The Memory of Trees

by F. G. Cottam

  ‘It was your empty beer can, moron, which you’ve just tossed on to the pebbles,’ Alex said.

  ‘I don’t think it was,’ Peter said, frowning. ‘It sounded like a splash.’

  ‘Fucking fish are throwing themselves out of the sea in their eagerness to be caught,’ Sean said. He belched, happily. ‘Kamikaze mackerel, boys. Hake suicide squads.’

  ‘Flounder, floundering,’ Alex said.

  And Peter raised his can in a salute earned by his Polish friend’s impressive facility with the English language.

  There was another noise, which they all heard. It sounded through the roiling mist like the dull slap of something heavy on the sand and stones where the waves broke in the opaque vista before them.

  ‘I’m not totally liking this place,’ Alex said.

  The splash recurred. It was more of a heave, laboured, substantial in size and somehow hurried.

  ‘I’m liking it here less and less,’ Peter said.

  Sean had become aware of a smell. It was more of a stink than a smell, something fundamentally rotten, decayed and corrupt and somehow wrong, like a sick joke made at the expense of nature itself. It was a contradictory stench. It was to his assaulted senses, the odour of death living. It crawled through his nasal cavities. It filled his soul with a sick sort of dread.

  He sensed something loom and then lumber out of the fog. It was massive and when its barnacled maw slathered against his exposed neck it was cold and rough in the brief nightmare the rest of his existence had abruptly become. He felt the skin seared away and sensed the arterial rush of his blood sucked hot and greedily out of him. It had wrapped limbs or tentacles around him and they bound with a grip that was inescapable.

  He struggled, screaming, hearing the dying screams of his companions as the fog thickened further and the stinking creatures overwhelmed them and emptied them of life.

  NINE

  British Columbia, April 9, 1864

  This is my account of the events at Loxley’s Cross. They will seem strange and outlandish to you, their reader. Every word written is written truly, though, in horror now and with the heaviest of hearts. Those events began in hope in the spring of 1862. They ended tragically in December of the following year.

  Our arrival at our new home was not straightforward. There was a delay caused by the depth to which the well had to be sunk to enable our family to draw clean water for our dietary and household needs. It draws from a prodigious depth and was expensive to bore. But it was done eventually and we took up residence in our unique and spacious house in that desolate part of Pembrokeshire.

  For me this relocation fulfilled of course a yearning I had endured since my student days, when I first read the chronicle detailing the exploits of Gregory of Avalon and the defeat of his mythic foe.

  My fascination with English and Celtic folklore is too well known an aspect of my character for me to bother to dwell on it here. Suffice to say that it had, until two years ago, dictated much of the curious and curiously nomadic pattern of my life thus far. I went to Pembrokeshire principally to look, to study and to learn. I believed at the outset that this land, despite its open features, concealed secrets waiting for discovery.

  The account of Gregory’s quest to slay the sorceress and her acolytes in the Forest of Mourning is familiar to scholars of antiquity. He was summoned by a magician or magus or an alchemist. In the terminology of our own advanced age, they would all be described as scientists.

  This scientist had no specialism. He was presumably adept at many of what were then considered the more mysterious arts. But he sought the courage and resourcefulness of Gregory in solving a problem he had failed to tackle effectively by means of his own devices. Probably he was the source of the legend of Merlin. I believe he was, because Gregory came from Tintagel, which of course in my considered view was Camelot. But this Arthurian link is conjecture and a theory that will always remain unproven.

  His protagonist in the ensuing conflict was described as malevolent almost beyond belief. It manifested itself in the female gender. It had disguised itself as a comely woman through millennia and caused chaos and tragedy wherever it chose to settle and thrive. Many authorities on mythology through the centuries had concluded that ever since the Fall, this creature has been living her antic, alien and destructive life, always at the expense of common humanity.

