Darkly Wood

by Power, Max

  Benjamin had been shocked by her earlier aggression, but her outburst had been brief and what had followed completely negated any feeling of upset he might have felt. All Benjamin felt now was concern. They each had their reasons to change the subject. Daisy was mortified with embarrassment and Benjamin was confused. He didn’t want to think about what had happened. Daisy had acted strangely but when she collapsed he became frightened.

  Benjamin held his arm around Daisy and looked about. They both did. The Wood seemed different somehow. All about them, there were strange shadows as the evening drew in and Darkly Wood was really beginning to live up to its name. Daisy chose to move past her apology. She was embarrassed enough and she needed to change the subject.

  “You’re right Benjamin. Let’s get home.” Again she looked around feeling unsure. Then she asked, “Which way?”

  Benjamin mimicked her search of the forest, turning his head around, trying to establish the way back. It was so strange. He felt that he should know the way out, but no matter how hard he tried, nothing seemed familiar. It was as though he had been blindfolded and then spun around and around. He had completely lost his sense of direction. Benjamin looked up hoping to get a bearing from the sky but the sky was hidden by the top heavy canopy above and the failing light from the cloudy evening sky above gave him no clues.

  “I don’t really know” was his honest answer.

  Neither of them did. They stood together looking left and right, a gradual panic sneaking in behind their masks of calmness. But they dare not admit it. Not to each other. Without another word and with Benjamin taking the lead, they started to walk together in silence. He kept his arm around Daisy to make sure she didn’t faint again. Daisy felt her condition had improved and was in no danger of fainting. Still she liked his arm around her. It felt strong, safe. Daisy tucked herself under his long arm and slid her own arm around his waist.

  As they began to move again, it was clear to them both that they were hopelessly lost, but Daisy was sure that the Wood couldn’t be all that big and eventually they would find a way back. Benjamin didn’t seem too confident and between them, despite their growing closeness, there was anxiousness and they fell silent.

  Unfortunately the more they walked in hope, the more hopeless their endeavour became. At every turn there was a new tangle of wood or scrub, blocking their path and diverting them into new uncharted territory. Sometimes they would turn back only to find the path seemed different somehow. It was as though the place was a living, moving thing, twisting around them, continually thwarting their efforts to escape its clutches.

  The going was very tough and got tougher by the minute. The ground underfoot was very uneven and the forest floor was covered in a dense carpet of ferns that sometimes came waist high. Most of the time, their legs were invisible below the knees which they had to raise high, to tromp through the Wood. It made little sense that the ground cover was so dense when the canopy of trees blocked the light. It was hard work.

  After what seemed a very, very long time, they were forced to stop. The evening was turning into night and the air had begun to turn cold. Daisy was tired and hungry and once they stopped, she noticed that Benjamin did not look at all well. She hadn’t looked at his face while they were walking. She was too busy tucked under his arm, picking out her steps. Benjamin had not said a word but he really wasn’t feeling too good.

  “We can’t keep walking.” She told him, worried, sure that he needed to rest. “Let’s face it, were lost and it’s getting dark. We will have to find some place to hold up for the night.”

  That much was true. It looked like they were never going to get out of the Wood before morning anyway. She thought of her mother for the first time. Isabel would be worried, frantic even. Daisy considered that it was likely that her mum had already called the police, but with no way of knowing exactly where her daughter was, it seemed unlikely that they would come searching for them in the Wood. Not now that it was getting dark anyway, she thought. Daisy began to accept that they would have to get through the night in the forest.

  Benjamin couldn’t but help be proud of her masterful approach. Daisy was a lot stronger than he had imagined. But it was his turn now to falter. He simply could not carry on, even if he had wanted to. Something was drawing his strength away. Each step that he took sapped his energy more and more. He simply had to rest, but he had said nothing. Daisy had been weak earlier and now he felt that he had to be strong for her. He didn’t want to worry her. The last thing he needed was to become a burden.

