Shadows & Tall Trees

by Shadows

  Five more minutes elapsed and the wood was a towering wave about to break. Malcolm stopped, eyed his map as he might a willful child in one of his classes, and complained at the scale being too small. A horsefly landed on it, mistaking it for the world. He batted the fly away and wiped at his gleaming forehead with his handkerchief. Being honoured with a name must mean the wood was of a size and character to deserve one. Karl couldn’t think of anything in its favour other than the shade it would offer.

  “Ready?” Malcolm said, as if the brief stoppage had been primarily to give his companions a rest.

  The path rose to a sagging stone wall. Malcolm went first, striding over the broken remains of a kissing gate.

  No diminution of the heat. Karl felt they’d entered innumerable stuffy rooms, defined not by walls but by the pillars of the trees, furnishings a matter of masses of brambles and other unidentifiable greenery. Maybe they should have avoided the wood, the way the birds had. Sunlight falling into distant glades and rides darkened the heavy cover elsewhere. The mix of trees suggested it was an old wood. That was the extent of Karl’s arboreal knowledge and it was confirmed not long after. Gareth stalked forward, camera poised, towards a collapsed wooden frame the size of a TV screen. Under cracked glass, words, some not eaten by insects or dampened to illegibility.

  “. . . birch, oak and ash, natural to . . . kingdom. Ecosystem thrives . . . maintenance of a continuous canopy . . .”

  Karl thought the choking underbrush wouldn’t be as continuous if, as he suspected, woodland overseers weren’t as scarce as the birds. He’d no sense of how far they’d penetrated the wood—and there were no longer sightings of sunlit glades. Close, heavy air pressed. Pattering on leaves began slowly like hesitant applause.

  “I think the trees have told the black cloud we’re here,” Malcolm said, shrugging off his rucksack and pulling out his waterproof. Gareth and Karl did the same.

  They walked like beggars, heads bowed as the air filled with rain and the swishing of their waterproofs. They stepped carefully over roots intersecting the path like prominent veins on a wet hide.

  Karl couldn’t be bothered remonstrating with Gareth, who was close enough behind to be kicking lightly at his heels. The hissing of millions of leaves sieving the rain focused into unintelligible whispered words directly behind his ear. Gareth hadn’t been previously given to japes and Karl was about to suggest he shouldn’t start now. Then he noticed his friend walking stolidly several yards ahead.

  Karl flung himself around. Puddles had formed on the empty path. The rain hissed and crackled like fire. His own flapping wet trouser legs had kicked at his ankles.

  “Sun’s back,” Malcolm called out.

  Some distance ahead a glade overflowed with buttery light. Karl’s limbs un-stiffened. Abruptly, the rain stopped but for sporadic fingertip taps on his hood.

  Moments later they stepped into a wide break lined with gorse. There was a litter of rocks and stones from a glacier that could have passed just yesterday. An empty wedge to the right in the trees revealed a pin-prick flash of a distant windscreen, a section of the lake like a bent nail, a flank of the mountain whose summit they’d reached in time for sandwiches and the midday news on Karl’s headphones.

  They walked down the ride until it was clear the right-hand path Malcolm said to look out for had been grown over, or broke away from a different glade entirely. But here was another path heading off to the left just short of where the ride ended in dense foliage.

  “Can’t see it on the map but it’s got to lead to somewhere,” Malcolm said.

  “Paths always lead somewhere,” Karl complained, stopping, rebellion inside him. “Let’s go back and look for the path on the map.”

  “The map’s not reliable here,” Malcolm said. Karl felt the same about the wood. The trees looked too dense to even let a path through but Malcolm and Gareth were heading into them.

  Karl followed and after a moment turf was light and springy underfoot and there were cushions of moss. “Had this place in mind all along,” Malcolm said, his grin signaling how untrue that was.

  Like a faulty TV picture, the whitewash flickering between the dark tree trunks. At their feet, a winding series of stepping stones, flush with the grass. They ended at a short length of fence into which was set a low gate with a sign across it, Journeys End Refreshments. “Should be an apostrophe before or after the ‘s’ in ‘journeys’, but I’m prepared to forgive on this occasion,” Malcolm said.

