Dark Woods

by Steve Voake

  As the man turned and stared at him, Cal guessed he had sensed him watching all along. Without dropping his gaze, the man raised his arms until the scissors were pointing straight at Cal.

  He nodded slowly, three times, as if to say, Yes, it will happen, never doubt or question it.

  Then Cal was running through the woods, desperate to be anywhere but in this place where the man with the scissors was waiting to drag him down, away from the light for ever.

  Twenty-Three

  ‘Take it easy, Cal,’ said Eden, shaking him roughly by the shoulders. ‘Just tell me what happened.’

  Cal crouched beside the shelter, staring back through the trees.

  ‘Cal! Speak to me!’

  ‘He’s here,’ said Cal.

  ‘Who? Who’s here?’

  ‘He had shears, silver ones. He was washing blood from them in the stream.’

  ‘Look at me, Cal,’ said Eden, holding his face in both her hands. ‘Who was washing them?’

  ‘Him,’ said Cal. ‘The man from the cell.’

  ‘Are you sure? It was pretty dark back there.’

  ‘Yeah, it was him all right. He wore old-fashioned clothes. Like someone from a storybook. And he just kept staring at me and all the blood was in the river and then he pointed at me with those shears. He wants to kill me, Eden. I know he does.’

  Eden took her hands from his face and rested them on his shoulders.

  ‘No one’s going to kill you, Cal. Not if I’ve got anything to do with it.’

  She looked at the rays of morning sunlight filtering through the trees.

  ‘Do you think he followed you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe. I was too busy running.’

  ‘You don’t think he was just some ordinary guy? Like a hunter, cleaning his knife in the stream, and you got freaked out because you weren’t expecting it?’

  Cal shook his head.

  ‘I know what I saw, Eden. And he’s out there. He’s out there looking for me. For us.’

  ‘All right, listen,’ said Eden. ‘Maybe you should tell me about those pictures.’

  ‘What pictures?’

  ‘You said you’d done some drawings of him.’

  Cal looked over his shoulder, afraid that the man might already have tracked him down.

  ‘When we were travelling in the camper van,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘I kept having these nightmares. And I kept doing this same drawing of a man in a long green coat with a top hat, carrying scissors all covered in blood. And that’s the man I saw just now. Down by the stream.’

  At this, Eden seemed to relax a little.

  ‘Cal, how much sleep did you get last night?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m just asking.’

  ‘Oh no.’ Cal got up and shook his head. ‘You think I’m making this up, don’t you?’

  ‘No, I don’t think that. I just think sometimes when you haven’t had much sleep, your mind plays tricks on you. And you said yourself, this guy looked exactly like some drawing you’d done.’

  ‘I know, but—’

  ‘You’re exhausted, Cal. We both are. But think about it for a moment. How likely is it that you’re going to go walking through a forest in the middle of Montana and find some guy dressed up like a character from a storybook?’

  ‘But it’s the guy from the cell. I know it is.’

  ‘It was dark, Cal. And we’ve both been drugged, remember? Stuff like that can really mess with your mind.’

  ‘All right, then,’ said Cal, ‘think about this. You go for a walk in the forest and a guy drugs you and puts you in a van. You wake up and you find yourself wired up to a machine and the guy says he’s just doing it because he wants his dog back. He shows you an old teddy bear which you’ve had ever since you were a kid, complete with missing eye and he tells you that he fished it out of your dreams. How am I doing so far?’

  Eden shrugged, but didn’t say anything.

  ‘Then you pick up the guy’s shotgun and threaten him with it. You have an argument and then agree to wire him up to his machine so you can use it to get his dog back for him. But because of the argument he’s angry, which affects his brain and means that the dog comes out crazy. Then you go to a concrete building in the middle of nowhere and the dog’s there, and you hear whispering and then you see a crazy guy in the shadows and you make a run for it. Did you imagine all that too? Or do you actually believe that some of it might be real?’

