by F. G. Cottam
They’d do it before he died. If his condition didn’t deteriorate and the prognosis proved correct, he’d live to see his forest realized. They might by then have to carry him on a stretcher through the permanent twilight of its leafy glades, but they’d do it. It wasn’t a reversal of nature. That lonely yew looked firmly rooted, very much at home despite its isolation. They would collude with nature to restore something that should never have been taken from the land in the first place. Nature would be their ally and friend.
To Abercrombie, once the tycoon had completed his ceremonial laps of the yew, he said, ‘Do you own this copse in the Black Mountains?’
‘I’ve made some good buddies in the Kingdom of Wales.’
‘With a view to buying trees?’
‘It was probably at the back of my mind.’
‘How many can you personally deliver?’
‘I’d say at least a thousand, perhaps as many as twice that. It’s nowhere near enough, Tree Man.’
‘It’s a start,’ Curtis said. ‘I’d suggest you get Sam on it right away.’
When they returned to the house he went back to the room he’d been given the previous night and switched on his laptop and began work in earnest, contacting potential suppliers, recruiting manpower, arranging plant hire.
He emailed Dora Straub, with whom he’d worked on a project in the German Black Forest two years earlier. She was engaged in academic research, attached to the Ecology Department at Hamburg University. He thought that she could probably arrange a short-notice sabbatical for work as challenging and interesting as this was likely to prove to be.
He phoned Pete Mariner and reached him, as expected, in the pub. Pete was totally focused on the job in hand when he was working and totally intent on spending what he’d earned when he wasn’t. The fact that he was in a boozer in Tottenham was great news for the Pembrokeshire project, as far as Curtis was concerned.
He’d only just got Pete on board when Dora’s emailed reply reached him. She was very interested, she said. She was ninety per cent sure she’d be able to do it and would let him know for certain in a couple of days.
He worked solidly for two hours, then answered a soft knocking on his door and discovered Jo outside it, carrying a tray with coffee and biscuits. She asked whether he would be joining them for dinner and he said he didn’t think he would – he’d scavenge something from the kitchen later, if that was OK.
Francesca ate dinner with her father. His mobile rang as they were finishing and he retrieved it from a pocket and answered it with a frown. He didn’t say anything, just listened and stared absently at one of the paintings on the wall opposite where he sat before grunting an acknowledgement and breaking the connection.
‘Bad news?’
‘Nothing to get hung about,’ he said. ‘Sam’s in the comms room. Satellite’s picked up a fog coming in. Dense, localized.’
Francesca put down her knife and fork to either side of her plate. ‘Is this the start of it?’
He smiled at her. ‘Is this the start of what?’
‘Even if I was a believer,’ she said, ‘one tree wouldn’t do it.’
‘Sam says’
‘Sam,’ Francesca said. ‘You put a lot of store in a man you buddied up with in rehab, Dad. Sam’s a coke-head.’
‘Was, sweetheart. Past tense. And so was I, when I met him.’
‘You should tell Tom Curtis.’
‘That I met my do-do guy in rehab?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Sam thinks you have the hots for our tree man.’
‘For Christ’s sake. I only met him yesterday.’
‘Honey, even I can see he’s easy on the eye.’
‘I think you ought to tell him. Not just because he’s picturesque, either. He’s obviously decent and conscientious. He deserves to be told.’
‘He’ll find out,’ Abercrombie said, ‘in the fullness of time, if there’s anything to tell, if any of it turns out to be anything other than weird Celtic bullshit. You’re not really sold on it, so what exactly would you tell him anyway?’
‘I think this place affects people in strange ways. You hear and see things here that aren’t real.’
Her father laughed. ‘Hallucinations?’
‘It’s to do with scale and remoteness. It’s a wilderness. All that space and isolation plays on the senses.’
‘You’re talking about creative people, wild imaginations, tuned to atmosphere in a way most people aren’t. He won’t be sensitive to the same vibes you are. You’re a painter. He’s a guy who plants trees. It’s a practical skill. Artist versus artisan, honey.’
‘Curtis thought he saw something down on the shore this morning. He thought he saw a man who looked like his twin, staring at him.’
