“Well, you got to suspend disbelief.”
“Or else what? The characters will realize they are just characters?”
“The Truman Show did tackle this topic.”
“No it didn’t! The movie is a joke. Truman doesn’t ask why he resembles Jim Carrey. It doesn’t occur to him even once. He pretends he’s living in a world without Jim Carrey.” She jerked her head. “He continues to pretend he’s not Jim Carrey even after he realizes his whole life is fake. Why does he do that?”
“It’s just a movie,” I said, helplessly. “Kusum is the literary one. She’s hip to these postmodern twizzlers. I’ll intro you two once I get back to Chennai.”
“She doesn’t even exist, you poor fool.”
“Oh, Francesca,” said Mrs D’Mello, sounding exhausted, “please don’t start. Don’t bother Gabriel. Go to sleep, be a good girl now.”
Francesca’s face underwent an extraordinary range of expressions. It was strangely inhuman to watch someone shift from rage to fright to humor to doubt to sorrow. My heart went out to the girl.
“I’m the only sane person in this car. But nothing is mine, not even silence.” Francesca’s voice trailed away and she once again rested her head on her mother’s shoulder.
Mrs D’Mello turned to me. “You can’t win arguing with her, you’ll only go mad. I’ve tried everything. She’s tried everything, poor baby. So many doctors, they just reduce her to a vegetable, that’s all. I’m praying the temple will help. God doesn’t care about religion. Didn’t Jesus help the Canaanite woman? People get cured in the temple, don’t they, at the temple? What do you believe, Gabriel?”
What could I say? I nodded. I tried to imagine Francesca’s life and failed. She was being consumed by the Lion That Devoured All Categories. It wasn’t wise to approach the beast.
I felt the car hit a stone, shudder. I instinctively grabbed for something, felt living hands grasp my own. The LED TV lurched, threatened to slip free; it was safe enough, but Mani extended his left hand to stabilize it. The car turned savagely to the right, again hit something, a grinding metallic sound, hung suspended for a terrible second, started to fall, over the side of the hill, gently, such a long hopeless fall, the fall of all doubts, all hopes, all sins, all plans, until only one crystal clarity remained: it was over. Yet my mind wouldn’t let go. I sensed my mind cry out for Kusum. Kusum, Kusum, beloved wife, my Kusum. I began to weep. Francesca’s hazel eyes, luminous in the forest of screams. She was cradling her mother, smiling.
“Don’t worry, Gabriel,” I heard Francesca say. Or was it another? And we fell.
THROUGH WYLMERE WOODS
SOPHIA MCDOUGALL
Readers familiar with Sophia McDougall’s story, ‘Mailer Daemon’, in Magic (Solaris, 2012) will be delighted to encounter two old friends here, though both stories also stand alone. This is both a prequel and an origins story, an exploration of Morgane and Levanter-Sleet’s complex relationship. The road here acts as a conduit for power and a path into the unknown. McDougall writes brilliantly about empowerment and identity, making ‘Through Wylmere Woods’ an extraordinarily heartfelt story about a journey into self-discovery.
CHAINSAWS ARE SHRIEKING against the sky as she runs into the woods. It sounds as though the road crew are somehow suspended in mid-air, their blades carving out blocks of cloud, rather than down here biting into oak. Even when she’s stopped sobbing, curled up and hidden at the base of a tree, the roar almost drowns the usual sounds of Wylmere Woods. The birdsong, the noise of the stream, and the woman’s voice she sometimes hears chattering and yelling in the water, the whispering among the leaves.
This isn’t the first attempt at escape, but it is the most premeditated. This time she has supplies: inside her school backpack there is a change of jeans and underwear, Tales of the Round Table, her sewing kit, embroidery silks and some stolen swatches of velvet, an art-deco hair slide, a packet of fig rolls, and a twenty pound note from her mother’s purse, which she hopes should pay for the bus fare to London.
