What They Find in the Woods: Dark Minds Novella 2

by Gary Fry

  And that was when a terrible suspicion began overwhelming me.

  Had I been deliberately poisoned? Was my student the dishonourable stalker in this relationship, and not me, after all?

  Of course all this meant that I’d have to accept everything she’d been striving to prove lately, asking lifelong Pasturn residents about their experiences of a local bogeyman. Had she remained distant from me more recently, wondering why her crafty conjuring had failed to have the impact she’d hoped? Was she actually losing her mind? Had her obvious attraction to me – some kind of complex sublimated father-daughter manifestation, possibly arising from an awkward relationship with her absent dad – led her to a kind of psychological damnation, where she’d become so ill that she was about to throw away all her great academic potential?

  But there was another way of looking at this. Indeed, I soon found myself wondering whether I was deluding myself, a problem arising from a life lived without passion as well as physical limitations borne of incipient middle age? Was the stained residue inside this cup simply leftover liquid from one of the standard herbal teabags my beloved wife had once bought me? And had my prolonged virus been nothing other than that, a fever lingering only because I’d stubbornly refused to see a doctor?

  Just then, I couldn’t think to any useful purpose; my mind felt awhirl. But moments later, a bizarre idea occurred to me, and being unwilling to wait until I could exercise better judgement in a calmer state, I immediately left my office, locked up, and then hurried across the campus to the science departments while still carrying that cup.

  I realised how strange my request must have sounded to the first academic I spoke to that afternoon, but once I’d shown him my staff card and offered to pay for the service, he eventually referred me to someone who might be able to carry out the task I required. I went to this man’s office at once, but learnt from a colleague occupying the office next-door that he was presently delivering a lecture. Then I waited and waited, watching the sky darken outside, and my reflection in the corridor window looking more and more haunted.

  At last the academic returned; I explained what I needed, and although he looked at me askance – maybe even with some degree of suspicion – he finally agreed to help me out.

  “I won’t be able to get this back to you for a few days,” he explained, taking the cup I now offered. But I said that was fine and then calmly – or rather, as calmly as I could in my increasingly disturbing circumstances – left the building.

  I genuinely hoped the lab results based on an analysis of that drinking vessel’s contents would settle this matter for good. If tests revealed any or all of the ingredients I’d found listed in that ancient recipe, I’d have no choice but to conclude that my student Chloe Linton was experiencing some kind of breakdown and would surely need therapeutic care. But if they revealed anything else – that the liquid residue contained only manufactured tea derivatives, perhaps – such a diagnosis might be more suitable for me.

  As I stepped back outside, I realised there was one thing left to try, something that – if my head had been clearer before fleeing my office several hours earlier – I might have considered in advance of taking drastic action. Indeed, I could go back and try a drink made from one of those remaining teabags, judging whether it was similar or otherwise to that I’d enjoyed with my supervisee that day. I had only a faint recollection of that beverage’s taste – it had been scented and sweet, like such products tended to be – and so doubted I’d be able to make an accurate assessment. But it was certainly worth a try.

  However, I was only halfway back across the university’s sprawling grounds when something stopped me dead in my tracks: a private incoming mobile phone message.

  And as it turned out, it wasn’t from my wife.

  14

  When I finally reached Pasturn in the car, I knew exactly where to go. The text I’d received had simply read:

  Matt,

  Meet me you-know-where at 7 p.m. I need you.

  When you get there, shout loudly, and I’ll shout back, leading you to me through the woods.

  C xxx

  I knew I should have left all this well alone, but by the time I’d reached my vehicle in the university car park, I’d already called my wife and told her that, as this was my first day at work after the holidays, I needed to stay back a few hours, catching up on paperwork and similar, and that she should go ahead and eat without me. Rose had hesitated a moment, as if still entertaining suspicions about where my heart now lay, but eventually, presumably believing that someone as intelligent as I was supposed to be wouldn’t try hiding an affair behind the feeblest excuse in modern history, she accepted my comments and rung off.

  In any case, that wasn’t what I was up to, was it? By the time I’d driven to the village and then parked up outside that now moonlit woodland, I’d convinced myself that I was here in only a professional capacity, preventing my vulnerable student from doing something foolish. She’d been ill recently, after all, and I believed that her indisposition was likely to possess a psychological component. I’d seen her latest research and realised that it wasn’t the product of a stable mind. Indeed, hadn’t her message to me that day read, “I need you,” as if only I, a qualified practitioner in the social sciences – in the human arts – could help?

  I continued deluding myself in such a self-justifying way as I finally stepped over the boundary of that dark expanse of trees. By this time, in late winter, it was pitch-dark, with only an icy sheen of starlight guiding my initial ventures into that overgrown plot, where brambles and creepers slivered underfoot. Before long, just as – now sufficiently away from the road to avoid embarrassment in the presence of any potential passersby – I first called Chloe’s name, a particularly tight strand of undergrowth tore off one of my shoes, leaving me scuttling around in just the sock, spikes and knuckled things sticking in my foot.

