The Darkest Part Of The Woods

by Ramsey Campbell

  Her sense that he was failed to encourage her. She kept feeling she was about to blunder past a tree and come face to face with him with someone who was close to her, at any rate. That was the kind of prank

  Sylvia might play, though surely not in her present condition. 'Sam," Heather called at the top of her voice, "will you show yourself," as she dodged around a fallen tree that formed with its neighbours a shape like an enormous hieroglyph.

  She wasn't aware of disturbing the roots that were matted with upheaved soil, but she thought she heard a pattering of earth; perhaps it was somewhere ahead.

  She opened her mouth to shout again, but instead cupped both ears, to be met by a silence that challenged her to believe she'd heard anything. She was pacing forward, leaves cracking like beetles under her feet, when the woods produced another sound—a thump like a single giant heartbeat muffled by the earth.

  It was ahead of her. She couldn't judge how far—how distance night have minimised it and its source. She made herself keep moving, though before long she grew reluctant to call out, not for fear of in impression that the presence above the trees had halted to await her but because she'd identified the cause of the impression: the patch of toadstool sky that was visible between the trees. She was coming to the space in the middle of the woods, and there was no sign of Sam.

  Then what had made the sound? Perhaps a branch or a nest had fallen. It was absurd of her to be nervous in broad daylight of entering the largest open space the woods contained. There was nothing to be seen in it except the mound encircled by brick—nothing that need remind her of Selcouth's journal. She stalked forward, furious with herself for being wary when her concern should be for Sam. She Tamped into the clearing between a pair of trees shaped no more oddly than their neighbours and tipped with half-revealed green objects that had to be leaves. She was striding to the centre of the space, less interested in identifying what she'd heard than in locating Sam, when she faltered. Someone had dug up the mound.

  A squarish hole surrounded by moist earth and more than wide enough to admit or release a man was gaping at the low pale fat sky. Heather was infuriated to feel sweat pricking her hands as she ventured closer. For a moment she thought she wouldn't be able to step over the mouldering bricks to see into the hole. "Sam," she yelled, almost as much from frustration as in the hope of summoning him. When there was no response from among the host of trees, she planted a foot on the yielding upturned earth and followed it with the other.

  The digging had exposed a curve of steps slippery with earth. At the top of the steps two unequal pieces of a stone slab had been levered up with a spade whose head was bent half out of shape by the task. At first she thought the realisation that the passage led to Selcouth's cellars was allowing her to distinguish the lowest steps more clearly, if her eyes weren't adjusting unusually swiftly to the dimness into which the steps descended, and then she wondered if the sun had managed to break through the clouds. When she glanced at the sky it was as coated as ever. She peered down and immediately saw why the steps were growing more visible. Someone was climbing out of the dark.

  The light that came crawling up the passage seemed reluctant to reveal itself or its bearer, and she found she had to make herself breathe and swallow. The lowest steps began to shiver with the glow, and a flashlight wavered into view, followed by a hand, an arm, a shoulder, the top of a bowed head. They were Sam's, and his posture made her nervous of seeing his face.

  He was halfway up the curve of steps when he raised his head. It was obvious that he hoped nobody was awaiting him. As he met her eyes he did his best to hide any expression, but looked guilty enough to retreat if something below him hadn't daunted him. His gaze flickered, both desperate for a way of escape and unable to leave her, so that she was almost too apprehensive to ask "What have you been doing, Sam?"

  He took hold of the shaft of the damaged spade as if he meant to claim he had only been digging. "Looking for Sylvia," he said, "And did you find her?"

  The solitary nod that was his response looked like another unsuccessful attempt to drag his gaze away from Heather's. "Where?" she prompted impatiently. "Not down there."

  Some seconds elapsed before he delivered another trapped nod, and she felt as if the heat was making them both sluggish. "Come out before that falls on you," she said, reaching an urgent hand down to him.

  He didn't take it—his face suggested that he felt she mightn't want him to touch her—but she refused to step back until he was past the threat of the heavy slab.

  He retreated to the far side of the hole from her and stared unhappily into it.

  "What's down there?" Heather said loudly enough to deny there was anything to fear.

  "I told you."

  "You've told me nothing yet, and I think it's about time you did. Why aren't you in London?"

  "Same reason."

  "As what?"

  He was looking more cornered than ever. "Sylvia," he muttered.

  "Where are you trying to tell me she is?"

  One corner of his mouth winced, and it was with some difficulty that he said

  "She's gone."

  "I'm sorry, Sam, you're not making yourself remotely clear. Have I got to go down and see for myself what's there? In that case give me the flashlight."

  He clutched it with his free hand, covering the lens as though to deprive her of the illumination. "Don't," he mumbled.

  "I can assure you I don't want to, but I will unless you tell me why you were down there. Is it something to do with that wretched old book of my sister's?"

  "Have you read it?"

  "I've read enough to know what this place is and the kinds of things the sad case who wrote it imagined about it. If you're thinking of that picture, someone else could have drawn it, must have. I know what it says, but I shouldn't think that kind of writing would take much to forge. Don't ask me why anyone would have done all that."

