by Jan Siegel
‘What was that all about?’ Annie demanded.
Nathan was silent for a long minute. ‘I can’t tell you,’ he said eventually. ‘I’m sorry. There’s something I don’t understand yet, and … I have to work it out.’
‘There’s more to this immigrant business than a school project, isn’t there?’
‘Yes. Please don’t ask me, Mum. I don’t want to lie to you, and I can’t tell you the truth.’
Annie studied his serious face, and saw the pleading in his eyes. She said on a sudden rush of panic: ‘You’re not doing anything illegal, are you? I know these people need help, but you wouldn’t – you wouldn’t get involved in breaking the law – would you?’
‘Of course not. I’m not stupid, Mum. I’ll swear it, if you like.’
Annie gave a tiny shake of her head, only half relieved. ‘This man’s a stranger to you,’ she said, ‘yet you have secrets with him.’
‘I’ll explain when I can,’ Nathan said. ‘If I can.’
‘I ought to stop this right now …’
‘No! Please … I’m not doing anything wrong,’ he protested, hoping it was true. His activities might not be illegal, but he knew they were questionable. ‘Please trust me, Mum.’
‘I trust you,’ Annie said wryly, ‘but you’re too young for me to trust your judgement.’
But she made no attempt to prevent his rendezvous with the asylum-seeker, and that night she collected him and Hazel from the party at eleven, ‘because you shouldn’t walk home on your own at that hour, even though the village is quite safe,’ and after they had left Hazel at her home a silence fell between them that neither could break. Nathan was unhappy because he had never been alienated from his mother, and he knew he was hurting her, and Annie saw him turning into a teenager, secretive and hostile, and her heart ached. In bed she couldn’t sleep, and she heard him climb up to the Den, but she lacked the will to call him, and send him back to his room. A little while later, footsteps on the landing told her he had gone to bed, and she lay wakeful long after, isolated in her separateness, not knowing that Nathan, too, did not sleep.
FOUR
The Pursuers
The next day they went over to Thornyhill for tea. Nathan left his mother with Bartlemy, hoping she would talk to him, since he knew Bartlemy had a way of making things right. Meanwhile, he took a packet of Smarties and went looking for Woody. As always, it was quiet under the trees, the familiar woodland quiet of birdsong and leaf-murmur and the hum of a passing insect. Sunlight speckled the ground, filtering through branches unruffled by any wind. When he had gone some way, he sat down on a convenient log, calling softly: ‘Woody! Woody!’, and waited. The woodwose appeared very quickly; perhaps his long nose had picked up the scent of the Smarties. Nathan offered them to him.
‘I like green ones best,’ Woody volunteered, making a careful selection.
‘All the colours taste the same,’ Nathan pointed out prosaically. ‘Still, most people have a preference. I like the yellow ones myself.’
They sat for a while in Smartie-munching companionship, talking little. Presently, Nathan began to tell his friend about the cup of the Thorns, though he still could not speak of the chapel or his vision, and how they had to find the injunction so Rowena could reclaim her family heirloom. Woody understood little of this, having had nothing to do with the law in this world or any other, and Nathan’s explanation didn’t enlighten him, but he was able to assimilate the final point of the story. ‘The injunction is probably just a piece of paper,’ Nathan concluded. ‘If we can find it, Mrs Thorn can prove that the cup belongs to her, and get it back. We’ve had a good look through the house and it doesn’t seem to be there, but Uncle Barty thought it might be concealed in these woods, maybe on the site of the ancient home of the Thorns. That was destroyed a long time ago, before Thornyhill was built – my uncle told me there were other houses, dwellings he called them, and in the time of Henry VII, or perhaps it was VIII, they built the house the way it is now, sort of on top. You can still see bits of the old, old walls, in some of the rooms. Anyway, there should be the ruins of the original place around somewhere, under the trees and the leaf-mould. I thought you might know where.’
‘You mean,’ Woody said, concentrating, ‘the first house was not – where the house is now?’
