The Beginning Woods

by Malcolm McNeill

  He lit a cigarette and waited. In the mirror above the bar his reflection watched him from behind dimly glinting bottles, his pale face drawn with exhaustion.

  If I solve the Vanishings, will I be able to sleep and enjoy life, the way other people sleep and enjoy life?

  It seemed an impossible fantasy, but a pleasing one, and he was beginning to dream of a simple garden, of potatoes and cherry trees, when a movement in the mirror caught his attention. He was being observed, he saw, by a tall figure standing in the shadows near the door. If it was the woman he had come to meet, she had entered so quietly neither he nor the barman had heard.

  “Mrs Jeffers?”

  “Who else would it be, this time of night?” She moved forwards a little, enough for him to see long, wrinkled hands arranging the folds of a golf umbrella. “Get him to turn off the lights, will you?”

  “Lights?” He glanced about. “You mean the candles?”

  “You don’t turn off candles, Doctor Peshkov. It’s the cigarette machine. The beer fridges. And that absurd Eiffel Tower lamp beside the till.”

  “But why?”

  “You know why.”

  “I do?”

  “Look—have him light more candles if the dark frightens you.”

  But the barman was already making the necessary adjustments. “Pas de problème,” he murmured. “Pas de problème.”

  “Pierre, merci,” said Boris, as candles appeared one by one in bottles along the bar.

  “Lovely,” the old woman said approvingly. “Now we can get down to business.”

  She left the shadows, and Boris watched in the mirror as she organized her limbs on the stool beside him. She was about as old as he’d expected from the antiquated handwriting of her letter. Her dark-grey hair was twisted into a serpentine tower, held in position—magically, it seemed—by a single silver pin, long as a knitting needle, thrust diagonally downwards. Ornate silver earrings hung from her ears, which drooped under their weight. Her face was long and bony, and covered in an elderly fuzz of white hair, while her close-set, penetrating eyes reminded him of a bird—a heron, or a crane.

  It was all typical of the cultured, eccentric sort he’d expected. So why, as he studied her, did he feel a creeping unease? From the moment he’d seen her appear in the shadows by the door a small balloon of fear had been inflating in his throat.

  “I don’t remember the last time I was up so late,” she complained, propping her umbrella against her stool. “I suppose you adore night-times in cities. Wandering the streets. Collar up. Frowning like a murderer.”

  “You’ve been following me?”

  “At night? Not likely. As far as I’m concerned there’s nothing worse than a city at night.”

  “And yet here you are.”

  “This is a special occasion. Speaking of which. Monsieur! Puis-je une WHISKY!” She rapped on the bar, making a loud clacking sound, and he noticed several silver rings glinting on her fingers. “It’s not past your bedtime though, is it?”

  “What? No. Actually yes,” he said. “It’s been past my bedtime for two days.”

  “What’s keeping you awake? Monsters under the bed?”

  “There are no monsters under the bed.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure,” he said. “I’ve checked.”

  “You had to check? I like that, hehheh, that’s good. Merci, dear boy.” The barman retreated with a hushed de rien, and she sipped her whisky. “So what is it, if it’s not monsters?”

  Boris crushed his cigarette into an ashtray and imagined telling her what happened when he tried to sleep.

  How he’d lie down and close his eyes.

  How one of the Vanished would appear in his mind.

  How he’d think about this person—who they were, where they lived, who they’d left behind—and how he’d find something had slipped from his memory, their age or some other detail.

  How this would torture him so much he’d have to get up and go through his files until he found the missing information.

  And then he’d be trapped. He’d have to look at them all, one by one. Because the thought that terrified him more than any other was that one had been forgotten—that not only a name, or an age, or a birthplace, but an entire life had slipped from existence for ever.

  The café door banged—a stack of freshly printed newspapers hit the floor. He blinked and came out of himself. From the old woman’s face he saw that he hadn’t just imagined telling her—he’d actually spoken his thoughts out loud.

