Darkest Part of the Woods

by Ramsey Campbell

  "I hadn't forgotten. The hash hasn't screwed up my memory yet. Go ahead."

  Sam fetched his ankle-length Oxfam overcoat from the less than horizontal row of hooks outside the dauntingly basic toilet, and was limping streetward when Dinah turned from arranging magazines in the window. "I haven't had a chance to say sorry, Sam."

  "I didn't think you needed to."

  "I was wrong last night. You couldn't have done any more to stop them cutting down the trees when you were hurt. It's not as if I did anything at all. I expect I would have if I'd known you then."

  Until last night Sam had assumed she and Andy were living together. Though she lived in the same faded Victorian house, Andy was sharing his bed with a man.

  Sam had been the only one to decline Andy's Moroccan hashish pipe, which had provoked Dinah to suggest that his having abandoned the protest had been another failure of nerve. He'd already gathered that arguing was her way of getting close to people, but he hadn't said much in his own defence, because he felt that in some way he'd broken faith with the woods. "Wish you had," he told Dinah awkwardly, and made his escape from the shop.

  His green Volkswagen was parked on rubbly ground behind Worlds Unlimited and a takeaway whose rear emitted fumes and an outburst of Cantonese chatter. Having indulged in a fit of coughing, the car found its way out between two Victorian family houses that seemed to be competing over how many students they could accommodate. In less than a minute he was passing the university, where the students crossing the lawns already looked young to him. He remembered feeling unengaged last year by anything he read or wrote, however much his work pleased his tutors, as if some unidentified aspect of him had yet to be enlivened. His vigil at the edge of the woods had seemed potentially far-more fulfilling-still did, so that he had to remind himself that he was on his way to visit his grandfather, not the woods.

  Ten minutes took him out of Brichester and along the motorway to the bypass, beyond which the woods appeared to bristle with stillness beneath a stretch of low white clouds that resembled an elaborate skeleton the length of the horizon.

  The trees extended shadows to finger the car as he sped through the gap in the safety barrier and across the bypass to the Arbour. A shiver overtook him, though the afternoon was hot enough for several patients and two male nurses to be sitting in the grounds. One patient was lying on a recliner midway between the hospital and the gates. As Sam cruised past he saw it was his grandfather.

  Sam parked between a Bentley and a minibus and hobbled across the grass. He wasn't sure if Lennox was asleep; his eyes might be shut or only nearly. His right arm was propped on its elbow, while the hand seemed to be mimicking the shape of a tree across the road. Sam tiptoed lopsidedly to gaze down at the long slack wrinkled face, and was disconcerted to imagine that he was seeing himself in his seventies. At that moment Lennox squeezed his lips together at the pain of flexing his upheld hand, and his eyes flickered open. Though he seemed to be peering past Sam, he murmured, "It's Sam, isn't it? You look uncomfortable."

  Sam hoped that referred to his injury. "Just my ankle," he said.

  "Here's a place." Lennox sat abruptly up and patted the recliner. "So you won't have been getting about too much with that."

  "I should have been coming to see you more often before."

  "So long as it counts now," Lennox said, half turning his head away from the woods as Sam sat beside him. "Care to start off with a promise?"

  Sam found his directness as unsettling as the proposal, but felt bound to say "If you like."

  "Answer me a question when I ask it and I'll tell you some things."

  "Go ahead." When Lennox only cocked his head towards the woods as though listening, Sam had to assume he was meant to prompt him. "How are you?" was the most he felt able to risk.

  "Conscious."

  "Well, good." He hoped to be able to leave it at that, but Lennox gazed in open disappointment at him. "Isn't it?" Sam said.

  "Of what should be the question."

  "Of

  what?"

  "Of the dark there wouldn't be any light without. The dark that's above all this and under it too." As though the relevance ought to be obvious he added "Do you use drugs?"

  "I tried pot the first year I was at university. Too scary for me."

  "What

  scared

  you?"

  "Felt as if I might see things I wouldn't be able to handle."

  "Once you see you go on seeing."

  Sam took that for agreement, and felt he had to respond. "You mean since you touched that stuff in the woods."

  "Most of forty years." Lennox met Sam's dismay at this with a wry grin. "Tell me what you think you know about it," he said.

  "You came to England to research it. You were, you're an authority on mass hallucination. You taught courses on the psychology of popular delusion."

  "Sounds like I must have been damn sure of myself."

  "You wrote a book about it. If you haven't got a copy here I can bring you one."

  "I'm touched. I'll be telling Heather she should be proud of how she brought you up, or you can tell her yourself, but don't waste your time with that book." Lennox cocked his head at a wryer angle still and said "Remind me what I was up to in your town."

  "A professor at the university read your book and wrote to you about all the stuff people were seeing in the woods. And then didn't he die, so you got his job as well?"

  "Are we talking about old Longman? That's who brought me, sure enough. What did everyone think I was doing here again?"

  "Trying to find out why people were hallucinating about the woods."

  "Was that what they were doing? And was I a success?"

