What They Find in the Woods: Dark Minds Novella 2

by Gary Fry

  “I’ve read all of…ah, I mean, most of your second-year essays, Chloe,” I replied, my quick correction actually a lie; in truth, I had read all her existing undergraduate work, but hadn’t been required to do so, as I’d only tutored her for a selection of her modules the previous academic term. “I have every confidence in your ability to achieve that with ease.”

  By now, the burning sensation in my gut – one I’d suffered for over a week, possibly since our last supervision meeting – had diminished to some degree, a development perhaps related to Chloe’s clearly weakening resolve. She appeared sullen again, like a child who was unable to get her own way. Maybe that was even the truth. And yet however cruel it felt to turn the screw, a mental image of my innocent wife kept me focused on my standoffish position.

  When at last, with all our business attended to, Chloe eventually got up to leave, I sensed my own resolution waver a little, her remarkable youthfulness filling my vision with its usual disarming power. All this felt wildly tempting, and for such a wide range of reasons that even I, a trained psychologist, was unable to assimilate them. In the event, however, I merely looked away, and then, as another concern about her academic work mercifully occurred to me, I filled the sudden silence with an impartial enquiry.

  “Incidentally, whatever happened to…uh, what was the guy’s name?” For some insidious reason, both pictures my supervisee had located online – that pencil sketch and the photograph of Donald Deere – had been on my mind lately, but just now it was the second that concerned me, that admittedly spooky image of a figure standing amid a profusion of trees so dense I’d failed to spot other entities lurking nearby, things my student had described as “all white and bony”. Nevertheless, I’d now recalled the name of its taker, and then quickly finished, “Whatever happened to Norman Gantley? Weren’t you once trying to get in touch him?”

  Chloe, still appearing rather sulky, like a girl told off by a father she idolised greatly, turned to me while preparing to leave, the generous mound of one breast visible beneath that loose-fitting bib. She clearly wasn’t wearing a bra under her chaste white top. Then, possibly even observing my irrepressibly roaming gaze, she replied, “He died.”

  Only that and nothing more.

  I was intrigued, but it was eagerness to avoid anything of a more personal nature that made me ask, “And how did you find that out?”

  “His wife told me.”

  “Ah, right.” Should I have taken this new monosyllabic attitude as a personal affront or rather as an indication that the matter under discussion didn’t concern her much, that nothing really did now? In truth, neither option particularly heartened me, but that was when I added, “How did she get to tell you?”

  “Oh, just by telephone. I called her up.”

  “And…” – I was almost reluctant to say it, but as Chloe had still to make for the exit, I found I had no choice – “…and how did he die?”

  My student looked at me for a few seconds, her eyes ghosted and face dead pale. “He got cancer, his wife said, though she didn’t go into much detail. Only that he’d used to work in a mill and that fragments of wood had got in his lungs.”

  “Fragments of…wood?”

  “Yes, but that isn’t what killed him – failure of his respiratory system, I mean. Hell, I’m just beginning to realise how much his wife did tell me about this. But I guess she just needed someone to talk to. She sounded pretty spaced out. She didn’t even remember the holiday she and her late husband took up north a few years earlier.” Chloe paused a moment, and then, looking back into my face, finally added, “The man died of cancer in his eyes. It must have – what’s the word? – must have metastasised from his lungs. Anyway, that’s what got him first: his eyes. The cancer apparently ate right into his brain, Matt.”

  12

  Christmas came and went, and Rose and I were happy. She’d had her latest novel accepted for publication late the next year and had now clearly turned her attention to other pressing matters. I tried my best to perform on several nights over the holiday period, and to my wife’s credit, she was understanding, accepting my surely accurate opinion that a combination of occupational stress and the daily drink I’d used to help me unwind was playing havoc with my forty-something self.

  I didn’t hear at all from Chloe, which presumably meant she was happily getting along with her project or maybe even enjoying a nice, long holiday with her mother, just the two of them together in that small house. On more occasions than the observation warranted, I recalled a comment she’d made to her first interviewee in Pasturn, about how she presently didn’t have a boyfriend but was “working on it”. Whoever the guy was, I hoped he wouldn’t interfere with her studies; despite my rather slipshod supervision lately, she had great promise, that student – great promise indeed.

  The irregular blogger Shaz had made no further entry in her chronicle of imaginary events in that same village. I trusted that this was because her pregnancy, the consequence of some lamentably indulgent act one night after escaping her mum and paid carer, now preoccupied her, possibly even forcing her to grow up quickly, removing all those pop posters she’d claimed to have on her bedroom walls while thinking deeply about becoming a mother.

  I worried about her capacity to achieve this well; after all, the experience she’d documented online, some kind of waking dream in which she’d believed she’d seen her child’s unreal father gazing into her bedroom, had to have been a fantasy. In fact, I’d proved that, hadn’t I? Her window was much too high; only someone using a ladder could have gained such elevation. And who the hell would carry one of them around in a residential location so late at night?

