Shock Forest and other magical stories

by Margaret Mahy

  Suddenly Mr Murgatroyd knew that the house was his no longer. His strange tenants had made it their own, then left it behind them.

  Mr Murgatroyd didn’t want to stay there any more. Why, I’ll miss them! he thought, amazed and frightened at the thought of missing anyone. He ran to his paintpot and painted a new sign and stuck it up outside his house.

  ROOMS TO LET – FREE.

  Then he packed his toothbrush and nightshirt in a bright bundle of his own and ran out of the door. Far, far up the road he saw the procession of his tenants skipping along, looking like butterflies in the sunlight.

  “Wait!” called Mr Murgatroyd. “Wait for me!”

  Shock Forest

  The Carmodys found the red gate easily when they knew exactly what it was they had to look for.

  “Just over the hill, and we’ll be there,” said Eddie’s mother.

  “Our own forest!” said Eddie. “A whole forest! All ours!”

  They had inherited something out of a fairy tale. “A whole forest,” Eddie said again.

  “I’m soooo sick of hearing you say that,” groaned Tara. “Does this look like the gate of a grand old house? Be real!”

  It was true Eddie had imagined large iron gates and stone gateposts, rather than this wooden gate sagging on rusty hinges. An avenue of tall gum trees curved away behind the gate. The hillside, running up on the right of the gum trees and running down on the left, was covered in a pelt of hairy brown grass and tussocks.

  “Open the gate, Tara,” said their father. “That’ll give you something to do besides grumbling.”

  Tara scrambled out and stamped towards the gate, muttering all the way. She had not wanted to leave the city, or her good friends, the shops and the swimming pool. She hated the thought of Shock Forest, and was frightened that her parents might decide, now that her father was out of work, and since her mother could work anywhere, to live there for ever.

  “Five hours grumbling! She might get into The Guinness Book of Records,” said Eddie.

  The car rocked forward, struggling and staggering over hidden ruts in the drive.

  “Oh, wow!” cried Tara savagely, delighted to think things might be turning out just as badly as she had always said they would.

  The two lines of gum trees came to an end, and the Carmodys bounced up to the top of the slope. Shock Forest lay before them.

  The hillside facing them was as brown as all other hills in that part of the world, and almost as empty. Almost – but not quite! Rising among the grass and tussocks were hundreds of blackened fingers, all pointing darkly at the sky.

  “A shock!” said Eddie. “A real shock!”

  “But your father must have known,” said his mother.

  “I don’t think he did. Well, he never came here,” said Mr Carmody. “And Mr Caxton never said anything.” Mr Caxton was a young lawyer.

  “We have inherited a forest!” cried Tara, copying her father’s astonished cry of a fortnight earlier. “And – hey, Dad – can that dump over there possibly be the great Shock mansion?”

  “Well, it’s big enough,” said Mr Carmody defensively.

  The house sprawled out a hundred metres to their right. It was big, but battered, too, and badly in need of a coat of paint. All the windows looking back towards the forest seemed to be boarded over.

  “Oh, well,” said Mrs Carmody, “a house is a house. And I’m longing for a cup of tea.”

  “I thought there would be lawns and gardens,” sighed Eddie, his dreams of grandeur fading. Tussocks marched up to the house and rubbed their tawny heads against its walls.

  “The rose gardens and fountains will be on the other side,” declared Tara, sounding more and more entertained as things grew worse and worse. “Just like Shock Forest was going to be on the other side of the hill.”

  “Oh, shut up, Tara!” said Mr Carmody wearily. “Give us a break!”

  They drove up to the house and stopped at the door.

  Mr Carmody turned the large iron key in the lock. The door swung open at once, whining, as if it were afraid of being knocked on, and the Carmodys found themselves in a hall with hooks for coats, and a straight-backed chair with carving on its back and arms. The carpet rustled under their feet. It was covered in dry leaves.

  “They must have drifted in under the door,” said Mrs Carmody.

  “But where did they drift from?” asked Mr Carmody. “There isn’t a tree in sight. And look! Ashes!”

