"Let's cross now while it's safe," Heather intervened.
Both Sam and Margo regarded her as though she was failing to appreciate their ages, especially when she grabbed their hands. As they stepped over the knee-high metal barrier that divided the concrete strip along the middle of the bypass, she saw that the metal was greenish with some kind of growth. The three of them had to straddle the barrier while a pair of cars speeding abreast honked at the party or at each other, and she felt Margo wobble, if that wasn't her impatience to reach Lennox. Headlamp beams fluttered over the outermost trees, and shadows seemed to trawl the empty depths of the forest for Sylvia. Margo tugged at Heather's hand to urge her across the road into the dark.
The woods appeared to have reserved some illumination to themselves. The dim sky that was cracked with branches retained only a faint glow, but the elaborate tapestry of dead leaves underfoot was managing to seem more luminous. Given time, Heather might have been able to discern the shape of every leaf and the pattern they composed, but she was hearing Margo's low intense voice. "Stop that nonsense now and talk to me. Where's our daughter?"
Lennox had halted as the three entered the forest, and was watching them as though he had a secret he was eager to reveal, but only extended his arms again, perhaps to help him keep his balance now that he was still. "Don't do that,"
Margo cried. "I said talk."
"What do you want to hear? There's plenty if you listen."
"Lennox, try and concentrate," Dr Lowe said, kicking up leaves a he hurried between the trees. "Do you remember who took you out this afternoon?"
"Certainly I do," Heather's father said with heavy dignity. "I remember everything."
"So you'll remember when you last saw her."
"It needed to be dark."
Margo gripped his upper arms hard. "Lennox, if you don't give us a straight answer-"
"Nothing's straight here. You could start by knowing that."
"You'd better be with me. Don't you care you've lost Sylvia?"
"She's anything but lost. She'd never say she was."
Margo held her husband at arms' length and did her best to scrutinise his face.
"So where did you leave her? Can't you see it's near dark?"
"More than that where she is."
A smell of earth and decay seemed to surge out of the thick dusk a though all the trees had stirred their roots to creep imperceptibly closer. Margo released Lennox and lifted her hands, which were on the way to turning into claws. "What do you mean? What have you done to her?"
"To her, nothing," he said, looking hurt. "For her, everything I could."
"Can you be specific?" Dr Lowe prompted.
"I always have been. I wouldn't have progressed very far in the world if I hadn't, would I?"
"About your daughter."
"I gave her a bottle like we used to, Margo. See, there's something I remember."
"Maybe you remember I never wanted to. I always wished she would feed from me like Heather did." Margo was making this clear not just to him, and visibly resented the time it took.
"What do you mean, you gave her a bottle?" she demanded.
"Remember we'd put something extra in to help her sleep when her dreams kept waking her up."
"You're saying you got her drunk? And left her where?"
"That's right, it was alcohol we used to give her," he said as if that sufficed for a reply, and turned to the doctor. "I may as well confess I haven't been taking my pills the last few days.
You might want to realise how easy it is for someone to look as if they're swallowing them. I kept them in case they came in useful, and they did."
"You're saying you gave some to Sylvia," Margo said tonelessly.
"A few. I didn't tell her, you understand." He seemed to find that more than reasonable, and Heather was aware, as she'd tried for years not to be, how out of reach his mind had grown.
"I was trying to make it easier for her," he said with some pique.
"What?" Margo said, less a word than an agonised gasp.
"You can ask her."
Heather twisted around to follow his stare. The ground or the leaves it had yet to absorb slithered beneath her feet. At first she saw
only trees dimmed by trees that led her gaze into bristling darkness, and then the outline of a trunk some hundreds of yards distant appeared to waver before sprouting a shape that lurched away from it-a figure that began to follow a route not much less intricate than the one Lennox had pursued. She saw that the figure was Sylvia just as her sister stumbled, clutching at a tree so hard the crack of bark resounded through the woods.
As Sylvia paced forward so uncertainly she might almost have been recalling how to walk, the women ran to her. Margo bruised Heather's arm twice in supporting herself but relinquished it to sprint the last few yards. She took Sylvia by an elbow and slipped her other arm around her daughter's waist and peered into her face. She uttered a low cry and glared between the unmoved trees at Lennox.
"What did he do to you?"
Sam contributed an embarrassed cough before his grandfather protested "Why did you get up, Sylvia? I was sure you understood Selcouth."
Heather took hold of Sylvia's free arm with both hands. Her sister's face was stained with mud or tears or both. Her eyes appeared to be unsure how to focus, and she smelled of exposed earth. Her mouth took long enough to open for Heather to grow apprehensive, but all she said was "I don't seem to be able to hear very well."
"Selcouth," Lennox repeated at the top of his voice.
