corresponds with something that must be recorded before it disappears into a barely discernible fancy or feeling.

  The instant he goes wrong he rips the page to pieces and begins again from the beginning. In no way must he neglect the beast’s muscular shoulders and haunches. Also, the arched back has to rise into a hump to throw the whole weight and force of the body forward. The neck, he knows, is short and inflexible while the broad nostrils are strong enough to bulldoze grassy or frozen ground.

  Well, that wasn’t so difficult, was it – he soon traces the legs quite well? He gives each foot two main toes enclosed in layers of horn. A third, much smaller toe projects from each hoof – he knows this from having studied the tracks left behind in the woodland’s muddy ground.

  Except it’s not that simple.

  His drawing looks hopelessly rough and unfinished; it’s at best a very crude portrayal of the Forest’s most mysterious inhabitant.

  In no way does the sketch capture its emotions.

  He should show, not tell.

  For what he wants is to summon forth a living creature from the grave. But how to convey its acute sense of smell? Its poor eyesight? It’s amazing hearing?

  Those pricked, forward-pointing ears have to quiver.

  The small, angry, reddish eyes must glow like deep, transparent garnets.

  He has better luck with the teeth.

  The lower canines make formidable weapons.

  His fingers work in a frenzy to capture the froth that foams from the creature’s jaws as it hones its bottom tusks against its upper ones to deadly points.