by Gary Fry
It showed another JPEG image, presumably extracted from the Internet. But this was no artist’s sketch. It was a black-and-white photograph, displaying a figure standing at the heart of woodland, one almost merging into the tree-packed background, limbs little more than bony branches, head resembling a giant knot amid a vertical strip of gnarled bark.
As I suggest, this shape almost merged into its background. Because there was definitely a face visible here, one whose strikingly wide eyes shone with twin violent lens-flares. There were also unmistakeable impressions of hands and feet, whose fingers and toes curled tightly, the first at tendrils of dangling foliage all around this human-sized shape in the woods, and the second at a leaf-strewn, muddy floor.
I suppressed another sudden shiver in the brightly lit expanse of my office; this was becoming quite a habit, I thought. Then my door arced open, seemingly of supernatural volition, but I remained too compelled by this alleged real life, un-doctored photograph to pay it much heed. Underneath the printed image were a caption and a copyright credit, probably added by the person who’d taken the snap:
IS THIS DONALD DEERE?
© Norman Gantley, Derby, 2007.
“So what do you think of that, then?” asked Chloe as she retook her seat and immediately handed one of the two cups she’d brought back, each bearing what appeared to be a reddish liquid with a scent like several kinds of herbs mixed together. The teabag, split between two beverages, must have been completely drained of its strength, because she’d clearly thrown it away after brewing these pungent concoctions.
Now gripping a cupful of the steaming liquid, I looked up at her, holding out the page with my other hand as if I found it negligible to her research, though actually wanting shut of the thing as soon as possible. The image had unaccountably troubled me – yes, me a dyed-in-the-wool rationalist who believed that God was a delusion and dead was dead.
“It’s diverting enough, I guess, but far from central to our investigation,” I said eventually, my voice becoming involuntarily pompous.
Chloe’s renewed smile seemed to falter, maybe on account of the sternness of my tone. After placing her own cup on the table between us, she glanced down at the printed page and then promptly back at me. “But what about all the figures you can see in the background – there are about thirteen, I think, all white and bony…”
“Chloe, please,” I said, realising that I hadn’t examined the shot in sufficient detail to spot anything more than that creepy figure upfront, surely nothing more than a conspiracy of tree limbs which had resulted in the illusion of a humanlike entity standing in a shadowy wood, just waiting and watching .
Shaking my head clear of such corrosive thoughts, I added, “If we’re…if you’re going to get the grade you’re certainly capable of achieving, you’ll have to remain focused on the task at hand. This basically means forgetting about any…any foolish speculation concerning whether the issue under scrutiny – a rural legend – has any basis in truth, and concentrating instead on exploring, from a psychological perspective, its impact on the resident community.”
“Well, I guess that tells me,” Chloe responded in a dramatic whisper, her mouth now a small moue of surprise.
Following my uncharacteristically passionate outburst, I began to feel slightly guilty, and it was several more seconds before I managed to look away from the young woman, my heart pumping hard, and finally said, “Hey, look, I’m sorry. I’m…I’m under a bit of pressure at the moment, what with so many admin deadlines to hit. I guess I shouldn’t have been so…well, direct.”
Chloe, surprising me with her resilience – I’d actually expected my words to have had more impact on her previously tender nature – simply smiled with clear understanding and then spoke again. “Why not take a little drink, Matt? It’s herbal and supposed to be relaxing.”
Something about the way she’d articulated the final word – “relaaaxing,” she’d said, with the central vowel extended – persuaded me to obey her instruction, drawing deeply from that cup of sweet, hot liquid I held, and almost finishing the lot in one go.
After finally setting aside the almost empty vessel, I noticed that Chloe was smiling more broadly than I’d ever seen.
We spent the rest of the meeting discussing various tasks remaining in her project: advertising for Pasturn residents to volunteer to be interviewed; dealing with issues of confidentiality and anonymity; emphasising the importance of trying to get down a good first draft of the dissertation’s literature review before Christmas; and generally making sure all other written sections – methodology, findings, and conclusion – were timetabled to occur way in advance of the hand-in date during spring of the following year.
Now that we seemed to have patched over the cracks of our recent minor altercation, Chloe looked happy enough, and even though I’d just begun to detect the first stirrings of what might be a head-cold – this was hardly surprising, what with winter approaching – I was similarly confident about the project’s movement towards completion.
That ghastly picture, the one showing a near-human figure which couldn’t be anything of the sort, wasn’t alluded to again, but as my student finally rose to leave, she mentioned something that, to my mind, was almost as bad.
“Oh, I forgot to mention,” I said, her voice almost casual in tone, “the girl whose blog I found a short while back, the one who triggered this whole project…”
“Yes? What about her?”
“…she’s pregnant,” said Chloe, her face as straight as some doctor delivering news about a terminal medical condition to a patient.
