Darkest Part of the Woods

by Ramsey Campbell

  Heather had to make an effort not to feel dismissed as predictable to the point of dullness. "You're talking about Sylvie."

  "Not in herself, just her showing up, but his doctor's sure it will do Lennox good to see her when he's been asking after her so much."

  "Is the doctor going to tell him she's coming?"

  "He thinks she may as well show up unannounced. Is she with you?"

  "Yes, and wondering what we're saying about you, aren't you, Sylvie?"

  Sylvia responded only by accepting the receiver. "I'm good," she told Margo, and "Like I'm back where I should never have left" and "Anxious to see him. Anxious how he'll take me..." She was continuing along these lines when Sam padded not quite evenly downstairs.

  Apart from being barefoot, he was wearing yesterday's clothes. "Didn't you have a shower?"

  Heather enquired.

  "I will. I was going to make breakfast if anybody wants some."

  "Those who did have had it, thanks, Sam. But listen, I'm sure your aunt won't mind seeing you in your dressing-gown and nothing else."

  That was his normal morning attire on his days off work, but he looked so embarrassed that Heather changed the subject as Sylvia hung up the phone. "Who was drawing on the bathroom mirror?"

  For a moment Sylvia and Sam regarded her with a blankness so identical it looked like a shared secret, and then Sam said "Sorry. Me."

  "No need to be sorry, but what was it about?"

  "Couldn't tell you. I was half asleep. Who was talking in the night and woke me up?"

  Sylvia resumed her blank look. Since she appeared to be set in her silence, Heather said

  "What do you think you heard?"

  "Someone."

  "Saying

  what?"

  "I didn't understand what it was muttering on about. It stopped when I got up."

  "I expect you dreamed it."

  "Like I dreamed the stuff I was trying to see what it looked like on the mirror."

  "As long as that's settled," Sylvia said, "do you think we could leave pretty soon?"

  "We can now," Heather told her, and immediately wondered how their father would react to Sylvia. That was far more important than speculating about the length of time Sylvia might have sat with her on the bed. There was no point in brooding over that-no reason to think it had been Sylvia's voice Sam had imagined he heard in the dark.

  9

  In a Ring

  AS soon as Heather drove through the gateway she saw Lennox. Of several patients in folding chairs on the lawn, he was the closest to the gates. She couldn't tell whether he and his fellow inmates were watching the road or the woods, which had trapped a morning mist, though the November sky was clear. All six twisted in their seats to observe her progress up the drive. So much of a reaction made her tense, so that she was glad to see nurses in the grounds and Dr Lowe in the front entrance of the Arbour.

  He was polishing his glasses. Without them his round face looked unprotected, not as competent as he would surely have preferred to appear. He held the glasses up as though to focus on some aspect of the woods, then emitted a gasp he might have wanted nobody to hear, and breathed on a lens that he rubbed afresh with a large sky-blue handkerchief. As Heather parked in front of a bay window he donned the glasses, clearing grey hair out of the way of their arms with his forefingers, and approached the car. Even when the Prices climbed out he remained in a welcoming stoop. "You'll be the long-awaited event," he told Sylvia.

  Lennox and the others had adopted various gnarled postures to face her. "Did you tell him we were coming?" Heather murmured.

  "Just that he might be visited, but he seemed to know that. I won't be far away."

  Presumably that was to reassure Sylvia. Heather was aware of little except her sister's nervousness as they crossed the lawn. The seated patients had turned to watch Lennox, who seemed almost to sprout upwards from his chair. He swung it aside and dropped it on the grass as he advanced on Sylvia, hands outstretched as if to measure her girth. "I told you she wouldn't let us down," he cried.

  Sylvia took his hands, and they gazed into each other's eyes as if sharing a secret or trying to discover one. "How did you know I was coming?" she said.

  "Because you were called."

  Heather could only assume her sister was pretending that answered the question.

  "You haven't changed. You're more the same," Lennox said. "You've only grown where it counts."

  He passed a hand over the crown of her head in a gesture not unlike a benediction before wrapping his arms around her, loosely enough to suggest that he feared she might snap.

  The seated patients cheered and stamped so loudly they would have been audible in the forest, which appeared to respond by withdrawing its mist not quite far enough to unveil a rank of dripping shapes. "You see how you're appreciated," Lennox said. "You as well, Heather."

  As the stamping faltered and the cheers ran out of breath, the nearest man wheezed,

  "Introduce us."

  "This is Vernon, girls. He used to be a naturalist. Still is when there are flowers in the grounds."

  "They're what took me to the woods, the rarities," the man said with uneasy pride.

  "And that's Delia. Her mother used to take her walking there every Sunday."

