The Trees

by Ali Shaw

It led him beneath clawed trees, whose branches snagged at his clothes as if trying to tear them to ribbons. It hopped over a gurgling brook that Adrien had to take a run-up to jump. It ploughed through a series of puddled ditches he would far rather have picked his way around, but into which he had no choice but to follow. Looking ahead, he could see no sign of where the beast was leading him, and as more time passed he began to wonder whether it was not just stamping its usual trails, leading him nowhere.

  Then a scream rang out through the woods. Adrien froze rigid, while the kirin bridled and clopped the forest floor. It had been a girl’s cry, defiant but full of pain.

  ‘H-Hiroko?’ whispered Adrien, then yelled it, ‘Hiroko!’

  He received no answer, and nor could he be sure exactly where the scream had come from. It had seemed to ricochet between the trunks, and the kirin grumbled and plodded on as if it had already forgotten it.

  ‘Come on!’ urged Adrien, waving his arms at the beast. ‘We’re supposed to be helping her!’

  The kirin continued stoically, and Adrien began to fear that the scream had been Hiroko’s final shout. What if Leonard had simply killed her? That would explain why he’d heard no further cries.

  ‘Come on, come on, come on,’ he begged of the calf, while trying his best to stay alert for any sight of the girl, or of the chapel, or even of Hannah and Seb.

  The tree trunks moaned and creaked, and a rumbling of gas escaped the kirin’s stomach. Adrien wondered if this was all a sick joke of the forest’s, staged at his expense. Perhaps his promise to the whisperers had come too late, and this interminable journey was his punishment. He was busily composing another foul-mouthed rebuke to them when, finally, a change appeared in the woods up ahead. There the going looked brighter and clearer, and Adrien filled up with a sudden fear of arrival, and of what he might find at the chapel. The kirin turned its head sideways and looked back at him with one dozy eye. Upon seeing the blunt block of its horn, Adrien couldn’t believe that he’d come all of this way unarmed. He had not even thought about choosing a dead branch for a weapon. When he cast around in the undergrowth, there was only a thatch of skinny twigs, and many of those bound up in thorns that nipped his fingers when he tried to reach among them. He snatched back his hand and sucked the cut skin.

  The kirin didn’t wait. It quickened its pace and cantered uphill until it reached the clearing ahead. At first, Adrien held back, his imagination already peopling the chapel with a dead Hiroko and a triumphant Leonard towering over her. Then he took a deep breath and forced himself across the final distance, up the slope to where the trees parted and the sun shone through.

  It was not the chapel. It was the hotel valley.

  ‘No!’ he gasped, staring horrified at the kirin. ‘No no . . .’ He pointed down the felled slope to the ruined hotel, and his arm was shaking. ‘Not this! Not here! You stupid animal! You cretin! We were supposed to be rescuing Hiroko!’

  A wad of slobber escaped from the animal’s lips. It reached down its head and scratched the side of its knee with its horn. Adrien took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose.

  From the base of the valley came a rumble and a crash, that familiar sound of a part of the hotel collapsing. A grating thump followed it, followed by an awful squeal and a sequence of pounding thuds. Adrien put his glasses back on and supposed that his only options now were either to hurriedly muster help or to strike back into the woods alone.

  When he looked at the hotel again, it was under a parting haze of dust. The wind blew and teased the smoke away, and revealed that the roof and upper floors were all gone. One wing of the building had caved in with such force that it had felled a tree beneath it. That trunk now lay almost horizontal, a mirror image of another that had grown that way on the far side of the building. All of the thinner, higher branches had been stripped by the avalanche, and the trees that remained upright were joined together by sheets of wall and flooring. The overall effect was of one colossal patchwork trunk, with two symmetrical arms.

  Adrien stared from the building to the kirin, then back to the hotel.

  Its shape was that of the throne tree.

  ‘Oh shit,’ he said.

  He looked back over his shoulder at the forest, expecting to see whisperers at his back. There were only the trees, and nearer than them the stumps. The kirin rooted vacantly through the dirt on the edge of the wood, then looked up at Adrien with a huff of breath, as if surprised to find him still present.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘okay . . .’

