The Beginning Woods

by Malcolm McNeill

  Mr J. P. Wentling, formerly of Pennsylvania, but now at St Anthony Park, Minnesota, had a disappointing experience with a squonk near Mount Alto. He made a clever capture by mimicking the squonk and inducing it to hop into a sack, in which he was carrying it home, when suddenly the burden lightened and the weeping ceased. Wentling unslung the sack and looked in. There was nothing but tears and bubbles.

  If he questioned the Dark Man, or told anyone about him, he would melt away in bubbles and tears. And he didn’t want the Dark Man to go. The Dark Man was somewhere between a shadow and a friend.

  As it turned out, though, the Dark Man was the one with questions.

  The first time Max heard them, he was ten years old. He was in the supermarket with Alice, tagging along behind her, eating the crisps she’d passed down. Near the bottom he stopped to tilt the good bits into his mouth, and when he lowered the packet Alice and the trolley had disappeared and the Dark Man was there like a clap of thunder, ten times close and a hundred times big.

  He didn’t introduce himself or explain what he wanted. He just asked two questions. Before Max had a chance to answer there was a clatter and a shout, and a snake of shopping trolleys rolled between them.

  When it passed the Dark Man was nowhere to be seen. Only his questions remained.

  Who are you?

  Where do you come from?

  These questions seemed easy and at first Max believed he knew the answers. But the more he thought about it, the more he began to wonder.

  If he’d answered the Dark Man with, “I’m Max Mulgan, I come from Bickerstaffes Road,” somehow he knew the Dark Man would have replied, “No, you aren’t,” and “No, you don’t.” So the questions lodged in his mind, and other questions piled up behind them.

  Where did I come from?

  Where did where I come from come from?

  Where did the where where the where where I came from come from?

  Nobody except the Dark Man seemed interested in these questions. They weren’t in the end-of-term tests at school. They weren’t on quiz shows on TV. Nobody talked about them. Nobody mentioned them.

  This made him feel different.

  And that made him feel alone.

  And that bound him to the Dark Man more than ever.

  THE BOGGY CLUMP

  But sometimes it was good to be alone.

  Near Bickerstaffes Road was a park called Newton Fields, a wide, open place with a play area, a duck pond and a resident Wind that blew with unending breaths across the grass, collecting and delivering birds and snapping the pages of newspapers. In the middle rose a hill where people gathered for picnics in summer, Bonfire Night in autumn, sledging in winter and Easter-Egg-rolling in spring. Standing on its crest, Max could see all the way across the park to a row of stately houses whose wide windows were partly concealed by poplar trees. As he watched the slender trees swaying with pleasure in the Wind, he liked to wonder who lived behind those distant, glinting windows.

  His favourite spot was a corner of the park where a stream ran. He could sit there all afternoon on a hummock of grass, unseen except by roving dogs and the fetchers of kicked-too-far footballs.

  The stream was interesting. Minnows darted about above the orange mud. Birds dropped from the trees and dipped their beaks into the water.

  Once he saw a kingfisher.

  There was always something different.

  At the park’s edge, the stream passed through a metal grille and into a concrete tunnel, vanishing underground with a swirl of its cloak. He liked to watch the water gurgle through the bars and disappear into the darkness while he thought about the Dark Man’s questions.

  One day a large branch floated down the stream and clunked against the metal bars. Twigs got caught in the branch, then leaves got caught in the twigs, and soon a Boggy Clump had formed. The bigger it got, the faster it got bigger, and after a few more days the grille was snarled with muddy junk—a doll, a pair of shoes tied together at the laces, a broken umbrella, a telephone. By the next weekend the roar of water that had echoed up from the concrete tunnel had fallen silent, and the stream had spread into a shallow, still pool.

