Darkest Part of the Woods

by Ramsey Campbell

  "You know you should," Sylvia said, and slipped past Heather to sit between her and Margo. "You'd feel worse if you stayed away. He couldn't help what he did."

  "Don't tell me that. Anybody could, especially when it's their own child."

  "No, mom. You have to believe me. I was there, remember."

  All the same, it wasn't clear how much she had forgotten or preferred not to recall.

  Heather hadn't even been able to judge when the drugs had worn off. For days after their father's death Sylvia had seemed hardly to know where she was or what she felt. Margo had done her almost unrelenting best to ensure Sylvia at least felt protected, and hadn't concealed her relief when Sylvia had refused anybody else's counselling. She'd told the police only that Lennox had drugged her and that she was certain he must have thought she was dead when he'd buried her-why he'd done so, she couldn't say. The police had found the shallow hole he'd dug within the exposed foundations in the depths of the woods, and the coroner had accepted Sylvia's version of events. Now, however, Margo said "You won't convince me."

  "Then I won't try any more. Just listen to what we all have to say about him."

  Having lapsed into silence, the priest was observing their dispute. His expression suggested he was understudying any one of several stained-glass images of Christ in the windows. "Shall I continue?" he said.

  Margo barely held her hands out, not bothering to turn up their palms, and it was left to Sylvia to tell him "You should."

  "Professor Dyson, former vice-chancellor of the university, will now share with us his memories of Dr Price."

  The professor came with a pair of sticks. He took some time to arrive at the pulpit, and not much less to be assisted into it by the priest, all of which was insignificant compared with the period he spent remembering Lennox with, it seemed to Heather, almost as many wheezing breaths as phrases. He praised her father's professionalism and the results he'd achieved with students, then hitched himself down from the pulpit and along the aisle. At last the sounds of wood on stone ended, but only until the priest announced Dr Bowman, who was accompanied by a solitary stick. She had a good deal to say in favour of The Mechanics of Delusion and its author's commitment to research before she returned to her pew. Heather didn't know to what extent the hollow bony clicks of wood on stone were making her uneasy and how much was her anticipation of the next speech. The edge of the pew felt moist as new wood, presumably because her grasp on it was, as the priest said "And now Sylvia Price will speak for the family."

  "You don't have to say anything," Margo muttered.

  "I want to, mom."

  "You want to put yourself through this in your state?"

  "Especially in that."

  Margo frowned into her eyes, then released her in something like despair. "I shouldn't stop you if it means so much to you," she murmured. "Just be careful, that's all I ask."

  It wasn't clear whether she meant Sylvia to take care what she said or of herself. At least a scan at the hospital on Mercy Hill had confirmed the baby was unharmed. Heather massaged her sister's shoulders as they went by. Sylvia grasped the sides of the pulpit as she ascended the steps, her long voluminous dress matching the priest's robe for blackness. She moved her hands to the leafy front edge of the pulpit as though exploring an aspect of the wood. Her fingertips ranged back and forth like branches swaying in a wind as she spoke.

  "I guess most people who know our family would think I never really knew my father, even less than my sister did. I was pretty young when he went away, but we used to go and see him, and usually he'd ask how I was getting on. Sometimes he'd want to hear everything I'd done since we last met, and I'd feel like I couldn't tell him enough to satisfy him. I think he always wanted to be the father he wasn't allowed to be."

  Heather thought their mother might have felt accused, and laid a hand on Marge's stiff unyielding brittle arm. "Anyway, I grew up and went away myself," Sylvia said. "I can tell you I was trying to be like him, like everything I admired about him. Maybe one reason I came home this time was I thought I'd managed. I believe he wanted me to know he thought I had."

  For a moment Heather took her pause to mean she was keeping a memory to herself, and then she heard the interruption, a repeated scratch of something like a fingernail. It came from the direction of the coffin-from the window beyond it, where a leaf or a large insect was twitching next to Christ's left foot. Heather saw the oddly symmetrical leaf detach itself from the pane against the outside of which it had been held by the wind. It vanished into the clouded gloom that appeared to be draining colour from the image in the glass.

  "I know some people say he tried to harm me at the end," said Sylvia. "The papers did.

  All I can say is maybe nobody alive knows what he meant to do. Wait, that isn't all," she said as Margo gave signs of being unable to stay quiet. "That last day he was more like the father he wished he could be and I did than I'd ever seen him. If anyone hasn't heard I'm pregnant, well, I am, and I think knowing that let him be everything he could be. That's how I want to remember him, as my baby's grandfather. He saw one grandchild, and I only wish he could see another."

  As Margo emitted a muted sniff, Heather had the surely unworthy notion that in some way Sylvia had won. Sam restrained himself to looking embarrassed as his aunt took three steps down from the pulpit, so measured that Heather could almost have imagined she was being guided by the child inside her. Heather saw Terry wonder if he should move to offer Sylvia his arm, but it wasn't her state that made Sylvia falter. A voice had said "He did."