  He started down the slope. Then he broke into a jog. And then he ran.

  16

  Murderers

  ‘Adrien?’ cried Hannah. ‘Adrien, where are you?’

  ‘I can’t believe this,’ said Seb, rubbing his eyes. ‘I can’t believe any of this.’

  ‘He was right there. Right there. And then he was gone.’

  Hannah’s first fear had been that Leonard had got him too. She’d grabbed Seb and stayed very close to him while they’d checked the place where they’d last seen Adrien. She had whispered his name a few times before she’d dared to call it, at any moment expecting Leonard to spring out on them with his rifle.

  ‘Do you think,’ suggested Seb, ‘I mean, I don’t want to accuse him of anything, but . . . do you think he might have just chickened out?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ she said, although she didn’t think it likely. One thing she had learned about Adrien Thomas was that he could find running away just as terrifying a prospect as staying put, especially if running left him alone.

  The morning sun brightened every detail of the forest, revealing every crease in every tree trunk and every blemish on every leaf. Still they saw no sign of Adrien, and were calling out his name when they heard a scream.

  ‘That was Hiroko!’ gasped Seb, and launched himself in the cry’s direction. It had been faint and distant, but undoubtedly the noise of a girl. Hannah looked around the birch woods one last time, then dashed after Seb. She supposed Adrien would have to fend for himself, wherever he had gone.

  They’d been blundering in the direction of the scream for several minutes before they found the path. When Hannah reached down and sank her fingers through the leaf litter, she felt hard paving underneath. ‘This way!’ she exclaimed, and they hurried along it, jogging wherever it was firmest underfoot. They had not gone far before they tasted cinders on the air. A moment later they spotted the chapel up ahead, and both ducked into a crouch.

  The nearest of the building’s stone walls was just visible between the trees. A trail of smoke drifted from within, although they could not see the flames from their vantage point.

  ‘Someone must be there,’ whispered Seb.

  Hannah couldn’t see anybody, but she nodded agreement. ‘It’s probably a trap. We should be as quiet as we can.’

  As they crept nearer, more broken masonry revealed itself, but they still didn’t have a clear view of the inside of the chapel. They could see a campfire’s glow buffing a fringe of greenery that overhung the western wall, and could hear logs spitting out of sight.

  ‘What now?’ whispered Seb.

  Hannah looked in every direction, but could see nothing untoward. She took a deep breath. ‘Your call, Seb. I’m almost certain that Leonard’s got this planned.’

  ‘Maybe he’s asleep in there. Maybe he’s just gone to the loo, and this is our best chance. We might be able to slip in and out again before he even notices.’

  Hannah wasn’t convinced, but they sidled around the chapel to try to get a better look. The north wall had crumbled away entirely, so they made that their target. When they reached it, they could finally look into the chapel’s interior, which was an overgrown rectangle beneath a hymn board and a few rotten planks of pew. There was no Leonard. There was only the smouldering campfire and, beyond it, Hiroko.

  She was lashed to a stone with her back to them, but no sooner did Seb see her, and see she was alone, than he sprang up and rushed towards he
r. Hannah tried to grab him but he was too quick, off like a dog after a stick. At the sound of his accelerating steps, Hiroko turned and looked over her shoulder. She was gagged, but her eyes were wide with warning.

  In the same moment, Hannah saw the kettle. It sat on a trivet in the fire but, although the flames licked its base, no steam was rising from its spout. Either it had boiled dry, or someone had placed it there not a few minutes before.

  ‘Wait!’ she screamed, but Seb already had too much momentum and Hannah not enough to catch him. He’d just set foot in the chapel when his ankle stuck in place as if it had been cemented to the floor. He lost all forward momentum and fell hard, his skull bouncing with a crack off the flagstones. Hannah shrieked and, full of instinct, forgot all traps and dangers. She hurtled after him but had not gone two bounds before her right knee jerked out from under her. She fell sideways with a hard thud, feeling like her kneecap had just exited her leg. Only when she pulled herself back up, panic for Seb overcoming her pain, did she realise that she had been shot and not snared as he had been.