  Nevertheless she was ready to wonder aloud whether Sylvia had—whether she wasn't as stable as she had pretended to be—if that would relieve Sam of the notion that he was at the mercy of any aspect of the journal. She wasn't expecting to hear him ask "What picture?"

  "Never mind if you don't know," Heather said, willing him to forget she'd mentioned it. "You still haven't told me why you're here."

  "Yes I did."

  She was about to lose all patience when she glimpsed the guilt that was trying to hide behind his eyes. A surge of panic made her blurt "What have you done,

  Sam?"

  "I wouldn't hurt her. I'd never have done that."

  "I know you wouldn't." Heather took a deep breath to say or to delay saying "Has someone . . ."

  "I told you, she's gone. It's gone."

  "Do you mean her baby?"

  She saw him glance downwards under the imperfect cover of a nod, and had the sudden awful notion that she understood the shame he was trying to conceal.

  "Sam, you haven't. . ."

  "What?" he said with a fierceness that might have been exhorting her to speak or the reverse.

  "Did she turn against having the baby? Did you—did you help?"

  She couldn't have been prepared for his reaction. He'd scarcely pressed his lips together when they started writhing with a violence that made it impossible for her to guess the expression he was struggling to withhold. She snatched the flashlight from his slackened grasp and jabbed the beam into the hole. She had taken one step down, so angrily that it bruised her heel, when he mumbled

  "Don't. You don't want to see."

  "Why don't I? I will unless you tell me what you've done."

  At first it seemed the threat was insufficient to gain her an answer. She had exhausted staring at him and was descending another step when he managed to pronounce "Wait. I..."

  Heather looked up to find him gazing at her in something like anguish. That was enough to dispel an impression that not only he was watching her—that they were being spied upon from between all the trees or behind the sky. "Go
on, Sam," she urged. "Go on."

  "I'd be the last person to harm it."

  "I knew you couldn't really have. It's our baby too."

  "No," he said, and she saw the hope that he'd implied enough desert him. "It's mine."

  She felt everything close in—the audience of trees, the heavy bloated secretive sky, the dark beyond the shaky flashlight beam—to dwarf her voice. "How do you mean?"

  "How do you think?"

  "I'm not thinking anything," Heather said, her mind having turned into an inert lump. "You've got to say."

  A shiver passed through him, perhaps only with the effort of drawing a harsh breath that emerged as harsher words. "I'm the father."

  He might have been shouting it to the woods. If she hadn't been trying to calm him, she could have imagined that the echoes the last word awakened were in a succession of voices quite unlike his. "You can't be really, can you, Sam?" she said. "Whatever gave you that idea?"

  "It's true. Christ," he snarled in disgust at her or himself.

  "What would Sylvia say if she could hear you?"

  "She knew it was before I did."

  "You mean she put it into your head? Sam, I wish I didn't have to tell you this, because I promised I'd keep it to myself, but she's had some mental problems."

  "Just like me."

  That had the sound of a question or even a denial, but Heather did her best to use it. "I know you have, and we'll find someone who can help. It needn't be Dr

  Lowe if you don't think he's much use. But this idea has to be part of what's wrong, hasn't it?"

  "Because it's true."

  "All right then, tell me how."

  "We met here the day she came home, before we knew who we were. It's all to do with this place, everything is. That's why we came back."

  No, Heather thought: it was all the fault of Selcouth's journal. There was no knowing what Sam and Sylvia might have imagined together based on it while both their minds were less than balanced. She was at the disadvantage of not knowing what he'd unearthed or thought he'd unearthed. "Wait here for me or come down with me, whichever you prefer," she said. "I have to look."

  She was below the surface of the mound when she thought she heard him mutter "I can't."

  "You can," she said, not lingering to make sure he'd heard. She hurried down the steps as fast as she could bear the swaying of the light in the narrow spiral passage, and slowed only whenever she came abreast of a room. There were several, all of them seared black and bare. If they'd had anything to do with

  Selcouth, she was glad of the damage. They contained nothing but tangles of old bones and in one case a lumpy heap of burned books—nothing worth a second glance. All she wanted to find was Sylvia. Her lips kept parting to call to her but managing no more than to whisper her name. She found her in the lowest room.

  Sylvia lay on a heap of rotting vegetation, her knees drawn up towards her chest, her arms pressing her legs together, her hands clenched on the hem of her dress to tug it down to her feet. She was no longer pregnant; indeed, very little remained of her. She looked thinner than the oldest person Heather had ever seen, as though she had been almost entirely consumed. Even her face was hardly more than skin and bone, and yet it seemed to Heather that it had reverted to being her little sister's, perhaps because the eyes and mouth were as wide as a child's. There was no telling whether they expressed wonder or terror or some emotion beyond those—no knowing what she might have seen or thought she'd seen in her final moments.

  Heather felt as though time had grown pointless. She had no idea how long she stood in the doorway, adding her free hand to her grip on the flashlight when the beam began to droop towards the floor. If there was a faint trail across the bare earth from Sylvia's body, Heather was unable to care. She was seeing how a solitary toe exposed by a sandal was peeking from beneath Sylvia's dress. All at once Heather lurched across the room as if her grief had dealt her a violent shove, and bent to close her sister's eyes.

