The Beginning Woods

by Malcolm McNeill

  He spoke with a peculiar accent Max recognized. Wherever the Dark Man came from, this man came from the same place—except maybe from a different time. He wore a dark coat reaching almost to his knees, a white shirt tucked into high-fitting trousers and a black waistcoat with a watch chain. He looked like he’d stepped out of a history book.

  “These writers, after all,” the man went on quietly, “these poor Devils sit thinking for a horrible length of time, hours and hours every day, for years on end—their entire existence! While you’re watching television and playing computer games, staring at a screen with your brain in the grip of a machine, they’re wrestling with the secrets of the universe! And when at last they do find something their work has only begun, because then they have to write it all down, they spend their last drop of blood capturing it with the utmost precision, sweating over every word so others will be able to understand their feelings and thoughts, all this for one purpose, and one purpose only—the transmission of the human condition through time! Now,” he said, raising his finger, “that’s not for everyone, I’ll admit. Each must live in their own way—the flowers and diamonds again! But even so, even so, let me ask: How long do YOU sit still and wrestle with the secrets of existence, in the course of a day? Two hours? One hour?” His eyes narrowed. “Not one minute! Not one minute do you spend! Yet here it all is, all that work, all that thinking, ready and waiting. The greatest story of them all—the story of human life—here on these very shelves, all thanks to those writers who toiled like the most wretched of slaves with next to zero hope of reward. And how do you repay them? What epitaph do you chisel out on their tombstones? Reading. Is. Boring. I think you haven’t thought it through, have you? Otherwise—” his eyes narrowed even further “—you wouldn’t come out with anything so stupid.”

  He reached this insulting conclusion staring right at Max, right into his eyes, with such penetration that Max suddenly got the impression the speech was only a distraction, something to pass the time while he got on with this staring of his. He even felt a prickling in his brain, as if the man was rummaging around in there with his long fingers to see what he could find. Even as he thought this, the man took a step closer and the brain prickling intensified.

  “When you read,” the man whispered, “you discover who you really are. You find traces of yourself, little pieces you didn’t know were there.”

  He held Max’s eyes a moment longer. Then, with a dramatic flourish, he pulled the curtain across. Seconds later the front door banged, and Max turned in time to see the man striding down the garden path, scribbling into a notebook with feverish energy. Somehow, he was not surprised to see the Dark Man outside the gate. The pair of them shook hands, then disappeared together, conferring closely.

  When you read you discover who you really are.

  Max picked up the book Alice had left him and looked at the back:

  A POCKET

  of

  GHOSTS & GOBLINS

  Discover the ways and habits of Sprites and Shades, Gremlins, Ghasts, Brouhahas, Frights, Bloodguddlers, Brownies, Urchens, Hellwaines, Imps, Trollots and Kobolds in these fairy tales gathered from twenty-three countries around the world.

  When Alice came back to check on him he was up to the Brouhahas.

  Like to go?

  Not yet.

  OK.

  A plate clunked down beside him. A sandwich. A cake.

  He looked down a few pages later and the plate was empty, his fingers sticky with chocolate.

  The sun went down. Imps and Hellwaines skittered about in the garden. Trollots pressed their noses against the window pane.

  The street lamps came on.

  The curtain opened.

  Time to go.

  No!

  But it really was time to go, and Alice was dragging him back across the park, getting him out of the Book House only by purchasing not just A Pocket of Ghosts & Goblins, but A Sackful of Monsters, A Chalice of Devils & Demons, A Cauldron of Witches & Wizards and A Barrel of Giants too.

  His Forever Parents didn’t show up in the Book House that day, or the next.

  But he no longer expected them to.

  They’d been there all along, frozen on a page among all the millions of pages.

  He wasn’t supposed to wait for them.

  He had to find them.

  He read on the windowsill, with the curtain drawn to hide him from the other people. In this secret nook he tramped over mountains, wandered through forests, struggled across deserts and delved into caves. He sailed oceans to far-flung continents, lost himself in the crowds of foreign towns and poked his nose into the dungeons of ogres. He explored the ethereal citadels of Wizards and Genies, and even crossed the boundaries of time to visit distant eras, past and future—all in his search for his Forever Parents.