  When Darwin’s Origin of Species was published four years ago I read it avidly. Indeed, I read it several times over, agreeing with almost all of his conclusions regarding natural selection. I see no contradiction whatsoever between my own beliefs and the scientific orthodoxy of the great observer of nature who has coined the term, the survival of the fittest.

  I think it arrogant to assume anything about the natural world. Apparently we humans are the dominant species. But what if there are other species, equally or more intelligent, though not as prevalent as us? We humans breed as prodigiously as mice. But numbers alone do not endow us with superiority. If it did, the residents of the ant hills of the African continent would govern the destiny of our planet. It would be them or the great shoals of unimportant fish populating oceans.

  I have examined and explored the myth of the Green Man. I have read all the accounts of the Pendle witches. I have been to the lake where I believe Gawain finally and reluctantly threw Arthur’s sword into the waiting hand of a being probably best described in theological terms as an angel.

  My point, put simply, is this. I do not think we are the only species on our planet able to boast manifest superiority to the great apes. The world is shrouded in darkness for much of its life. And the sunless time it endures enables elusive creatures to pursue their own ends. Perhaps they avoid discovery because they fear us as much as we, in our folkloric stories, fear them.

  They are capable of magic. We abandoned magic in the Age of the Enlightenment when rationality superseded the old ways with the methodology of the laboratory. What is magic? Magic is a door to which we have lost the key. But the door is there. Were it not locked, it would open on to wonders.

  This was my reasoning upon our arrival. With that established, I will give a plain account of what took place when I committed the foolish sin of delivering my innocent family and most particularly my two beautiful and blameless daughters to the inherent evils of the place history knows as Loxley’s Cross.

  There was an iron signpost a furlong distant from where I had the house constructed. It pointed to three destinations. They were Raven Dip to the south of it, Gibbet Mourning to the north and to the west, on the coast, Puller’s Reach.

  The more I saw that signpost over the first weeks after our arrival, the more redundant it seemed to me. The nearest Welsh settlement to us was seven or eight miles to the east. No one crossed or visited the land we occupied. It had become the custom of the country thereabouts to stay away and rural customs become deeply ingrained and then followed without question until they achieve the status almost of rules.

  One discovery that delighted Rachel and the girls was the small Saxon church at Raven Dip. It was derelict, in the sense that it wasn’t used. There was no priest or vicar present there. There were no services held. The church must have been deconsecrated, perhaps in medieval times or in the upheaval of the Reformation in the 1500s. That was the period when King Henry closed the monasteries, after all.

  The church was tiny and always chilly, but it was in excellent repair, completely intact once beyond its ancient oak door. It was devoid of the paraphernalia of worship. I have not yet mentioned a congregation and you will have assumed from what I have said that there wasn’t such an entity. But there was. There was a congregation of one, which is how Rachel and the girls came to meet Amelia.

  To get to the church at Raven Dip meant enduring a journey of eight or nine miles each way from the village where Amelia told the girls she came from. But that journey was only a practicable penance for a devout worshipper to whom her faith, she told Rachel, meant a great deal.

  She got
on with the girls immediately. It became her habit each Sunday as spring progressed into summer to share a picnic with the three of them in fine weather on the rise to the east of the Dip in the open air after church. That was a glorious period of golden sunshine, looking back. So their picnics were leisurely and enjoyable affairs. They broke the monotony for Rachel and the girls, and alleviated too the solitude.

  It was Amelia I had to thank for alerting me to the stained-glass depiction of Gregory at Raven Dip. It was done in the style made fashionable again over recent decades by the Pre-Raphaelite school. It was genuine, to my eye, but still accomplished several centuries after the gory event it commemorates.

  The monster is gruesome. I attributed that at the time to the imagination of the craftsman who completed the piece. Gregory is what a medieval scribe would have called fair. He looks noble and resolute and is armed in a manner too modern for his actuality. The window struck me principally as a reminder of the way in which legends are embellished as they endure down the centuries. It occurred to me that they cannot help but gain in drama.