  The gesture seemed to fall short of any meaning, because there was nobody to respond to it. Heather stepped back, avoiding a flashlight that was trained on the doorway, its lens as blank as Sylvia's vacated eyes had been. It brought home to Heather that her sister might have died not just in the depths of

  Selcouth's cellars but in the blind dark. She couldn't think past that idea, which overwhelmed her mind with dismay and rage. Some of that found her voice.

  "Sam, come down," she shouted. "We aren't leaving her here. Come and help me carry her."

  She heard no answer. Perhaps her shout was muffled by the passage. Though it distressed her to take herself and the light away from Sylvia even for a moment, she backed fast if less than steadily out of the room. For an instant, on the threshold, she thought something was at her back. It could only be the dark, because she sensed its presence whichever way she turned, and then not at all.

  "Come down. Come here," she called as she climbed to find Sam.

  34: The Revelation of the Forest

  Heather had barely lost sight of the lowest room when, in the midst of her shock, she grasped what was most important and real. She shouldn't upset Sam more than he already had to be. Whatever his mental state had been, finding his aunt's body must have made it worse. He must be blaming himself for her death—for not finding her in time—and so confused that he was taking the blame for her having been pregnant. He needed help and understanding, not to feel even more accused. He needed his mother's support as much as she would welcome any that he could provide. "Sam, are you there?" she called more gently. "Can you hear me? Wait there if you don't want to come down."

  She wouldn't have minded hearing a response. She felt awaited before she came abreast of the next highest room, and couldn't help turning the light aside through the doorway. Shadows—only shadows—flexed themselves as if the charred bones just inside were preparing to scuttle towards her. They were only bones, and bones couldn't move, which meant she needn't waste another glance on them.

  They returned to the dark behind her, and she kept the flashlight beam firmly on the steps above her until she had almost reached the next gaping entrance. This showed her the remains of books, and however much she deplored any damage to rarities, if these had led to Selcouth's activities she was happy they'd been destroyed. If the contents of the other rooms were also related to his journal she preferred not to think about that, not down here in the dark, not while she had more immediate anxieties.

  "Sam, can't you answer?" she would rather not have had to call, but there was silence apart from the flat trapped sound of her footsteps. At least that meant there was no sound from the rooms she had passed or still had to pass, and certainly no reason for her to send the light into the two she had yet to encounter. She managed to restrain herself from doing so, though as the dim edge of the light trailed into the rooms it almost made her glimpse shapes trying shakily to raise themselves where she remembered the bones had been huddled. She was nearly in sight of the outer world—she would have heard if the slab had fallen in the way.

  The beginnings of panic sent her stumbling upwards, thrusting the flashlight beam ahead as though it might be capable of moving stone. It found the top of the steps, beyond which the opening appeared to be filled with darkness as solid as earth. She lurched at it and saw a cloudless lucid blue sky overhead. She grabbed the shaft of the spade to help her onto the mound, and for the briefest instant felt as if she'd seized a weapon to defend herself against something behind or above her. Then the sense of a presence left her, and she murmured "Sam."

  Perhaps she had spoken too softly. The nearest to a response she heard was a creak of branches and a fluttering of wings. As her head emerged above the surface of the mound the forest rose to its full height around her. Sam was nowhere to be seen.

  He had to be within earshot, she promised herself. "Sam," she called as she stepped over the ring of brick, off the mound. The bright horde of trees and their intricate dense web of shadow held themselves still as though
to help her listen, and then a blackbird—it was black, at any rate—clattered out of the highest branches of a tree about a hundred yards beyond the edge of the clearing nearest Goodmanswood. Its shadow raced across the leaf-strewn ground like a denizen of the web, and as the shadow vanished she glimpsed Sam's face peering around the tree where the creature had made itself apparent. "Wait there," she called. "Let's talk."

  She wanted to believe he hadn't heard. Before she'd finished speaking she couldn't see him, and had to tell herself she hadn't imagined doing so. As she hurried across the grass, which was so elaborately patched with unfamiliar weeds she might have thought the glade was determined to represent every species it could bring to mind, she brandished the flashlight as though it would help her see. "Don't go any further, Sam," she called at the top of her voice.

  He was the one she was anxious about, but she didn't mind if he thought she was pleading on her own behalf, if that would halt him. She heard a movement that must have been the scraping of twigs beneath his feet while he risked another glance at her from behind a tree half as distant again as the place she'd last seen him. She hadn't realised there was sufficient cover to let him move that far unobserved. "Stay there," she pleaded rather than try to decree. Working her shoulders, which felt burdened by nerves, she hurried forward. She had barely left the clearing when she lost sight of him.

  "Don't keep doing that," she cried, though she was in no doubt that she understood his behaviour: he didn't want to face her now that he'd admitted what he thought he'd done. He should know it would take more than that to turn her against him, especially since she'd done her best to let him know that he hadn't begun to persuade her. "Nothing's changed," she called, "nothing's changed between us," and tried a question. "Has it, Sam?"