Darkest Part of the Woods

by Ramsey Campbell

  "That's called having a theme," Heather said, loudly enough that everyone in the room stared at her. She was allotted several polite smiles when the woman with the ringlets told her

  "No, it's called running out of ideas."

  "And not having many in the first place," said the man with the compensatory beard.

  Heather wasn't sure what she might have retorted on her mother's behalf if she hadn't seen Lucinda Hunt leading Margo and a Metropolitan Television crew into the room. "Shall we give the star a corner to herself?" Lucinda suggested to the spectators. "No need to hush, though."

  She was so intent on ushering her party to the chosen spot that she didn't notice until too late that she had virtually emptied the room. "Would some of you like to sound as lively as that in here?" she shouted from the doorway.

  Only Sam and Sylvia responded. "Can you chatter?" she not so much asked as told them and Heather.

  "What do you want us to say?" Sam pleaded.

  "Whatever you think, of course," Margo called across the room.

  He began to wander from exhibit to exhibit as the interviewer, a slight but intense young woman with blonde hair as long and as broad as her back, thrust at Margo a microphone twice the size of her hand. "Go," she said, a signal to the cameraman rather than a dismissal. "Holly Newsome talking to Margo Price for Arts After Dark. Margo, what do you want your exhibition to say to us?"

  "Come

  and

  look."

  "And anyone who does, what will they find?"

  "Just about all I've done that I'd want to be known for."

  "This is your choice of your work, then."

  "Mine and Lucinda Hunt's. She particularly wanted to include my recent pieces when she saw them in the studio."

  The gallery owner reacted by gesturing the Prices to break their silence. "What do you think of it, Sylvie?" Heather blurted as Holly Newsome said "You wouldn't have included them yourself."

  "Certainly I would. The last time I felt this inspired was when I'd just come to England."

  "I wouldn't have missed seeing what mom thought was important," Sylvia said.

  "Don't forget to look in the mirror, then. Any favourites?"

  "I've always liked The Light through the Thorns."

  "Me too. How about the pieces in this room?"

  "Looks as if mom's on the way to something new."

  "It's a voyage of discovery, my work," Margo was saying. "I'm still discovering what's in my wood."

  Sylvia muffled a laugh and caged her stomach with her fingers. "We haven't heard from Sam yet."

  He made little haste to rejoin the sisters as Holly Newsome said "What do you want your audience to take away from your work?"

  "They needn't be that far from it. They can always take some home."

  The interviewer looked faintly pained, and Heather did her best to provide a distraction by asking "Which do you like, Sam?"

  "The one in our hall," he mumbled, shuffling his feet as though eager to return there.

  "If an artist could explain what she does," Margo was saying, "she wouldn't need to paint or carve it or whatever her thing is."

  "Any last words?"

  "Just they should come and see for themselves."

  "Margo Price, thank you." The interviewer lowered her club of a microphone and turned to the cameraman. "Let's have some noddies."

  As he began to film her nodding as though to encourage what her interviewee had finished saying, Margo hurried over to Lucinda Hunt. "Was I as inarticulate as I thought?"

  "She was super, wasn't she, you people? You were all your audience expects, Margo.

  They'd only resent being told what to think."

  "We were proud of you," Heather told Margo as Holly Newsome beckoned the cameraman to photograph the contents of the nearest glass case. Margo was beginning to appear ready to accept some praise when the interviewer said "Is something wrong here, Lucinda? What's this?"

  Margo and Heather reached the exhibit before Lucinda did. A tapering black stain that resembled an extension of the spiky shadow of the foot-high carving had trickled across the white plinth. "That shouldn't happen," Margo declared. "It never has before. I treated that wood the way I always do."

  "I'll fetch the key," Lucinda said, striding to her office. Heather stooped to the glass, telling herself she couldn't have glimpsed movement in the miniature labyrinth of contorted scrawny branches and elaborately drilled trunk. She had distinguished only lurking shadows when Lucinda returned, jangling a few small keys on an extravagantly large ring. She twisted one in the side of the plinth and hoisted the glass as half a dozen spectators drifted into the room. Margo picked up the carving and turned it over.

  Hers was the first cry. As her fingers recoiled, dropping the sculpture to shatter on the plinth, two women screamed and fled into the next room. The underside of the carving glistened like the belly of a snail, but that wasn't why Margo had let it fall. The base had been covered with small twitching objects, too many for Heather to begin to count as they swarmed down the plinth.

  They must be some species of beetle, she thought, but she had no time to make out their darkly glinting colours or their shapes. For an instant she imagined they were massing into an elaborate pattern on the floor. Then, with more eagerness than they had shown for the exhibition, three visitors surged forward to trample the swarm into less than pulp.

