The Beginning Woods

by Malcolm McNeill

  Then something came looping towards his face, spinning and winking and growing larger and larger and larger.

  A bottle.

  Then darkness and down.

  And then there were stars.

  Proper, nice, glittery stars. Up in the night sky.

  Confused, he blinked and smacked his lips. He was lying on his back. Grass was under his fingers, cold and slightly damp.

  He sat up, groaning as his head throbbed. He was in Newton Fields near the swings. A familiar presence moved out of the shadows, and the Dark Man knelt beside him, his normally pale face reflecting a flickering, reddish glow. He said nothing, and only looked past Max towards the hill in the centre of the park.

  Max followed the direction of his gaze.

  Then he got to his feet.

  On the hilltop crackled a mountain of fire, its long flames surging upwards as though trying to escape their bindings. Silhouettes of people were moving round it, their shadows cast long and flat all the way across the park.

  He left the Dark Man and approached the bottom of the hill. The bonfire shook and trembled above him. Orange, glowing shards lifted and curled into the night sky, cooling as they went, bright at first, then cold and invisible, disappearing like shooting stars in reverse.

  “We didn’t find the answers,” the Dark Man said behind him. “Now it’s too late.”

  Max looked at him wordlessly, then went back across the park to the Book House. A fire engine was there, blue lights flashing out and round, mingling with the orange glow of the street lamps. A fireman was directing an arc of water into the building through the space where the roof had been.

  “It’s the same all over London,” a bystander was saying.

  “All over London?” another said. “All over the world, more like.”

  Max watched the Book House collapse inwards with a roar, and his tears vaporized in the heat.

  Sharks and fires.

  He’d lost his Forever Parents again.

  And this time, he knew, it was for good.

  THE BETTER CHOCOLATE

  School was cancelled all that week and all the next.

  Max stayed in his bedroom for two days after the bonfire in Newton Fields, refusing to come out or talk to anyone. Alice kept sitting with him and saying things about changes and figuring things out. He would have to try not to miss the stories, she said. He would have to concentrate on what was real, on what was right in front of him.

  The trouble was he didn’t like what was real and what was in front of him.

  Everything was going to be better now, Forbes kept saying. Nobody needed to worry about the Vanishings any more. As long as you stuck to the new guidelines, you’d be safe. All thanks to the Seekers and Professor Courtz.

  This name was suddenly everywhere. On the news. In the classrooms. In the morning assembly. Courtz. Courtz. Courtz. He hated even the sound of it. At night he had nightmares that a hand was pressing stones against his window, rubbing them up and down against the glass.

  crrrtttzzz

  crrrrtttzzzzzz

  crrrrrrrrrrrrttzzzzzzz

  One day a rubbish lorry drove along Bickerstaffes Road, followed by workers in fluorescent jackets, who picked up boxes people had left outside their houses and heaved them into the back of the lorry—the remaining books. Max watched from his window as they collected the boxes Forbes had left outside. These were his books, the books he’d read to tatters, the books he’d bought—A Sackful of Monsters, A Chalice of Devils & Demons, A Pocket of Ghosts & Goblins, A Cauldron of Witches & Wizards and all the others. They went into the back of the rubbish lorry, and the crusher came down, and the Ghosts & Goblins, Witches & Wizards, Monsters, Giants, Devils & Demons were pounded to a pulp and driven off to be incinerated in the huge Volcano furnaces which were under construction all over the world. Professor Courtz had condemned spontaneous book-burning. It had to be done in the proper fashion. It had to be organized. Methodical. Thorough.

  A single story was enough, he said, to trigger a Vanishing.

  Not one could be allowed to slip through the net.

  Over the following weeks the Censorship tightened its grip. Strange scenes began to appear on the news: huge, violent crowds surging back and forth; protestors being chased down streets; the sinister pall of smoke that rose above Greenwich when the Volcano furnaces were ignited. At first it was just stories that fed the flames. Soon it was other things too.