‘That’s right,’ said Nathan. ‘Sorry if I sounded muddling. It would only be a few bits of wall, perhaps not even that. Just lumps in the ground where the foundations were. I went to see a Roman villa once and there were no walls, just floors, buried under the soil, and when they scraped it off they found wonderful pictures in mosaic. This place might be a bit like that, though I don’t know if it’s Roman, and I don’t suppose there are any mosaics. The Thorns can trace their ancestors back to the Saxons or even further, according to my uncle. He says there are records of someone called Turnus, which is also spelt T-H-Y-R-N-U-S, in – I think – 400 AD, and that’s meant to be Thorn Latinized, because people often Latinized their names in those days, if they were grand enough. Of course, Thorn could be Thymus anglicized, I suppose.’
‘I don’t do spelling,’ Woody admitted cautiously. ‘What is AD?’
‘It’s Anno Domini, the year of Christ’s birth. It’s how we count time. AD was over two thousand years ago.’
‘I don’t count very well either,’ Woody murmured. ‘I can do up to twenty-three, but –’
‘Why twenty-three?’
The woodwose wriggled an assortment of fingers and toes.
‘I see,’ Nathan said. He realized Woody was distressed, and added hastily: ‘It doesn’t matter. If we have to count anything, I’ll do it. The thing is, you know the woods. I thought you might know of a place where there were odd ridges in the ground, or something like that.’
‘I know,’ Woody said. ‘But I don’t go there much. It’s in the Darkwood. I don’t like it there. The trees grow twisted, as if they are afraid of the sun, and the river changes its course, and at night there are strange creakings and whisperings, and I have seen shadows move where there was no movement to cast a shadow.’
‘Whisperings?’ Nathan said, remembering the snake-murmurs in the chapel, which reached even to his dreams. ‘You mean – voices? What do they say?’
‘Nothing,’ Woody replied. ‘Nothing I can hear. They just whisper. Swss – swss – ss. A hissy sort of sound. No proper words. And once I heard thumping noises, coming from underground.’
‘Maybe there’s a badger’s sett,’ Nathan suggested.
‘Not badgers. Smell’s wrong. Badgers smell animal, rank, very strong. No animal smells in the Darkwood. More like a tingle than a smell. A tingle in my nose.’
‘Like a sneeze?’
Woody shook his head decisively. ‘A different kind of tingle. A tingle that means something bad, or maybe not bad, something peculiar – like what you said.’
‘Something weird,’ Nathan said, recollecting their former conversation.
‘I think so.’ Woody still wasn’t sure about the meaning of weird.
‘Can you take me to this place? There could be secrets buried there – the injunction, or something else. Something that thumps. Anyway, we have to see. And it’s not dark now; it won’t be dark for ages. We’ll be quite safe.’ He concluded, optimistically: ‘I’ll look after you.’
Woody seemed to accept this, with reservations. ‘We go there quickly, and leave quickly,’ he insisted. ‘The Darkwood is unfriendly, even to me. Old memories linger there, bad memories.’
‘The trees remember?’ Nathan asked, thinking vaguely of Ents.
‘Memories remember,’ said Woody. ‘Leaves dying turn to leaf-mould, trees to wood-rot. Always something left. Memories lie thick in the Darkwood, like the leaves of many seasons. Things can grow from the memories, as seeds grow from the woodland floor. Bad memories breed bad spirits.’
‘I’ve been to the Darkwood often,’ Nathan said. ‘I’ve never sensed any danger, not real danger.’ Except in the buried chapel �
�
‘You haven’t been to this place,’ Woody said with confidence. ‘I would know.’
‘Let’s go quickly then.’
Woody took him at his word, flickering ahead between the trees like something with little more substance than a leaf-shadow. When Nathan was very young, Woody had always led him carefully away from the garden, holding his hand, helping him if his clothes snagged on twig or briar; but now he kept well in front of his companion, pausing only rarely to let him catch up. Several times Nathan had to call to him to wait. They were far from any path and as they penetrated the Darkwood low branches reached out to trip him, netted stems snarled his ankles. On his previous explorations he had always chosen the most open route, but Woody was undeterred by the undergrowth: his thin body slid through every tangle. As they plunged deeper down the valley the sun went in, or was cut off by a shoulder of hill, and the trees closed over them. In the dimness it grew harder for Nathan to see his guide, unless Woody turned and motioned to him with a quick, nervous gesture. Normally sure-footed, the boy stumbled over tree-roots and slithered down sudden steeps in a flurry of dead leaves. Then the woodwose stopped abruptly in the lee of a tree-trunk begreened with moss. ‘We must be careful now,’ he said, ‘and quiet.’
