Shock Forest and other magical stories

by Margaret Mahy

  Trees again, but growing now, not burning. These trees reached forward to brush their faces with new bending twigs and young leaves. These trees welcomed them.

  “Our seeds!” exclaimed Tara. “These are our seeds. That’s a cabbage tree, and I remember pushing cabbage-tree seeds into the dirt just there, I told them to grow, and they are growing. That’s the tree my seed grew into.”

  Together they stepped into a future forest. The air was softened with fine rain… nothing much more than a mist… smelling of wet leaves and soil and ferns. The trees went on and on and on.

  “But we didn’t plant all these,” Tara said, sounding puzzled.

  “We will, though,” Eddie cried, sure he was right. “We’ll plant more tomorrow. Shock Forest is starting all over again.”

  Red light flowed towards them. They had come to a boundary between the green, growing forest of the future and the burning trees of the past. And there, on the boundary between growing and burning, sitting in her large, carved chair, was Great-Aunt Isobel Shock. Time was her sitting room now. The stiff, springy hair that stood out around her face blazed angrily, yet Isobel Shock was shivering.

  “I burned them!” she cried. Her teeth chattered, chopping the words short. “They hate me. They hold me.”

  “Who?” asked Eddie, amazed.

  “The trees hate me,” she said. Tears, reflecting the flames, ran down her cheeks in smouldering lines.

  “We were going to make a farm. We were going to live happily ever after. Why not? I know the Maori people said it was tapu and that no one should touch it, but land is meant to be used. And then – and then the forest bewitched Toby. He’d walk among the trees, and come back happy. I wouldn’t walk with him. Why should I learn to love the trees? That land they were growing on was meant to be our farm. But, at last, one dry, summer day when Toby was in town and the wind was blowing towards the sea, I did go into the forest… went into the forest carrying paper and petrol and matches. The trees whispered to me, but I wouldn’t listen. Not me! I crumpled the paper… piled the sticks… poured the petrol. ‘Tssst!’ went the match. The forest burned and burned and burned. It turned to ashes. Toby drove up, and, as we stood side by side watching it burn, I felt something inside Toby turning to ashes, too.”

  She fell silent.

  “What happened after that?” asked Eddie.

  “After that?” said Great-Aunt Isobel. “Nothing happened except that we grew older. The forest is still burning. Our farm never thrived. Toby died.”

  Her voice was growing fainter.

  “I can hear his voice calling my name, but the forest is holding me.”

  Then, suddenly, she began to burn all over, twitching and twisting in the embrace of the fire.

  Tara caught Eddie’s arm and they ran down the hill, under their cool trees, and back to the house again.

  At breakfast, Mr Carmody said he was going to talk to the man at the shop.

  “I’ll come, too,” said Tara. “I’ll open the gate.”

  “Now, there’s a change,” said Mr Carmody. Tara grinned.

  “I’ve had gate-opening experience,” she said. “You might wreck the delicate hinges.”

  The Bridge Builder

  My father was a bridge builder. When I was small, bridges brought us bread and books, Christmas crackers and coloured pencils – one-span bridges over creeks, two-span bridges over streams, three-span bridges over wide rivers. Bridges sprang from my father’s dreams threading roads together – girder bridges, arched bridges, suspension bridges, bridges of wood, bridges of iron or concrete. His bridges became visible parts of the world’s hidden skeleton. When we went out on picnics it was along roads held together by my father’s works. As we crossed rivers and ravines we heard each bridge singing in its own private language. We could hear the melody, but my father was the only one who understood the words.

  There were three of us when I was small: Philippa, the oldest, Simon in the middle, and me, Merlin, the youngest, the one with the magician’s name. We played where bridges were being born, running around piles of sand and shingle, bags of cement and bars of reinforced steel. Concrete mixers would turn, winches would wind, piles would be driven and decking cast. Slowly, as we watched and played, a bridge would appear and people could cross over.

  For years my father built bridges where people said they wanted them, while his children stretched up and out in three different directions. Philippa became a doctor and Simon an electrical engineer, but I became a traveller, following the roads of the world and crossing the world’s bridges as I came to them.

  My father, however, remained a bridge builder. When my mother died and we children were grown up and gone, and there was no more need for balloons and books or Christmas crackers and coloured pencils, his stored powers were set free and he began to build the bridges he saw in his dreams.

  The first of his new bridges had remarkable handrails of black iron lace. But this was not enough for my father. He collected a hundred orb-web spiders and set them loose in the crevices and curlicues of the iron. Within the lace of the bridge, these spiders spun their own lace, and after a night of rain or dew the whole bridge glittered black and silver.

  People were enchanted with the unexpectedness of it. Now, as they crossed over, they became part of a work of art. But the same people certainly thought my father strange when he built another bridge of horsehair and vines so that rabbits, and even mice, could cross the river with dry feet and tails. He’s gone all funny, they said, turning their mouths down.

  However, my father had only just begun. Over a river that wound through a grove of silver birch trees he wove a bridge of golden wires, a great cage filled with brilliant, singing birds; and in a dull, tired town he made an aquarium bridge whose glass balustrades and parapets were streaked scarlet and gold by the fish that darted inside them. People began to go out of their way to cross my father’s bridges.