  Eden leaned back against a tree and sighed.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I do believe,’ she said. ‘I believe that right now, I don’t know anything about anything. Except that you and me have to find a way of getting out of here and finding our way back home. And as far as I’m concerned, I’ll do whatever it takes to get there.’

  Cal looked up through the trees at the sun as it climbed into a clear blue sky. He listened to the birdsong and the insects chirping in the heat.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Whatever it takes.’

  Then they turned and walked deeper into the shadows of the forest.

  Twenty-Four

  Jefferson woke to the hum of computers and the striped shadows of the window blind falling across his sheet. Pulling the discs from his temples, he sat up and rubbed his eyes in an effort to push the pain of a whisky hangover back into his brain.

  Swinging his legs around, he sat on the edge of the bed and tried to put his fragmented memories of yesterday back together again.

  He remembered the whisky, the argument with the girl, the shotgun. He remembered the drugs and the van, and how angry she had been. But he had been right to bring them here, hadn’t he? Science and knowledge were unquestionably more important than the individual. He was doing this for the good of the world. Pushing back the boundaries of human knowledge and bringing light into darkness.

  He pressed his palms to his eyes and tried to ignore the voice that sounded like his mother, the voice telling him he was wrong and that he had done a bad thing.

  Those poor children. You had no right, Jefferson. No right at all.

  ‘You don’t understand!’ he shouted. ‘You died! You went away and left me!’

  He brushed the tears away with the back of his hand.

  ‘What am I supposed to do?’ he asked the empty room. ‘I just want my dog back. Is that so much to ask? I just want to see Tansy one more time.’

  Tansy. Of course.

  How could he have forgotten?

  That had been the whole point of it. And the children had agreed, hadn’t they? Well maybe not the spoiled, nasty one. She had been too busy trying to make him angry, trying to ruin everything with her attitude. Her mind had been full of bad things, frightening things that he had transferred to the arrival cages for a closer look, although now he wished he hadn’t. Same as he wished he’d left the thing from the boy’s mind back where it was.

  But the point was that the boy had understood the importance of what Jefferson was trying to do. He had helped him, attaching the electronic sensors to his head just the way Jefferson had shown him. And then Jefferson had gone to sleep and dreamed of … of what? Had he dreamed of Tansy? His head hurt and he couldn’t be sure.

  Jefferson put his head on one side and listened. The usual sounds from the forest. A jaybird calling to its mate. Bugs buzzing against the screen door. But nothing else. No sound of anyone moving around the kitchen, no kettle boiling, no one cutting bread or fixing a pot of coffee.

  Jefferson felt the chill of anger in his blood. The boy had promised. Said he would help to bring Tansy back.

  Sliding off the bed, Jefferson strode across the room and wrenched the door open. As he expected, the living room was empty. He remembered something else and checked all the rooms several times, not wanting to believe it, although he knew that it was true. He went to the kitchen table and shook his head, moving his papers, scanning the room, even dropping to his knees and peering with increasing desperation beneath the couch. But of course, it wasn’t there. Not
only had they left him, same as everyone did, but they had taken his shotgun too.

  Jefferson swore, banging his fist on the table so that the papers jumped, some of them sliding off onto the floor. A thought occurred to him and he snatched his jacket from the back of the door and checked the pockets. When he found that the keys were gone, he knew that they had been to the outhouse, to the place where yesterday’s mistakes and secrets were kept, and he began to feel very afraid. But then a thought full of hope came shining through, because that was what all this had been about, hadn’t it? Cal had promised he would find the dog and Jefferson was sure now that he wasn’t a boy who would break his promises. He would have searched Jefferson’s dreams and found Tansy, and brought her back to him. No doubt the girl interfered then, made him run away with her. But that was all right, wasn’t it? Because Tansy was probably out there right now, waiting patiently for him, and they would be together again.

  Everything would be all right.