‘Who is there to hear us?’ Nathan asked; but Woody did not answer.
They moved forward very cautiously now. The boy made out a ridge in the woodland floor, running too straight for nature into a jungle of briar. He tried to follow it but Woody caught his wrist and pulled him on. They came to another ridge beyond where the ground fell away for a few feet. Peering down, Nathan saw the short drop was almost sheer, as if it had been shaped by a wall. Or maybe the wall was there still, under leaf and moss and root-tendril. ‘That tree was uprooted in a storm last winter,’ Woody indicated an upturned bole some way below. ‘The earth slipped. Lots of earth. Then it was like this.’
‘I’m going to climb down,’ Nathan said. ‘I want to look closer.’
‘No!’ Woody hissed. ‘You will disturb things. Memories – or worse. We come quickly, go quickly. You promised.’
‘I must look,’ Nathan said. ‘That’s what we came for.’
He swung his legs over the edge, and jumped down. It looked an unlikely spot to find a missing injunction, but he had forgotten about that in the excitement of discovering the place where the first Thorns had lived; an eager curiosity drove him on. He explored the slope with his hands, pushing aside nettle and briar-twig, getting scratched and stung. He could feel a network of fine tubers stiffening the soil. Remembering how the chapel had been concealed, he probed in between with his fingers, sensing a loosening in the earth. There was a sound from Woody – a kind of stifled whimper – and he glanced up; but his friend had gone. Something like a zephyr moved across the wood floor towards him, eddying the leaves, shuddering a low-slung branch. The treetops did not even quiver; whatever it was travelled only on the ground, invisible, rippling the undergrowth like a serpent. There was a faint rustling which might have been grass-stems rubbing together, but wasn’t. Then it swelled to a whisper of many voices, wordless yet filled with unknown words – a whisper that drew swiftly nearer, coiling across the ground, like yet unlike the whisper in the chapel, softer, colder, more deadly … Nathan backed away from the earth-wall and began to run, down the slope at first and then pausing, knowing that was foolish, veering right and uphill again. He didn’t look round but the pursuing whisper always seemed to be just behind him, close as his own shadow. He didn’t know what had happened to Woody. Cricket and rugby had made him fit but he fell once, setting his foot on a rolling piece of log, shortening his breath, and even when the whisper failed fear still followed him, urging him to panic, blocking out thought and sense. When at last he came to a halt, panting and exhausted, he was back in Thornyhill woods but far from the house, and a distant bend in a road showed through the trees. He looked all round, but there was nothing out of the ordinary, and the birds were singing again, and the sun had returned. He called: ‘Woody! Woody!’ but the woodwose did not reappear. He said: ‘You were right. I’m sorry,’ hoping the apology would reach the ears for which it was intended, and set off walking slowly back to the house, keeping parallel with the road, thinking and thinking.
‘So Nathan is growing up,’ Bartlemy said to Annie, over the comfort of tea and exquisite little biscuits whose flavour she couldn’t identify. ‘He has secrets. It’s a cliché, but he’s no longer a child. He’s becoming a man, an adult if you prefer, and men keep secrets from their mothers. It’s natural. He has asked you to trust him, and I think that’s what you should try to do. If there’s something going on, something we should know about, we will find out in due course. Forbidding him to meet this stranger won’t help. An asylum-seeker … I wonder now.’
‘What do you wonder?’ Annie inquired. She was feeling insensibly soothed, perhaps by his placid attitude, perhaps by the sweetness of the biscuits.
‘I was wondering where this stranger comes from. A man on a beach, who has swum in from a boat, only I believe they never traced the boat, nor found any sign of companions. Illegal immigrants rarely travel alone. Don’t press him with questions, but maybe Nathan could be persuaded to bring this man here for a meal. He must be destitute, and he’s bound to be hungry.’
Annie smiled suddenly. ‘It’s a good idea,’ she said. ‘Food is your cure-all, isn’t it? You use it to work magic, to open hearts and unlock minds. Not a potion, but a biscuit –’ she took another ‘– or a mug of broth, or a piece of cake.’
‘Exactly,’ said Bartlemy.