“Pregnant?” I repeated with a uselessness I found rather hard to reconcile with my usual self-image, one of sharp-minded competence and at times even dogged inspiration. When I spoke again, I found myself no more at ease. “How did you find that out?”
“I noticed her the other day, standing in her bedroom window. She’s already started to show.” Having just thrown the strap of her handbag over one shoulder, Chloe held both hands in front of her belly, about six inches from her leather jacket. “I’d guess that she’s about four months’ gone.”
My mind performed a quick calculation, establishing a conception date of early August: the period in which, I recalled, so-called Shaz had written that creepily evocative blog. It was now nearly December, and sure enough, that was almost four months later.
At that moment, a lot of information I’d acquired from the website text my supervisee had sent a few weeks earlier returned savagely to me. I’d assumed – and we’d certainly discussed the document along these lines – that this would be used as only background information, a way of scene-setting the project during Chloe’s introductory sections, merely establishing the rural legend’s features, before explaining how she’d explored its impact on Pasturn’s small population. But having handed me that unsettling photo, did Chloe now intend to treat this story as more important than that…even as something true?
I sincerely hoped not; that wouldn’t only jeopardise the grade she might achieve, but also, by her failure to address a suitable psychological issue in a scientifically respectable way, call into question the state of her mind at the moment, suggesting that the story she’d haphazardly chanced upon was taking firmer grip on a promising young student than any objective, critical approach should ever allow.
But what more could I do than issue further cautions? In any case, weren’t these becoming rather repetitive, and even likely to flare up more tensions between us?
In the event, I said nothing, and as Chloe, still holding her face in quite a neutral expression, turned to leave, it was she who spoke the final words that day.
“By the way, I know good researchers should leave no stone left unturned, and so, for the sake of completeness, I’m going to get in touch with the man who took that photograph – you know, the one I showed you earlier of the figure in the wood, surrounded by all those dancing things.”
I’d still yet to see these other alleged
entities in this shot, but as the picture was now tucked back in Chloe’s bag, that didn’t look likely to change anytime soon. That was my own fault, of course; I’d been too eager to dismiss it as even a piece of supplementary evidence. But what could I say? That I was wrong and she was right? That she could include the image in her project, after all?
As that sense of violation – a stinging sniffle in my nose, a burning sensation at the back of my throat – took renewed grip upon me, my student spoke again.
“As you saw, the guy’s called Norman Gantley and lives in Derby. I tracked him down recently by using an online telephone directory and plan to call him this week.”
And before she went out, she didn’t give me chance to issue my approval, even though I’m not sure this was something I’d have offered anyway.
8
That head-cold – or whatever it was; it remained burdensome, but the symptoms never seemed to graduate to anything more than low-grade irritations – refused to leave me for a long while. During this time, I’d mulled over all that had occurred during Chloe’s and my last meeting, deciding that whatever had once happened between us, in the subtle interstices that exist among all people (especially men and women), it could be dismissed as a passing phase one or possibly both of us had been going through.
At any rate, things felt smoother now. I hadn’t heard from Chloe in over a week, suggesting that she was knuckling down to serious work on her dissertation and other modular assessments. Additionally, things at home had for me reassumed their usual steady nature, with Rose approaching a deadline from her independent press publisher and working hard to finish a new romance novel. Indeed, other matters – equally important in her mind, but slightly less pressing at the moment – had been temporarily set aside.
One evening in early December, my wife fell asleep beside me on the couch at only eight o’clock, which led me to suspect that she was also now becoming ill, maybe having contracted whatever ailed me. I leaned across and roused her, asking in a whisper, “Hey, darling. Are you okay?”
She looked up, eyes hooded; she’d probably been staring at a computer screen all day, and after many similar experiences myself lately, I realised how tired this could make you feel, not to mention the headaches it induced. After some tender encouragement, I eventually persuaded her to go to bed early, tucking her in and kissing her forehead, before retreating again downstairs. I was happy with Rose, I really was, and when other intrusive thoughts, previously suppressed because I’d wanted to spend some valuable time in my wife’s company, returned to me while browsing my phone, I at last gave them the attention they probably warranted.
Uppermost among these concerns was one relating to a particular blogger residing in a small village north of Leeds, who was now apparently pregnant following some tawdry fling or other. It was a pitiful truth that vulnerable people like her often fell prey to unscrupulous others, especially men on the prowl as they commonly were. Maybe, I speculated recklessly, the girl – Shaz from Pasturn – had engaged in such an illicit tryst during the summer, and then afterwards, feeling guilty about it (having contravened instructions from her alcoholic mother and only semi-present nurse), she’d invented an elaborate fantasy to justify the encounter in her undeveloped mind. Indeed, rather than a messy bang in some litter-strewn backstreet, she’d actually made love to a prince, someone who, out among all that romantic wildlife, had made her feel like a princess.