  Eventually Amelia was invited to the house. She told us that her father was a surgeon. She spoke only with the slightest of Pembrokeshire lilts to a voice with a sweet, clear timbre. She was twenty-two, she told us. She was unattached. She seemed far too attractive a young woman to be on her way to spinsterhood and that was not a fate Rachel wanted to conspire in having her meet.

  Nevertheless, we discussed offering her a position as something between a governess and a companion for the girls. They had by this time greatly taken to her. She was educated, impeccably mannered and seemed entirely someone of good character. She was also local. She was knowledgeable enough about the history and mythology of the region to be of help to me in my researches. She knew the location of the cave in which Gregory had earned his posthumous fame.

  I cannot clearly remember the moment when Amelia introduced the idea of the maze. Certainly the suggestion pre-dated her employment with us. But it must have been after her first visit to the house. She must have remarked to Rachel or to myself or both of us that the desolate landscape would be the perfect location for such a feature.

  It would entertain the girls. It would brighten the prospect through our windows. It would attract nesting birds and they would pollinate the ground and more vegetation would grow across the barren wilderness we had made our home.

  ‘Regeneration,’ Amelia said. ‘It is what nature does.’

  The phraseology struck me as strange. She sounded almost as though she was quoting what she said. But I could not argue with the sense or the sentiment. And so I had privet cuttings purchased on my behalf and delivered by a team of wagons and we dug the channels and bedded them ourselves to a design I sketched one evening inspired probably by too much claret drunk at dinner.

  The planting itself was joyous. We toiled excitedly in the strengthening sun and then when our shift was done, slaked our thirst with cool lemonade and our hunger with ham sandwiches. It took about a month, from start to finish, if my recollection is correct. I’m honestly vague on the specifics. A mood of giddiness possessed us during those days and weeks of horticultural industry and it prevents me remembering the exact detail. Then the day arrived when our maze was done. That would have been sometime early in July.

  Its rate of growth was unexceptional at the outset. Its shrubs grew thicker and taller and more substantial. But one would expect that of any cuttings sown assiduously into fertile ground and then regularly watered.

  The girls never truly took to the maze. They never mastered its intricacies. They were not at first afraid of it, but wary of its complications and the way in which as it got taller and thicker, it became more impenetrable to light. Once it was two or three feet over the height of their heads, they were reluctant to venture into the labyrinth without an adult hand to hold. They would only do so comfortably when the sun was positioned directly overhead.

  I should say something here about the general health and demeanour of the woman our family knew and had welcomed into our household as Amelia. She was slight and not strong. She tired easily, for a country girl.

  It occurred to me more than once that her doctor father might justifiably have prescribed her a blood tonic. She seemed slightly anaemic. She was quite beautiful, but wanly so. A little like the painted Ophelia with which Millais failed to delight the Royal Academy, she sometimes had the tired aspect of a willing victim of the fates.

  She did not need to be physically robust. The girls accompanied me on walks around that considerable wilderness when they grew restless in their need for exercise. We bought them a pony apiece. Rachel would saddle her gelding Jupiter and they would ride for hours, the three of them.

  With Amelia they read stories, or they did embroidery, they spoke in Latin and French, learning the languages with which she was conversant. They learned history from her, of which her knowledge seemed almost encyclopaedic. They played with their doll’s house and their puppet theatre and she taught them tricks of illusion. They sketched and painted and rode in the trap. I observed during this time that she always found a febrile sort of energy for the maze, but thought little of that apparent contradiction.

  Eventually I explored the cave in which legend insisted Gregory had fought his noble fight against his demonic protagonist. It was truly an awful place. After meandering at the start to ensure no light spread through its length, it ran east and dead straight for well over a mile of fetid and absolute darkness.

  At its conclusion there was a gallery, scooped somehow by nature out of the stone. This was, I supposed, the dismal spot where Gregory had done his bloody deeds, despatching first the creatures that guarded her and then their inhuman mistress. You could not but wonder at his courage and resolution in reaching the spot, let alone summoning the martial strength to complete his victory in so emphatic a manner.