  13

  Unseen Company

  HEATHER was unlocking her front door when Jessica reached the gates at her ungainly version of a run. "I brought the papers from the shop," she panted, "in case you hadn't seen them."

  "I've seen a few. Come in," said Heather as their breath on the night air turned orange with the streetlight.

  "I will for just a minute. I'm in the middle of making cakes for the shop and then I have to run back."

  She was more dishevelled than ever, with flour in her unruly hair and on the backs of her hands. The way she and her husband Joe ran the corner shop struck Heather as disorganised to the point of extravagance, but it seemed to work for them. "Here I am," she called into the house, "and Jessica."

  Sam and Sylvia emerged from the kitchen along with a spicy smell. "Dinner's nearly fixed," Sylvia said.

  "I'm just showing Heather what the papers said about your strange event."

  "Which was that?" Sylvia said, crossing her wrists in front of her midriff.

  "Your mother's uninvited patrons."

  "The insects," Heather explained, since Sylvia's face stayed blank, only for Sam to look worse than confused. "Can I hang onto the papers till mother's seen them, Jessica? She's coming round for dinner."

  "They're yours or hers, whoever wants them. Buy some cakes from us sometime. Is this the celebrity now?"

  The sound of heels clacking on the path terminated in the briefest ring of the doorbell.

  The new arrival was indeed Margo in an old coat thrown over last night's spangled evening dress. "Have we acquired another member of the family?" she said.

  Heather had to tell herself that referred to Jessica, who said "I just brought some of your publicity round because I don't think you usually read these papers."

  "Forgive me, Jessica. I wasn't expecting so many people, that was all. We must get together soon and catch up on news."

  "I'd enjoy that. I'll be on my way, then," Jessica said, but stopped short of the door. "Did you hear about the Finches next to the old school? They found a buyer for their house."

  "Good," Heather assumed she ought to say.

  "Well, only till they had a survey done. Apparently they'd noticed a bit of a smell in the back bedroom but couldn't see where it was coming from. The surveyor pulled out a wardrobe and its whole behind was a mass of fungus."

  "Nasty. Will they be able to sell?"

  "They hope so once they find out where the damp gets in. Makes you want to go and look behind everything in case you've got an unwanted guest, as you might say," Jessica said, and let herself out of the house. />
  Margo draped her coat over the end of the banister and grimaced at the tabloids.

  "Lord, do I want to know what those rags have been writing about me?"

  "Let's take them in the kitchen so we can all look," Heather said, and separated the papers on the table. Jessica had used a ballpoint to mark a headline inside each with a blotchy cross. THE PAINTER DIDN'T TWIG... SHE'S STUMPED BY HER ART...

  ARTIST BRANCHES OUT TOO FAR... LITERALLY LOUSY ART SHOW... THIS

  BUGS ME, SAYS ARTIST... "I never even spoke to them," Margo complained.

  "Everyone knows that paper makes stuff up," said Sam.

  "As if I'm not frazzled enough about my other pieces. I know we couldn't find anything wrong with them last night, but that one looked all right when I was working on it."

  "Maybe all this publicity will bring you more customers," Heather tried to comfort her.

  "To see the insect lady's crazy art, you mean."

  "Nobody's crazy here." As Sylvia turned to the cooker, her luminous reflection executed a pirouette in the dim garden, beyond which the bare woods had set countless claws in the black sky. "Is it time for me to serve yet?" she said.

  "I'll help," said Sam.

  "Looks as if we're surplus to requirements," Heather told Margo. "Come through and I'll open the wine you like."

  It was a Chablis that brought out all the flavours of Sam's fish soup and appeared to do Sylvia's vegetable alternative no harm either. Margo murmured her appreciation, of which she had plenty in reserve for Heather's beef bourguignon.

  She'd lingered over several mouthfuls when Heather began to wonder why she was so unusually taciturn. She had just decided that Margo was preoccupied with appearing on Arts After Dark that night when Margo said "Has someone got a surprise for me?"

  If Sylvia revealed her secret now, it would surely rob Margo's television interview of the significance she deserved to feel it had. "What makes you say that?" Heather risked asking.

  "Just a feeling. Are you the one, Sam? Is it you?"

  He seemed in no hurry to finish his mouthful, which apparently required the aid of half a glass of Syrah to send it down. "Me what?" he then said.

  "Is that why you're trying to look innocent? You aren't engaged, are you? Don't tell me you're married and nobody knows."

  "I won't. I'm not. There's nothing."

  "You're just looking forward to seeing her on television," Heather said, "aren't you, Sam?"

  "Everyone

  is."

  "There's something else," Margo insisted, peering not much less than accusingly at him.

  Heather was unable to glance at Sylvia for fear that they might burst out laughing at the misapprehension. When she heard Sylvia's lips opening she held her breath. "Why does there have to be?" Sylvia said.

  "If I can't be right about my family I can't be right about anything."