Her seeing stone is clutched in her hand in case she needs it, but for the time being it seems safest not to use it. It’s always a difficult balance: the things are blurry and indistinct when she doesn’t use it; she can’t always see what they’re up to, but it’s also easier to pretend she hasn’t noticed them. A lot of things know when they’re being looked at and get much more interestedin her, and much more dangerous when she puts the hole in the stone to her eye.
She uncurls, cautiously, but carefully avoids looking up, or forward, or at anything. Around her, shadows leap and rattle. Rust-coloured wings twitch overhead. Eyes blink at her in the dark places between roots. But there will be things in London too. Perhaps the things here would get used to her in time, and she could live among them here, eating berries and mushrooms, like people in stories.
But you would have to eat an awful lot of berries to actually get full. And there never seem to be any berries in Wylmere Woods.
She is aware all the time that what’s really going to happen is that she will be found and brought back to the house, and everything will be even worse. She’s thirteen, she can’t pass for any older (in fact the idea of passing for, being, older makes panic boil in her gut). Thirteen-year-olds do not actually succeed in running away to seek their fortunes. They cannot actually start embroidery businesses in London, or live off the land in the forest. It’s pathetic she’s even trying, running away with her stupid King Arthur picture book; it’s like something a six-year-old would do.
Nevertheless, she puts her hand into the backpack and draws out the flapper-girl hair slide. It’s beautiful, real mother of pearl, it must be seventy years old. She found it in a box in one of the shut-up rooms they can’t afford to heat or clean. It might be worth a lot of money, but not enough to actually repair the roof or pay off the mortgage, so she hasn’t told anyone about it. She’s never worn it outside her bedroom before, but until they catch her, she might as well escape as fully as she can, for as long as she can. Her father has taken to growling about how long her hair is getting, but as actually getting it cut is supposed to be her mother’s job, it hasn’t happened. She parts her hair on one side, and pushes the slide in beside her temple, enjoying the little glow of tension on her scalp. She still doesn’t let her eyes focus too precisely, but she lifts her head with something like defiance, wipes her eyes and plods onwards through the woods.
There’s a banner spread between trees, sagging a little under the weight of rain. It reads, ‘THE END OF THE ROAD’.
There are people in the trees. Human people, who are obviously not aware of the shadows that crawl and leap in the undergrowth, the eyes. Trees festooned with people like Christmas baubles stand like wayposts all along the imaginary line that is the route of the A3012 through Wylmere Woods. They’re singing into the rain.
The line is the shortest possible route to Delchester, that’s why it’s there. From Delchester, she might be able to get to London.
“Hello.”
There’s a girl, maybe a year older than her, chained to an ash tree like a sacrificial maiden left for a dragon. She doesn’t have quite the desperate, martyred expression suitable to her position, however. She looks matter-of-fact and slightly bored. She’s wearing khaki combat trousers; her blonde hair, knotted messily with coloured thread and beads, straggles over a rainbow jumper.
“Are you here to join in?”
She hesitates. She’s been ambivalent about the new road so far. Her mother has decided the A3012 cannot come soon enough, it is the valve from which their revived fortunes are waiting to burst. It will bring a flood of day trippers who will pay to visit the gardens, and buy tea and sandwiches in the cafe she wants to set up in the gatehouse. George and her father are both against it, but for reasons the protesters would probably not find sympathetic.
As one would expect, the things in the woods are against the road. Is she on their side? She can tell they’re agitated, even when she’s not looking at them, s
he can sense the jaggedness in their movements, the flashes of disorder they leave in the air. The wood-things are not benevolent, but nor have they ever actually harmed her, which is much more than can be said for the things in the house.
And maybe if she stays and doesn’t talk much, she’ll be absorbed into the protesters and they’ll forget she wasn’t there all along and take her with them when they leave. It’s like running away with the gypsies, only more modern. My mother said I never should play with the gypsies in the wood, she thinks, with a small thrill.
“Yes,” she decides.
“What’s your name?” asks the maiden sacrifice.