Admittedly, this was desperate reasoning, but it was as good as I could manage that evening, with dark crowding beyond the lounge window and a stiff wind making trees creak outside, like someone approaching with rather less than normal human limbs.
Quickly thrusting aside that distasteful impression, I typed into an online search-engine: “Shaz, blog, Pasturn.” Seconds later, after clicking FIND, I was rewarded with a whole range of the world’s detritus, including various exotic ladies, all of whom ably exemplified the predatory needs of males the world over, along with, near the top of this pile of links, just what I’d sought: Chloe Linton’s first informant, and more crucially, her infrequently updated public journal.
She’d made only a handful of new posts since that troubling one back in August, most relating to her everyday life, how restricted she felt, how frightened she sometimes became, and how regrettably few people were involved with her on a regular basis. She liked her “mum” and “nurse Susan” of course – they were kind and always understanding – but she wished “something else would happen”, something “amazing and wonderful”, which would make “the stars look brighter at night.”
But then something obviously had. Her first blog entry in September simply read: “I’m going to have a baby!!!!!!!!!!”
This was followed by a few months’ silence, during which I could only imagine what the girl had been going through. Perhaps her earlier fantasy, penned before she’d realised the consequences of the forbidden act she’d enjoyed and later elaborated upon in private prose (insofar as a universally-available blog post could be described as such), had assumed even more power over her tender mind.
This was the only explanation I could come up with after I’d read the last entry she’d added to her blog, one made about a week ago now. It made me wish my wife was still awake, helping me to feel less alone in our silent home, even though she’d inevitably ask what I was doing reading the ostensibly secret thoughts of such a young, clearly disturbed person.
SHAZ’S BLOG!!!
November 26th, 2014
MR. PASSION HAS A LOOK AT WHAT’S COMING!
Mum still won’t talk to me very often, and nurse Susan doesn’t say I’m a big disappointment, but I can see that in her face anyway. It’s the way her eyes look at me, as if she’s trying not to glance down at my big belly whenever she visits but really struggles not to. But all this is OK, because I’ll soon have someone else to be with, won’t I? And that will be best of all.
What I wanted to tell you about– anyone out there, still reading this blog – is something that happened to me last night. I thought I’d be scareder than I was, but it turns out that having a baby inside me has made me less scared, which has to be good, hasn’t it?
Anyway, I’d just gone to bed, after helping Mum into hers. She’d drunk a lot, mainly because she has nobody elseand now even I’m about to share her with another. I waved goodnight to my pop posters, which will have to come down soon to make way for other things–adult things– and finally switched out my lamp. It was dead dark and silent for a long time, but that was when I heard something moving outside.
You won’t know where my house is and what the surroundings look like, so let me tell you that I live in a narrow street with lots of joined-up houses on both sides. Each house has a small garden, and sometimes, after all the people have gone to bed, animals creep around in them, looking for bits and pieces that might have fallen out of dustbins. But this thing sounded bigger than an animal. It seemed to be surrounded by other noises, all like rattling objects, the way skeletons might sound if a wind rushed through a long row of them. This noise got angrier, as if something was now tugging all the bones together, but that soon ended. Then that other sound struck up again.
When it started making an annoying clunking, which soon got louder and louder, I could only think it was moving towards me, but not from a distance, like the far side of the street. I mean upwards. I think I’ve said before that my bedroom is on the top floor of my house, and so if something– or even somebody– was trying to get high enough to peer into my window, it must be doing something to get the better of what everyone knows is called gravity.
Now I got scared, but not so scared that I was too afraid to get out of bed and then creep over to the window, where my curtains were pulled closelytogether like a nun’s outfit. I had someone else to protect now, not just myself, and if someone was about to try burglarising mine and Mum’s house, I wouldn’t let them, because since dad left, it’s all we have, and we’re never letting it go, ever.
So
then I pulled back one of the curtains. And almost collapsed at the sight of what I saw out there.
The thing beyond the window almost looked like me, but only because my legs had just given way and I’d droppedonto my knees. Now my head was only as high as the figure’s outside, and the room was so dark that it made moonlight bounce off my face and place its reflection overthe man’s features beyond the glass, so that, for one horrid moment, it even looked like my dad out there. But then I stood up and backed away, glancing again only afterI’d got my balance. It wasn’t my dad at all. But the awful thingis that I’m not sure what it was.
Hisface was all blank like a window, but parts of it– the ears on each side, itssticky-out nose, and the end of its chin–seemed to be made of old brick, just like the stuff my house is built from. I couldn’t see much more of his body, because only his head was poking over the sill at the bottom, but I did notice bits of wood on either side of him, as if he was using things like the trees in our garden to support him. But then, by the way he now moved these items, I realised that they were attached to him. They were his hands!