  A big problem for them was that there was no real shelter in the Wood. There were trees everywhere of course and tangles of brush, but otherwise it was a flat landscape beneath the fern cover. In places, the forest floor rose dramatically into a hill or rock outcrop, but not where they were. Daisy came up with the solution. She found a big old oak that must have been as old as the Wood itself and there was a massive cavernous hole on one side. With Benjamin looking weaker by the minute, she instructed him to settle himself in at the base, which he did without arguing. She told him not to move. He couldn’t, even if he had wanted to.

  Daisy gathered, dragged and cajoled fallen branches, some as big as herself and created a makeshift lean-to over the cavernous hole. She collected ferns and moss for the floor of their temporary home and then snuggled in close to Benjamin to keep out the cold and the fear. Across the top, Daisy laid large ferns to keep out the rain should it come. The shelter wasn’t great, but it was all they had.

  By the time she had finished, it was almost completely dark and Daisy was becoming seriously worried about Benjamin’s deteriorating condition. It seemed to come from out of nowhere, just as her earlier collapse had. There was no reason that she could see for either event. They had not eaten, but they were hardly starving. All the same, in a way it was good for her to be distracted by her concern for Benjamin. The night ahead held many terrors and in such circumstances, it can be good to have something other than ones yourself to worry about. She had never slept away from home before, not even on a sleepover. Had she time to consider her dilemma, Daisy would have been even more frightened. She had barely left the security of her night light behind and now she had to face a long dark night out in the wild.

  Had she known the truth, had she known just who Benjamin really was and why he had sought her out in the first place, Daisy would have been truly terrified. As night finally clasped its wings around them, Daisy was only beginning a journey that would bring her to the very edge of reason. Darkly Wood whistled and howled, creaked and groaned, rustled and shimmied all around in the unseen darkness and hiding just out of reach, watching and waiting, was a boy who had no trouble seeing in the dark. He watched and waited as he had always done. He scented the air as a cold breeze ruffled his fair childish locks and a cruel thin smile crossed his lips.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN – THE MAN WHO NEVER SMOKED

  Cranby was always a town that attracted blow-ins. It was tucked far enough into the countryside to be considered a peaceful retreat and yet near enough to the city for people to be able to get back to the big smoke if they really wanted to. Because of its geography, developers had never really looked at Cranby. It was an odd, isolated town with a stream through the middle and a large acreage of privately owned land that contained a protected Wood. The Darkly family owned just about every blade of grass for miles around and most of it was inhabited by tenant farmers. It had been by-passed by a motorway in the early seventies, not that there was ever much passing traffic in Cranby anyway. It was a village pretty much on a road that led from no place important, to no place important, filled with ordinary, hardworking people.

  For the most part it was such folk, the locals you might say, that made up the vast majority of the town and surrounding area’s small population. But there were always others from outside, who seemed to come and go and ever so occasionally settle. Some never quite managed to blend into the peculiar community, for Cranby people had their ways and they also had
their prejudices. Others did manage to blend. One such blender was Ignatius Pipe.

  Ignatius was a foreigner from Dublin. He was an educated man and a hard worker. Ignatius arrived as a passer-through, looking for seasonal farm work, but due to his good nature and hard work ethic, the seasonal work seemed to keep coming through all seasons. He worked as a labourer for the most part and eventually worked for pretty much every farmer in the district. Not one of them had a bad word to say about Iggy, as he was fondly called.

  In his spare time, Iggy did odd jobs for people in the town, especially Lily Dolan his landlady. She was not in the habit of taking in strangers, but Lily made an exception for Iggy. Her family came from Dublin also, so there was that connection and she had once been a blow in too. That shared origin was a great bond. There was that and the fact that Iggy was quite simply charming. There was never any suggestion of any impropriety. Neither Lily nor Iggy attracted that type of gossip. She was a well-respected lady, whose reputation was unquestioned. Iggy was, well he was just Iggy. There was nothing bad you could really say about Iggy, not in Cranby certainly, for he was well respected.