  “We’ll sweep it all up tomorrow,” said Mrs Carmody. “My tongue’s hanging out for a cup of tea right now.”

  They came into a big room with a fireplace and wide, soft chairs, worn but homely. A huge mantlepiece running above the fireplace was crowded with photographs. In the centre was a picture of a laughing old man, old-fashioned but handsome, and, beside that, a picture of a woman with thick, streaky hair sitting in the very carved chair they had seen in the hall. At one end of the mantlepiece was a stuffed bird… a hawk with sad, dusty wings outspread, casting a narrow shadow across the photographs.

  “Let’s unpack,” said Mr Carmody.

  “Unpack! We’re not staying!” cried Tara. And Eddie realized that she had cheered up a few minutes earlier because she had imagined that, now her parents had seen what Shock Forest was actually like, they would naturally go straight home again. Yet, in the end, even Tara was curious about the house, and helped carry things into the kitchen so she could explore without appearing too interested. Eddie followed her.

  It was what people call a farmhouse kitchen, which meant it was as big as most people’s dining rooms. An old spade and a worn broom leaned against each other at the back door, and the windows on either side of the door were boarded over. In spite of this, Eddie had the curious feeling that someone was watching them. In a horror film, Great-Aunt Isobel would turn out to be sneaking silently up and down secret stairs and spying through hidden peepholes into the lives of other people. As he thought this, Eddie noticed a small hole in the red-boarded wall behind the door – the perfect peephole for a phantom aunt.

  That night Eddie lay awake in darkness. The window of his room was boarded over just as the kitchen window had been. But what had Great-Aunt Isobel been trying to keep in? Or what had she been trying to keep out? There, in the partly boarded up house, Eddie listened to a silence which was not quite silent. Eddie thought he might be hearing the hills breathing, for the sound, if it was a sound, was faint, but vast, too… vast, distant and lonely. In the end it sang him to sleep. Yet, once his eyes closed, his eyelids immediately grew transparent, and he looked up through them at an angry red light seething on the ceiling over his bed. And then, as he watched in terror through these glass eyelids, a voice whispered and wept in his ear.

  “Burned! It burned,” said the voice. “It’s still burning! And I’m burning, too. I lost him. And I lost my way.”

  Suddenly, Eddie’s eyelids were no longer glassy; he was awake and knew he had been dreaming. Yet his dream felt as if it had been more than a dream. It felt like a vision. Thin, straight lines of golden light shone through cracks in the boards on the other side of the glass. Outside, on the brown hillside, it was morning.

  After breakfast the Carmodys wandered down the slope behind the house, up the opposite hillside and into the burned forest. Tara stalked on ahead, occasionally shouting over her shoulder.

  “You could keep a horse here,” was one of the things she suddenly called. Years ago she had longed for a horse, but they had never had room for one.

  “You know, it’s beautiful – in its own way, that is,” said Mr Carmody, sounding puzzled by this observation.

  Tara spun round, walking backwards in amazement.

  “Beautiful?” she cried. “Get real, Dad! Those Shocks burned their forest. And they didn’t even make a good farm out of what was left.”

  “It’s certainly not great farming land,” agreed Mrs Carmody, who had lived on a farm herself when she was a child, but on a green, dairy farm, as easy to run as a farm
could ever be.

  “I don’t think they tried very hard,” said Mr Carmody. “They were always struggling. Independent, though! Toby was not only dead but buried before she ever let any of us know. She was… well… not hostile exactly, just aloof.”

  “That’s right! Blame the woman!” exclaimed Tara.

  “No, it’s nothing to do with blame,” said Mr Carmody. “Everyone says she adored old Toby. But they kept to themselves… and to Shock Forest, of course.”

  “What’s that – that cage over there?” Eddie asked, pointing.

  He was watching Tara who had come to a standstill beside a pen of some kind, fenced around with spiky iron railings.

  “It’s a – a grave,” said Mrs Carmody. She hesitated, then walked towards it.

  “Guess whose?” asked Tara.