  The bench slithered beneath Heather's hands as she twisted round. Nearly the whole of the congregation was staring at Timothy, the man who was convinced rare species inhabited the woods. Only his fellow

  patients continued to watch Sylvia, who spoke so low she might not have wanted an answer.

  "What do you mean?"

  Timothy's head seemed determined to nod at the same time as it shook. "He could see deep into you," he said.

  "Into everyone, you mean."

  "Into his own most of all. He told us once that nothing sees like blood."

  This was too much for Margo, who retorted "Blood didn't mean much to him at the end."

  "It must have," Timothy insisted. "He said nothing mattered more than who you made.

  The closer you were the more you'd understand."

  The priest cleared his throat with some vehemence. "If I can remind everyone where we are and why..."

  "Let's talk later," Sylvia said to Timothy.

  "The later the better," Margo mumbled, and waited for Sylvia to rejoin her. "Why do you want to talk to them?" she demanded under some of her breath.

  "Because they knew dad. They must have spent more time with him than I ever did."

  Margo seemed to think this deserved either no response or only one best left unsaid. She made a show of concentrating on the priest as he invited the mourners to reflect on the occasion or pray in silence. Heather was delving into herself for more of a sense of her father than she was able to resurrect-perhaps it was the presence of his fellow inmates at her back that enveloped her mind in the notion of following him into the woods-when the priest broke the hush with a last few words. As the undertaker's men stepped forward to heft the coffin, a taped soprano began to sing "I know that my redeemer liveth." With a kind of defiance, and to nobody in particular, Margo explained "He used to say Handel was one of his favourite things about England."

  Heather was reminded instead of the professor who'd invited Lennox to study the effects of the forest, only to succumb to Alzheimer's and lose himself in the woods, in whose midst he had starved to death. A cold wind that smelled of earth came to meet the coffin and the Prices as they emerged from the church. Margo glanced back, visibly about to tell Sylvia to button up her coat if she hadn't already been doing so. The five from the Arbour had turned to face the coffin as it passed, and now Heather heard them-not only them, she reminded herself- shuffling in pursuit. The wind raised t
he hair on the heads of all the undertaker's men as they paced towards the side of the churchyard nearest to the woods. The late afternoon sky was as sombrely clouded as it had looked through the windows; Heather could have imagined that the restless bony mass of the forest was dragging darkness to earth. The four men in black halted by a gravestone that gleamed white as a child's first tooth. While they deposited the coffin on a platform in the open grave, the priest folded his hands as if tacitly inviting prayer and stood behind the stone that bore Lennox's name and dates. When nobody else gave any sign of making a move, Sylvia lifted a pinch of earth from beside the grave and scattered it along the coffin lid.

  Heather refrained from wondering if Sylvia was reminded of having been buried herself.

  She stooped to snatch up a handful of earth and cast it on the coffin.

  Margo grabbed a handful and shook her hand free of it over the lid, and once Sam and Terry had imitated her, the other mourners did. The quintet from the Arbour stepped forward in a circle to drop simultaneous portions of earth that seemed to provoke a muffled creak, no doubt carried out of the forest by the wind.

  Heather saw Margo consider objecting to their gesture, only to rub her mouth with her fingertips as the coffin began to sink into the grave. At that moment the five turned to gaze at the woods.

  Heather thought she saw the woods respond. She saw the treetops opposite the churchyard writhe and grow spindly as insect legs with the effort of producing a light they held up. Just as it became too intense to face, she identified it as the sun, creeping from behind the dark grey sky-wide bank of cloud. The cloud and the woods squeezed it small, concentrating the light until it resembled an impossibly protracted flash of lightning, relentless and chill. The wind had dropped as though frozen by the light or seized by the thousands of filaments of shadow that had come alive, stretching themselves across the deserted common towards the churchyard.

  The only sound was the faint hum of the mechanism that was lowering the coffin into the grave, which had deepened with blackness. Before the coffin could touch bottom, a shape fluttered into the graveyard.

  It slithered over the turf, humping up grublike whenever it reached a headstone, and appeared to vanish into the open grave. When Heather squinted towards the light, whatever had cast the shadow had disappeared. Of course that made sense.

  If she felt vibration underfoot, heading for the forest and immediately gone, that must be an effect of the mechanism of the platform. If she'd seemed not so much to hear as feel a muffled voice or voices, no doubt they belonged to some of the quintet, all of whom were gazing at the sky. It was Sylvia however, who said either eagerly or nervously "What was that?"

  Heather rubbed her stiffened hands together and felt as if she was ridding them of a glaze of ice. The five were shivering and grinning through the mist of their breaths. She was about to declare that it had been nothing but a shadow when Timothy said "It was birds. Maff birds."

  "I thought it was the face I used to see," said Nigel. "The face that flies."

  "I saw a face, but it was crawling on the ground," Delia said, tugging at her eyes from beneath.

  "And growing," Phyllis added, clasping her hands together so hard they shivered more than ever.

  "It's nearly his time, then," Vernon said as best he could for shaking Dr Lowe gestured to the nurses to help him intervene, but Sylvia was faster.