It sounded as much like a summons as an explanation. For a breath Heather felt that the woods were poised to reveal a secret-that it was dark enough for them to stop pretending. A lorry roared along the bypass, swinging shadows of trees across the ground as though a huge barred gate had opened in the elaborate decaying patchwork, and she helped lead Sylvia towards the light. "Let's go where you can sit down," she murmured.
Sylvia stumbled forward as the men turned to the barred glow of the Arbour, Sam looking unsure which group to join and staying between them, Dr Lowe remaining close to Lennox. The only sound in the woods was the shifting of leaves and twigs underfoot until Lennox said to the doctor "So much for your medication."
"I'm not sure I understand."
"I thought it was meant to be soporific."
"Only in the sense of making you calm enough to sleep."
"I wish you'd made that clear," Lennox said, and glanced over his shoulder.
"Sorry about that, Sylvia. I'd have tried to find something else to give you if I'd known."
When Sylvia didn't answer, perhaps because she was still deafened, Margo cried "How dare you talk to her after you gave her drugs? Your own daughter. I've been praying you'd get better but I won't any more. You've gone beyond ever coming back to us."
"You got that right. You'll have to catch me up."
"Just you keep your distance."
For a moment Margo's voice was entangled among the trees as though they had taken her rebuke personally. Lennox responded, if at all, by turning to the doctor. "What do you think the stuff that grew in here till they destroyed it all was for?"
"For."
"Is there an echo in here? It wouldn't be the first time I've heard one in these woods, or something like one." He cocked his head at the trees and the mass of darkness that seemed to be emerging from them as much as cloaking them. He might have been sharing his comments with the forest or even feeling prompted to say "Try again. What would the lichen have been for?"
"To be part of the ecology like everything else, presumably," Dr Lowe said, as much to Sam as to Lennox.
"He hasn't got it, has he, Sylvia?"
"She isn't speaking to you," Margo declared almost before Sylvia failed to answer, "and she doesn't want to hear you raving either."
"She won't. I'm not. Try and learn while you're in here. It'll help," he said, gesturing beyond the women as though to invoke the aid of
the darkness growing vas
ter at their backs. "It was meant to make you ready, don't you understand? To prepare our minds."
He'd halted at the edge of the trees and looked reluctant to pass beyond them.
As Sylvia faltered, Margo shouted at him "Don't stand in our way."
Dr Lowe grabbed his arm as the headlights of a truck found them. Once the truck had rumbled by and the men had stepped over the metal barrier, Margo and Heather escorted Sylvia across the road. Heather had no time to give in to an impression that they were leaving more than trees behind, and forgot it as she reached the gates. The men had stopped at the near end of the drive as if their elongated shadows had tethered them to the woods. The gravel turned Lennox' shadow scaly as a tree-trunk and Sam's too-Heather didn't care about the doctor's. As Sylvia was led into the grounds the doctor said "I should let them know they can call off the search."
Lennox wandered to a recliner that had been left on the grass. "I'll just sit here for a while."
"Sylvia needs to sit more than you do," Margo objected, "and she doesn't want to sit with you."
Apparently Sylvia did, or didn't mind, since she wobbled toward the recliner.
Margo sat her on the far end from Lennox and planted herself between them with a furious grimace at him. "You'll all b staying here while I resolve things, will you?" Dr Lowe said, and hurried across the lawn.
Margo sat forward to gaze unhappily into Sylvia's face, then peered closer. "My God,"
she cried, "what's that? Is that why you can't hear?
Heather only glimpsed that the orifices of her sister's ears were black not just with shadow before Margo snatched a handkerchief out of her diminutive handbag and wet a corner of the pastel fabric which she pushed gently into Sylvia's left ear. Some of the material she dislodged slithered down Sylvia's cheek and spattered the recliner Margo examined the corner of the handkerchief and turned to Lennox. "What did you do to her?" she demanded. "It's mud."
Though Margo's voice was low with rage, Sylvia nodded and stuck out her blackened tongue to rub mud off it with her fingertips. "That's what it is, sure enough"
Her apparent lack of emotion aggravated Margo's fury. "Answer me," she almost spat at Lennox.
"You can, can't you, Sylvia? You can tell her why it had to be."
Sylvia was still cleaning her tongue, and her blurred response sounded childlike. "I don't know if I know."
"That'll be the drugs I gave you, sorry. Remember what we heard."
Margo presented her back to him, hunching up one shoulder to emphasise her aversion.
"Come along, Sylvia. Let's go inside where it's more pleasant."
Sylvia used her hands to brush the midriff of her denim overalls, which were stained with earth as much as with shadows. "I'm trying to remember," she protested, more childishly than ever.
"The
grave..."
"Whose grave?" Margo cried "You're making me wish it was yours, Lennox."
"Mine," said Sylvia "You're telling us he..." Margo said as if her mouth would scarcely work.