  But it wasn’t long before he began to suspect there was something wrong with his approach. There were, after all, so many books. It took months just to get along one shelf.

  Deciding he needed help, he wrote Someone Porterholse Porterholse Someone a letter.

  Dear Someone Porterholse Porterholse Someone

  I’m looking for my Forever Parents in your books and I can’t find them because there are so many and I want to know if maybe you saw them once there did you? When you saw them they might have been in a Balloon. If it is true please write to me. My name is Max Mulgan 37 Bickerstaffes Road and tell them to watch out for the geese. I’m on the windowsill most days.

  Thank you very much

  Max Mulgan

  p.s. I hope you get this letter soon.

  p.p.s. The iron pig is nearly full.

  p.p.p.s. Please tell the Wind upstairs to stop making so much noise.

  He left the letter by the pig, hoping the Wind wouldn’t sweep downstairs and blow it away.

  The very next morning he got his reply.

  THE STORYBOOK

  It was left on the window ledge—a pale cream envelope with a silky, luxurious feel. When he tore it open, he found no note inside, only a small iron key that tumbled out onto his hand. On the underside of the envelope flap was a short message:

  He was there in a flash, testing the handle in surprise.

  It hadn’t been locked before. He’d opened it once to have a peek, but there hadn’t been anything special—just some raincoats hanging from a rack, a pair of wellington boots, a vacuum cleaner with a bloated dust sack and a couple of those odd lanterns. All the usual under-the-stairs stuff.

  Nothing odd.

  Nothing secret.

  So why was it locked now?

  The key turned easily. He looked left, looked right, then slipped in and closed the door before anyone saw.

  Inside it was stone-dark.

  The closet had one of those string light switches, he remembered. Groping forwards, he snapped it down. The bulb screwed into the underside of the stairs came on.

  Coats, vacuum cleaner, boots, lanterns—it had all gone, and the cupboard had been transformed into a cosy reading room. A rug now covered the draughty floorboards and the bric-a-brac had been cleared to make space for a low table and an armchair.

  On the table were a woollen blanket and a pair of fingerless gloves.

  On the armchair, sinking into a cushion, was a huge black Book.

  No book like it had been on the shelves outside, or anywhere.

  He got down on his knees. Reaching out, he placed his hands on the Book’s cover, afraid they might slide into that inky surface as into a pool of water. Instead they encountered polished wood. Sturdy brass hinges held the cover in place, while the spine was a thick strap of leather, dotted with the heads of tiny nails. There were no markings—no title, no author’s name, no publisher’s logo. There was only the smooth surface, cool and mysterious beneath his fingers. At first glance it was black, but when he bent closer he saw purples, deep greens and browns, all swirling about in whorls and loops. The Book had retained the mark of its origin—a tree somewhere in a forest—and s
o it seemed wild and alive.

  Like it hadn’t just been made.

  Like it had grown.

  Heavy footsteps passed in the corridor outside, startling him. Looking round, he saw a bolt, shiny and new, screwed into the door frame. He slid it across, then lifted the book with a grunt, wriggled under it and sat in the armchair with the Book in his lap. Leaning back as though opening a trapdoor, he heaved the cover up, over and down.

  click

  A mechanism in the hinges snapped into place, turning the cover into a rigid board, allowing him to rest the Book across the arms of the chair. It seemed to float in front of him, suspended in the air, weightless despite its size.

  The first page was blank. Even so his fingers trembled across the grainy paper, sensing the Book’s surprise at his touch. A pungent smell rose from its pages like the startled emission of a squid—the tang of forests, of pine cones and rotting leaves, of gleaming moss, stagnant ponds, frogspawn, sap, bark and fungus. It was nothing like the Forest Fresh air freshener Alice sprayed over the house to get rid of the smell of her cigarettes. It was the real thing. It boiled up through his nostrils, filling his brain, and he turned eagerly to the next page, anxious to discover what kind of stories could be found in a book such as this.