  But just then I didn’t care much about that; my suddenly unleashed love or desire – a feeling I’d been violently suppressing for weeks – seemed to have immunised me from physical pain. Indeed, I soon found myself shaking away the other shoe, as well as tugging off both socks, all of which enabled me to be at one with nature, my bare flesh grappling with its unruly elements.

  “Chloe!” I called again, no longer believing that my passion was merely a fever, nor caring whether it had been induced by my lived circumstances – a stable marriage, such cautious economics, my sensible career – or by a species of invasive magic, which called into question every rational thing I’d ever believed in, let alone implicated someone I now deeply cared about in a form of mental rape. This feeling simply existed, and that was enough for me. And now I was desperate to locate my victim or abuser.

  “Chloe!” I shouted for a third time, on this occasion with full-throated volume.

  Indeed, that was when she responded.

  “Matt,” said her voice from a good distance, somewhere over to my left. As I went that way at once, many more woodland fragments and unyielding stones biting into my flesh, she added, “Come to me. I’m over here.”

  By now, she sounded louder, but I couldn’t tell whether this was because she was much more eager or I’d merely got closer. At the time, I think my state of mind led me to hope both were true. I tore through countless naked, whipping branches, treading wet earth into compacted clumps of mud. After at least a minute spent pursuing Chloe’s repeated, rapidly nearing, and impassioned cry of, “Matt…Matt…Matt,” I sensed my vision becoming disputed by my sudden outburst of energy, as all my advancing years protested. Sweat ran into my eyes, causing disturbances in the shadowy territory around me. For one panicky moment, I thought I saw a figure lurking to my right – a tall person, far bulkier than my petite supervisee – but after turning to snatch my gaze that way, I noticed just more tree trunks, solid and imperious, so many knots and gnarled bark on their uprights resembling distorted faces, their creaking limbs reaching out little more than spindly-fingered twigs.

>   But then I’d finally reached the area from which my student’s voice still called loudly. I’d expected this to be a clearing, like in the first blog post I’d read by Shaz, but it didn’t turn out to be that. Indeed, for several confused moments, during which chemicals surged through my body like explosives about to yield to some sudden ignition, I was unable to figure out where her new cries – “Matt…Matt… Up here, Matt,” – came from. But then, instead of glancing around into so much shadow-packed woodland, I looked directly upwards…and finally saw her.

  She was laying in what resembled some kind of tree-house, a carpentered composition of planks and logs forming an uneven platform coupled with firm sides and a leafy roof. From where I stood, still barefoot and also quite naked of hands and face, I could see only her head and shoulders, poking over the ragged rim of the place’s solitary entrance, where a ladder of sorts – I viewed this in only my peripheral vision – reached as high as her. But I was unable to observe that upright device with any more scrutiny; the young woman had now captured my full attention. The top of her body was nude, I realised, and when she spoke to me again with such desperate seductiveness, I immediately crossed to the base of that row of unsteady rungs and began to climb.

  “I need you,” she’d said once more, just as she’d written in her text.

  Each of my eager, clumsy footfalls caused creaks to resound around me, as if the item I incautiously ascended had been only tenuously constructed. It appeared to be made of wood, but the substance – each length of those timbered rungs and uprights – felt warm to my touch, like something alive rather than any inert material. At any rate, to whatever degree I briefly suspected otherwise, it certainly hadn’t squirmed under my hands and feet; that sensation was surely just an effect of so much perspiration leaking from me, an involuntary betrayal of my forty-something body.

  When I eventually reached the top, this latest treacherous reflection took firmer grip of my mind and I recalled all the failed attempts at lovemaking my wife and I had suffered lately, every one of them my feeble fault. I’d been too tired, too drunk, too uncertain about the possibility of having a child so relatively late in life… I knew I could legitimately claim each of these things was true, but as I clambered inside that makeshift shelter – which, judging by the creaking wetness of its constituent substance, had surely been built a long time ago – the disturbing truth was that I now had an erection more forceful than any I’d enjoyed since my indestructible, carefree youth.

  Nevertheless, while clambering further inside that scented chamber towards the person who, during the last few months, had beguiled me so powerfully, I remained self-aware enough to remove quite another item from the area of my groin, something that would satisfy my curiosity on a matter which, at a subconscious level, had began to trouble me while driving all the way over here.

  Chloe Linton, wearing no clothes at all, wriggled in front of me, half-hidden by shadow but also visible in the additional strands of moon- and starlight penetrating this elevated location. I saw her garments piled to one side, as if she’d planned all this mental and physical assault, going back months, planting seeds of lust – that palpable vulnerability, those scanty outfits, so many out-of-office-hours communications – which had since grown into great trees of passion inside my head, each bearing fruits of love.