  Building surprising bridges was one thing, but soon my father took it into his head to build bridges in unexpected places. He gave up building them where people were known to be going and built them where people might happen to find themselves. Somewhere, far from any road, sliding through brush and ferns to reach a remote stretch of river, you might find one of my father’s bridges: perhaps a strong one built to last a thousand years, perhaps a frail one made of bamboo canes, peacock feathers and violin strings. A bridge like this would soon fall to pieces sending its peacock feathers down the river like messages, sounding a single twangling note among the listening hills. Mystery became a part of crossing over by my father’s bridges.

  In some ways it seemed as if his ideas about what a bridge should be were changing. His next bridge, made of silver thread and mother-of-pearl, was only to be crossed at midnight on a moonlit night. So, crossing over changed, too. Those who crossed over from one bank to another on this bridge, crossed also from one day to another, crossing time as well as the spaces under the piers. It was his first time-bridge, but later there was to be another, a bridge set with clocks chiming perpetually the hours and half hours in other parts of the world. And in all the world this was the only bridge that needed to be wound up with a master key every eight days.

  Wherever my father saw a promising space he thought of ways in which it could be crossed, and yet for all that he loved spaces. In the city he climbed like a spider, stringing blue suspension bridges between skyscrapers and lower blocks – air bridges, he called them. Looking up at them from the street they became invisible. When crossing over on them, you felt you were suspended in nothing, or were maybe set in crystal, a true inhabitant of the sky. Lying down, looking through the blue web that held you, you could see the world turning below. But if you chose to lie on your back all the architecture of the air would open up to you.

  However, not many people bothered to stare upwards like that. Only the true travellers were fascinated to realize that the space they carelessly passed through was not empty, but crowded with its own invisible cons
tructions.

  “Who wants a bridge like that, anyway?” some people asked sourly.

  “Anyone. Someone!” my father answered. “There are no rules for crossing over.”

  But a lot of people disagreed with this idea of my father’s. Such people thought bridges were designed specially for cars, mere pieces of road stuck up on legs of iron or concrete, whereas my father thought bridges were the connections that would hold everything together. Bridges gone, perhaps the whole world would fall apart, like a quartered orange. The journey on the left bank of the river (according to my father) was quite different from the journey on the right. The person on the right bank of the ravine – were they truly the same person when they crossed on to the left? My father thought they might not be, and his bridges seemed like the steps of a dance which would enable the person with a bit of left-hand spin on them to spin in the opposite direction. This world (my father thought) was playing a great game called “change”, and his part in the game was called “crossing over”.

  It was upsetting for those people who wanted to stick to the road to know that some people used my father’s hidden bridges. They wanted everyone to cross by exactly the same bridges that they used, and they hated the thought that, somewhere over the river they were crossing, there might be another strange and lovely bridge they were unaware of.

  However, no one could cross all my father’s bridges. No one can cross over in every way. Some people became angry when they realized this and, because they could not cross over on every bridge there was, they started insisting that there should be no more bridge building. Some of these people were very powerful – so powerful, indeed, that they passed laws forbidding my father to build any bridge unless ordered to do so by a government or by some county council. They might as well have passed a law saying that the tide was only allowed to come in and out by government decree, because by now my father’s bridge building had become a force beyond the rule of law. He built another bridge, a secret one, which was not discovered until he had finished it, this time over a volcano. Men, women and children who crossed over could look down into the glowing heart of the volcano, could watch it simmer and seethe and smoulder. And when the winds blew, or when the great fumes of hot air billowed up like dragon’s breath, the harps played fiery music.

  “The bridge will melt when the volcano erupts,” people said to each other, alarmed and fascinated by these anthems of fire.

  “But none of my bridges are intended to last for ever,” my father muttered to himself, loading his derrick and winch on to the back of his truck and driving off in another direction. It was just as well he kept on the move. Powerful enemies pursued him.

  “Bridges are merely bits of the road with special problems,” they told one another, and sent soldiers out to trap my father, to arrest him, to put an end to his bridge building. Of course, they couldn’t catch him. They would think they had him cornered and, behold, he would build a bridge and escape – a bridge that collapsed behind him as if it had been made of playing cards, or a bridge that unexpectedly turned into a boat, carrying his astonished pursuers away down some swift river.

  Just about then, as it happened, my travelling took me on my first circle around the world, and I wound up back where I had started from. My brother, the electrical engineer, and my sister, the doctor, came to see me camping under a bridge that my father had built when I was only three years old.

  “Perhaps you can do something about him,” Philippa cried. “He won’t listen to us.”

  “Don’t you care?” asked Simon. “It’s a real embarrassment. It’s time he was stopped before he brings terrible trouble upon himself.”

  They looked at me – shaggy and silent, with almost nothing to say to them – in amazement. I gave them the only answer I could.

  “What is there for a bridge builder to build, if he isn’t allowed to build bridges?” I asked them. Dust from the world’s roads made my voice husky, even in my own ears.