  Paintings.

  Drawings.

  Poems.

  Movies.

  Music.

  Cartoons.

  A list was published of Censored Products, Systems and Activities. Its official name was CEPSA, but it came to be known as Courtz’s List. It was so long it had to be alphabetized, and there was a copy of it up in every classroom, post office and supermarket. Max memorized it, wondering about all these weird-sounding things that were disappearing from the world. As he walked home from school he would mutter it under his breath: “… plays, poetry, prayer, predestination, priesthoods, propaganda, prophecy, proverbs, puns, puppetry…”

  All these things, he was told, encouraged dreaming, and dreaming was the cause of the Vanishings. Anything that encouraged dreaming had to be stamped out. A Symposium official went round all the houses on the street, to make sure everyone complied with the new rules. The mural in Max’s bedroom had to go, she said. So Alice scrubbed it out, and put up wallpaper covered with tiny hexagons. One day a Symposium education officer visited the school. He was energetic and friendly and bounced about with a big grin on his face.

  “Imagine a chocolate bar,” he said to the assembled children. “It’s all right, go ahead. Just this once won’t hurt. Imagine the biggest, tastiest, most expensive chocolate bar in the world. Close your eyes. I want you to picture it. Really picture exactly how good it is.”

  Max imagined a giant cockroach tearing the roof off the school, crushing the man in its jaws and flinging bits of his body all over the room.

  “Do you see the chocolate bar in your minds? Are you imagining it?”

  “YES!” the children screamed.

  “When I say NOW,” the man went on, “I want you to open your eyes. And then you’ll see a chocolate bar that’s a billion times better than the one you’re imagining, a chocolate bar that makes yours look like a cardboard cut-out. Ready?”

  “Ready!”

  “Remember, this chocolate bar I’ve got here is going to be a hundred billion trillion times better than yours, I guarantee it. Do you believe me?”

  “NO!”

  “Well, we’ll see. Open your eyes… NOW!”

  They opened their eyes. He was holding a cheap bar of chocolate, the kind you could buy in any shop and eat in a second.

  “Now, which one’s best?” asked the man. “This one, or the one in your heads?”

  “In our heads! The one in our heads!”

  “Really?”

  “REALLY!” all the children howled—then they fell silent and watched as the man began to eat his chocolate.

  “Mm-MM,” said the man, cramming one hunk of chocolate into his mouth after another. “This is really good. This is delicious. You know what? I love chocolate! Chocolate is the best. How are you enjoying yours? Taste good?”

  They looked back at him.

  “What’s up?” he asked, polishing off the last cube. “Something wrong with your chocolate bar all of a sudden?”

  And then his smile disappeared. He took the microphone and came to the very front row of children, where the smallest and youngest were sitting.

  “It doesn’t matter how fantastic something is in your head—if you can’t make it real it’s nothing. The tiniest cell of the human body is more amazing than the biggest Dragon! Why bother with the imaginary world at all? The real one is so much better. And now there’s this extra-special danger to dreaming that wasn’t there before, a DEADLY DANGER that makes it really important for us to GET RID OF THE IMAGINARY WORLD COMPLETELY. People who prefer
dreams to reality Vanish and never come back. The world they dream about doesn’t exist, but they spend their whole lives in that world. And they stop existing. The imaginary world is just imaginary! It’s WORTH nothing because it IS nothing! We don’t need it any more. We don’t want it.” He crumpled up the wrapper of his chocolate bar and tossed it into a bin he had ready on stage. “So let’s chuck it, yeah?”

  “YEAH!” screamed the children, because the man had produced a box of real, straight-from-the-fridge chocolate bars and was flinging them over their heads.

  YEAH!

  YEAH!

  YEAH!

  They all got the message.

  Avoid dreams.

  Avoid anything that encouraged dreams.

  And avoid Vanishing.

  This was advice Max couldn’t follow. If he stopped dreaming he would lose what was most precious: his Forever Parents. He’d never met them, he’d never seen them, yet everywhere he went he felt them. And only because of his dreams.