  “I thought you’d be like this,” she said, touching his arm. “And seeing you now, and listening to you, I understand so much about you. You’re a kind man, and you’ve taken the Vanishings to heart, that’s all.”

  Boris felt his eyes, absurdly, filling with tears. His rough fingertips fumbled them away. If the old woman saw she pretended not to.

  “So,” he said. “Why were you so determined to meet me? Why not one of the Seekers?”

  “Oh, my little story isn’t something you want regular scientists getting their hands on,” she said, with a quiet smile. “It’s for someone a bit more… from both worlds, if you know what I mean.”

  “There’s only one world.”

  “Have you checked that too?”

  “I don’t need to. I’m sure.”

  She clicked her tongue. “Don’t say that. It doesn’t come from you, from your heart. Professor Courtz might say it. But not you.”

  The sudden mention of Courtz took him by surprise. “He’s a recluse. How do you know what he’d say?”

  “It’s plain what kind of man he is. All circuit boards and equations. He’d rather words were numbers and ideas were formulas. You’re different. There’s something of the cauldron about you. Something Witch-made. It’s a mind like yours that’ll solve the Vanishings, not a mind like his. Don’t you know that?”

  “I know Courtz.” He gave her a grudging look. “Perhaps you know people you don’t know quite well.”

  “You’d be surprised, dear boy, what I know, you really would.”

  “Do you know how to stop the Vanishings?”

  “I know how they started.”

  “That’s nothing. Even Pierre knows that. Pierre, les Disparitions, c’a commencé comment?”

  “Par les Anglais,” mumbled the barman from behind a newspaper.

  “You see?” said Boris. “It was the English. Everyone has an opinion. What’s so special about yours?”

  “Who’s talking about opinions? This isn’t something I thought up. It’s something I saw.”

  “We have to correctly interpret what we see.”

  “And if there’s only one possible interpretation?”

  “Then there is no need to seek out mine.”

  “I didn’t come here for your opinion. I came here for your help.”

  “My help?”

  “Your help,” she said again, nodding. “I would say your help alone, but we never really are alone are we, Doctor Peshkov? Even the most solitary traveller is pursued by demons. Or Wolves.”

  “Wolves?” He glanced at his reflection. The other Boris was there, no surprises. “What do you mean?”

  “First things first. I’ll tell you what I saw, then we can get down to business. Are you ready?”

  He nodded, and she leant in close to whisper in his ear. It was only a short sentence—having said it, she leant back and sat waiting for his response.

  He scratched the side of his face to hide his disappointment.

  Why did he bother with these meetings? They always turned out the same way. Some wild story. Some strange fantasy cooked up by a lonely soul. Over the years he’d heard hundreds of theories. And this one beat the lot.

  “A baby started the Vanishings?” He was unable to conceal his disbelief. “That’s what you wanted to tell me?”

  “That’s it, yes,” she nodded, before adding hastily: “I’m not saying he did it on purpose. He can’t have known what he was doing—I me
an, he’s only just learnt to walk.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve never heard anything more ridiculous.”

  “There’s that fellow Courtz again. Why do you keep trying to be someone you’re not?”

  “Whatever our differences, we are both scientists. We share certain basic standards. By those basic standards, it’s absurd.”

  “Is it? What have you discovered about the Vanishings that makes you so sure?”

  This was a good point, he thought, but he was unwilling to waste any more time. He reached into his pockets for some coins and was about to leave when a late-night taxi turned on the road outside. Twin shafts of light swept through the bar, catching the old woman side-on.

  “Dratted stuff,” she muttered, flinching slightly. “Just no escape, is there?”

  The moment was over in a second, but he saw it. Pain flickered in her eyes, and the skin around her nose and mouth tightened. Even her hair changed, the iron-grey gleaming white as the light passed over it.