  “He can be a retired bridge builder,” Simon replied. “But I can see that you’re going to waste time asking riddles. You don’t care that your old father is involved in illegal bridge-building.” And he went away. He had forgotten the weekend picnics in the sunshine, and the derrick, high as a ladder, leading to the stars.

  “And what have you become, Merlin?” Philippa asked me. “What are you now, after all your journeys?”

  “I’m a traveller as I always have been,” I replied.

  “You are a vagabond,” she answered scornfully. “A vagabond with a magician’s name, but no magic!”

  Then she went away, too, in her expensive car. I did not tell her, but I did have a little bit of magic – a single magical word, half-learned, half-invented. I could see that my father might need help, even a vagabond’s help, even the help of a single magic word. I set off to find him.

  It was easy for me, a seasoned traveller, to fall in with my father. I just walked along, until I came to a river that sang his name, and then I followed that river up over slippery stones and waterfalls, through bright green tangles of cress and monkey musk. Sure enough, there was my father building a bridge by bending two tall trees over the water and plaiting the branches into steps. This bridge would, in time, grow leafy handrails filled with birds’ nests, a crossing place for deer and possums.

  “Hello!” said my father. “Hello, Merlin. I’ve just boiled the billy. Care for a cup of tea?”

  “Love one!” I said. “There’s nothing quite like a cup of billy-tea.” So we sat down in a patch of sunlight and drank our tea.

  “They’re catching up with me, you know,” my father said sadly. “There are police and soldiers looking all the time. Helicopters, too! I can go on escaping, of course, but I’m not sure if I can be bothered. I’m getting pretty bored with it all. Besides,” he went on, lowering his voice as if the green shadows might overhear him, “I’m not sure that building bridges is enough any longer. I feel I must become more involved, to cross over myself in some way. But how does a bridge builder learn to cross over when he’s on both sides of the river to begin with?”

  “I might be able to help,” I said.

  My father looked up from under the brim of his working hat. He was a weatherbeaten man, fingernails cracked by many years of bridge building. Sitting there, a cup of billy-tea between his hands, he looked like a tree, he looked like a rock.

  “I’m not sure you can,” he answered. “I must be more of a bridge builder not less of one, if you understand me.”

  “Choosy, aren’t you?” I said, smiling, and he smiled back.

  “I suppose you think you know what I’d like most,” he went on.

  “I think I do!” I replied. “I’ve crossed a lot of bridges myself one way and another, because I’m a travelling man, and I’ve learned a lot on the banks of many rivers.”

  “And you’ve a magical name,” my father reminded me eagerly. “I said, when you were born, this one is going to be the magician of the family!”

  “I’m not a magician,” I replied, “but there is one word I know… a word of release and remaking. It allows things to become their true selves.” My father was silent for a moment, nodding slowly, eyes gleaming under wrinkled lids.

  “Don’t you think things are really what they seem to be?” he asked me.

  “I think people are all, more or less, creatures of two sides with a chasm in between, so to speak. My magic word merely closes the chasm.”

  “A big job for one word,” said my father.

  “Well, it’s a very good word,” I said. I didn’t tell him I had invented half of it myself. “It’s a sort of bridge,” I told him.

  All the time we talked, we had felt the movement of people, not very close, not very far, as the forest carried news of my father’s pursuers. Now we heard a sudden sharp cry – and another – and another. People shouted in desperate voices.

  “It’s the soldiers,” my father said, leaping to his feet. “They’ve been hunting me all day, though
the forest is on my side and hides me away. But something’s happened. We’d better go and check what’s going on. I don’t want them to come to harm because of me and my bridge building habits.”

  We scrambled upstream until the river suddenly started to run more swiftly, narrow and deep. The opposite bank rose up sharply, red with crumbling, rotten rock, green with mosses and pockets of fern. My father struggled to keep up with me. He was old, and besides, he was a bridge builder, not a traveller. Closing my eyes for a moment against the distractions around me, I brought the magic word out of my mind and on to the tip of my tongue – and, then I left it unspoken.

  The soldiers were on the opposite bank. They had tried to climb down the cliff on rotten rock but it had broken away at their very toes and there they were, marooned on a crumbling ledge – three of them – weighted down with guns, ammunition belts and other military paraphernalia. Two of the soldiers were very young, and all three of them were afraid, faces pale, reflecting the green leaves greenly.

  Below them the rocks rose out of the water. Just at this point the river became a dragon’s mouth, full of black teeth, hissing and roaring, sending up a faint smoke of silver spray.

  It was obvious that the soldiers needed a bridge.

  My father stared at them, and they stared at him confounded. But he was a bridge builder before he was anybody’s friend or enemy, before he was anybody’s father.

  “That word?” he asked me. “You have it there?”

  I nodded. I dared not speak, or the word would be said too soon.

  “When I step into the water, say it then, Merlin!”

  I waited and my father smiled at me, shy and proud and mischievous all at once. He looked up once at the sky, pale blue and far, and then he stepped, one foot on land, one in the water, towards the opposite bank. I spoke the word.

  My father changed before my eyes. He became a bridge as he had known he would. As for the word – it whispered over the restless surface of the river and rang lightly on the red, rotten rock. But my father had taken its magic out of it. No one else was altered.