"Finish it, dad," Sylvia begged.
"The grave shall be a cradle," he said, and stared not much less than imploringly at her.
Sylvia fingered her tongue and scrutinised the result before flicking away the grains of soil. "I'm sorry, I don't get it."
"Be glad you don't. You'd be as crazy as your father," Margo said and slipped an arm around her. "Come away from him."
"Don't do this, Sylvia," he pleaded. "You're making me forget. Help me remember."
"How?" Sylvia asked in much the same tone, and a tear found a path down her muddy cheek.
"She's going nowhere with you," Margo said, hugging Sylvia to her.
"Then you'll excuse me if I go by myself."
His sudden assumption of dignity seemed ponderous, so that his surging forward out of a crouch took Heather unawares. He was striding fast towards the gates before she called "Dad, wait"-for what, she couldn't think. She wasted another second in gesturing Sam to follow, and one more in saying "Quick." Lennox was nearly at the bypass when they sprinted after him.
He heard them, and ran through the gateway as if trying to imitate his elongated prancing shadow. When Heather heard the thunder she bought at first it was coming from the woods. She could almost have imagined that the darkness the trees were using to hold themselves still vas owning up to its nature. Then she realised what she was hearing. “Dad," she nearly screamed.
He didn't falter; if anything, he put on speed. As he dashed into the road, the lights of the oncoming lorry turned him incandescent and the giant trumpet of the horn seemed to greet him. It only arrested him. He was standing in the road, his torso contorted towards the vehicle and his arms outstretched in a parody of an embrace, when he was flung with a sound like the thump of a vast drum across the metal barrier, as though he was being offered to the forest. His luminousness went out, and he sprawled at the edge of the trees. As the lorry groaned and panted to a halt it ploughed into the hedge beyond the Arbour, and Heather began to tremble with more than the chill of the December night. For a heartbeat she was convinced that the snapping of twigs came from the shape that lay twisted on the far side of the road. It twitched once and then was as still as the woods.
17
A Yuletide Rite
CHRISTMAS Eve might have been peaceful except for the wind from the woods.
Whenever it revived, Heather saw them flex their multitude of bared claws, and couldn't help bracing herself yet again before its chill reached across the common. It seemed to carry a smell of turned earth, but perhaps that was rising from the churchyard, where the wind set the few leaves that still clung to the infrequent trees chattering like flattened desiccated birds and sent a flight of them scuttling and scraping among the headstones. It did its best to dislodge Margo's headscarf while it flapped the priest's black robe and fluttered Sylvia's voluminous overcoat as if the garment was being kicked from within. One of the undertaker's men smoothed down a troubled tuft of hair, whose roots didn't quite match its blackness, as he and his colleagues stooped to ease the coffin out of the hearse. Margo was the first to pace after them, holding Sam by the arm. Heather followed, staying close beside Sylvia as Terry did in case she needed support, into the church.
While it was Victorian, the architect had done his utmost to render it Norman.
It seemed to Heather to be overgrown with leaves: masses of them carved on the thick arches of the doorway and windows, arrangements of them concealing the roots of the stout round pillars
and encircling their capitals beneath the heavy reddish vaulted roof. Later someone had undertaken to relieve the austerity by replacing the plain windows with stained glass, most of which included images of leaves. Heather was unnecessarily aware of all this, and felt that her grief was staying out of reach, hovering over her like a cloud laden with unshed rain. She trudged past the couple of dozen pews, which were less than a third occupied, and waited while Sam limped aside to let Margo sidle along the left-hand front pew. As Heather joined her she enquired none too quietly "Do they have to be here?"
"They ought to be, shouldn't they?" Sylvia murmured.
Most of the congregation were from the university, even if retired, but scattered among them Heather saw five patients from the Arbour-the five to whom Lennox had introduced her and Sylvia. They appeared to have tried to position themselves in a circle, which was less undermined than emphasised by the presence of two male nurses and Dr Lowe. He nodded gravely to the Prices as they turned towards the altar.
The undertaker's men were lowering the coffin onto the stand, so soundlessly that Heather was confused to find herself thinking how still the forest could be. She watched the priest climb the steps of the pulpit with a slowness that gave him the appearance of being elevated by the half-inflated balloon of his roundish pale bland wrinkled face. He inserted his plump fingers between one another on top of the wooden-leafed pulpit and inclined his balding head, then raised it and his soft bedside voice. "We are gath
ered here to remember Lennox Weaver Price. Tributes will be paid by some of his former colleagues at the University of Brichester, where he was respected both for his teaching and his research..."
"Before he tried to bury his own daughter alive," Margo muttered.
Sylvia reached across Heather to take their mother's hand. "Don't, mom."
"Maybe it's me that oughtn't to have come."
Darkest Part of the Woods Page 13