She ducks her head and wishes after all she’d left the slide in the bag. What must she look like? She thinks of the names she sometimes whispers in front of the mirror at home, Vivien, Lynette, Rhiannon, but what if she says one of them aloud and the girl laughs? She is too cowardly to do anything but mutter the horrible truth so quietly it won’t be heard.
“What?”
She mumbles it again. All that’s audible is a breathed half-syllable “...tin...”
“Christine?”
Warmth floods her chest. Though she’s dressed in shapeless jeans and an old blue jumper of George’s under her mac, though there’s nothing but the slide in her hair to say she isn’t a boy, this girl has looked at her and seen a possible Christine. It’s not a name she particularly likes, there’s no resonance in it, but it’s infinitely better than her real one. She thinks of St Christina the Astonishing, and the name becomes more palatable still. She can be Christine if it means she can stay.
She grins helplessly and nods.
“I’m Amber,” says the maiden sacrifice.
“Do I have to be chained to a tree too?” asks Provisionally-Christine. It doesn’t seem safe. The wood-things might not realise they’re not really being sacrificed to them.
Amber shrugs. “Don’t you want to?”
Provisionally-Christine looks up at the people perched impossibly high in the canopy, the walkways strung between boughs, the treehouses. “Can I get up there?”
“Are you sure? We’re not very health and safety. We haven’t got enough hard hats. And some people are scared of heights.”
“I don’t mind. It looks really cool up there.”
“Okay. I can’t get out of these chains without help.”
Christine scrutinises her. “Can’t you? What happens when you need the loo?”
“We thought the pigs would’ve come by now,” says Amber philosophically. “I’m bursting for a pee, actually. Give us a hand.”
There doesn’t seem to be a key to Amber’s chains, all she can do is yank at them until Amber manages to wriggle out from underneath. She scurries off into the undergrowth and comes back, still hitching up her combat trousers.
“So, are you here with your folks, or what?” she asks. Christine is dismayed to find herself torn between admiration and vague disapproval of the casual Americanism. Her parents are not anybody’s folks.
“They don’t know I’m here.”
“What, you just walked here on your own?” Amber considers briefly. “Cool.” She leads Christine over to a tall oak which supports a small village of platforms and tarpaulin, and yells amiably at a man with dreadlocks. “Jed, can you get me and Christine up to Lothlorien?”
Christine, charmed by the name, tries not to be too pleased at how easily Amber says ‘me and Christine’, like it’s normal, as if she’s meant to be there.
“You ought to have a hard hat, we don’t need any more trouble,” fusses Jed vaguely, but he seems to feel that he’s done his duty by having said that, helps Christine into a rope sling and hoists her swiftly into the tree.
She sits on the edge of a platform, her legs dangling. The tree breathes and sighs around her. She feels weightless, as if she’s part of the lacework of branches, as if she’s left her awful body down on the ground.
Amber scrambles up beside her and says “What music are you into?” Christine almost answers Chopin, but just in time says, “Radiohead.”
Amber smiles approval and says, “I like Supergrass.”
Christine can see the empty space the A3012 has already gnawed into Wylmere Woods, an invisible worm with chainsaws for teeth, through the valley. There’s an encampment on the ground at its nearest edge, more banners and signs rising to greet it.
“It’s awful, isn’t it?” says Amber. “We were down there overnight planting acorns in it, but...” She shrugs. She has, Christine realises, no expectation that the protest will actually succeed. Christine is saddened, but it’s a bright, enlivening sadness that sings in her chest. She says a silent prayer in her head to St Jude, the patron saint of Lost Causes and her favourite. Christine looks above the scar in the valley, up to the wooded ridge the A3012 won’t touch. There’s something strange up there; a quiver in the air that says Things, but something else...
A tall pine tree among many. But when you look straight at it, you realise the trunk is a column of steel, spray-painted brown, the branches are green metal fins, arranged in too-tidy circles to disguise the array of antenna.
It’s the mobile phone mast they put up last year.
Christine puts her stone to her eye and looks at it.
“What’s that?” Amber asks.