And then Hoover looked up, thumping his tail, and they knew Nathan was coming back, and Bartlemy went into the kitchen to find more biscuits.
Back in the village, an hour or so later, Nathan went to see Hazel. He needed to talk about what had happened in the Darkwood, he needed a confidante, an ally – in his heart, he knew he needed someone to go back there with him. When he had thrust his hands between the roots, into the crumbling soil of the earth-wall, he was sure there had been a hollow space beyond; he even thought he had touched metal, like a rod of iron buried under tree and tuber. He had noted with relief that, as he had hoped, Annie seemed more relaxed with him after her tea with Bartlemy. When he said he was going to see Hazel she started to question him, then stopped short, smiling and saying: ‘Okay.’ He smiled back, trusting things were all right again, and went out.
As he approached the Bagots’ house he heard raised voices – adult voices, not Hazel’s. Her father and Lily. And Effie Carlow. The front door opened and Dave Bagot strode out, carrying a zip bag so full it wouldn’t close. He brushed past Nathan, ignoring him, got into his car, and drove off much too fast. Inside, he heard Effie Carlow say: ‘Good riddance.’ He knocked tentatively on the still-open door.
Effie’s face appeared suddenly from the gloom of the hall, looking more than ever like a predatory bird, beak-nosed and beady-eyed. ‘So it’s you,’ she said. ‘Hazel’s upstairs, in her room. Of course, in my day a girl didn’t invite a boy into her bedroom, not if she wanted to keep her reputation she didn’t. But times change. How is it with the dreaming? Been in any new worlds lately?’
‘Not lately,’ Nathan said. From the kitchen, he could hear the sound of weeping – the gentle tears of resignation, not the wild sobs of anger and despair. He felt it was best not to comment on it.
Effie smiled at him, or perhaps merely bared her teeth in a kind of ferocious grin. He went upstairs in search of Hazel.
She stuck her head round the bedroom door and pulled him inside, shutting out any possibility of adult interference. The room was less of a bedroom than a lair, the walls layered with pictures and posters, books and CDs stacked on shelf and floor, teenage magazines skulking under the bed. There was a desk littered with unfinished homework, a half-eaten bar of chocolate, a bottle of ginger beer, and a portable sound system which pumped out some sort of weird twanging music that Nathan thought might be Indian. Hazel’s taste in music was
still at the experimental stage: she refused to restrict herself to the accepted trends and was always trying out new genres. It was as if she was searching for a certain sound, something that would make her feel a certain way, but she could never quite find it. ‘What’s this?’ Nathan asked, picking up a CD case, but Hazel brushed such trivia aside.
‘Did you see Dad?’
‘He shot past me outside. Has he –’
‘He’s left. He’s really left. He and Mum had a row, and Great-grandma Effie came round, and he was yelling at her too, and I think he hit Mum, and she – Great-grandma – drove him out with a broomstick. He called her a wicked old witch, and other things too, but he went. I’m so glad. I don’t care what anyone says. I’m so glad.’ She pulled her hair over her face, and pushed her fist in her mouth, and for a moment Nathan thought she was crying.
He said: ‘Are you okay?’
She nodded, but didn’t say any more. He put his arm around her, and felt her shuddering.
‘He didn’t hit you, did he?’
‘Not this time. Only the once, with the back of his hand, not a proper hit, just casual. He was drunk. I told you about that.’ Nathan made an affirmative noise. ‘Great-grandma says she’s going to stay here for a while. That’ll stop him coming back. He’s afraid of her.’
‘Are you?’ Nathan asked.
‘A bit.’ He was almost sure she shivered again. ‘Sometimes. But she’s better than Dad. She has to be better than Dad.’
They sat for a while listening to the strange twangy music and drank some of the ginger beer, which was flat. When Hazel was calmer Nathan told her about finding the site of the first house of the Thorns, and even about Woody, which she found rather hard to take in – she could deal with other worlds, but semi-human creatures lurking round tree-trunks sounded suspiciously like pixies or goblins, and she wasn’t having any of that. She said with conscious cynicism that she had long outgrown fairytales. ‘You’ll understand when you meet him,’ Nathan assured her. He tried to tell her about the whispering and the phantom pursuit, but that was hardest of all to describe.