  They began on the following page, written in dark ink by the same hand that had scribbled the message on the envelope:

  As soon as he read these words, he knew: it was in the Beginning Woods that he would learn the truth about his Forever Parents.

  THE WOODS AND THE WITCH

  At first the Storybook frightened him—it gave off such a thick warning, like a tome of black magic. I know more about you than you know about me, it seemed to whisper. There was something unrevealed about the Storybook, as if it held secrets as well as stories—secrets it was unwilling to share.

  But this uneasiness soon passed. Often he sat in the cupboard, cradling the unopened Book on his lap, running his fingertips over the cover, murmuring incantations and words of invitation—a summoning spell for his Forever Parents. During school he would think of where he had left off, and when afternoon came he would rush to the Book House, sneak into the cupboard and plunge into the story once more. Every page he turned he expected to come face to face with his Forever Parents. With every story he took another step towards them. When he reached the end of that Storybook another appeared to take its place. Then another. They were as limitless as the world they described: a magical forest, where the chaos and tangledness of trees ruled with total power.

  The Beginning Woods was like the World, but minus science and plus magic. In each story, something familiar became twisted and strange. London was in the Woods, but it was a London of long ago, of top hats and horses, cobblestones and candles. It came as no surprise that in the Beginning Woods the Wind came from Giants, and the sky had been painted blue. Dragons too were just as he’d imagined—slow and stupid, foraging for trees and pursued for their stories by the Dragon Hunters.

  His favourite tales were about a creature of absolute evil called the Wasp Witch. She cropped up in several stories, sometimes taking a major role, sometimes only passing through to lay a curse or cause some other malevolent circumstance. She wasn’t the only Witch in the Beginning Woods, there were hundreds—they were a kind of breed—but they were rather more significant than riders of broomsticks and owners of cauldrons. To be a Witch in the Beginning Woods was to occupy a particular place in the order of nature, to be fundamental to the workings of the universe. They spent their time inventing nasty things such as cockroaches, quicksand and ceratocystis ulmi. A Witch always came into being as a man or a woman because they needed fingers and thumbs for inventing things and wielding their tools. This particular Witch had sprouted from the darkness beneath a rotting log like a growth of Old Man’s Beard, and shared with that fungus the habit of spreading herself about and popping up where she was least wanted.

  As a Witch she had been responsible for the creation of Stinging and Sucking Creatures such as Wasps, Visps, Hornets, Mosquitoes, Fleas, Midges, Horseflies, Scuttlebugs, Vampire Moths, Redbottles, Bloodflies, Squirmers, Catnippers, Gnats, Tics, Pokklers, Anklejabbers, Tree Lice, Merchant Bugs, Ivy Eaters, Ghoulwhips, Scorpionflies, Goldenback Murderers and their ilk. Not only did she invent them but she marshalled their forces and governed their actions. Having created a new batch of Wasps, she would set them loose on picnics in great swarms, or blow them singly through a straw into a classroom, and in this way she fulfilled her witchery functions and took part in the processes of nature.

  Because of these practices, she was known as the Wasp Witch.

  But it was not in the creation of Mudflies and Cooters that she made a name for herself in the history of evil: these were, after all, relatively lowly nuisances—they hardly compared to the Volcanoes and Yersinia pestis thought up by renowned Witches of terrible power and authority. She had another talent, for which she could be freely condemned as a villain of the highest order.

  She stole colour.

  Wherever she went, she kept an eye out for anything colourful. If she saw an apple radiant with the splendour of summer, she would take it in her hands, polish it against her sleeve, then send her tongue into it—a highly specialized tongue she had crafted herself, snipping off her own useless tongue with a pair of pruning shears and stitching this new one in its place.

  She craved the colours of living things most of all; they were more fulsome, their flavours subtler, complex and delicate. It really was horrible the way she stole the gold from a Golden Eagle, or the glittering beauty from a Rainbow Trout. Afterwards the stricken beast would be completely translucent, like a jellyfish. As for her, she didn’t give a hoot, she would march off to find her next victim without a backward glance.

