The Darkest Part Of The Woods

by Ramsey Campbell

  "I'd say the piece we saw falling to bits sums it up," said Dougie Leaver.

  "And now from the past to the future," Holly Newsome almost interrupted, and faced the monitor again. "This may look like an ordinary music score, but composer Ellen Ogunduwe -"

  Heather had prepared a comment to make as soon as the television was switched off. "I shouldn't think anyone who knows about art will care what that Leaver man thinks, or a programme that has him on it either."

  "It's kind of you to say so," Margo said in a voice that sounded squashed flat.

  "Does anyone want to say anything else kind?"

  "They're just people who get paid to carp."

  Sam came to Heather's aid. "To crap, you mean."

  "I'll bet a whole lot fewer people have heard of them than they have of you, mom."

  "I think," said Heather, "if you ring Lucinda you'll find they don't represent the majority at all."

  "I guess I'll wait till she calls me. I'm not going to ask any of you what you really thought of the exhibition, because I know you'd feel bound to praise it.

  Don't be insulted if I ask you to excuse me. I believe I can use a quiet stroll home."

  "You mustn't go till you've cheered up," Sylvia said.

  "In that case you'd have to make up a bed for me."

  "Of course we will," said Heather.

  "I appreciate it, Heather. I appreciate all of you. I'd just like to be by myself for a while if you'll let me. I'll be fine, so don't worry."

  "Don't you want to hear my news first?" Sylvia said.

  "I don't know. Do I?"

  "I think you might," Heather said. "I think it calls for another bottle as well."

  She was in the kitchen, lifting out of the refrigerator a bottle of Margo's favourite she had kept in reserve, when she heard Margo say "Do I get a hint while I'm waiting?"

  "There's someone else here with us," said Sylvia. "Someone you can't see."

  Heather wished she hadn't put it that way, suggesting that the revelation was about to be overheard. She shut the refrigerator and made for the hall. Perhaps it was the impression left by Sylvia's words that caused her to glance over her shoulder as though she'd belatedly become aware of something odd about the view at which she hadn't even glanced. Looming over the fence at the end of the garden was the silhouette of a head.

  She would have dropped the bottle if she hadn't clutched it with both hands. She set it on the table, an action that felt like a bid to hold reality together, and urged herself to the window. She couldn't really be seeing a presence: the fence was seven feet high. Perhaps the shape above it was a mass of branches, in which case the objects crawling dimly on it must be leaves, the explanation why its outline was so restless. How could a tree appear to have strayed so close to the house? She was leaning her hands on the chill tiles under the window, and making an effort to scoff at the notion that the shape was about to grow some kind of face, when she grasped that she would be better able to distinguish it if the kitchen was dark. For a moment her hands felt frozen to the tiles, and then she pushed herself away and lunged for the switch.

  "Have you got lost?" Margo called. "I won't know what the surprise is till you come back."

  "I'm just. . ." Heather closed out the light from the hall and kept hold of the door as she turned to the window. She sucked in a breath and came close to laughing out loud at herself. There was nothing at the fence. Beyond it she could just discern the bristling darkness that was the edge of the woods, and a faintly luminous low cloud that seemed to sink into the depths of the forest as she watched. Perspective must have created the illusion—of course the cloud was only sailing away—and another trick of perspective had let her mistake it for a head. "Here I come," she called, grabbing the bottle. She'd had enough of being troubled by the woods. They had nothing to do with the secret Sylvia was about to share with Margo and Sam.

  14: A Sunday Gossip

  Heather was wakened by a gentle knock at her door. "An you on your way to being up yet?" Margo said, easing it open "We're all ready for breakfast."

  "What time is it?" A second blink confirmed the bedside clock was holding up its hands at ten past ten. "That's what comes of talking till whenever we did,"

  Heather said. "Give me a few minutes and I'll make something for everyone."

  "I've fixed breakfast. It's been a while since I've done that for anyone besides myself."