  "Of course you're right about us," Heather said at once. '

  “We'd never lie to you."

  "Only tonight you come first, mom. Forget about us for a while."

  "Think about yourself. We all are."

  "And lots of others will be," said Sam.

  "Did I look presentable?" Margo said, and Heather knew the subject was changed at last. She and Sylvia kept up the topic all the way through dessert of how impressively Margo had conducted herself and how others had failed themselves, and then it was time to adjourn to the sitting-room, glasses in hand.

  An earlier programme must have overrun. A gay soap opera was ten minutes later than it should have been in coming to an end, or rather to anything but. Margo sighed impatiently and tutted at herself and took sips of wine so tiny they might have been designed to exhibit her restraint. An announcer's voice synopsised the next episode over the closing credits, which were followed by a trailer for a series about the history of child abuse before an electronic fanfare and an onslaught of split-second computer graphics heralded Arts After Dark. The tide flew apart in fragments to reveal Holly Newsome and three other people seated on minimal metal chairs in front of a curve of some material the colour of dense fog. "On tonight's Arts After Dark," Holly Newsome was saying, "we chat online with the Ephemeralists, who exhibit only on the Internet. We look at transgressiveness in cinema-which country's movies break the most taboos and are there any left to break? We listen to a piece by a composer whose music you can hear by touching the notes on the score-she hates all the performances her work has been given and says musicians are history. But first, a major retrospective by the American expatriate painter and sculptor Margo Price opened today in the wake of some last-minute publicity. I talked to the artist at the private view."

  "What does she mean by last-minute?" Margo demanded as the presenter turned to watch herself and Margo on a screen.

  "Nothing much, I should think. Remember she said major," Heather said, and was shushed.

  The presenter had left in nearly all her questions and interpolated the odd apparently responsive nod as well, although the interview began with Margo's exhortation: "Come and look." She talked about renewed inspiration and continuing discovery and the intuitive process she recommended, while her family's voices could be heard in the background, though not their words; they were even visible in a couple of shots. As she concluded by saying "They should come and see for themselves" Margo raised her glass, only to roll it the width of her forehead.

  "Well, that was a poor performance."

  "It wasn't at all," Heather protested, but Margo interrupted her. "Why are they showing that?"

  Last night's camera had zoomed in on the broken carving. While she was glad the insects had gone, Heather would have welcomed a chance to see what they had been. The close-up turned into a still that remained on the monitor Holly Newsome turned away from to say

  "The image from Margo Price's exhibition that most people will have seen. Here to discuss the exhibition are Dougie Leaver, media critic of the Beacon, Maria Perez, art historian, and Abdul Kidd, Reader in Popular Culture at Birmingham University."

  "See, you're popular," Heather said.

  "Depends how it's meant," Margo told her as Holly Newsome said "How significant do we think that image is?"

  Dougie Leaver rested his hands on his even larger stomach and unfolded some of his chins. "I think it'll be what everyone remembers best."

  Maria Perez lifted one bare bony arm to sweep back her long wavy hair, which resembled a cascade of oil. Her thin face looked ready to peck him as she said "If your paper has anything to do with it."

  Abdul Kidd wrapped a fist in his other hand and inclined his top half in her direction without quite facing her. "In general the public has already made its mind up about contemporary art, and the media only confirms that, not tells them what to think."

  Heather was wincing at his misuse of language as Holly Newsome asked him "Is it your observation they're in favour of Margo Price?"

  "Last time I looked they seemed to be."

  "You can see her on quite a few people's walls still," Maria Perez said.

  "That's just one poster though, isn't it?" Dougie Leaver commented, pinching a handful of his chins.

  "Sometimes one poster can be enough to root an artist in the popular consciousness."

  "For how long?" Dougie Leaver presumably wanted to know.

  "It's a dangerous game, trying to predict reputations. Yesterday can be tomorrow in the arts."

  "Price is part and parcel of a yesterday we're better off without."

  "You'll tell us which," said Abdul Kidd.

  "The druggy sixties. You can see that in the kind of tricks she likes to play with what you think you're seeing. Hear it in the way she talks, as well."

  Holly Newsome tried to intervene. "I don't think you should-"

  "I'm not saying she takes drugs. I'm not even saying she wants to appeal to people who do, but she said the kind of thing they all say about having to take a voyage of discovery and not being able to explain it to anyone who hasn't."

  "I'd pl
ace her in an earlier tradition," said Maria Perez, "of illusionism if not of actual trompe l’oeil."

  Holly Newsome turned to her. "And how important do you think she is to that tradition?"

  "I don't think the exhibition shows us anything we haven't already seen. I felt she was trying to recapture her inspiration of the sixties as she said she was but only managing to repeat herself. But I think we'd seen the effects she was attempting before she ever started."