  "Say

  whose."

  "The one your father kept telling us about."

  "The one that told Lennox his name."

  "Gave him his name and a lot more you need-"

  Neither Timothy nor Nigel nor Vernon waited for one another to say any of this, and the women's impatience with them was too great to let them finish. Delia and Phyllis drew breath in chorus and bellowed "Sel-"

  Margo clapped her hands so fiercely that she winced. "That's enough. The end," she said as if she were rebuking children, Sylvia included. "Whatever Lennox did, he's gone now. Show him some respect and let him rest."

  The five covered their mouths, and might have appeared chastened if Timothy hadn't proved unable to contain a snort of mirth. "He just went all right, true enough."

  "We heard him go," Phyllis said behind her hand.

  "But there won't be much rest for him," spluttered Vernon.

  "Nothing rests in the woods," Nigel mumbled.

  If Delia had anything to add, Terry headed her off. "Look, that really is more than enough," he said, his face reddening with every phrase. "You ought to be able to have some sense of the occasion, otherwise you shouldn't be here at all.

  It never hurts to know when to be quiet," he appealed to the doctor.

  "Come away now, Sylvia," Margo said. "You'll have had your fill of burials, I should think."

  At once she looked upset by her own choice of words, which had made Heather feel a little sick. Sylvia moved away from the inmates of the Arbour and supported herself on Sam's arm. "Okay, I'm finished here," she said.

  The lowering mechanism had quieted, having placed the coffin. As Heather linked arms with Margo and turned away from the grave, a wind followed them. This time it brought no smell of earth, only a few distant bars of Silent Night. It had always been Heather's favourite carol, and she was letting it recall to her how childhood Christmases had felt when she wondered who could be singing in the woods. The wind must be confusing her sense of direction, just as it began to distort the voices. In a moment she could no longer hear them, but in that moment the high voices sounded as much like birds as children. They sounded almost as if they were mocking both the similarities and the carol.

  18

  The Uprooted

  WHEN Heather heard Sam cross the landing to the bathroom she waited to be sure that the oven almost full of turkey fired itself up, and then she went upstairs to tap on the bathroom door. "Sam?" she murmured, and had to say more loudly "Sam?"

  "What?" he demanded in a voice that sounded not much less than drowned.

  "Happy Christmas, to begin with."

  A few seconds passed before he slid back the bolt. "Happy Christmas," he offered as an apology.

  "You look as if you've dressed for the event."

  She was referring not to his unclothed top half that he'd edged around the door but to the moustache and beard of foam he'd donned. "Why are we whispering?" he whispered, licking not just his lips but the foam around them.

  "Don't do that. You'll put yourself off my Christmas dinner," she said and reached to clean his nervous lips with a thumb. "No need to wake Sylvie. I was wondering if I could use your computer while I have a few minutes to myself and look something up on the net."

  "I'll have to put you online," he said, not much short of a complaint, and shut the door in order to emerge wrapped from the waist down in a pink bath-towel.

  "You could tell me the password if you wanted to save yourself trouble."

  He didn't respond before switching on the computer and typing a word she had the grace not to read, glimpsing only that it began with f and o and had an e in it as well. "There's the web for you," he said as the modem began burbling to itself.

  His room was the mess she expected: the hi-fi piled with overlapping compact discs and crowned with headphones, the computer that appeared to have borne a litter of floppies, the office chair in front of it, dressed in a selection of his clothes as though understudying Sam- and yet she had an odd notion that the room wasn't quite as chaotic as it appeared, that it was rather too reminiscent of her previous sight of it. Beyond the common, beneath a sky the colour of thin ice over black water, the bones of the forest were twitching in a wind. She sat forward on the cluttered chair and pulled down a search engine from Sam's menu of favourites and typed Selcouth in the narrow rectangular space.

  She had no idea what she might be calling up. She wasn't expecting to be shown more than a dozen sites, even if some of them were repetitions. Websters Dictionary 1913, p .1384...

  Game of Obscure Words... Financial Services, Portland, Oregon.
.. Word of the Week... She was about to follow up a lead to Middle English verse when the last retrieved site scrolled into view.

  Aleister Crowley, Peter Grace, Roland Franklyn, and John Strong were among those who regarded Nathaniel Selcouth as the most far- seeing...

  As frequently happened, the search engine displayed just the start of the opening sentence to be found on the site. Heather closed her hand around the mouse and rested her forefinger on the left button. The name Nathaniel had to be a coincidence, or might Lennox have mentioned it to her sister? She clicked the button hard rather than waste time on wondering. The incomplete sentence that was printed m bright blue turned black, and the bottom margin of the window set about filling with blue from left to right as if the essence of the sentence was concentrating itself there. Though it was in no hurry to finish, she did her best to keep her attention on the screen, but eventually she had to rid herself of the impression that someone had come to the edge of the forest to watch her. There was nothing to be seen except the skeletal gestures of the trees and the message the computer sent her. Connection timed out, it said.