  Such a creature was the Wasp Witch.

  But it wasn’t because of her that Max returned to these stories again and again. There was another character attached to the Witch, who always appeared at her side.

  This was the boy, Kaspar Hauser.

  He lived with the Witch in her cottage. She had kidnapped Kaspar from his parents when he was a baby and raised him in a box, in such a way that the wretch actually believed she was his Mother, and never for one second considered that his real parents might be elsewhere, praying for his safe return. Armed with a brush and pan, he spent his days cleaning her workshop and cottage, collecting all the leftover parts of Stinging Insects—the jointed legs, wings, abdomens, feelers, eyes, suckers, antennae, mandibles and so on—and reordering them into labelled bundles. He would make Frankenstein insects out of these parts, many-legged, inside-out and upside-down beasts, like Quantipedes and Lurchers. Because the Witch was always busy with her experiments his life was very hard: nothing but work, work, work, from the moment he woke to the moment he fell, groaning with exhaustion, back into his narrow box.

  Naturally enough, by the time he was ten years old Kaspar was thin and tired, hardly a boy at all, and more like an insect himself, with ribs you could rattle a stick against and eyes as large as dish plates. One day he was so exhausted he could not get out of his box and lay under his blankets sobbing and apologizing. The Witch howled and span, and sprinkled Earwigs into his bedclothes, but there was nothing to be done, he was too weak even to move, and at last she relented.

  She had worked him too hard.

  He needed help.

  Would he like a companion?

  Yes, he would, very much! Kaspar bounded up, flung his little arms round his Mother’s neck and kissed her happily. A playfellow? Marvellous!

  So that afternoon the Witch took Kaspar into her workshop and cut him in two, into two boys who were identical in every way.

  She divided his name as well. One half she called Kaspar, and the other Hauser.

  In the first few weeks after the operation the boys rejoiced in each other’s company. The day’s work, burdensome for one, became a pleasure for two. They chattered, they sang, they laughed. Time flew by, and if they were still exhaus
ted at bedtime, then at least they felt it was down to the capering, jumping and somersaults, and not the sweeping, dusting and scrubbing.

  The Witch watched this jubilation with alarm. She didn’t like it. She missed the good old days of grovelling and cringing. So she devised a plan, a diabolical, monstrous plan that only a real genius of evil could have conceived.

  One morning she took Kaspar aside and said: “Listen up, Snotnose—we’re running low on Wasp parts. Go into the Woods and fetch me some Buttercups, Nettles and Tree Sap.” Then she added, as if as an afterthought: “Get Kaspar to help you.”

  “You mean Hauser,” Kaspar said at once.

  “Don’t play Cleverdicks with me,” the Witch shot back. “Do you think your own Mother can’t tell you apart?”

  Now, right from his fingertips to his toes Kaspar felt like Kaspar, and was more certain of being Kaspar than of anything else in the universe. Nevertheless, this was his Mother he was talking to!

  “But… I really am Kaspar,” he said, running his little fingers all down his body to be sure.

  “Tsk tsk,” said the Witch. “Who knows best?”

  “Mother does,” said Kaspar automatically (because he actually did believe this to be true).

  “That’s right. And who loves you with a most perfect love?”

  “Mother does.”

  “And does a most perfect love screw things up and get them back to front?”

  “No.”

  “Well then,” said the Witch. “Who are you?”

  “Hauser,” said Kaspar firmly, glad to have it all sorted out and cleared up.

  The only trouble was, she told Hauser he was Hauser as well, and naturally he completely agreed, so later on there was a fist-fight over who was the proper Hauser. Called in to referee, the Witch declared that Hauser was Kaspar and Kaspar Hauser. Kaspar was covered in glory—at last he was proved to be who he wasn’t: Hauser, and none other than Hauser! But his triumph lasted only a few short hours—later that afternoon the Witch dropped a bomb by asking him to “fetch Hauser from the woodshed.” By the time the twins went to bed they were half-mad with confusion, and when they woke the next morning they had no idea who was who. Terrified, they ran to their Mother’s boudoir.