  Inside the spikes of iron was a space about as big as a double bed. One grave was covered by a long, flat stone and the other by a mound of earth. Both graves were covered with leaves.

  “Why didn’t they just pack up and move to the city when they got older?” asked Mrs Carmody. “It makes me sad, thinking of them struggling out here, looking at burned trees day after day.”

  “They didn’t look at them,” said Tara. “The windows that overlook the forest are all boarded up.”

  From the top of the long slope they could see sunburnt fingers of land stretching out, then folding in between one another. In the distance they could make out a slot of misty ocean.

  “There’s forest all the way to the sea,” said Eddie.

  “Native bush,” Tara corrected him. “Not high, though.”

  “Gorse,” said their father. “That’s gorse and broom! People cleared the native trees, and the gorse and broom just cheered and took over. Foolish colonists!”

  “Why would anyone bring gorse to a new land?” Mrs Carmody asked. “Well, let’s be glad that we don’t have that particular trouble on this hill.”

  “Why don’t we have gorse when everyone else does?” asked Eddie.

  “Good question!” Mr Carmody looked from side to side, studying the different greens of the distant slopes, frowning. “I suppose the Shocks must have sprayed it. Or grubbed it out.”

  But thinking of the neglected hillside they had just climbed, it was hard to believe that Great-Aunt Isobel Shock had cared whether gorse grew there or not.

  “I thought I could hear the sea last night,” said Mrs Carmody at last, looking across to the sea, “but now it looks too far away to be heard.”

  “I heard it, too,” said Tara, “but perhaps it was only the wind.”

  “Yes… though nothing rattled,” Mrs Carmody pointed out. “Things rattle in an old house.”

  “Mysteries! Mysteries!” Mr Carmody sighed. “No gorse! No rattling! Now listen – especially you, Tara! I know you’re longing to get back to the city but I want to think things over, talk to a few people around here and find out just what possibilities there are.”

  “I could feel this coming,” said Tara. “Find someone who has a burnt-tree collection, and sell it. That’s my advice.”

  All the same she didn’t sound as angry as she had yesterday. Eddie thought she sounded puzzled and even, if it were possible, a little scared.

  Once again Eddie lay in bed, uncertain if his eyes were open or if he were looking through glass eyelids once more. Once again he was seeing that reddish flicker move restlessly over the walls and ceilings. And yet, if he turned his head sideways, there on the floor were his jeans and jacket, collapsed into a heap that still, somehow, had his own shape pressed into it… too real to be part of any dream. Perhaps it was not him but the air of his room that was dreaming – dreaming of fire.

  Eddie corrected himself. Air could not dream. The white walls must be reflecting fire from somewhere else. Scrambling out of bed, he pressed his eye to the glass, lined it up with a crack and peered outside.

  The hillside behind the house was burning. He could make out the shapes of great trees, their arms flung up in horror at what was happening to them. Their fingers burned, their skin burned, and now Eddie could hear once again that curious, soft roar that seemed to come, not merely from the other side of the glass, but from spaces inside the house as well – spaces that were stealing heat in order to set the ghostly fires roaring once more. That’s why (even as he listened to the huge breath of the flames and shared the hillside’s terrible, reviving memory) Eddie was shivering. Outside, burning trees lashed from side to side, as if in agony.

  Eddie knew he must see all there was to see. He left the window, went downstairs, crossed the big room (dry leaves once more crackling under his feet) and went through the kitchen to the back door. It stood slightly open. Something moved on the other side of it, black against the trembling red.

  A hand fell on his shoulder. Eddie thought he would die of fear. He turned with his cry still caught in his throat, and found himself staring into Tara’s face.

  She put a finger across her lips, as Eddie waved a shaking hand towards the door, then snatched up a broom from where it leaned against the kitchen bench and pushed the door open.

  Great-Uncle Toby Shock gazed back at them. He looked exactly like the young man in the photograph on the mantlepiece but he was burning like a tree – burning without actually being consumed, and giving off chill not warmth. His lips flickered as if they were made of flame, and when words came, they did so in the breathless, roaring voice of the fire. Their great-uncle was asking them a riddle.