  The second stone hit her in the hip. It could only have been airborne for an instant, but her ear picked out its approach like the noise of a hornet. The muscles and the bone in her hip juddered at the impact, and she fell again, the fall making the pain ring out doubly. She looked up and saw Leonard stalking towards her. He was not carrying his rifle, but Hiroko’s slingshot, and he was approaching from the very patch of forest she and Seb had just passed through. Perhaps they had stepped within a whisker of him, so fixated on the chapel that they had missed altogether the danger in the woods. He had another pebble fitted to the slingshot’s rubber, keeping it trained in her direction while he looked left and right between the trees.

  ‘Where are you?’ he called out to the woods. ‘Game’s up! I’ll kill them if you don’t show yourself.’

  Nothing answered. Only a song thrush which had landed near the hymn board.

  ‘Seb?’ hissed Hannah.

  He moved, and her relief was so great it was anaesthetic. He tried to prop himself up, but squealed at once as his left arm skidded out from under him. He flopped down again holding that arm at a peculiar angle, and Hannah could tell it was broken. Blood dribbled from a gash in his forehead and more seeped from his trapped ankle, but he was alive and that was what mattered.

  Leonard stepped urgently into the chapel. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Where’s who?’ gasped Hannah, holding her hip.

  ‘Don’t push me.’

  ‘Do you mean Adrien?’ She shook her head to try to cast the pain away. ‘He didn’t come with us.’

  ‘Bullshit. He would want to help his friends.’

  Hannah’s pelvis had filled up with tiny explosions. She dug her teeth into her bottom lip, to try to keep herself focused. ‘Adrien just vanished. On the way here.’

  Leonard stared into the woods, and the rubber strained in the slingshot.

  ‘Hold out your hands,’ he said.

  She didn’t suppose she had any choice. He slackened the weapon and tied up her wrists with the same sharp wire that had bitten Seb’s ankle. While he was busy doing so, Hannah seized the chance to meet her son’s eyes. Seb was panting from the pain of his wounds, but he managed to nod at her, to show he was coping. Even in these circumstances, she was incredibly proud of him.

  Leonard finished tying the wire.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ demanded Hannah.

  ‘I already held that conversation with the girl.’

  Hannah looked to Hiroko, who was straining to turn her head far enough to see them. A bruise had swollen the line of her jaw and a small gash bled on her shoulder, but she didn’t appear to have suffered any serious injuries.

  ‘Ankles,’ said Leonard, motioning to Hannah’s legs. Reluctantly, she shifted position so that he could tie them. He crouched and reached into his pocket for more wire, but his hand came out empty so he reached into the other one. ‘Damn,’ he said, ‘no more wire.’

  At that Hannah seized her chance, rocking back onto her hips despite the agony of putting weight there. When she swung forward again she kicked Leonard with both legs, hard as she could.

  He caught her ankles before she made contact. She wriggled to try to escape him, but to no avail.

  ‘Stop,’ he said, and the fight went out of her.

  Leonard lowered her feet to the ground, but did not let go. His grip was firm and warm without hurting. A gardener’s touch, she thought with a shiver.

  ‘No wire,’ he said again, then placed both hands around her right foot.

  He snapped it sideways, ninety degrees, and Hannah bellowed at the sudden shock of it. Seb tried to rise to help her but could only flop back towards the snare that held him, spitting with pain of his own.

  Leonard stood up. ‘Calm down, Hannah. I’ve only sprained it.’

  It didn’t feel like that to her, it felt four times its normal size and expanding, and as hot as an oven inside. Her eyes were streaming, but she clenched her bound hands together and sank her fingernails into her skin, forcing herself to think straight.

  Leonard stood up and scanned the woods in the direction they’d come from. ‘I’m not happy that he’s still out there, but it probably wasn’t him anyway. Chances are it was one of you two.’

  Hannah tried to picture Adrien charging out of the woods to save them. It was almost impossible. Even if he came, he would never best a man such as this.

  ‘No matter,’ said Leonard, scowling again at the forest.

  ‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ grunted Hannah. ‘None of us killed your dog!’

  Leonard’s rucksack and gear were tucked out of sight beneath one of the window ledges. He picked something up from between them and held it outstretched on his palm like a crystal ball. ‘Recognise this?’