  Heather smelled bacon fried as crisp as Margo always cooked it, a the English seldom did. The aroma lingered after Margo went down stairs. Heather lay in bed for half a minute, listening to a Sunday bell that sounded loud yet muffled. If she let herself she could feel like a child in her mother's house, with as few responsibilities as she chose to have. She sighed not too wistfully and headed for the bathroom.

  Margo's was the voice she heard most often as she performed an abbreviated morning ritual. Last night Margo had shed at Sylvia's news the tears she'd managed to keep to herself over Arts After Dark She'd hugged Sylvia and Heather and reproached them fiercely for not telling her before, and had taken some persuading that Sam hadn't known too. He'd already looked uncomfortable, and once the women had started crying and laughing together he'd retreated to his room. If Sylvia had been readying herself to be asked more than she was prepared to reveal, that hadn't taken place; perhaps Margo was too delighted that more than Sylvia had come home.

  "Here's the rest of the family," Margo announced as Heather reached the kitchen.

  "All of us that are here, I ought to say." That silenced her while she ladled bacon and scrambled eggs onto plates, and then she said "Have you told your father the good news?"

  "You don't think I'd tell him before I told you. There's no chance it might upset him," Sylvia didn't quite acknowledge asking.

  "I don't see how it could, even with him as he is. We may be old but we were never too conventional. We used to have quite a sexy time together until -" Margo looked towards the woods rather than at anyone and summed up with a cough whatever she might have added. "Sorry, Sam. I'm embarrassing you again."

  Heather thought it chivalrous of him to say "I don't know why you said again."

  "I'll tell dad this afternoon," Sylvia said.

  "Will you be telling him a name?" Margo was eager to learn.

  "I believe I've come up with one for it, yes."

  "Don't think me peculiar, but promise you'll never call your baby an it, will you? That's like wishing they won't be a person. I've always thought it was bad luck." Margo waited to see something like agreement before saying "So are we going to hear the name?"

  "Nathaniel."

  "Nathaniel Price," Heather sampled aloud. "Nat Price. Natty Price. I'm sure he can live with those if he's a he. Did you get it from anywhere in particular,

  Sylvie?"

  "It came to me in the night."

  "Suppose," Margo said, "our new person's a girl?"

  "Natalie."

  "You certainly know what you want," Margo declared, though for a moment, and for no identifiable reason, Heather wasn't sure her sister did.

  Once breakfast was finished Margo stood up. "I'd better stir my old sticks. I want to go by Jessica's before she sells all the Sunday papers."

  "I'll walk along with you," Heather said.

  "I could use a walk too," said Sylvia.

  "I'll stay and wash up," Sam told them.

  "I hope Natty turns out as thoughtful as you," Margo said and embarrassed him with a protracted vigorous hug.

  Outside the air tasted of frost. The street was silent except for a thin shrill scraping on glass. Overnight the windows of every parked car had grown as blank and pale as the sky while the windows of the houses had turned white around their edges. The women were halfway to the shop when Sylvia said "Mom, what didn't you want Sam to hear?"

  Margo glanced around them. They'd left the man with the scraper well behind, and the pavements were deserted apart from the occasional sentinel tree.

  Nevertheless she responded w
ith some wariness. "About what?"

  "You were telling us about you and dad."

  "Well, yes, I was. I did."

  "You were going to say more and then you stopped because of Sam."

  "I was thinking of you as well." Margo halted on the corner of the street that led into Goodmanswood and to the shop. "I didn't want you thinking I could possibly be blaming you," she said.

  "For what?"

  "The last time your father and I ..." Margo held her hands apart and moved the fingertips as though to trace something invisible between them. "It was when you were conceived," she said, lower still.

  "I don't know why I'd ever blame myself for that."

  Heather didn't want to ask the question that felt like an additional chill in the air, but Sylvia did. "Why was it the last time?"

  "Because that was when he started being how he is."

  "He didn't hurt you," Heather wanted to be assured.

  "Never physically. He just went away from me."

  "Went where?" asked Sylvia.

  "Into himself, where he is now." Margo glanced at her in case that was sufficient and saw it was not. "We thought he'd left all that behind," she said. "It was two years since he'd gone in the woods and been affected by that devilish stuff. He wasn't even taking tranquillisers any more, it was so long since he'd felt any effects. And then it all came back, and worse."