  “I’ve some water left if you want some,” Karl said. “Let’s just get back. I want beer, not tea.” Hidden here, the house’s saving grace was not being made of gingerbread.

  “Keep hold of your water, Karl,” Malcolm said, lifting the latch with a sharp snap.

  Karl went through last, the latch raining a rusty powder onto his fingers.

  The whitewashed cottage was at the end of a long narrow lawn. Around the door was a trellis of faded red roses. There were windows at each side and two upstairs—all with closed shutters apart from the one to the right of the door. Murk behind the large single pane of glass.

  They dropped their rucksacks by a lone round table halfway down the garden by the wall. “I’ll parley with the natives,” Malcolm said, anticipation in his face at what a delight this was certain to be.

  “Sure there are any?” Gareth said to Malcolm’s back. The closed shutters and dark window gave Karl hope but then a face appeared in a gap in the doorway, and he noticed a shape, vaguely visible in the window.

  A hefty someone. More likely a female, to judge from the profusion of banana-sized and sharp-pointed crescents of yellowish hair around the solid base of the dark block of the head. Working at a sink or worktop?

  A few words were exchanged and Malcolm called back, “Apple pies and tea do for you?” Gareth said “yeah” and Karl raised his thumb, rather than his voice and affront the stillness of the trees. Malcolm had gone to the un-shuttered window where he stooped to a book on the ledge. He wrote into it then was strolling back to the table.

  He asked Gareth how many photos he’d taken. Gareth checked, said “thirteen”.

  “Lucky for some. A good day, don’t you think, Karl?”

  “Not bad,” Karl said. The trees had twisted it out of shape, the house stopped it dead.

  Malcolm said, “I envy you, still having hills on your doorstep when we’re gone.”

  A hundred miles was no “doorstep”—and walking alone held no appeal, even if he’d known how to read maps. That’s why he’d joined the Hill Billies. Malcolm and Gareth had joined separately at the same time. A disparate trio of physiques and personalities bound together from the first day in a loose camaraderie. The Hill Billies group had folded four walks later. Karl had a vague notion the three of them had infected it in some mysterious fashion, thus ensuring its demise.

  He couldn’t feel the breeze carrying the sounds of the country fair down corridors between the hills and over the dense carpet of woodland. Many voices, with one amplified and surging over the rest.

  Karl said, “Hear that—?”

  “Stand by your beds, gentlemen,” Malcolm interrupted, smoothing the altar-white tablecloth.

  Tall and very slim, the young woman carried a loaded tray and approached with quick small steps of her tiny feet. The close-fitting maroon garment she wore down to her calves had a sheen in which darker shades billowed like smoke.

  She placed the tray on the table; the pies had strikingly golden crusts and pillows of clotted cream. Karl tried to catch her eye, just to see if he could. She had large wide-apart eyes. Supposed to be an attractive feature, weren’t they? He’d beg to differ. Malcolm said, fulsomely, “Thank you. You’ve saved our lives.” Her lengthy thin-lipped smile encouraged him to go on.

  “How’s business? You’re quite hidden away.” He could ask questions like that.

  “Coming to an end,” she said, her voice sibilant, how th
e trees would talk if there were a breath of air. “We’re going home. We aren’t from around here.”

  “No?” Malcolm said. Still smiling, and as if she hadn’t heard his invitation to expand, she turned and went back to the cottage.

  “See her teeth? Like a baby’s milk teeth,” Karl said, pushing at his apple pie with his spoon.

  “Except for the incisors—they were a grownup’s.” Gareth was observant without ever being obviously so.

  “Arms too small,” Karl said. “Perfectly proportioned, just . . . too small.”

  “Oh, we are pernickety today.” Malcolm lifted a hideous china teapot. “Shall I be Mother?” he said, as always proceeding to be.

  They drank and ate.

  “Eggy. Too much egg,” Gareth said. Karl agreed—the strong flavour of egg yolk in the pastry battled with apple. “You fussy eaters,” Malcolm chided, smiling under his cream moustache.