  “We went into the green and the green became red,

  But inside the red I have hidden the green.

  Give the green to the black where the green burned and bled.

  What-will-be will grow out of time-that-has-been.”

  Tara suddenly thrust the broom against the door, slamming it shut. The painted wood twitched and shivered as if it, too, could feel the cold.

  The voice on the other side of the door sang a second riddle.

  “Over the fire, there flies a bird,

  And on the bird is a hook of horn,

  And in the hook there lies a key.

  Unlock the red and loose the green.”

  And suddenly it was over. The door stopped quivering. The kitchen was filled with an ordinary darkness.

  “Why does this ghost have to ask riddles?” asked Eddie, his voice shaking.

  “We hear riddles,” Tara replied. “It’s because they don’t match up with us. Anyhow, that second riddle’s easy.”

  Eddie followed her into the sitting room. Tara reached up and ran her fingers along the beak of the stuffed hawk. Something clinked as it tumbled away across the hearth and into the leaves on the carpet. She picked it up.

  “A key!” she said. “To unlock the red. But how can you unlock a fire?”

  “I don’t know,” said Eddie. He suddenly felt limp and heavy as if he must sleep. The riddles were working in him. He must sleep, and perhaps, in sleep, he might even dream the answers.

  “Where do these leaves come from?” cried Mrs Carmody next morning. “Leaves and ashes! Look at them!” She looked cross, but a little frightened, too. “I swept this hearth yesterday, but it’s messed up again.”

  In the kitchen Eddie suddenly remembered the little hole he had seen watching him the first time he walked into the kitchen. Now he looked closely, he could see it was a keyhole in a door without a handle, flush with the wall and also painted red.

  “I’ve found a door,” he called to Tara.

  Tara had fastened the key to her charm bracelet. By holding her left hand close to the wall, and jiggling the key with her right, she unlocked the door.

  “What have you found there?” asked Mrs Carmody. “Oh, look! A spice cupboard! And spice jars!”

  “Cloves and nutmegs!” said Tara. But she sounded doubtful. She pulled the cork from one of the jars. “They’re not green. They’re all shrivelled up.”

  “It says ‘Kanuka’ on this jar,” said Eddie, reading the labels. “Kanuka, ngaio, cabbage tree…
”

  “Seeds,” said Mrs Carmody with sudden interest. “Tree seeds. Get planting, kids. There’s a big future in forestry.”

  “It’s not as funny as you might think,” said Mr Carmody. “There is a future in forestry.”

  “Those seeds are probably too old to grow,” Mrs Carmody said.

  But Eddie was reaching for the spade behind the door. It seemed to leap into his hand.

  “I’ll plant them,” he offered. Tara watched him, frowning.

  “I’ll help,” she said. Eddie saw his father and mother look at her in amazement. But Tara didn’t notice. She was thinking of something else. “Out of the red,” she muttered to Eddie, “that red cupboard, for example, we’ll bring the green… that’s the seeds… and then we will see what there is to be seen. I read somewhere that seeds which have been buried in pyramids for three thousand years will still grow.”

  Besides the spade, they found a small garden fork and a hoe propped against the wall just outside the back door. Together they began to dig on either side of the brick path that stretched out to the rusting clothes line. No one had dug there for a long time: the ground was hard and unwilling. Yet, finally, they finished digging it over, first with the spade, then with the fork, pulling out the long roots of twitch grass, smashing the lumps of soil with the back of the fork, and crumbling the smaller lumps with the hoe. As they worked, the seeds sat in a jar soaking in rainwater from the tank. That evening they planted them in two long, straight rows, one on either side of the path.

  Later that night Eddie woke to hear, not a roar but a whisper, and the scratch of fingers at his window. Through last night’s crack he saw the fire once more, but fainter and more distant. Something dark swayed backwards and forwards on the other side of the boards, but he couldn’t make out what it was.

  His door opened. Tara stood there, beckoning him to follow her downstairs and through the open kitchen door.