  Sam was unable to judge if he was being mocked. "You traced it to some lichen," he said. "If you, if anyone even touched it it got to them."

  "I'll bet I came up with the solution too."

  "Some trees that had mutated because it grew on them, maybe they'd even produced it somehow, they had to be destroyed."

  As Lennox leaned towards him, Sam was startled by a cold smell of decay until he saw the woods stir-there must be a wind. "How many?" Lennox said.

  "About a dozen in the middle of the woods. A lot less than were cut down for the bypass."

  "And that was the end of it, was it, except for me and my friends in here that your professor told me about in the first place."

  Sam wasn't sure if he meant in the Arbour or in his head, towards which he'd raised his contorted hand. "Some scientists took away samples but those broke down before they could get them anywhere, so it was never analysed."

  "Bad medicine anyway," Lennox muttered, "trying to deal with the symptom instead of the cause."

  "I don't think I understand."

  "You said you'd answer a question."

  Sam wondered if this was being offered as some kind of an answer. "If I can."

  "Heather told me you hurt yourself falling out of your tree-house, but what made you fall?"

  "I was nearly asleep."

  "How far up were you, twenty feet? Trying to get closer to something?"

  "Trying to stay clear of the bailiffs."

  Lennox grimaced with impatience. "Why did you fall?"

  At the edge of Sam's vision the woods appeared to flex themselves. Another wind must have stirred them, since the smell of decay had revived, though they weren't moving when he glanced across the bypass. "I thought someone had got onto the platform with me," he said.

  "Who?"

  Lennox's eagerness made Sam wary of disturbing him. "I don't know," he said, truthfully enough "It was just me falling asleep."

  Certainly the incident resembled a dream he could barely recall, although the closeness of the woods appeared to help. He'd been sitting on the platform with his back against the treetrunk, watching the sunset sink into the trees before he crawled into his sleeping bag. At first the sight of darkness rising from the forest had only reminded him that the nights were beginning to lengthen,
and then he'd felt as if a presence vaster than the woods was advancing towards him across the changed landscape-as if the night sky or the blackness of which it was the merest scrap was descending into the woods. He'd closed his eyes to fend off the dizziness the impression brought with it, only to imagine the presence had shrunk and was perching next to him. He'd flinched away so violently he had toppled off the platform. Before his eyes were fully open he'd had a dreamy notion that the night would bear him up Then the ground had struck his right foot like an enormous hammer hardly muffled by its covering of last year's leaves, and as the rest of him fell over he'd heard and felt his ankle snap. "I was just bloody clumsy," he said.

  "Don't close your mind, Sammy." Lennox righted his head and turned it towards the forest while widening his eyes at Sam. "What can you see?" he urged.

  There was no doubt now that a wind had risen. Leaves were flocking out of the woods to dance with their shadows on the bypass. "What am I supposed to?" Sam risked asking.

  "I can't tell you. Trust your own experience." When Sam found nothing to say, not least because he felt too intensely watched, Lennox said "Go and look."

  "Don't you want me to stay and talk to you?"

  "There are better ways for a young buck to spend his time than listening to an old lunatic." Apparently this was meant to be overheard by a nurse, who frowned at him and wagged a finger at his choice of a

  word for himself. "Next time we'll have more to say to each other," Lennox told Sam.

  As Sam stood up, his grandfather swung his legs onto the recliner and propped his cheek on the knuckles of one crooked hand as though in preparation for a spectacle. "Thank Heather for her efforts," he said. "I never answered any of her questions."

  "Are you going to?"

  Lennox stared into his face for so long that Sam had begun to wonder if this implied he should know the answer when his grandfather said "Selcouth."

  "Will she know what that means?"

  "Sooner or later," Lennox said, drawing his legs up towards his stomach.

  Was he betraying that he was less able to cope than he'd pretended? He reminded Sam of a wizened fetus. "See you," Sam promised, and limped to his car. As he drove by the recliner he beeped his horn, but Lennox stayed expressionless and absolutely still except for his hair, which swayed in imitation of the woods that might have been all he was seeing.

  As soon as Sam was through the gates the wind attacked the car. It must have changed direction, since it kept struggling to force him across the bypass while the trees at the edge of the road bent away from it, indicating or reaching for the depths of the woods. When he swung the car into the outer lane, large trucks sidled dangerously close to him. He was gripping the wheel so hard it bruised his fingers by the time he was able to make a U-turn to the lay-by alongside the woods.

  His tree had been felled to help clear the space. It was only one of hundreds the protesters had failed to save while he was in hospital. No doubt they were protesting elsewhere now; few of them had been local. He couldn't blame them too much for the destruction when he'd been unable to prevent it himself. He wasn't even certain any longer how it might have affected the environment. He wasn't here only in response to his grandfather's suggestion; he thought a walk in the woods might help him remember what else he had seen from his tree.

  He'd glimpsed movement at twilight, he seemed to recall now- movement at or rather, to have been visible, presumably above the middle of the woods.