  Having now assimilated the death of photographer Norman Gantley – he’d once worked with wood and contracted a related disease, which had since spread to his eyes and then destroyed his brain: but so what? – I soon found myself, during New Year’s Day, examining the other picture my supervisee (who still hadn’t been in touch, despite my daily checks for email) had sent to me a few months earlier. It showed that bad man in his natural habitat, climbing into a tree-house with his gnarled face pointing over one trunk-like shoulder, his naked feet and hands little more than clustered knots. But it was the device he’d used to ascend that high which now interested me.

  As I had no copy of the other alleged image of Donald Deere (my student had shown me only a printed version of this photograph during a meeting in my office; I’d tried finding it online, but with no luck), I was unable to observe these two pictures side by side. Hadn’t Chloe said something about a number of smaller figures lurking in the background of late Mr. Gantley’s snap? Perturbed by what I’d already seen – that conspiracy of woodland assuming a humanlike shape – I’d quickly relinquished the sheet and hadn’t got a chance to examine it closer. Nevertheless, the young woman’s description of these “thirteen” entities to me – “all white and bony” – had certainly put me in mind of similar hints in Shaz’s innocently evocative blog concerning her experiences deep in the Pasturn woods. Hadn’t the girl talked about seeing a large number of “chair-like things” around a fire, and then, upon the master’s (their father’s?) instruction, every one of them coming to life, looking like “wooden effigies”, and later, “bits of wood […] mimicking […] human bodies”?

  I glanced again at the artist’s sketch of this rural legend’s subject, of a man called Donald Deere, who – according to eighty-three year-old Judy, lifelong female resident of the village – had apparently stolen children to serve as obedient assistants, which presumably, back in the 1500s, meant performing any and all domestic or practical tasks. And was the structure seemingly made of misshapen wood which Donald climbed in this drawing really just a rudimentary ladder? Hadn’t fragile Shaz, in her second post about her apparent experiences – one in which she’d awoken to see her child’s ostensible father staring into her bedroom one moonlit night – mentioned other details, including the sounds of objects moving just out of sight, maybe bel
ow her furtive observer, who’d clearly clambered towards her bedroom window with a clump of rising footfalls?

  With mounting panic and irrationality, I quickly pushed aside all this corrosive nonsense and then simply got on with being a good husband…in all areas except one, of course. The alcohol I found myself resorting to with increasing need as the new academic term approached hardly helped such matters, but that was just the way life was. If I’d ever had enough time and freedom to do what the hell I wanted, I’m sure I’d also have developed a rose-tinted view of reality, perhaps even expressing it creatively for the enjoyment of others with similar idealistic perspectives. And yet passion and joy and all the other pleasurable aspects of existence – recreational activities, sexual relationships, ownership of property, parenthood – came at a cost. They all had to be worked for. And the things we strive hardest to achieve could be easily swept aside at a whimsical stroke. Indeed, a mere moment of weakness could wreck many years of cautious strategy.

  During the days leading up to my return to the office, I was drunk nearly all the time. This helped me ascribe that weird sensation deep inside – a feeling of emptiness which undoubtedly contained a lascivious component – to a constant chain of hangovers blighting every morning and often the afternoons, until I started drinking again, carrying me all the way till bedtime, where my wife had often turned in earlier anyway and there were no further problems to endure.

  I believe it was this uncharacteristic behaviour that, unsurprisingly, resulted in her suspicion. On the evening before I was due to return to the campus, she sat beside me on the couch and, after drawing in a long breath, asked, “Matt?”

  I was checking for email at the time, finding only frustrating circulars, all of which reminded me of the hassle I was about to face as the academic year moved into its final stages. I must have replied with an air of distraction – a terse “Hmm?” perhaps – because that was when Rose spoke again.

  “Is there something going on I’m not aware of?”

  I paused in my actions and then turned to look at her, my face surely rouging over, but only because I was still consuming wine at more than a bottle a night. “What do you mean?” I asked, a little aggressively maybe, but it wasn’t as if her question had been particularly sensitive.

  “With you, I mean? With us?”

  All six monosyllables felt like shots to my heart, a handgun’s chamber fully discharged. For a while I said nothing, simply glanced away, out of the lounge window whose curtains had yet to be drawn. I couldn’t see my face reflected in the glass, carved out of the world’s dark way beyond, and this lent me enough confidence to respond.

  “I’ll be okay. It’s just this…this fever I’ve been suffering.”

  “Fever?” Rose sounded incredulous, and rightly so, I now understand in hindsight. “But you first complained about that weeks ago. Don’t you think it’s time you went to see a…well, a doctor?”

  The way she’d spoken, with emphasis on her final word – on that modern distributor of magic potions – left me in little doubt about what she referred to. I felt briefly affronted, as most men do whenever such matters are alluded to, but then considered the situation from her point of view: she wanted a child; we’d recently agreed to try for one, me doing so because that was what I’d always done: be compliant, please other people, put my personal desires to the back of my increasingly frustrated mind. I now realised what Rose must think each night when I struggled to rise to the occasion; she’d almost certainly believe it was her I had an issue with.