  Delia clapped her fingers to her cheeks as if her protuberant eyes needed support.

  "Carried on after she was dead and buried."

  "You did," Heather felt it was advisable to say, "not your mother."

  "Her or something that kept looking like her."

  Heather regretted having spoken, not least because Lennox gave Delia a smile that might have greeted a witty remark. "And that's Phyllis next to Delia," he said. "Phyllis used to pick mushrooms in the woods about this time of year "

  "You are what you eat," Phyllis declared and used her greyish tongue to trace increasingly unappetising shapes around her lips.

  "I'm Timothy," said the man beside her, his head swaying from side to side. "I always knew there were rare birds in the woods. I could just never photograph them."

  "Something flies round the woods, but it isn't birds," his neighbour said. "Too big.

  Sometimes it's under the branches and sometimes up above, with a face I'm Nigel," he added with no apparent sense of incongruity "It's Lennox who sees furthest into the woods," said Delia, tugging at the skin beneath her eyes.

  "So far. Will you give me some time with my family now?" he said, and made for the hospital building.

  Heather was glad to leave his companions behind. Not only had they all been victims in the sixties of the mutated lichen, but now she realised they had formed the party he'd recently led into the woods He ushered the sisters up the left-hand staircase to his room, which was so warm it felt impatient for midsummer. He raised the window a hand's breadth, apparently as far as it would move As a smell of fog and rotting vegetation found its way into the room. He sat on the foot of the bed and beckoned Sylvia to join him. "Space for you as well, Heather," he said There barely was. "I'm not a sylph like her," she said. "I'll have the stool."

  "So long as it doesn't make you feel like the dunce. That's where teachers used to sit children who were slow on the uptake."

  "I did know that," Heather said, less sure of the relevance.

  "Sure enough, you're the reader." Perhaps that was meant less than positively, since he added "You have to concentrate on what's important. I've finished with most of my memories now, but I remember you before you were born.

  I remember when you were conceived, Sylvia."

  "Gee."

  "Do you know what I saw then?"

  "I

  don't."

  "Everything that has to be."

  When he turned to gaze into the blurred shifting noonday twilight under the trees, Heather tried to reclaim his attention. "What else do you remember about us?"

  "I saw you come out of your mother. I saw your sister do it with her eyes open, she was so ready to see."

&n
bsp; "I don't suppose you remember that, Sylvie."

  "Maybe I will."

  Heather assumed that was intended to appeal somehow to Lennox. "No need to be jealous, Heather," he said.

  "I'm

  not."

  As though to placate her he said "I remember how you were always taking her into the woods when you were children."

  "Hardly always, and only when she asked."

  "And your mother thought they'd been made safe." He might have been addressing the restless undefined depths of the forest as he enquired "So what are you going to do for me?"

  It was Sylvia who risked asking "What do you need?"

  "Let's see if your sister can tell us."

  Heather took this for an attempt to include her, but couldn't find much of a response.

  "I'll let you," she said.

  "The history of the woods."

  "I can find that in your library, can't I, Heather?"

  "Only what happened since anyone kept records," Lennox said. "Still, there'll be something before the manifestation that brought us here."

  "Manifestation," Heather said as a query or a challenge.

  "That's okay, Heather We don't expect you to understand all at once."

  She wasn't going to ask who else he thought he was speaking for besides himself.

  "Only don't give it too much time," he said. "We don't want you having to absorb it all in one go."

  She didn't know she was about to blurt "Like you did, you mean."

  "I haven't yet. There are changes on the horizon."

  The only visible horizon was formed by treetops, but that wasn't why she made herself say "Tell us about them."

  "In here," he said, tapping his forehead as if ascribing madness to someone else, "and out there, if there's any difference."

  "I think there is, don't you, Sylvie?"

  "Not once the woods get in," their father said. "Do you honestly suppose you could touch them and nothing would come of it?"

  He had to mean the felling that had made way for the bypass She was wondering whether to argue with him, and hoping that Sylvia would, when he stretched an arm in her direction before bending it towards the window as though to include her in an embrace "Look out there," he said "Tell us what you see."

  "Trees."

  She did: sunlit rows of them dripping like an army of the drowned, and more blurred ranks behind them-trees of the kind Sam had fallen from. For an instant the grey formless depths of the woods appeared to quiver as though considering what shape to adopt "That's all,"

  she said She wouldn't have been surprised to hear disappointment in his voice, but it was quite neutral as he said only "Sylvia."

  Sylvia leaned towards the gap under the sash. The smell of leaves acrawl with fog surged into the room, and Heather glimpsed a secretive movement the width of the forest She couldn't help holding her breath until Sylvia spoke. "I don't know yet."

