The Darkest Part Of The Woods
Page 12
"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 vaster at their backs. "It was meant to make u 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 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 gathered 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."
"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?"