  Somehow he managed to conceal his first reaction. Then panic was galloping up on him. He fumbled for a cigarette, and snapped one match after another trying to light it. Giving up, he reached for a candle—but that stopped him dead.

  The candles…

  All that fuss about the lights…

  The cigarette tumbled from between his nerveless fingers. Somewhere a thousand miles away, the old woman was speaking. Was he feeling all right? He’d gone all pale. And he was pale enough to begin with!

  “I’m fine. I just… I thought I saw… Please, go on…”

  He put his palms flat on the bar. Lowering his head, he forced himself to breathe steadily. Deeply.

  And then he saw her umbrella, propped against her stool.

  Her neatly folded umbrella.

  His body went weak.

  She’d been folding it when she came in. That meant she’d had it open. But it hadn’t been raining. She’d been walking around on a clear night under an open umbrella. Why?

  You know why.

  He felt himself collapsing. He did know. He’d just refused to admit it. And now the question was rising in his mind, no longer faint, no longer a whisper—but a roar.

  Tensing his shoulders, he held himself together with sheer force of will.

  It couldn’t be that.

  It was impossible.

  He would prove it.

  He caught Pierre’s eye. “Lumière,” he mouthed.

  Bizarrely unconcerned, the barman sidled towards the switch that would ignite the chandelier glittering darkly above them. The old woman had noticed nothing and was still talking, but now he couldn’t understand a single one of the words she was saying.

  Beschreibung deß Lebens eines seltzamen Vaganten, genant Melchior Sternfels von Fuchshaim, wo und welcher gestalt er nemlich in diese Welt kommen—

  German.

  Why was she talking German all of a sudden?

  Panic drove him to his feet. She stopped and stared in astonishment as he stepped away from her. She saw the guilty flicker of his eyes towards Pierre, whose hand was lifting towards the tiny brass switch.

  “Oh you merry fools,” she muttered.

  Her hand snapped down for her umbrella.

  The chandelier lit up in a blaze of light.

  She jerked like a bomb had gone off, her arms coming up to cover her head. A second later she went for her umbrella again, bending down, but this time she keeled forwards, toppling off her stool. He threw his arms round her.

  “You idiot!” she got out. “Turn it off!”

  He stared in horror at her upturned face. Her eyes were bulging out of their sockets, white as hard-boiled eggs.

  She was blind.

  He’d blinded her.

  And her hair! The grey tower of tightly bound coils was falling apart, crumbling like ash from a cigarette.

  He ripped off his jacket and threw it over her.

  “PIERRE!” he screamed. “Vite! Vite!”

  The barman was pressed back against the wall, shaking his head from side to side.

  “Vite? Comment-ça, vite?”

  “La lumière, pour l’amour de Dieu! Éteins!”

  Pierre’s hand flapped up.

  click

  Nothing.

  clickclickclickclickclick

  “PIERRE!”

  “Ça ne marche plus! Ça ne marche plus!”

  Boris vaulted the bar and struck the brass plate a terrible blow with his fist. It disappeared into the wall with a puff of dust—the light flickered but did not go out.

  He spun back round.

  The old woman was pulling herself along the bar, knocking over stools and bottles. His jacket had fallen from her head, and now the light was really going to work, turning her from a tall old woman to a hunched, shrivelling creature. Her spine arched into a question-mark curve, the vertebrae popping one by one. Her face drew against her skull like a sock pulled too tight. She lifted her hands to shield herself—they crisped and crackled into blackened claws.

  He vaulted back over the bar and snatched up her umbrella.

  Pressed the catch and pushed.

  It jammed.

  clickclickclickclick

  Howling, he smashed it to pieces against the bar.

  The old woman sagged against a table. Candles and bottles went flying.

  “Idiot… scientist,” she got out. Teeth dropped from her mouth and rattled across the table like dice. Then she slid onto the floor, a tangle of skin and bones—curling up, smaller and smaller. Above her the chandelier rattled with malevolent energy, every one of its crystals shivering with delight as it punished the old woman for daring to intrude where she did not belong.