  "That's the way. You will," Lennox said, and pushed himself to his feet by dragging the sash down. "I think that's enough for one day. I'll walk out with you," he said, and smiled rather wistfully at the doubts Heather was unable to conceal. "Only to your car."

  Dr Lowe met them at the foot of the stairs. "How was the visit?"

  "I think we've made a good start," Lennox said.

  "I'd say so," said Sylvia, and Heather felt bound to produce a murmur of agreement.

  "And where are we bound now?" the doctor said with heavy casualness.

  "Me, back where I was." Lennox stood away from the car as the sisters climbed in.

  "Come again soon," he told them, "for a check on progress."

  He paced the car as it coasted along the drive, then made for his chair. Heather glanced towards him as she reached the gateway, and almost neglected to brake.

  As she regained control before the vehicle could lurch onto the bypass, the woods seemed to gather their dank depths and inch towards her. She forced herself to concentrate on the headlong traffic, and almost managed to put her last sight of the hospital grounds out of her mind. Lennox and the others were sitting in a circle, just as they'd stood in the centre of the forest. The memory seemed no more real than an old dream, and she could neither grasp it nor rid herself of it. She couldn't be sure, nor could she deny, that the circle of seats on the lawn was exactly the size of the ring of bricks deep in the woods.

  10

  A View of the Future

  A peal of bells roused Sam. Though the church was behind him in Goodmanswood, the wind that the trees across the common were exerting themselves to snatch made the bells sound as though they were deep in the forest, misshapen too and clogged with moss. He knew he was hearing a tape so worn it had ceased to bear much resemblance to bells, but he was disconcerted to realise he didn't know how long he had been seated at his desk.

  He ought to be on the move soon. A glance at his fat black wristwatch showed him that his father was already a few minutes late. He wouldn't be loitering at the desk, where the computer screen displayed a faint reflection of his face with little of a mouth and less for eyes, if he hadn't risen earlier than he ordinarily did on his days off work. He'd felt a need to look out of the window, not that there was much to be certain he was seeing. It didn't help him remember why the knees of his trousers had been stained with mud the last time he'd come home from the woods.

  The glassy light of a sky laced with fast thin whitish clouds showed treetops flaking like dead skin in the wind. The sun was caught in a dance of branches that seemed constantly about to sway in unison. The far edge of the common was crowded with shadows bent on clawing the ground into the woods. Of course it was the wind and not the shadows that kept urging the grass towards them in waves, but he couldn't shake off the notion that there were more elongated spindly shadows than trees bordering the forest to cast them. He hadn't been able to locate the source of the impression when the doorbell rang.

  Once he heard his father's voice he made himself leave the window. Sylvia had let his father in. Though he would have combed it before leaving the car, his black irredeemably wavy hair was tousled by the wind, and so was the pale blue silk scarf that adorned his throat within the collar of his dark blue shirt. He glanced up the stairs, and his comfortably overfed face sent Sam a wink.

  "Morning, old chap. I'm just meeting your delightful guest."

  "She's my aunt."

  "Sylvia." Sam's father appeared to recoil as he stepped back for a more comprehensive look. "I don't know if you'll remember me," he said. "I'm Terry Harvey, your nephew's old man."

  "Heather told me we were expecting you."

  "I hope that didn't sound too ominous."

  "Just as neutral as could be."

  If his father and Sylvia were flirting, Sam couldn't help feeling uneasy, but then her presence in the house had that effect on him. He limped downstairs as his father said "How does it feel to come back to a village when you've seen so much of the world?"

  "Everything that's part of me is here."

  "Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest... That's to say, I know this is your home."

  "Maybe you should check with Heather."

  "You know he doesn't need to, Sylvie," Sam's mother called from the kitchen.

  "Apologies if I assumed too much," Sam's father nonetheless said. "I thought I'd grown out of that habit."

  Sam took another step down, only for his father to break the awkward silence. "I was really just saying how much of life you must have seen before you decided to come home."

  "Some of us didn't feel we had the choice," Sam's mother said as though she didn't care if she was heard.

  "Is that maybe a shade unreasonable? I wasn't thinking about you."

  "Hardly the first time."

  "I was thinking of this young fellow," he said, and to Sylvia "I keep telling him he ought to find out how much more there is to life than here and the town up the road. So where are we heading today, Sam?"

  "Can we go into town for lunch?"

  "That gets my vot
e, only another time you might want to come down to me. Stay chez Harvey any Saturday night by all means. Fridays too if you like."

  "Not London, Brichester. I promised Andy I'd check the shop if I was round that way."

  "If we're really only going up the road, anyone else who wants feeding is welcome to join us."

  "No, you go and be uninhibited," Sam's mother said, he couldn't tell how slyly.