  In that moment of clarity, Jefferson’s anger evaporated like rain after a storm. He opened the back door and felt the sun warm on his face. As he walked along the path through the undergrowth, he listened for the tell-tale whines or barks that would let him know she was waiting for him.

  But nothing yet.

  Perhaps, he thought, they had tied her up or, more likely, left her in the arrival cage where she would be safe until he found her. He hoped that at least they had been thoughtful enough to leave her some food before they took off. The girl wouldn’t have, of course; too busy thinking about herself. But he felt sure Cal would have done. He could tell just from the way he spoke about things that he knew what it was like to be alone in this world, understood the importance of reaching out to another soul when you had the chance.

  Emerging from the clearing, Jefferson saw at once that the door had been left open and for a moment he felt his anger returning. Why were people never able to do things properly? If you unlocked a door and opened it, wasn’t it obvious you needed to close it and lock it again when you left?

  It was the girl again, he knew it. He could imagine Cal being careful, wanting to make sure that everything was just so, and her saying, No, Cal, leave it, we have to get away from the crazy man.

  He wondered how she was liking it now.

  Jefferson knew how confusing the forest could be if you didn’t know your way around, every tree more or less the same, making you think you’d seen it a thousand times before. He imagined them stumbling through the night, becoming more and more lost, wondering if they would ever find their way out again.

  Well, they wouldn’t, Jefferson knew that much. The forest was a hundred miles of wilderness that would swallow them without a trace. They would just be two more missing persons, two out of thousands in this sad, messed-up world, their pictures fading on posters and milk cartons before the world forgot about them altogether.

  But then the thought came back to Jefferson that he had done a bad thing, that he should never have put them in his van.

  ‘All right!’ he said out loud, and then again, a little louder. ‘All right!’

  He had done it for the right reasons, he told himself. You couldn’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, as his mother used to say.

  It was a means to an end, and that end was bringing Tansy back.

  And once she was back, then everything would be OK because she would come with him into the woods, just like she used to. They would find Cal and the girl and he would say to them, Look at this, look at this good thing you have done, and it would be like one of those fairy tales that his mother used to read to him on winter nights by the light of the fire, the ones where lots of terrible and frightening things happened but then good triumphed over evil and everything in the world was all right again.

  Jefferson smiled.

  He would be the author of a story with a happy ending.

  ‘Tansy,’ he called, stepping through the door into the cool shadows of the outhouse. ‘Tansy, it’s me. Where are you, girl? Hey, Tansy. Speak to me!’

  Whether it was the heat, or the after-effects of the alcohol, Jefferson didn’t know, but he began to feel distinctly queasy.

  Why wasn’t she answering?

  The door of the arrival room had been left on the latch and he hurriedly walked in. The arrival cage was unlocked and the door was open.

  The cage was empty.

  ‘He didn’t get her,’ he whispered, hardly able to believe that the boy would let him down so badly. ‘He didn’t bring her back.’ He walked across to the cage and slammed it angrily back on its hinges. But as he did so he noticed something caught on a piece of wire, poking out from the edge of the frame. Crouching down for a closer look, he saw that it was a tuft of fur, mottled with tiny patches of black.

  ‘Oh, Tansy,’ said Jefferson, pulling out the fur and holding it against his cheek. ‘Tansy, you’re here.’

  He stood up and listened, full of anticipation. She had been here, in this cage, pulled from eternity through the gateway of his dreams. He was sure that, at any moment, he would hear the familiar barks and whines of the companion who had been away for so long.

  ‘Tansy!’ he called excitedly. ‘Tansy, I’m coming!’

  But as he walked out again, he glanced up the corridor and noticed that the other doors were open.

  ‘No,’ he muttered, suddenly anxious. ‘No, no, no.’

  He ran to the first room and saw that there was a trail of slime leading across the floor and, in the corner of the cage, a circular hole. He peered in and saw that the hole went straight down for about a metre before tunnelling off to the left.

  ‘Oh no,’ he said again. ‘No, no.’