  With my back to the direction in which I had travelled to the gallery, I saw that there was a crack in the rock to my left that might lead to some other avenue or chamber. I had brought with me a hurricane lantern to light my way and in my pack, two Davey lamps of the type with which miners equip themselves as spare sources of illumination. I had also brought a length of rope attached to a grappling hook.

  I placed my hurricane lantern carefully on the cave gallery floor and hooked the grappler and used the rope to climb up the eight feet or so of rock face to the crack. I levered my way through it and lit the Davey lamp I had put in my jacket pocket for the purpose.

  I found myself in a roughly circular chamber about ten feet high and perhaps thirty across. The floor was loam, rich and springy underfoot. There were fungal growths, pale and mushroom-shaped and larger than any native species with which I was familiar. They gave off a musty and corrupt smell.

  Most of the walls were stained by splotches of thick moss and over these afflictions, stretched the silvery gossamer of spiders’ webs. The spiders that had spun them scurried to escape the light I had introduced to their grotesque home. I am unafraid of spiders generally. These were the biggest I had seen outside the tropics and looked venomous.

  Most curious in that horrible place was a sort of bier, constructed at its centre out of what I took from its dominant characteristic of smooth erosion to be driftwood. This had been meticulously put together and provided with a mattress made from reeds. The reeds had been skilfully knitted but the bed coldly abandoned a long time ago, I thought. I shuddered, unable to picture how unimaginative or low might be the spirit of someone content to shelter there.

  It was not just the profound solitude and silence and darkness of the spot, though all three of those incurred sensations were almost overwhelming in their force. There was a sense of menace in the cave which almost pricked the skin palpably. Whatever bleak spirit could endure it? They could surely share none of the fears and instincts and loathing of isolation that generally typify mankind.

  I climbed back down to the gallery with a shudder. Some instinct made me remove my
jacket. A large spider squatted across its back. I kicked the beast way with a grunt of disgust and it scuttled rapidly into the shadows.

  I put my jacket back on, picked up the lamp, freed and coiled my rope and walked the long and lonely route out of the cave. I confess it was all I could do not to run. I am not an overly demonstrative man. Yet when I rounded the dog-leg near its entrance and saw an oval of brightness I knew to be daylight, I could have wept with honest relief.

  My whole purpose in coming to Loxley’s Cross was to locate Gregory’s burial plot. I still believe he is buried there, but confess I never found what I was looking for. I believe he took trophies when he defeated the forest’s malevolent ruler. If they were still in his possession at the time of his death they would have been buried with him.

  I now believe the tomb likely to have been plundered. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, is it not? I spent days and months searching for some posthumous clue as to the real nature of the creature this noble warrior defeated, artefacts I thought would lie intact and esoteric and wonderful with his helm and broadsword amid his mortal remains.

  Gregory had two sons. The elder, David, became a priest led by a vocation that eventually took him to Rome. Thomas, the younger, was a complete contrast in his unruly nature. He fought and caroused and sowed his seed with sufficient enthusiasm to father several Welsh bastard sons and daughters of his own.

  History does not document all of his bad habits, but if he was extravagant, or if he gambled, he would likely have got into debt and, with David set to inherit, seems to me the likeliest culprit should his father’s tomb indeed have been ransacked for whatever treasures lay with him. Thomas could have sold them to an ambitious chieftain or even to a king. They could have gone to one of the powerful Saxon realms such as Wessex or Northumberland. They would have possessed the assumed power of religious relics and been highly coveted.

  The most difficult period before the final tragedy at Loxley’s Cross occurred in the late summer of ’sixty-three, when both of our beloved girls were stricken with diphtheria. We fetched doctors from Cardiff and then summoned an eminent London physician but the fevers did not abate and the girls surrendered to weeks of semi-consciousness and delirium. It seemed that nothing could be done and we despaired.