Darkest Part of the Woods

by Ramsey Campbell

  The private hospital stood at the end of a lazily winding drive. Originally a broad three-storey house built by a landowner, it had grown six new ground-floor rooms behind itself. A minibus was backing onto the gravel in front of the left-hand bay window, beyond which a man had thrust his fingers in his ears while the bus reiterated in a high sharp voice "Beware vehicle reversing." Sam halted the car and ducked out of reach of the kiss she aimed at him. As the car veered away with a stony screech, Margo hurried out of the wide front entrance.

  "There you are," she said as if she had begun to doubt the possibility. "Dr Lowe is ready for us."

  The tall minutely stooped doctor turned from murmuring to the receptionist at her desk between the feet of a pair of curved staircases. He used a fingertip to separate a tuft of his greying hair from an arm of the silver spectacles that looked too flimsy for his broad round face. "Shall we go along to my office?" he said, holding out his palms well short of Heather's and Margo's backs to guide the women into a brief corridor.

  Two pastel abstracts that might have started life as landscapes flanked his door, and Margo dealt them each an unfavourable blink. The office into which he bowed the women seemed both fat and dark with the leather of several chairs and with the bindings of dozens of nearly identical volumes shelved to the right of an extensive pine desk, an impression scarcely relieved by the' view of the twilit lawn staked out by a few trees more solid than the misty woods across the bypass beyond the high wall. Dr Lowe indicated a couch and sat on the nearest chair rather than behind the desk. "I don't know if anyone thanked you for helping yesterday," he said, "but let me start by thanking you both. I believe you were instrumental in persuading Lennox to come back to us."

  "I don't know if we did that, did we, Heather?"

  Heather didn't immediately respond, having only just recalled that the man she'd seen watching the minibus had been among her father's companions in the woods.

  The memory felt more like a fading dream. "I don't," she said.

  "But if we hadn't been around there mightn't have been enough people to cope."

  "I won't deny there could have been a problem," Dr Lowe admitted. "We'll be discussing patterns of staffing next week."

  "And maybe hiring some extra staff?"

  "As you're aware, we don't have problems of containment as a rule."

  "So why did you yesterday? You aren't someone else who blames Lennox for everything."

  "Someone other than whom, can I ask?"

  "It seems like half of Goodmanswood sometimes, doesn't it, Heather?"

  "Quite a few people at least."

  Margo sniffed at the revision. "I'd say more than that think he's responsible for everything that happened in the woods."

  "It does appear to be the case," the doctor said, "that Mr. Price was the instigator. He asked reception to look for something he told her he'd mislaid, some book he needed to consult.

  It was just a diversion. He wouldn't name the book."

  "I wasn't talking about yesterday. I meant the reason we came to England in the first place," Margo said with some bitterness. "And incidentally, he's still Dr Price. The university wouldn't take that away from him."

  "Dr Price, I should have said, of course. I'm certain anyone who knows the facts appreciates what he did. It's tragic that he should have been one of the victims of the very threat he identified. The sad truth is pioneers are often misunderstood." Having paused to observe that she was to some extent mollified, Dr Lowe said "The problem, as my colleagues and I see it-"

  "You've had your heads together over Lennox."

  "We had a conference this morning, since you were coming in."

  "So you could give us your final decision."

  "Hardly final. I'm of the view that nothing is when it comes to the mind. But it does appear that our other casualties of the sixties. Would that have been when you were born, Miss Price?"

  "Mrs. Harvey," Heather felt compelled to say, though she no longer was. "I was a couple of years old."

  "And her sister was born two years later. Why?"

  "In case the family dynamics are relevant. I was about to say the others seem to look to Dr Price to lead. They see him as the man who knows."

  "Knows what?" Heather might have said, but Margo did.

  "If we could establish that we might be on the way to helping them instead of merely containing them. They keep it very much among themselves, whatever they think. It's as much of a secret from the other patients as from us. I'm not suggesting it has any reality, only that it might give us more of an insight into this persistent mental state. Meanwhile Dr Price is the one who directs them."

  "He brought them all back here last night," Margo said.

  "He did, but only after he'd led them out. It isn't an incident we'd care to see repeated.

  Apart from stretching the staff too thin, any of his group might have come to harm on the road."

  "So

  you

  suggest......

  "One proposal was to split them up by transferring them to separate facilities.

  Of course there aren't any within a good few miles."

  "You'd have a whole lot of upheaval for nothing. Don't you realise "

  "I do, Mrs. Price. It was one of our newer people who proposed it. I've been here long enough to know your husband and the others would just make their way back to the Arbour."