  Boris cast about, snatched up a stool and sent it spinning upwards.

  With a violent crash the bar was plunged into gloom.

  Swiftly he was on his knees beside her. Her breath was coming in shallow gasps. She was saying something.

  What was it?

  Again!

  Candle…

  There were many scattered about. He relit one and held it next to her, anxiously touching her shoulders, not knowing what to do, how to help.

  A twitch of her fingers motioned him away.

  He jammed the candle in a bottle and slumped back against the bar. He watched that light as it worked its ancient magic, stroking her with the gentlest of touches, a painter at a work of restoration.

  He’d nearly killed her.

  He’d nearly killed one of the Forest Folk.

  He pressed his trembling hands to either side of his head.

  Now he knew two things he hadn’t known before.

  Why the old woman had come to him.

  And that it all very definitely had something to do with the Woods.

  2

  THE ORPANAB KOBOLD

  Babies come in all shapes and sizes.

  A baby might be beautiful or ugly, fat or thin, it will make no difference. Whatever its appearance, the baby will be loved, and will enjoy the nurturing consequences of that devotion.

  The one thing a baby absolutely must not be is spooky. A spooky baby will struggle to kindle love.

  “Is this thing before me really, truly, in actual fact… a baby?” That is the terrible doubt in the minds of those who behold a spooky baby. “Might it not be something else?”

  The baby who started the Vanishings was one such spooky baby.

  In those early days the Vanishings had not yet begun. He had set them in motion, and they were still to make their grand debut, but even so—right from the morning of his arrival at the Surbiton Centre for Orphaned and Abandoned Babies, he made himself known as an oddity.

  Nobody knew where he’d come from. The ORPANAB nurses only knew he’d been found in a bookshop, and this lack of information was in itself spook-worthy. Babies arriving into their care usually came with some token from their previous lives. A tear-stained note. A snot-streaked blanket. This one had the nerve to arrive empty-handed. And what was even
more extraordinary, what boggled the minds of the nurses, was that he’d been found entirely naked, without even a sheet of newspaper to wrap him in.

  But it was no surprise he was unwanted, the nurses thought.

  He was just so spooky.

  Instead of the plump little arms and legs of conventional newborns, he had hard, animal limbs more suited to leaping and burrowing. He had a way of staring too, of staring and staring—and it was such an adult stare! He seemed to know things beyond his age, as though he might open his mouth and start reciting Shakespeare, or make a comment about recent political developments.

  Indeed, when he did open his mouth for the first time, on the occasion of a yawn, his spookiest feature was revealed: his teeth. Not the partially visible buds sometimes found in newborns, but ten shining little pearls, perfectly formed and hard as barnacles.

  He was only, at the most, a few days old. And already he was snapping the ends off pencils.

  Spooky!

  Things got spookier still when he was brought to the main dormitory. On an average day this was the noisiest room in England. Noisier than the stock market or Parliament or the Monkey House in London Zoo. A hundred babies, all screaming at once, as though making up for those tedious months of floating in amniotic fluids, unable to make a single squeak. Day in, day out, a roar of confusion, interrupted only by stunned, milky stupor.

  But on his arrival the clamour fell silent. One by one, as the startled nurse passed between the cots with the newcomer in her arms, the babies rolled over to stare at the eyes glittering darkly from the crook of her neck.

  They knew What This Was that had arrived among them.

  They knew he did not belong.

  The newcomer seemed to agree. That same afternoon, the nurses caught him scuttling across the nursery, heading for the exit—the first of many determined attempts to escape. Again and again he had to be hooked down from a windowsill, where he would sit with his face pressed against the glass, longingly looking out at the world below. One week he disappeared entirely, sparking a manhunt and a newspaper article—he was on the rooftop, clambering among the Victorian chimney pots.