  This pool was terrifying to behold. Dead insects floated on its surface, trapped in a film of green algae, and a yellowy froth gathered round the edges. Alice called this froth Witch Spittle, a name that gave Max nightmares about what happened when he wasn’t there. Even so, the pond was dreadfully fascinating, and each day he would run from school to succumb to its evil power. The pond was generating something deep in the depths of its foulness. As he stood there one day, staring hard at the still water, a cheap plastic football bobbed with a bubbly glug to the surface—a mutated eyeball to stare back at him.

  Screaming, he ran home and told Forbes the pond was watching him. Forbes nodded solemnly, pulled on his wellingtons, and off they went to the park. One look was all Forbes needed. He strode into the water, took hold of the branch—still sticking out of the Boggy Clump—and gave it a heave. Watching from the edge, Max experienced a deep, satisfying thrill as the Boggy Clump crumbled apart, and all the built-up water, the algae, the dead insects and the Witch Spittle drained away.

  But Forbes wasn’t done. With skilful swings of his hook, he flung the bits of trash and junk onto the bank, and in a matter of moments he’d cleared the grille. As final proof of his mastery, he hoofed the football towards the centre of the park. An hour later the stream was rushing on its underground journey just as before, and there was a line of black bags next to the park bins.

  For the rest of the day Max stayed close to Forbes, admiring things he’d never noticed before, like how he could butter his toast with one stroke of his knife, or drain a mug of scalding-hot tea in one gulp. Everything was simple with Forbes and he was afraid of nothing, not even Pond Eyeballs and Witch Spittle.

  Forbes knew the answer to everything.

  Maybe even the Dark Man’s questions.

  Max decided to ask him. He waited until bedtime, when he was sitting on the end of the Mulgans’ bed. He sat there every night, to tell Forbes and Alice a story.

  Mostly his stories were about what he’d learnt at school. The night before, it had been about snow.

  “We found out about snowflakes today,” he’d told them. “How they’re shaped like a star, with all these patterns and diamonds. Mr Chandra told us that’s how water crystals form when they freeze.”

  “That’s right,” said Forbes. “And did you learn how they all have eight arms? Like an octopus?”

  “Six,” said Alice, giving him an elbow. “It’s six, isn’t it Max?”

  “Yes,” said Max. “But Mr Chandra is wrong. It doesn’t have anything to do with how water freezes. It’s the Starmakers.”

  “Oh-ho!” said Forbes, wriggling with pleasure. “Who are the Starmakers?”

  “Don’t you know?” Max had been surprised at this, because Mr Chandra hadn’t known either. “If you look even closer at a snowflake, if you look much more closer than ever, you see tiny chisel marks on the snowflake. Tiny chisel marks made by tiny silver chisels.”

  “Is that so?” Forbes said, winking at Alice.

  “The chisels belong to the Starmakers,” Max explained. “Snowflakes are stars that weren’t good enough. Each Starmaker makes thousands of stars a year, and they throw most of them away because of little mistakes. But now and again, once every million years, one of the Starmakers looks up from his anvil. And all the other Starmakers look up as well and put down their chisels, because they know what’s happened—finally there’s a star perfect enough to go in the sky. The proud Starmaker takes his star out into the Hall of Stars and hangs it up for everyone to see. Then for a long time there’s silence and no more stars are made and no more snow falls, because the Starmakers are resting and admiring the new star.”

  On other nights, the Mulgans learnt that Wind was the breath of Giants, and the sky was blue because it had been painted that way. Neither had anything to do with the warming of the land and
sea at different speeds, or the particular way light was scattered by air molecules. The cleverest thing about these stories, the Mulgans felt, was that Max put on such a great show of believing them to be true. And poor Mr Chandra—he had to be reassured at parent evenings that it was all just a private family joke.

  Except it wasn’t a joke.

  As far as Max was concerned, they weren’t stories at all.

  They were explanations.

  They were simply there in his mind, as though from a book he couldn’t remember reading.

  But he had no answers to the Dark Man’s questions. And when he asked Forbes and Alice, he could tell they were questions unlike all others, because something in the room changed—maybe even everything.

  “Where do you come from?” Forbes repeated, glancing at Alice. “Uh… you mean… where do babies—?”