  The moment he climbed out of the shivering Volkswagen, the wind did its utmost to frogmarch him away from the road. It felt as if the woods were panting to suck him in. He'd limped only a few steps across the earth that was shivery with leaves when the trees set about demonstrating how profound a refuge they offered. A stench of petrol followed him for a hundred yards or so, but the traffic was already being shouted down by the wind in the treetops.

  He didn't need to be able to hear the bypass; so long as he kept the sun to his left he would be heading for his goal.

  He tried not to glance directly at the sun. Dazzling himself with it only made him feel there was more to the woods than he was able to identify, though of course it was the sun itself that peered now and then through the treetops, the sun or clouds that the wind swept onwards before he had time to confront them.

  Ahead of him, above the tapestry of fallen leaves, the colonnades of tree-trunks held as still as their topmost branches were frantic. Now and then a tree swayed with a long slow creak, and once that was answered by another in the depths of the woods, as if great birds or reptiles were calling to each other. Apart from that he heard nothing but the wind and the muffled bursts of traffic noise it carried intermittently to him, playing such a game with the apparent location of the bypass that he turned more than once to reassure himself where it was.

  Before long it was hidden by trees, and the traffic was inaudible. Straining his ears only made him imagine that he could almost hear a huge voice muttering under cover of the wind.

  He still had hours of daylight, and how could he get lost so near the town in less than a square mile of forest? The notion seemed unworthy of the show the trees were putting on for him, the highest branches contorting them- selves into shapes he wouldn't have dreamed they could take, leaves fluttering or gliding through the air in patterns too elaborate for his mind to grasp, then fitting themselves into the mosaic of decay that was the forest floor. Some stirred as if they weren't entirely dead. Each one that settled gave him a sense that a design was another minute step closer to completion, but he was more intent on the dance of leaves in the air. Was that related to whatever sight he'd glimpsed above the middle of the woods? The leaves were most hectic between the trees at the limit of his vision, where they swarmed like insects caught up in some nervous ritual. At that distance the air looked solid with them. He limped fast towards them, and was within perhaps fifty yards of them when they swayed like a dancer's veil and parted, sailing up swiftly as ash above a bonfire. He could have imagined they were returning to their trees as he saw he'd arrived at his goal.

  He was at the edge of the clearing that had once been surrounded by infected trees. He knew how far he must have walked to it, though he had no sense at all of the time he'd taken.

  He couldn't recall his journey through the woods or anything he'd seen on the way. Somehow the sun had moved ahead of him to flare white between misshapen treetops. It made him feel as though cataracts of light were gathering on his eyes, so that he could barely distinguish a low mound as wide as a small house within a lower ring of mossy brick. Then two trees parted like the opposite of a prayer and seemed to focus on the mound all the light the sun contained.

  The top of the mound was scaly with lichen. Though the patch was no larger than a man, a shape it rather suggested, it was iridescent with so many colours Sam couldn't begin to number or to name them. He limped between the gesticulating trees and stepped into the open.

  At once the glittering mass stirred and then surged into the air. It was a multitude of insects that swooped and darted in patterns so intricate he was robbed of thought and breath.

  He didn't move until they veered towards him. As he stumbled backwards, part of his mind urged him to stand his ground, to see them clearly. Then the trees across the clearing swayed together, covering much of the sun, and the swarm soared back over the mound and into the depths of the woods. As he lost sight of them he thought they were shining brighter yet with colours he'd never seen, even in dreams. The withdrawal of so much light had left him virtually blind, and he shut his eyes and covered them with his hands.

  He was watching whiteness linger on the insides of his eyelids when a twig snapped close to him.

  It needn't be a footstep-the wind was fierce enough to break more than a twig-but it had sounded closer to the mound than the trees were. His eyes sprang open, to see little except blankness. The treetops had revealed the sun again, and he thought he smelled the mound, warm earth and something sweeter. Then his eyes began to
work, and he saw a figure advancing through the dazzle past the mound. For the moment he couldn't see its face. Its hands were outstretched to him as though to draw him forward, and above either hand an insect brighter than the sun was hovering.

  4

  The Author of the Book

  "NEARLY time to go," Heather called, and thought she should have left off the first word.

  When Sam didn't respond she went up past her mother's lithograph of an impossible tree whose branches were only as real as the spaces between them.

  He was no longer in the bathroom, where the mirror was recovering from blindness while the shower prepared its next drip. She twisted the tap shut and straightened his towel on the rail, then as a second thought dropped the towel in the washing basket on her way to knocking on his bedroom door. "Ready for the road?"

  Surely he hadn't gone back to bed. She knocked again and eased the door open. He was at the window, and might have been ignoring the mess his room continued to be: the dwarfish hi-fi piled with naked compact discs on which headphones were resting, the bed not so much made as more or less draped with its quilt, the computer desk scattered with floppies, its chair wearing yesterday's clothes over some from the day before that. She could see nothing beyond the window for him to watch, just the woods a quarter of a mile away across the common. "If you're coming into town with me I'm about to head off," she said. "No point in using two cars when we don't need to."