  He and Gareth finished theirs first. Malcolm lifted his cup. “To new beginnings.” His declaration rebounded off the trees like not-quite-articulated responses. Karl and Gareth echoed it in restrained murmurs then all three silently contemplated Gareth’s imminent departure to a life as a notably youthful mature student in and around Falmouth Art College, Malcolm’s recent appointment to a deputy headship at a Grimsby primary school. Karl was closer to a sacking than promotion at North West Energy’s call centre after losing his cool again and hanging up on an irate customer last week. A tally of two strikes; a third and he’d be out.

  “It’s a word I use sparingly, but ‘heavenly’ just about sums up this place.” Malcolm leaned forward; a self-satisfied little gust of laughter. “These establishments—” Low-voiced—this was for their ears only. “They’re uniquely English. There’s usually an attractive young girl at front of house. Mother is formidable, matronly, has a farmer’s wife build, keeps to the kitchen.” They glanced to the window in which the shadowy bulk was motionless, as if watching them back. Malcolm went on, “Dad’s even more in the background. He does the books, the DIY. Always mysteriously busy. Probably early-retired from some significantly more demanding professional occupation.” Malcolm sat back. He was fond of making affectionately astute observations and was pleased with this one.

  “Not surprised they’re packing up,” Gareth said. “Can’t be much passing trade.” Other people’s financial situations always interested him where nothing much else about them did. Despite a handful of exhibitions and positive reviews, photography wasn’t proving lucrative. He scraped a living from part-time jobs. He got out his camera, a small neat basic model he prided himself on finding wholly satisfactory for finding the strange in the ordinary.

  Malcolm patted the solid mass of his stomach. “That was lovely. Simple and comforting.” With a slight frown, he smacked his lips around a lingering aftertaste. Karl pushed aside his plate, a third of the pie uneaten. Neither of the others offered to finish it off. Malcolm got up. “I’ll go and pay.”

  He walked across the grass. Standing before the cottage, he pressed both hands to his stomach, frowned, then pushed at the door and stepped inside.

  A listlessness came over Karl with the lynchpin of Malcolm gone. “Come on,” he said, impatient after three minutes or so.

  “He could get a Trappist monk gabbing.” A skill Gareth didn’t have and probably didn’t envy. He got up and walked to the cottage door. He adjusted a function on his camera and photographed the slab of the doorstep, then stooped to the book on the window ledge. He wrote into it then tipped his head as if he’d heard a sound from the doorway. He went to it and stepped inside.

  Karl listened. No voices, no birdsong, no brush of tree foliage. The treetops waved to such a slight degree it could just as well have been the blood pumping through his eye sockets. He felt observed, and not from the trees, though he had a peculiar sense of them “facing” the garden and cottage. Not from the window either; dense gloom within.

  He stood before the window a moment later. Nobody inside. A bare plaster back wall; no sink or cupboards as far as he could tell.

  It was an open foolscap-sized book on the window-ledge. On facing pages row upon row of signatures with attached comments all written in a brownish red ink. A visitors’ book. Gareth Shuttleby’s was the last name, written in a tiny pinched hand, with, typically, nothing else added. On the preceding line, “Malcolm Goodey” in a controlled flourish that would have looked more fitting on a legal document. A fulsome comment next to it: “Excellent: a Heavenly enclave.” One empty line left to fill at the bottom of the right-hand page. Karl took up the pen: it was cold between finger and thumb, a smooth texture like polished bone. The silence was acute; the trees, like an audience bound in shadow, made for a sense of intense expectation—he couldn’t think what else might.

  Writing his name would feel like giving too much of himself. He felt a new-found appreciation of his anonymity answering calls at North West Energy. There, he was nameless—he liked things that way. No, he’d keep “Karl Crier” to himself. He couldn’t help thinking Malcolm and Gareth should have been equally reticent. He very much wanted to leave but first he had to find out what they were finding so compelling in the house. Malcolm might be deep in conversation but surely not Gareth.

  He pushed at the door and stepped inside

  —and down.

  Shock, at the unexpected drop of a foot or so. An odour of leaf mould and mildew. Dirt underfoot and the remains of rotted floorboards, beneath the layer of dead leaves. There was a landing—and no way up to it with the wooden stairs below, collapsed and rotten, strangled by some parasitic weed. “Hello? Anyone?” he said, his voice tight. Why hadn’t either of them cried out when they stepped into this place? Karl just wanted to cry. Nobody had lived here in years, yet the girl had brought out food—he could taste it now and felt queasy.