  To add to his charms, Iggy rarely accepted payment for the odd jobs that he did. He expected payment for proper work, but odd jobs, well he enjoyed them. His specialty was fixing clocks and watches. He was a genius with them. There wasn’t a time piece made, that Iggy couldn’t repair. Everyone knew that he was the man to go to if you needed your watch or clock fixed. But Iggy was multi-skilled. If it was mechanical and broken, he could find a way to get it going again.

  As a result, Iggy rarely had to put his hand in his pocket when he went to the pub. Pretty much all of the time there was someone at the bar who felt obliged to him for some favour and the landlord always turned to Iggy when he a problem with his pipes. Everyone owed him for favours and freebees.

  Like many the soul that turned up as a stray in Cranby, Iggy had a vague past and one he rarely discussed. If all of the stories he told were to be pieced together, it would become clear that Iggy had led a colourful life. But it was a little hard to pin him down, strictly speaking. Iggy liked to talk, but he knew what not to say.

  He had been an apprentice watch maker as a teenager, or at least that was his story. Later he had variously worked on board ship in the merchant navy as a cook, he had worked at a variety of trades including car mechanic, carpenter, bricklayer and believe it or not chimney sweep. In truth it wasn’t hard to imagine, for Iggy was hard working and could it seemed, turn his hand to pretty much anything. Had Iggy told them that he flew jet planes, people would not have been surprised, so great were his talents and breadth of his knowledge and skill-set.

  In a general sense, there was nothing unusual about the man. Nothing that is, except for one very odd peculiarity. What was most spectacular about this one peculiarity was that no one ever noticed. That fact in itself was perhaps the most amazing thing of all. You see, Iggy was a man who never smoked. Now I know that sounds quite unspectacular and in the normal course of events, it wouldn’t be anything to talk about at all.

  However, in Iggy’s case the fact that he never smoked would have come as something of a surprise to almost everyone in Cranby who had ever met him. The reason for this was that Iggy quite simply never went anywhere or did anything without a cigarette in either his hand or his mouth. When he didn’t have a fag in either, Iggy usually had one tucked behind his ear. The strange thing was of course, that he never actually smoked. He would even ask for a light on occasion, and this single act of sucking on a cigarette to let it catch was as near to smoking as he ever came. Iggy managed to perfect the process with as little ingestion of smoke as possible. He could light a cigarette convincingly without ever taking a drag.

  The impression created was quite extraordinary. Everyone in Cranby considered him to be a chain smoker. It was hardly surprising as he was never seen without one. On occasion, individuals would tell him he should cut back out of concern. Iggy even remarked from time to time that they would be the death of him. He even regaled his fellow smokers with stories of his failed efforts to give them up. But like many smokers he seemed unable to stop. Except of course, he never started.

  Such a deception, such a delicate illusion was a quite remarkable thing indeed. In fact, in all the years that Iggy lived in Cranby, not one person twigged this bizarre deception. And the reason he carried out this strange fraud? Well in a way that was the most peculiar thing of all. Iggy did it, simply because he discovered that he could. It began quite by accident as a very personal and private joke. One day, his very first day in Cranby in fact, Denis Mortimer offered him a cigarette in the pub. Although he had never smoked, Iggy had the cigarette foisted upon him by the rather pushy Denis who spoke loudly and bombastically. Denis was quite an affable fellow, but he rarely listened to anyone. The most important thing to Denis it sometimes seemed, was the sound of his own voice.

  Denis was pushy, so when he offered the offending item to the non-smoker Iggy, not only did it not occur to him that Iggy might not smoke, it didn’t occur to him that he might refuse one. So Iggy took it. He was not sure why and the next thing he knew, Denis was lighting it for him. Iggy stayed there all evening in the pub being offered cigarette after cigarette, which out of politeness he accepted, as he had now established himself as a smoker in Denis’s eyes. It became embarrassing and Iggy even apologised for taking them, saying he had forgotten to get some himself. For whatever reason the lie came naturally to him and it amused Iggy.