  And was that so far from the truth?

  I managed to placate her that night with a cuddle and a kiss, promising that if I wasn’t feeling better in a few days, I’d make a medical appointment. She just smiled and nodded, and later, once we’d gone to bed, I held her tight until she slept in my arms, while many savage agents of the night outside went about their usual unforgiving business.

  13

  She handed in her draft dissertation materials on time, but I didn’t get to see her at all during the first few weeks of term. She hadn’t contacted me by email, merely printed off all her chapter sections and supplementary materials, before shoving them in my pigeon-hole mailbox. This meant she’d been on campus, but when I made enquiries, like someone desperate still trying to convince himself that he was merely being professional, I was told that she’d skipped most of her lectures lately and that the School office had recently received a sick note from her doctor, excusing her for a “presently uncertain period of time”.

  As her final-year project supervisor, I felt tempted to call her – or at least her mother – at home, but in the event, my nerve failed me. Her other modules were nothing to do with me – I wasn’t a lecturer or marker on any of them – and as far as her research was concerned, she’d submitted everything required, hadn’t she? On paper, I had no grounds for concern and would struggle to justify personal contact after a medic had written that she needed “some recovery time”.

  But recovery from what?

  After collecting her documents from among my post – I now felt like a lovesick teenager clinging onto a long-awaited missive from his elusive amour – I had no choice but to retreat to my office, shut the door behind me, and finally delve into these materials, these latest scraps of information about a man called Donald Deere.

  Chloe had carried out a number of additional interviews with various members of the Pasturn community. During our last session, we’d discussed the importance of “maximising variation”, of getting a good cross-sectional representation of the village’s residents, capturing their differing demographics, with some older and others younger, some female and others male. Ethnicity was less of a concern in such a predominantly white-British location, but it was nonetheless important to explore people’s belief system, their religious inclinations or their willingness to accept ostensibly irrational phenomena.

  She’d certainly done that, but again her line of questioning during many of the discussions she’d conducted since we’d last met involved an increasingly frantic attempt to discover whether the legend was in fact true. I recalled that she and her mother had only moved to the area recently, and that Chloe would be unfamiliar with the local myth from her youth. She was effectively an outsider here, and although that left her in an advantageous analytic position – she’d presuppose nothing about the case and was in possession of objective distance – the lack of firsthand knowledge had possibly proved frustrating. Nevertheless, it now seemed as if she’d become rather obsessed in trying to acquire this.

  Some interviewees scoffed at her questions, especially when she asked about whether they believed it was possible to create a potion capable of making someone love another and whether this could ever work. In truth, during such lengthy passages in her transcripts, she didn’t sound in her right mind, and when I read a few more examples in which the person being interrogated – because that was often how it sounded – took umbrage at her line of enquiry, I started to get concerned…frightened, even.

  Quickly setting aside the can of coke with which I’d facilitated consumption of all this material, I turned to the appendices Chloe had included in her pack. This section was clearly under development, but even so, I was unsettled to find copies of the pictures she’d already shown to me, those two depictions – one sketched, the other photographed – of Donald Deere, lurking in his furtive home environment. Dismissing the first on the basis of troubling over-familiarity, I finally got to re-examine that photo by the late Norman Gantley and did indeed notice some figures in the distant background which might even be accurately described as “white and bony”, but might as easily be just narrow wooden stumps scattered among all the trees back there, their severed ends pale and smooth-grained. At any rate, I immediately set aside this snap in favour of other contents of the appendices.

  There were also copies here of both of Shaz’s blog entries on the same topic, which disturbed me all the more, because Chloe and I had not even discussed the se
cond one and I’d assumed only I’d seen it. How foolish. My student had again proved far from lapse in her data collection. Indeed, she’d gone much further than I had, discovering a new piece of evidence, a photocopied facsimile of something she might have discovered in an old book acquired through the university’s library service. It certainly looked old, but its ancient lettering, whose spelling was rendered in a Middle Ages script, was legible all the same.

  It was a recipe, simply headed, “The way to make another love thee”, and ominously signed “D” at the bottom. I didn’t need any more information to tell me what I now held, but as I rose from my desk and crossed my room while still reading the sheet, I soon found myself halting and groping with my free hand, trying to take hold of the cup from which I’d drunk the last time it had been used: during a supervision meeting with Chloe Linton, the one when she’d made me a drink of herbal tea.

  Just then, dropping that list of ingredients – which also included some kind of magic incantation, presumably intended to be read while constructing the beverage – I sniffed the treacherous vessel’s interior. It might just have been my desperate imagination at work, but I now thought I could smell cloves in there, and cinnamon, and parsley, and rosehip, and nutmeg, and…well, everything the page had mentioned, all mixed together in a heady brew designed to disarm even the most resolute of people, someone who’d constructed a solid life for himself and would happily welcome no further distractions between the present day and his grave.