“It’s a seeing stone.” She’s never said this before, to anyone. She thinks of telling the story of how she found it on the beach when she was ten, the chilly glow it gave off even before she saw the hole in it, but decides that’s going too far.
“You should show it to Mum,” says Amber, indicating a woman in jeans and a damp purple velvet top, bisected by a bulging utility belt. “She’s a white witch.”
Amber’s Mum is called Rachel. She tramps over, introduces herself and looks kindly at Christine’s stone. “Oh, are you interested in Wicca? You want quartz or beryl for scrying. Though of course, you can make do with a bowl of water.”
Christine tries to keep her eyebrows from rising. “Can you see that?” she asks mildly, nodding at the mobile phone tower.
Viewed through the stone, the mast wavers and shimmers as if obscured by a heat haze that thickens into a boiling black column, fraught with electric quivers. From within it a pair of brilliant lights glower out over the trees.
She’s never seen a Thing living in something so modern.
“See what?” asks Rachel.
The eyes in the blackness meet hers and she puts the stone down quickly. “Never mind.”
Rachel is certainly not a witch. But she passes Christine a thermos of cocoa, so Christine doesn’t hold it against her.
Rain soaks her hair. Bulldozers and cherrypickers are crawling closer from the edge of the scar, flanked by men in acid yellow jackets. There are terrible shouts from people on the ground, dragged out of the machines’ path. “Save our trees!” a man with a megaphone is booming from a sycamore fifty yards away. “Save our trees!”
She starts shouting along.
“Eruga!” shouts Rachel, instead.
“It’s a Celtic battle cry,” Amber explains.
“Eruga!” echoes Christine, who thinks she has never been so happy in her life.
THE DAYS ARE still short. The yellow-jackets have dragged or chased off everyone on the ground they can and have settled into a siege around the foot of the tree by the time the sky darkens. Some men in blue boiler suits have scaled one of the other camps, but the protesters fled across highwires and are now catcalling their foes from other trees, though they look colder and wearier now.
But the chainsaws have advanced. The vanguard of the A3012 is closer now, its progress laid out in white, raw stumps.
The wood-things are getting very anxious now. They trample and lash out in the undergrowth. Christine saw a man carried away by the police, blood pouring from his head. Amber huddles against Rachel’s side, pale-faced, while Rachel exclaims at the brutality.
“I don’t think it was the police,” says Christine. She wishes she had
n’t, afterwards. Amber looks at her oddly.
She doesn’t want to do it, with Amber looking at her like that, but the case is urgent: she begins drawing a pattern on the platform in chalk, a complex labyrinth of lines and pathways, like a fingerprint. Sand or flour or salt would be better, but even if she had any, it would all blow away up here.
“Is that a spell?” asks Amber. Her tone sounds, if only very faintly, unnerved and censorious; presumably this is not the kind of spell Rachel does. Christine knows it’s not a very good spell, having made it up through trial and error. She has no idea if there are better ways out there. All she knows is that sometimes, drawing a certain kind of pattern and thinking about it in a certain kind of way, letting her attention run through it like a the silver ball in a maze puzzle, sometimes holds off bad things, when praying to St Jude or St Monica doesn’t.
(Praying to God or the Virgin never works at all.)
The pattern is not like a protective wall around them – how she wishes that were possible – it’s more like a camp fire to ward off midges, and in this case it doesn’t seem to be working. No matter how carefully she tries to pour her mind into the gullies and whorls, she remains aware that the thing up on the ridge is moving. It separates itself from the phone mast, organising itself into something crudely bipedal, and comes striding down the valley, condensing as it walks so that in the blackness she catches glimpses of its inner structure: bones, claws, teeth. Christine clenches her fists – the thing is heading for her, she knows. She hunches lower over the pattern, whittling her attention away from everything outside it; she senses rather than hears Amber whispering something to Rachel but does not look up–
“Oh, sweetie,” Rachel says. “Don’t your parents know where you are? It’s been lovely having you here, but you’d better go home.”
End of the Road Page 16