  It quickly became apparent to Iggy, that Denis was oblivious to the fact that he never took one drag. As long as he held it right and made all the right moves, Denis simply did not twig what he was doing. Every now and then, Iggy would raise the smoking tube almost right the way to his lips. He would then hesitate, making some important point in their nonsense drink filled conversation, before withdrawing the offensive thing away without taking a drag.

  During their first meeting, Denis who was a stone mason offered Iggy his first job in Cranby and he started the following day. Out of politeness, Iggy bought cigarettes and returned the favour by offering them around on his first day at work. He was not a man to take a gift without returning the favour. Iggy was of course obliged to feign smoking himself once again and by this point, he found the whole deceit ever more amusing. Many times during that peculiar day, Iggy had to excuse himself to avoid exploding with laughter. How did anyone not notice? He wondered how long he could keep it up. So it began. The problem was Cranby was a small place and what began as a little private joke played out originally for Denis, soon spread. One person after another met him as a smoker. As he enjoyed the pub, Iggy was regularly offered fags, which he would graciously accept and was thus forced into offering them back. He was soon buying a pack a day just to keep up with the charade.

  It might seem strange but the deception became almost real to Iggy. He took it as a personal challenge to see how long it would be before anyone noticed. Although ridiculous and absurd from an outsider’s perspective, to Iggy it became a secret matter of pride. Over time, he developed a whole range of strategies, including complaining about how hard it was to quit and even going so far as to create an even more elaborate history of failed attempts in his past. All smokers had such tales, so Iggy was not to be outdone and his stories were the best. He even developed a slight smoker’s cough.

  Although seemingly ridiculous, it was a minor flaw in an otherwise exemplary character. He just became a pretend smoker and pretty soon, the joke became no less a reality for Iggy than his few pints of an evening.

  So the man that never smoked became part of the townscape, one of the locals. He was a true Cranby man as far as anyone in the area was concerned. So ingrained had he become in the daily comings and goings of the village, that even his strange accent became as familiar as the local accent. He was fun loving, entertaining and gregarious. Everyone loved Iggy.

  One evening, it was late January and the breeze that blew across the hill above the village
brought a chill to cut through a man, everything changed. Iggy had been working that day and indeed all week for Martin Chuzel the town’s only carpenter. They had just finished off a job on Mrs. Marley‘s house out beyond the town square. As was their tradition, both men headed to the pub for a few pints after work. There was nothing unusual about that and they hurried inside to get out of the cold. Martin ordered a couple of pints and they sat at the bar discussing their day’s labour, while they waited for Martha the barmaid to serve them up their beverages. The pub was quiet enough with only three others at the bar. Denis Mortimer was there, holding up the corner of the bar by himself and the Warmer brothers were standing at the far end of the bar deep in conversation.

  As there were so few present, it wasn’t long before they grouped together and even less time passed before a deck of cards appeared. They retired to the corner near the fire and drank and played cards for over an hour. It was not unusual for them to play cards in the pub although they never played for money. Cards were just a way of engaging the men and an excuse not to leave. Most didn’t need much of an excuse to stay anyway.

  So the night became one much like any other, until a simple comment changed everything. Denis offered Iggy a cigarette and he declined, preferring one of his own instead. There was nothing unusual about that. Then as Iggy sat with the cigarette unlit in his mouth, it suddenly struck Bill Warmer that he had never actually seen Iggy inhale a cigarette. It was an epiphany. As he thought about it, he reached across and offered to light Iggy’s smoke. Iggy accepted. He sucked against the flame and immediately exhaled without breathing in the smoke. Bill began to think that he might be right and he sat back silently observing Iggy as he didn’t smoke his cigarette.

  He watched as Iggy brought the lighting stick nearly, but not completely to his lips several times. He watched as Iggy gesticulated and pursed his lower lip, jutting out his chin and blowing as though exhaling smoke. Bill watched as he tapped his ash and stubbed out the butt, coughing his short little smokers cough as he did so. Then and only then did he speak.