  Heather remembered the last time Lennox had, Margo's midnight phone call wakening eight-year-old Sam, her father's expression when she'd next visited him, a secretive justified look. "If that's not your solution," Margo said to Dr Lowe, "what is?"

  "I believe we may have to try stronger medication."

  "So you can have him more docile," she said, and rubbed the corner of one eye with a folded forefinger. "So there'll be even less of him."

  "I do assure you if there were some viable alternative I'd be inclined to favour it."

  "Have you found out what set him off yesterday?" Heather hoped aloud.

  "Thus far that's one more piece of information we can't persuade him to share."

  "I wonder if he might tell me or mother."

  "Since when has he told us anything like that, Heather? I don't know any longer if it's him or the medication that's shutting up so much."

  "By all means give it a try," Dr Lowe said. "I'll take you to him." Margo was the last to stand, so slowly that the couch might have been uttering its weary creak on her behalf. Once they were all in the corridor, however, her stride took on some impatience. "Is Dr," the doctor said, increasing his stoop towards the receptionist, "is Lennox still in his room?"

  "He hasn't come down, doctor." I Dr Lowe led the Prices along the corridor above the one that contained his office. Two watercolours that might have involved a glance at mountains faced each other across the passage, and he knocked at a door beside the less specific of the pair. When that brought no response he eased the door open. Heather's father was sitting on the end of the bed, his back to the pale greens and blues of the simply furnished room. His forearms rested on the windowsill, holding him in such a low crouch he might have been trying to hide from the woods, which were dim and blurred except for lights that swarmed up the outermost trunks to vanish under the glistening foliage. "Lennox, we've come to see you," Margo called.

  Heather was dismayed to find she couldn't breathe until he moved. He pushed himself away from the sill and twisted on the bed, swinging his legs across it, thumping the wall with his shoulders and perhaps with the back of his head.

  Though Margo winced, he greeted them brightly enough. "Come and sit. Room for everyone."

  Margo took Heather by the elbow to propel her forward as if overcoming some reluctance, Heather wasn't certain whose. When the doctor followed them, Lennox narrowed one eye at him. "You're not the family," he said, then shrugged, rubbing his shoulders against the wall, a? Dr Lowe shut himself in. "I guess you can't do much."

  "It isn't like you to antagonise people," Margo said, stre
tching out a hand that stopped short of touching him. "You've always been polite."

  "Frankie's the last thing you need to be nervous about. We're old friends, aren't we, doc?"

  "I'd like to think so."

  "He's going to up your medication if you don't behave yourself "Well, Mrs.

  Price, I'm not sure I quite said-"

  "That's okay, doc. Fine with me. I can use some sleep." Before Heather could decide if his sounding so American was intended as a joke, he patted the bed hard enough to make the mattress resonate.

  "I'll start believing I'm not polite, sure enough, unless you all sit down," he said. "Let your momma have the chair and you sit next to me. Space on the bed for you too, doc, if you're joining the party."

  "I'll stand if it won't disturb you."

  "Takes a whole lot more than that. Maybe you've noticed." Heather sat within arm's length of him, though his vitality was somewhat disconcerting; she didn't know how long it might last or what its source might be. He grasped his knees to hitch himself around on the corner of the bed and gaze expectantly at her. "How are things shaping up?" he said.

  "Much the same, which is fine."

  "Is it?" He looked disappointed and then resigned, and seemed to feel bound to explain to the doctor "She's always been the cheerful one. Gets on with life and never complains." He cocked his head at Margo, who was sitting between and opposite them, her short legs drawn up beneath a chair with its back to the dressing-table mirror. "We haven't seen our grandson for a while, have we?"

  "I'll tell Sam you were asking after him," Heather said, since Margo only shook her head. "I expect he'd like to come and visit if you want him to."

  "Better do it soon," Lennox said, she wasn't sure to whom, then focused once more on her. "How are you making out at the university? You work there now, don't you?"

  "I have for, oh, ages," she told him, not glancing at Margo in case that brought either of them to tears. "I'm in the historical archive now."

  "I knew that," he said, remembering or convincing himself. "I could use a trip there.

  Will that be all right, Frankie?"

  "Let's see how you progress."

  "Forget it. Nothing there I can't..." He turned to the window, beyond which insubstantial luminous shapes were scurrying up the trees across the bypass, and his movement released a faint musty smell that reminded Heather of the depths of the woods. "They can't have that book," he muttered.

  "Tell me the title and I'll search for you," Heather offered.