  “No! I mean, who am I?”

  “Oh.” For a moment Forbes looked relieved, then he adopted a careful expression Max had never seen before.

  “You’re Max Mulgan,” he said. “You’re from Bickerstaffes Road. You live here with me and Alice. We’re your parents and this is your home. Isn’t that right, Alice?”

  “That’s right.”

  But Max wasn’t going to be fooled by those Mr Chandra answers.

  “I don’t mean that,” he said. “I mean who am I really?”

  “That is who you are really,” said Alice, her voice tightening. “Who else could you be?”

  Forbes glanced at Alice, then leant over, kissed her on the cheek and turned back the duvet.

  “Come on lad,” he said, getting himself up and holding out his hook. “Time for bed.”

  Max clung onto the hook, and Forbes slung him over his shoulder in the way that he did, and carried him into his kingdom. After tucking him in, Forbes sat on the end of the bed.

  “It’s my turn to tell a story,” he said. “Except this isn’t a story. It’s real.”

  “Like my stories?”

  “Eh… yes. And… no matter how strange it is at first, just remember—it’s got a happy ending. So… there’s nothing to worry about. OK?”

  “OK.”

  “Our story begins in a magical land on the outskirts of London called Surbiton.” Forbes scratched his beard. “Actually it’s not really a land. It’s more of a… commuter town.”

  “But something magical happened there?”

  “The most magical thing ever,” Forbes said. “We met you.”

  And so Max learnt that he was adopted, and he learnt what that meant. He heard about Mr Linklater and the ORPANAB, and how he’d been found in a bookshop.

  “And now you live with Alice and me,” Forbes said when he’d finished. “You’re Max Mulgan. We’re your parents and this is your home.”

  “What happened to my real parents?” Max asked at once.

  “Your birth parents? Nobody knows.”

  “Did they Vanish?”

  “Not then, no. The Vanishings hadn’t started then.”

  “So where are they? Why haven’t they come back for me?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “Maybe they have Vanished.”

  “It’s possible. Nobody knows that either.”

  “Nobody?”

  “Nobody apart from them.”

  “They’re dead, aren’t they?” Max asked, and without knowing he was about to, he began to cry for his poor, dead parents.

  “Nobody knows,” Forbes murmured, putting his great comfy arms round him and rocking him. “Nobody apart from them.”

  After a cuddle, Max felt himself being lowered back onto his pillow. Then Forbes was tucking the blankets under his chin. His face, smiling with planetary kindness, loomed close.

  “Nobody knows who your parents were, Max,” he said. “You can choose who they were then. And who they are now. You can choose.”

  He bent over to kiss Max on the forehead.

  “Goodnight Max.”

  “Goodnight Forbes.”

  The night light clicked and its yellow glow sprang up against the wall. Max rolled onto his side to face the wall. With a quiet, mechanical whirr the flock of birds swept around the room.

  I get to decide who they are. And nobody can tell me I’m wrong.

  From the Hot Air Balloon, the man and woman stared back at him.

  His birth parents?

  No…

  His Forever Parents.

  The black silhouettes moved across the wall with agitated, flapping wings—a never-ending flight that went round and round.

  dead they’re

  dead they’re

  dead they’re

  dead they’re

  His eyes closed. He was inside a flock of honking birds, high up in the sky, and they were flying with whirring, beating wings.

  His parents…

  The birds…

  The Balloon…

  A wicker basket creaked…

  He heard voices…

  Laughter…

  Someone was singing quietly…

  Sunlight glinted on spectacles…

  Auburn hair shone in the sun…

  A flame roared. The basket swayed. His Forever Father played a tin whistle. His Forever Mother sang in a low voice. He was with them in the Balloon and they were together, and because they were together they were happy.

  Then a hook gave the sky a touch, and in a dark corner of the dream a shadow was set in motion with a mechanical whirr. On the horizon a black smudge appeared, there was a beating of wings, an approaching flurry: a flock of birds, of Canada geese!