  It occurred to him, as he checked the second cell and found the cage empty, that this was almost certainly the man’s doing. When the man had first arrived from Cal’s dream he had seemed temporarily stunned by the transition, and Jefferson had used the combination of his confusion and the shotgun to drag him out of the arrival cage and up the corridor, locking him in a cell until he could figure out what to do with him. But the man had come round fairly quickly after that, peering back at Jefferson through the spy hole until Jefferson wished he had never brought him here.

  He had been too full of himself, hadn’t he? Too caught up in the science of it, in the possibility of playing God and bringing a human back to life. But the moment the man smiled and said, ‘I want the boy. Take me to the boy,’ Jefferson knew he had made a mistake.

  ‘Who are you?’ he had asked.

  The man had beckoned him nearer to the spy hole and in the gloom he was able to make out the neat, careful stitching along the seams of the man’s jacket.

  ‘I am the tailor,’ the man whispered, ‘and I have some cutting to do.’

  Jefferson had walked away then, past the other rooms filled with things stolen from the girl’s nightmares. But there was one important fact he had overlooked, of course; that although he could bring these creatures out of the darkness, he was unable to send them back again. He had given them life, and now he would have to live with the consequences.

  But then Jefferson felt the softness of the dog’s fur between his finger and thumb and remembered that, in the midst of all this mess, there was at least one good thing to come out of it.

  Running back along the corridor, he stepped out into the sunshine.

  ‘Tansy!’ he called. ‘Don’t be frightened. It’s me. You remember me, don’t you, Tansy? Where are you?’

  At first the sound didn’t register, perhaps because the forest was always alive with the buzz and hum of insects. But then he noticed that the sound was unusually loud, and that it came from somewhere nearby.

  Puzzled, Jefferson walked around the outside of the building, past the store that was half-stocked with logs for winter and beneath the branches of an apple tree that had sprung from the seeds of a discarded core.

  As he turned the corner he gasped, his mouth wide open in horror.

  Then, as his legs gave way, he
leaned against the crumbling brickwork, sliding down until at last he was on his knees, turning his face to the wall so that he wouldn’t have to see the cloud of green and gold flies, buzzing and settling upon the bloodied mass of fur that lay amongst the nettles and willow herb that grew along the edge of the forest.

  Twenty-Five

  ‘I think it’s our only option,’ said Eden. ‘If we follow the stream it should eventually take us down the mountain and back to the river. Which is where the campground is.’

  ‘Yeah, but we don’t know how far Jefferson took us, do we?’ Cal waved his hand in an effort to disperse the midges that danced in front of his face. ‘The campground could be a hundred miles from here.’

  ‘Maybe. But at least if we get to the river we’ve got a chance of finding civilisation.’

  She was right, of course. But the stream was where Cal had last seen the man, and he wasn’t in too much of a hurry to run into him again. They had decided to walk back up the mountain at an angle, basing their plan on the fact that the man would have seen Cal running away from the stream and so would probably expect him to carry on in that direction before attempting to head off down the mountain. So while the man set off on a false trail, they would be able to double back and make their way further east before heading down again once they had put some miles between them. But as they approached the stream Cal’s fear returned, jangling his nerves as he remembered the look on the man’s face and the water, dark with blood.

  Eden saw him hesitate and put her hand on his arm.

  ‘It’s a big place, Cal. We’ve been walking for over an hour. If he was going to find us, he’d have found us by now.’

  Cal clenched his fists as they walked by the edge of the stream, half expecting the man to appear at any moment. But as the trees thinned and the sun warmed his face, the feeling of danger lessened and Cal began to wonder if perhaps he had over-reacted.

  This was America, he reminded himself. They played football in crash helmets. Their woods were full of poison ivy. They did things differently here. Sure, the guy had been dressed weirdly enough. But was it any weirder than some of the other people he’d seen through the window of the camper van, walking the backstreets or offering to wash the windscreen at junctions?