  He expelled a breath that, having misted the window, appeared to be absorbed by the woods, and then he peered at her faint reflection among the trees. "It'll turn up," he told her or himself, and raised his voice. "Did you see anything last night?"

  The question made her feel oddly forgetful. "You and the people you took with you,"

  she said, and felt as though she was reiterating Dr Lowe's version of events. "Why did you go out there?" she had to ask. "I don't think that's for you, Heather."

  "I've had to cope with some things in my life," she protested, manufacturing a laugh.

  "Let's see if I can cope with this."

  "Don't feel slighted. Try not to think any less of yourself She resented his condescension, which she couldn't even grasp, and yet he sounded so like the father she hardly remembered having that she was unable to speak- She saw Margo sharing her feelings, and it was Dr Lowe who intervened.

  "It's been coming for a while, hasn't it, Lennox?"

  "You could say that. Why," Lennox said in what might have been genuine surprise and delight, "you did."

  "I'm saying you've been growing restless for some time."

  Lennox's enthusiasm faded. "More like ever since I was shut in here."

  "It's been more apparent these last few months."

  "Is that how long? Means more to you than me."

  "Can you say what's been disturbing you?"

  "Try looking in the trees."

  "I know," Margo said, sounding determined as much as inspired. "You mean the people who lived in them to try to stop the bypass. Sam was one."

  "When did you see them, dad? They were half a mile away up the road."

  "They were on the radio, weren't they," Margo said, "and in the papers."

  Lennox met Heather's reflected gaze, and his eyes seemed to glint from the dark of the woods. "Maybe you're the one who'll get it, Heather."

  "They've been trying to build the bypass all year," she was prompted to say. "Was it just that they were taking some of your view?"

  "Last night did you want to see they hadn't done too much damage?" Margo suggested.

  Lennox crouched towards the window. Heather saw the woods brighten and grow insect-legged with shadows that merged with the depths steeped in fog and darkness as two pairs of headlamp, beams were dipped. "You've tired me enough now," he said. "Maybe I'll even sleep."

  "We'll come and see you again soon," Margo said as Dr Lowe opened the door.

  "And I expect Sam will," said Heather.

  Lennox's reflection was swallowed by a blur composed of his breath and the woods. He spoke so low she had to strain to hear him. "Wait till it's all of us."

  3

  A Meeting in the Forest

  The rotund crewcut boy halfway through his teens wore a T-shirt over a shirt over a sweater.

  The T-shirt made it dear what he would ask before he did. First he wandered through the shop, using a finger and thumb to pluck from the shelves a very few paperbacks, at whose covers he gazed before turning them over as if that might transform them into something more attractive.

  Having returned a last disappointment to its place and his hands to the pockets of his faded piebald jeans, he confronted Sam across the counter. "Got any Star Wars videos?"

  "We don't sell videos, sorry."

  "How about model kits?"

  "Not those either."

  "Comics?"

  Sam was beginning to feel like one confronted with an unsympathetic audience.

  "We're for books."

  The angry rash at the corners of the boy's mouth appeared to drag them down.

  "What's Worlds Unlimited supposed to mean, then? I don't see any Star Wars books."

  "That's because you can buy those anywhere," Andy was anxious he should know.

  "Can't be a sci-fi shop without them."

  "We're more science fiction," Dinah told him as Andy winced at the abbreviation.

  "And fantasy and even horror."

  The boy was almost out of the shop when he delivered his verdict, "Old people's stuff."

  Andy sat down at the coffee table between the counter and the shelves, so hard that the middle-aged armchair was audibly distressed, "Twenty-three," he said, sweeping a lock of blonde hair back from his lightly ruled high forehead and trapping all his tresses in a rubber band at the nape of his neck, "and ready for recycling."

  "Gives me and Sam another year," said Dinah, pensively pinching the chin of her small oval face. "Seriously, maybe he just meant a lot of the writers are dead."

  "Their books weren't last time I read them."

  Sam was about to concur when Andy, as he often had when the) were at university and indeed at school, switched positions. "Anyway there goes someone else who didn't buy a book."

  "Quite a few have today," Sam pointed out.

  "Less than half. We're selling more on the net than we do over the counter. Most of my dad's collection has gone."

  Sam had discovered that local jobs of any worth and permanence were hard for even English literature graduates to find, but he said "Say if you can't afford me any more."

  "I need you both. Imagine me sitting in here all day with nobody to talk to about books."

  "That's what the customers want with their coffee." Sam heard himself making Dinah redundant too, and changed the subject hastily. "You were saying last night I could go early to visit my grandfather."