  Was this – an admittedly trite and yet compelling conception of such a base relationship, one I’d possibly just filched from my wife’s prose – a fair summation of what had occurred lately between me and my supervisee? More importantly, was it accurate? Or was it rather merely a self-justification, a way of endorsing my sexual desire, which was obviously now matched by that of my almost certainly disturbed student?

  Whatever the truth was – whether Chloe had poisoned me with a form of magic derived from the previous tenant of this shack, or that was simply wishful thinking on my part – I immediately tackled an issue that demanded an explanation. As I’d just seen the young woman’s mobile phone rested on top of her discarded clothes, I now held up mine and asked, “Where…where did you get my number?”

  Chloe came writhing my way, the sight of her pale, lithe body almost separating my habitual mental reserve from an uncharacteristic physical impulse. Yes, I wanted to go to her and perform the act I’d now been denied for much too long. But a timely recollection of Rose, of her innocently needy nature, prevented me from yielding so soon. Then, as my student tried placing her hands upon me, I briefly resisted, gazing hard at her – no, not at her small, pert breasts, nor at her thrilling thatch of pubic hair, but deeply into her eyes, as if to detect not only the yearning there, but also any terrible lies.

  “Answer me, Chloe. I need to know.”

  I’d always kept my phone number private, sharing it with only a limited number of people: Rose, of course; the Head of my Department and selected colleagues; the several close friends I’d maintained along such a lengthy span of life. Few others had ever had access to it, not national agencies like the government or banks, nor local establishments like doctor’s surgeries or dentists. Indeed, the only way anyone could acquire it without my knowledge was by manually accessing the phone when I was unaware – and how often would such an opportunity arise in my slightly obsessive existence?

  I could think of only one likely occasion in recent memory, and now awaited Chloe either confirming or denying this fresh intuition.

  By this time, other sounds had arisen above the constant wind outside, all those snapping sounds of branches feeling for purchase. The latest noises seemed firm and yet incomplete, edging slowly towards me – towards us – from behind. Had someone followed me to this hidden place? Had my wife’s suspicions been elevated to such a degree that she now kept track of my activities? But no, how could that ever be so? Rose was unable to drive, and the thought that she might have hired someone to carry out such a task on her behalf – a private detective, maybe – was the stuff of cheap fiction, even less realistic than material she wrote. Indeed, the simple truth was that Chloe and I should be alone here, tutor and student about to conduct their most intimate supervision session of all. But even so, something had definitely just mounted that makeshift ladder outside my present location.

  I grew scared, hearing more hollow clunks coming slowly my way, as if whatever now approached its home was as keen as me for a prize. I was reminded at once of that underage blogger’s second online entry concerning her ostensible encounter with Donald Deere, the way the father of her burgeoning child had come to observe its blooming mother. This notion – sex as a brute act of procreation rather than spiritual communion – caused my penis to sag, a sensation I experienced as a psychological defect. Moments later, I wondered whether it was the avaricious look in Chloe’s eyes which had caused this, and even whether all my other impressions – just auditory hallucinations induced by guilt – were simply my moral mind at work, flinching from the potential ruination of everything in life I’d worked so hard to set in place.

  “Tell me, Chloe,” I said, my eyes still fixed on her. “Tell me now.”

  Those sounds on that thing – on those things – only mimicking a ladder, that weirdly alive mechanism by which I’d also achieved entry, had almost reached the top. But then – as I feared turning to look and seeing what poor Shaz had perhaps observed one night last month, gazing through her bedroom window – my student eventually spoke.

  “It was just the once, when you went to make us a drink, during our second dissertation meeting,” she explained, her voice a disarming combination of unfailing allure and shameful apology. “I took a look in your phone. You’d left it on your office desk and I saw it and then, without really thinking, I got up to grab it in my hands. It wasn’t password protected, and I…I quickly scribbled down your number in my notepad.”

  Of course it wasn’t password-protected; unless profoundly flustered by some recent experience, I’d never let the device out of my sight. And yet on this occasion I had done so, and now I realised how sneakily – ho
w invasively – my supervisee had exploited the episode, and more crucially, how soon in our relationship it had occurred. Indeed, if this could be taken as evidence of her feelings for me from the start, as well as proof that I wasn’t misguided, after all, I wondered what else she was capable of, what further lengths she’d go to ensure she acquired what she’d obviously set her heart upon.

  She’d basically exploited me; this was surely certain now. That magic potion she’d prepared on the basis of an ancient recipe, coupled with the accompanying ritual she’d also discovered, had pitched me into a deeply unfamiliar condition. Now this was decided, I had to admit that I believed it all: I believed in Donald Deere and his toxic legacy; I believed in the children he’d begotten in such a disrespectful way; I believed in life after death.