  "What did, mom?"

  Heather thought Sylvia was being too childishly inquisitive, but their mother said "He started talking, not to me or for me to hear. He wasn't looking at me either or anywhere m the room. He might have been trying to see through the wall, the way he looked—no, maybe that's not fair, maybe trying not to see. I couldn't understand a word he said, but there was a whole lot of it. And afterwards he said he couldn't remember a thing. Anything, mind you," she added with some bitterness.

  Heather's mind produced a glimpse of her father's face looming above Margo's inverted one while he stared towards the woods as if the bedroom wall had ceased to be. She rid herself of the image by realising how anyone who saw the three of them would think they'd stopped for an everyday gossip. "It couldn't have been his fault, could it?" she risked saying.

  "I never said it was, especially not to him. He didn't need much persuading to move to the hospital. Come on," Margo said, determined either to dismiss the subject or to confront whatever lay ahead, "let's take a look at my press."

  Beyond a mutually supportive pair of five-foot shelves against which sat faint shadows of the legend stencilled on the window at J's & J's—Jessica was serving an old man with as much conversation as groceries while her husband Joe, his bulk done up in an ageing overcoat and his head kept warm by a shabby woollen hat, sang mangled carols to their granddaughter, who was perched on a stool behind the counter and crayoning on a pad.

  "We three things of Orient are, Bearing cash we head for the bar . . ."

  "They're kings and they travel afar," eight-year-old Rosemary protested with a mixture of amusement and exasperation.

  "See if you know this one, then," he said and sang in a hoarse baritone that managed to land on most of the notes:

  "The holly and the ivy, When they are both full grown, Of all the trees that are in the wood—Why, it's our local star," he said, belatedly abandoning the melody. "We saw you on the telly last night, Margo. No such thing as bad publicity, isn't that what they tell us? What can we do for you, Margo and Heather and can this really be the youngest come home to roost?"

  "Have you brought her to show her off, Margo?" Jessica said, counting change onto her customer's palm.

  "Happy to, and Heather as well, but I wanted to see what the Sundays are saying about me."

  "You may as well read them here," Joe said. "We don't want you paying for anything you don't like."

  Heather had to remember to breathe while Margo found her name. MARGO PRICE RETROSPECTIVE INTRICATE BUT INSUBSTANTIAL. Margo released a sound related both to a grunt and a muffled laugh, and Heather didn't know if she should touch her. She confined herself to skimming the review until Margo tidied the newspaper and spread out the next one. All the reviews lived up to their tides: DEPTHS BUT LITTLE DEPTH, A TYRANNY OF DETAIL, A REPETITIVE RETROSPECTIVE, LOST IN THE WOOD . . . Margo uttered no further sound on the way to returning all the newspapers to their unread state. "Well, that's that," she said. "Poor Lucinda."

  "Poorer you," said Sylvia, taking her hand.

  Heather was reaching for the other one when Margo said "I don't think I'm poor at all."

  "Not while you have a family you aren't," Jessica agreed.

  "You shouldn't let it matter what people think of you," said Joe.

  "Except all the ones who like your work," Heather was quick to add.

  "You know what I figure you did wrong?" Sylvia said. "You shouldn't have taken your new work to London. You should have made people come and see it in your studio. Remember that's where Lucinda saw it and liked it so much. Maybe it loses its power if it's taken away because it's a part of the place."

  Nobody except the eight-year-old had anything to say to that. "Part of the woods," she corrected.

  "Sylvia was always the imaginative one," Margo told Joe and Jessica. "Mind you, you've good reason to be a little strange just now," she said to Sylvia. "I know I was sometimes when you were on the way."

  She put a hand over her mouth and gazed big-eyed at Sylvia. She was miming the question of whether she should make it absolutely clear why the reviews hadn't troubled her when the bell above the shop door clanged as though to start a round, announcing two women and a good deal of perfume. "Good morning," they said to Jessica and Joe. "Hello, Rosemary."