  Rough stone walls exuded coldness and damp. His boots pushing through leaves, he peered into the gloom at the back of the house. A florid tongue of leafy branches thrust down through a window to feed on weeds, rubbish and glass shards.

  Discoloured chunks of white ceramic, mingled in rotted leaves on the floor, were the only indication that the room at the front may once have been a kitchen. Lighter than elsewhere, the space was harder to endure. Stepping backwards his foot squelched something soft. He looked down and his stomach rolled at the half-embedded worm wriggling in the decayed apple.

  Stepping back outside, he saw that the visitors’ book was no longer on the window ledge. Were the staff and Malcolm and Gareth enjoying a joke at his expense as they hid not far off in the trees? In the gloom of the house he could have missed some other doorway—but nothing would persuade him to venture back inside.

  “Yeah, very funny,” Karl called out, nodding as if it were. “You can come out now.” He thought someone was about to when he glimpsed movement.

  Sunlight outside deepened the gloom in the kitchen, occupied again. The more he stared, the less he wanted the two shapes with the girl to be more clearly delineated. Alone out here, he refused to believe the human-sized pepperpot had a crescent of horns around a black muzzle with nostrils you could fit fists in. It and the girl were in the shelter and deep shade of a fleshy black canopy, like a warped mattress. In the pillar-box thick stalk that supported it were several dark pits like empty eye sockets.

  The girl held a book before her. Karl could only think it was the visitor’s book. His limbs felt calcified. How long before perusal of the book was transferred to him? Twisting, he felt rooted in the lawn before a supreme effort freed him. He ran, grabbed his rucksack and then the gate’s latch snickered drily and puffed rust onto his hand as he pushed.

  A random fleeing until the woods expelled him. More unknown paths dipped in and out of further misted islands of woodland, rose and fell on meadows and pastures ruckled like mouldy green bed linen. An arrowhead of geese honked laughter in and out of low cloud. Sheep fled from him on stick legs, matted fleeces leaping.r />
  He was able to triangulate from the positions of the mountains a tortuous way to the village. A chill, a faint fuzzy patina of grey on tree and hill, as if summer had shifted into autumn in under an hour.

  Connerstone offered little relief. Damp grey stone, grubby whitewash, faded stucco. Rumbling cars glided in slow lines. Voices bloomed and diminished on the crowded paths outside a mini-gallery, the gingerbread shop, Souvenirs and Gifts, cafes and pubs. He sensed lassitude—people filling the time before departure. Grey light washed colours from their clothing.

  At a convulsion in his stomach, Karl tasted apples and foul eggs. The girl had been real but those companions must have been distorted reflections from the garden and the trees. Going inside to demand an explanation he would have found that out for certain—and the whereabouts of his friends. His phone would clear up the latter mystery.

  Malcolm’s recorded voice introduced and instructed like a deliberate delaying tactic before Karl could say, his voice clipped, “It’s me. I’m in the village. Are you? Ring me back.” From Gareth’s number a ringtone like a robotic cough.

  There was just over an hour before the Stagecoach service was due to leave the terminal. He’d kill time until then. He wandered, as much in the roadside gutters as on the paths.

  He was returning along the main street when there was the unhealthy rattle of an engine and a bus began to draw past him. Karl looked up at the passengers. They were still, listless, like prisoners, each pair in their tiny shared cell. Despite the state of the bus—a drab grey, dented, rust patched—their clothing suggested they were tourists or day- trippers rather than users of a regular local service.

  Gareth, in the middle of the back row, was neither. Karl stumbled, recovered, looked again. Gareth? Lacking any livery, the bus clearly wasn’t part of the Stagecoach fleet they were booked onto in less than an hour’s time. So what was Gareth doing onboard?

  Karl kept pace, leaping, waving, shouting. Gareth stared forward, oblivious, his expression even more closed-off than usual. People on the path went about their business with bovine intent, Karl’s antics of no interest. The bus picked up speed. Some obstruction up ahead had been cleared, but then, short of that, it took a squeaking left-turn into a side road.