  During this time a dull ache began to grow inside him, as though something in the centre of his being was withering up, like the seaweed on the nature table at the back of his classroom.

  For his twelfth birthday, he received a second-hand bicycle Forbes had found and repaired.

  It was too large, so he had to mount it from the kerb, but once he was on he could travel at enormous speeds. He spent that autumn racing along the Thames, through the city and out into the countryside, where he would roam the fields, jumping over streams, turning over rocks and rotten logs, braving the onslaught of nettles and farmers’ dogs. If he came to trees he would stare at them sleepily, wondering what secrets they might contain, and wander for hours beneath their branches, led this way and that by the rustling of the leaves, hoping to stumble on a way to the Beginning Woods and be reunited with his Forever Parents. Then in the evening he would return, his bike decorated with ribbons made from twisted grasses, his face glowing with the heat of the long journey and his shoes dusty from the country paths.

  But in the winter months he wrapped himself up in an old navy jumper, a donkey jacket and a scarf, and roamed the labyrinthine streets of London, peering in at the windows he passed and staring into every stranger’s face.

  Sometimes he would go to the bridge in St James’s Park and feed the Canada geese that gathered there.

  Sometimes he would skim stones by the Thames.

  Sometimes he would perch on the sundial in Kensington Gardens and watch the lonely old men in black overcoats pass by, like the shadows of grandfather clocks set loose from the hallways of empty houses.

  And when it was too cold he would stay indoors and peel away strips of wallpaper in his bedroom, trying to get to the country fair that wasn’t there, and the Hot Air Balloon that had departed long ago. He would make faces out of the strips, faces with frowning eyebrows and heavy, sorrowful mouths. Then he would scatter the pieces and begin again. Many sad faces were made and scattered before spring that year, and each night there was less of the hexagon wallpaper and more of the blank, grey plaster that lay underneath.

  Sometimes, lying in bed, he would stare sleepily at the patches of plaster, made luminous by the moon, and imagine they were maps of a far-off land where people possessed the strange yet necessary power of remaining where they were, not dying or Vanishing, not being dreams or becoming ghosts. Just being there, for ever.

  Such a world seemed fantastic beyond all other worlds, and he often wondered if that was the world his Forever Parents had been trying to reach in their Hot Air Balloon.

  6

  INTO THE MOULD

  Max’s life with the Mulgans was ended, quite unintentionally, by a man called Reginald “Chopper” Chumley.

  Reginald “Chopper” Chumley was the enormously fat and friendly owner of Chumley Abattoir. His family had owned the abattoir for generations and it was “Chopper” Chumley’s pride and joy. Every day thousands of cows and sheep would go in, the blades would whizz and chop, and out the other end would come all sorts of wonderful things like giblets and tripe, glistening in the afternoon sun.

  During the day he ran the abattoir visitor shop, selling pencils and key rings and extolling the virtues of mechanized slaughter. But despite his enthusiasm he was a poor businessman. After investing millions of pounds on miniature replicas of the Chumley decapitator, he was declared bankrupt, and a firm of accountants took over the abattoir. In their calculations grinder cleaners with one hand did not figure as worth while.

  “We can get crows to do it for free,” they decided, and with a flick of a pen Forbes was given the sack.

  So that afternoon he scraped the grinder one last time, took his redundancy cheque and walked with slow, determined steps to the racetrack.

  Over the next few months things at Bickerstaffes Road took a sharp turn for the worse.

  Alice hardly moved from the kitchen. When Max left for school, she was sitting at the breakfast table, and when he came back she was still there, in her dressing gown, smoking endless cigarettes.

  She watched his every movement, her grey eyes light and hard.