  One cannoned past. Another. Then hundreds. They thundered round the Balloon, blotting out the light, a storm of honking and a hammering of wings. But, just as suddenly, the Balloon was free. They had passed through and the sky was silent and bright and blue again.

  Only, there was a new sound.

  A low, sinister hiss.

  The Canada geese had made a hole.

  They were losing height!

  His Forever Parents leapt into action. Bedding. Books. Luggage. Armchairs. The writing desk. The tin whistle. All of it went overboard, tumbling towards the waves where the sharks were already circling, arguing about who was to get what.

  And for a while it worked. Land appeared. Hopes rose. So did the Balloon.

  Then the hole tore wider. They began to sink again, faster than before.

  His Forever Parents took stock. Land was still far off. They weren’t going to make it.

  Something else had to go.

  They cast around.

  There was nothing.

  There was something.

  His Forever Mother hopped over the side and dropped out of sight.

  Gone!

  That bought a few extra minutes, but not enough, not nearly enough! His Forever Father gave him a blessing, a hug and instructions for how to grow up and be good—then flung himself into the cold, shark-filled waters.

  And… that was it… they were gone… and the Wind blew, and the shore came, and the dream broke into many parts that went skittering about and became a thousand other dreams, many dream children with one Mother—the Balloon dream, his favourite. It returned to him many times, always filling him with a deep, heart-wrenching love for his Forever Parents, who had sacrificed themselves so the Balloon could carry him to land. When he woke his eyes would be bright with tears, and he would lie in his bed filled with the sad happiness of leaving a wonderful dream behind.

  THE OCEAN

  Max wasn’t the only one with dreams.

  As a boy Forbes had dreamt of becoming a great scientist, an engineer who would build rockets, spaceships and factories of shining steel, or a famous doctor who would cure disgusting diseases like the Mumbles or Grout.

  But somewhere along the line something went horribly wrong and he ended up cleaning the meat grinder at Chumley Abattoir.

  For twenty years he stood beside the grinder holding a long pole with a hook on the end. When a piece of meat or gristle got caug
ht in the grinder’s teeth he would scrape it out and flip it into a bucket marked BEEFBURGERS. And while he hooked and scratched, scraped and fished, he dreamt his dreams and was happy.

  As the years went on, though, his dreams began to leave him. One by one, they dropped from his pockets and rolled into the grinder, where they were mashed up with hundreds of sheep heads. In time only one dream remained, and because it was the last it tugged sadly at his soul. Seeing it go, he lunged after it, lost his balance—and his right hand was whipped off so fast he hardly noticed it had gone.

  Six months later he returned to the abattoir with a prosthetic hook. It was useful for scratching out the smaller pieces of bone that couldn’t be reached by the long, clumsy pole—but although he worked twice as fast as anyone else, and the meat grinder was the cleanest in the country, whenever he looked at it he thought about the rockets and dreams that had been crushed in its mechanical jaws.

  To replace his lost dreams, he went to the racetrack to bet on the dogs. Now and again he came home with a bundle of ten-pound notes, but mostly he returned empty-handed, and then Alice would shout at him until she was blue in the face. Forbes would shout back, getting red in the face, and they would storm off to separate parts of the house: Forbes to the television set and a can of lager, Alice to the greenhouse at the bottom of the garden where she kept a bottle of pale cream sherry, and there they would sit in obstinate silence wondering when it was all going to end.

  But it did not end. It went on and on, and slowly Alice lost her dreams as well.

  They crawled into the grime under the fridge.

  They were silenced by the bank manager’s frowns.

  They seeped out of her so slowly she did not notice they were going, until one day she woke up, looked in the mirror and did not recognize her own face.

  It was then they decided to foster a child.

  They wanted someone who was full of dreams. Someone who could bring dreams back into their lives. They chose Max, and for a while the racetrack and the shed at the bottom of the garden went unvisited. He told them their bedtime stories, and it all went according to plan.