  It was the block of brick that had killed the Alsatian, stained almost black around one corner.

  ‘I know your dog meant a lot to you . . .’ began Hannah, battling to keep the hurt in her ankle in check, ‘I know that but . . . doing this . . . it’s . . .’

  ‘It’s what?’

  She screwed shut her eyes as a wave of pain crashed up her shin and the underside of her thigh. ‘Not going to achieve anything.’

  Leonard regarded the brick in his hands, then tossed it disgustedly to the floor. It rolled to a clunking halt between her and Seb. ‘Both of you take a long hard look at that and see whether it jogs your memory. I want to know why you did it. What you were thinking. Was it not obvious that I’d catch you?’

  Hannah scanned her surroundings for some kind of escape. The chapel was like a scene from a postcard, its walls overgrown with flowering greenery that honeybees explored. Birds sang. Sun shone.

  ‘How . . . how do you expect us to tell you anything,’ puffed Hannah, ‘when we weren’t . . . the ones who did it?’

  With a groan, Seb pushed his back upright against the wall. His face was smeared red from blood and sweat combined, and he had a lock of hair stuck to the gash along his forehead. He held his broken arm with his good one, but the shape of the bone looked wrong. After drawing a long breath, he said, ‘Leonard . . . I did it because I wanted you to know what it was like.’

  Hiroko closed her eyes and groaned through her gag. Hannah immediately felt sick, the sickest she’d ever been. ‘No!’ she said, full of adrenalin at once. ‘No, Leonard, don’t listen to him. He’s trying to be brave, because . . . because really it was Adrien! Yes, it was Adrien who killed it! He confessed it to me on the way here.’

  Despite the obvious pain he was in, Seb’s voice was calm. ‘It was me, Mum.’

  ‘No, Seb,’ she said, staring at him. ‘No it wasn’t . . .’

  Seb looked up at Leonard. ‘I did it because you killed Yasuo. That fox was all Hiroko had to link her to her family, to everything she’s lost that mattered to her. You took it from her. And you enjoyed it. I wanted, at the very least, to take your enjoyment away.’

  Hiroko’s head drooped, a
nd her shoulders sloped away.

  ‘Do you understand what you’ve done?’ growled Leonard. ‘Do you understand that you took away the one thing that—’

  ‘Yes,’ interrupted Seb. ‘Yes I understand. Don’t lecture me.’

  Leonard clenched his teeth. There was a long silence, and during that silence the kettle began to whistle.

  ‘No doubt, then,’ said Leonard, ‘you’ve anticipated what happens next.’

  Seb nodded. Blood dripped from his chin. When Leonard turned his back on him and crossed to the fire, Hiroko began screaming through her gag. Hannah tried to push herself up, despite the agony in her ankle. The wire teased open the skin of her wrists and her hip made a noise like a key turning in a lock, but despite the pain she was in she managed to climb, while Leonard picked up the kettle, onto her good leg. When she tried to put weight on her right foot the tendons screamed and it was all she could do to stay upright. Blood traced out of the cuts along her wrists but she paid it no heed. She knew she would only get one chance at this. The moment Leonard turned back from the fire, she made her move. The nerves in her leg were a cracking whip that somehow she pushed to her advantage, charging at Leonard with a furious scream.

  When she neared him he raised a leg and kicked her over. She came easily off balance and, with her arms tied in front of her, had no way to ease her landing. Her ribs cracked off the brick Leonard had dropped, and her back muscles spasmed and made her ribs burn all the more. She rolled onto her side and the pain coursed into her hip.

  Leonard watched for a moment, then flipped the cap up on the kettle’s spout. Hiroko was sobbing, but the noise was muffled by cloth and spittle. Seb sat as still as he could, white now as well as red, blinking up at his captor through blood-encrusted eyelashes. Leonard locked eyes with him, then slowly outstretched the kettle until the spout hung over Seb.

  ‘You brought this on yourself,’ he said, and poured.

  17

  Heart of the Forest

  Fifteen minutes before Leonard poured the kettle, Adrien arrived in the lobby of the hotel.