  Meanwhile, Forbes would spend the day out in London, looking for work. In the evening he would return red-faced and sweating, clutching a plastic bag heavy with beer cans. Those cans and the potion they contained exerted a fearful influence over him. Under their spell he transformed into a hunched ogre with gnarled eyes and fiery breath. Max took to hiding in the attic again, in his old place behind the water tank among the dead wasps and rolled-up bits of carpet cuttings. In this little nook he would stare out of the skylight at the stars, which were always so cold and far away, lonely and surrounded by darkness. Sometimes he thought, or knew, that he heard a soft music pouring in through the windowpane, a high-up, faraway, melancholy trembling that seemed as soundless as the whisper of snowflakes across glass. But those were isolated moments of comfort. When he came down from the attic, the real world was always there, ready and waiting with its iron hook and fiery breath.

  As the months went on, Max saw the Mulgans less often. He was old enough now to go where he wanted in London’s vast labyrinth, and fast enough to steal sandwiches from supermarkets. Forbes and Alice didn’t seem to care what he did, where he was or when he came home. They didn’t even check his school reports, and just signed without looking at his grades. By the time he was thirteen, he was coming home long after the street lamps had blinked into life. Forbes would be watching the sports round-up after the news. Alice would be in the kitchen. Max would go straight upstairs to his bedroom and close the door. They had become entirely separate entities; they passed each other as silently as spaceships, and there was nothing but cold between them.

  THE GETTING BIGGER DARKNESS

  Max couldn’t sleep.

  Forbes had dropped off downstairs with the TV turned up. That was where he slept now, in the living room, and each night a different sound kept Max awake.

  Tonight it was another history programme. One about war. Helicopters thundered above the house, tanks roared up and down the street and artillery blew craters in the garden. He thrashed about, longing for midnight when Alice would go down to turn the TV off.

  But midnight came and went. Why didn’t she go? Somehow he knew that she was lying in bed waiting for him to do it, just as he was waiting for her.

  Well he wouldn’t.

  He wouldn’t.

  Never!

  He got out of bed.

  Groped his way downstairs into the darkness of the hallway.

  A wedge of shifting television light angled out under the door. Was Forbes awake? He crept closer and peered through the gap between the hinges. No, he was slumped in his armchair with his head flopped back, cocooned to the waist in a purple sleeping bag. In the flickering light it looked like he was being slowly devoured by an enormous worm that had risen out of the floor.

  He slipped through the door, tiptoed to the television and turned it off, then stood looking out of the window.

  It
was snowing.

  The first, fat snowflakes of winter were doffing against the glass, floating down out of an impenetrable darkness.

  This darkness, he’d been told at school, extended for billions of light years in every direction. The strangest thing about this darkness, he remembered, was that despite its size, which was already impossible for anyone to imagine, it continued to get bigger, not smaller—that the amount of darkness in the universe was increasing, while not a single atom was being added to the amount of anything else.

  Maybe Forbes wasn’t watching television at all.

  Maybe he was watching the Getting Bigger Darkness get bigger, and that was why he had the television up loud, so he could drown out whatever high-pitched noise the Getting Bigger Darkness made as it moved against itself.

  The armchair creaked behind him, and he turned to find Forbes staring at him. The sudden silence had woken him.

  “It was really loud,” Max whispered. Forbes only stared at him, his face empty. So he added: “Goodnight.”

  “You hate me, don’t you,” Forbes said then.

  “Yes,” Max replied at once, simply, without any effort.

  The room split and a gulf opened up between them. On the far side Forbes floated in his armchair, indistinct and meaningless, and Max finally understood, as he stood on the edge of this abyss, that his life at Bickerstaffes Road had come to an end.

  He got out of the living room. The TV came on behind him. At the far end of the hall, the front door waited like a portal to another world.

  He moved towards it and took the cold metal latch in his hand. A thin, freezing stream of air came in through the keyhole, whispering against his fingertips.

  It was time.

  There was no use pretending.

  He opened the door and cold air washed around him. Beyond the car and the driveway, he felt a presence passing in the darkness, something vast and invisible—and he seemed to hear, far off in the night, the distant call of the Woods.