  "When are Willow and Laurel coming back to ballet lessons?" the little girl said.

  "When they learn not to tell stories," Mrs. Bennett said and pressed her lips together without managing to pale her small red mouth.

  "In other words never," Mrs. Palmer said with a glossy crimson grimace.

  "I like stories."

  "Not the kind they tell," Mrs. Bennett said.

  She and Willow's mother were turning to the shopkeepers when Rosemary said "You needn't have taken them away. People still tell stories. Gwyn and Lucy do."

  "Only because our little brats did," said Mrs. Palmer. "I'll have a Sunday

  Beacon, please, Jessica."

  "They're different stories."

  "A Beacon for me as well."

  "What stories are those?" said Sylvia.

  "About the man who comes to the railings."

  "They sound like the same old nonsense to me," Mrs. Palmer said and pouted at having betrayed she was listening.

  "They're not. They're new ones. Lucy says he's getting so thin he'll be able to come through the railings soon, and they're only this wide," Rosemary said, holding up one palm. "And Gwyn says bits keep falling off him and you can see them running across the common if you look."

  "Have you?" said Sylvia.

  "We don't go in the yard any more. I'm glad grandma and granddad live on the other side of the road."

  "I should think so," Mrs. Bennett declared and let fly an impatient sound. "I don't mean being scared, you've no reason to be that. I mean not going looking for things nobody ever saw."

  "Nobody but druggies," Mrs. Palmer said.

  "There's been a few of those round here, so just you make sure you and your friends never start."

  "I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few in that lot who tried to stop the bypass."

  "So long as they know they aren't welcome round here."

  Both women had their backs to the Prices but kept their voices raised to compensate, while Joe and Jessica struggled to hide their discomfort. Margo watched the women pay for their tabloids and waited until they turned around before she said "Excuse me, were you talking about anybody in particular?"

  Mrs. Bennett stared at her for so long it would have appeared to be a substitute for speech if she hadn't remarked "You were on television."

 
Mrs. Palmer gazed over the Prices' heads. "Anyone who thinks we were talking about them knows if we were."

  "You can tell about some people just by looking at them," Mrs. Bennett said, seeming to observe some absence in the air above Sylvia's head.

  "Don't you believe it," Margo said and began to laugh, then coughed and waved a hand in front of her face. "Come along, girls. I'm getting a bit stifled, aren't you? A treat to see you, Joe and Jessica. We must do it more often."

  "You know our hours," Joe said.

  That didn't strike Heather as exactly inviting, but perhaps he was doing his best to stay neutral. She and Sylvia followed Margo out, to be overtaken by the women, who sailed past on a wake of perfume and set about muttering together before they were quite out of earshot.

  Margo watched them vanish into adjoining houses guarded by imitation gas lamps. "You know," she said, "I believe those two silly cattle may have meant me."

  The sisters gazed after her as she marched away, head held even higher as she passed the ersatz gas lamps, and then Sylvia said "One more revelation to go."

  "And that's. . ."

  "I mean, one more parent to tell."

  "Do you want me to come with you?"

  "I don't always need my big sister," Sylvia said, giving her a smile that was prepared to be apologetic. "I can cope with dad. If he's ever going to be in the mood for the news it ought to be now. After all, it's nearly Christmas."

  15: A Wooden Visitor

  Heather was reading a newspaper column entitled Always A Price when someone opened the front gate. The coverage of Margo's exhibition had reminded the columnist that throughout her student days she'd had Margo's best-known poster on her wall. A rummage in her attic had failed to locate the poster, and the rest of the column consisted of memories prompted by items she'd found. "Buy a new one if it means that much to you," Heather muttered, and then her frown deepened. By the sound of it, whoever was on her path was using more legs than anyone ought to have.

  She sent herself into the hall, which wasn't sufficiently dim even so late in the afternoon for her to bother switching on the light, and pulled the front door open. She was expecting to see a person with a stick, not Sam grasping a small fir-tree by its slender trunk. "Sam," she cried, more exasperated with him than she'd felt for years. "How far have you had to hobble with that?"