‘He seemed pretty chilled this afternoon.’
‘The stare was hostile. He felt threatened.’
Her father shrugged.
‘Who would you say it was?’
He didn’t say anything for a long time. He put his fingers to his throat and stroked the place housing the tumour that would end his life when it erupted and he drowned in his own haemorrhaging blood. That was Francesca’s thought and she could see her father read her mind, seeing it there.
‘I’d say it was a ghost, baby,’ he said. ‘But you don’t believe in those. Yet you’d still like me to share a bunch of myths about this place with Tom Curtis that risk freaking him out and scaring him away when he’s planted only a single tree. Women are such contradictory creatures.’
‘I don’t actually think anything would scare him away,’ Francesca said. ‘Folklore certainly wouldn’t do it.’
‘Because he’s brave?’
‘Because he’s desperate. He needs the money too badly. You know he does. It was one of the reasons you gave him the job.’
‘He got the gig for a whole stack of reasons. But I do think it sort of cool that he’s so broke. It makes him keen. God loves a trier and so do I.’
There was a knock at the door and Freemantle entered the room. He did so on silent feet. Francesca thought you didn’t need to see or hear him to know who it was. You could smell his aftershave and sense his bulk and eagerness.
Without turning, Abercrombie said, ‘What you got, Sam?’
‘Cold spots are still registering low temps. Raven Dip’s about five degrees below ambient, Loxley’s Cross the same.’
‘Puller’s Reach?’
‘Just the fog bank. It came in low and it’s dense.’
‘Well,’ Abercrombie said, ‘you want the sea, you gotta take the weather. Mother Nature’s sometimes a bitch.’ He stood, signalling that the meal and conversation were both over. ‘That’s the deal, people,’ he said.
Francesca got up and walked past where Freemantle stood without a word or a look and went to her studio. Night was descending. She would work on the painting she was close to having completed for an hour and then have an early night. An early night still seemed a paradoxical thing in her father’s company, a kind of contradiction in terms. He had lived all the way up, as the saying had it. But he was dying now, his strength depleted, and the nights were ending earlier all the time for him.
She could see the contradiction in the position she had taken over dinner with her father. She knew from her own experience that the place they were in evoked sensations in people that were unfamiliar and unnerving. At least, they did in her. She thought they did too in her father and in Freemantle, whom she suspected was thoroughly spooked by the whole domain.
She refused to accept the myths as the cause of these sensations. The stories were scary. But they were monstrous and outlandish and only an ignorant medieval mind convinced of a vindictive God and dark magic and a flat earth with an edge to fall off if you ventured too far could take them as anything other than gory folkloric metaphors. They were a thousand years old, the stories. They were impossibly remote from the real world.
Yet she wanted Curtis told about the mythic history
of the place when it had been thickly forested. She wanted him told about the creatures abiding in its permanent twilight and the things legend insisted they had done.
Her father would have spotted this flaw in her reasoning. He hadn’t pointed it out, as he would have in the old days. Instead, he had diverted her with some flattering guff about her distinguishing artistic status and heightened creativity. The cancer had mellowed him into this approach to verbal conflict. Where once there had been the ferocity of clashing wills, now there was gentle cajoling. It was just avoidance.
She felt nostalgic for one of the blood and thunder rows between them of the old days. But to have one of those would mean her dad was getting better and he wasn’t and wasn’t going to. Those dramatic conflicts were a part of their shared past. The curtain had been drawn on them. The theatre was dark.
She looked at the painting on the easel and sighed because she knew she couldn’t paint. She had told Tom Curtis the truth when she had told him that she painted only in natural light. What she’d actually done, she realized, was taken refuge in the studio to get away from Sam Freemantle because she found it so difficult to tolerate sharing space with the man.
Curtis being around made things more endurable. It was one of the characteristics that she liked about him. But she knew that he was going back to London the following day to sort out his affairs before the start of the project proper. He’d be back before long. He was in his room now translating the challenge into practical terms and it was necessary. He was putting the wheels in motion and they were gigantic wheels that would turn slowly at first but gather unstoppable momentum really fast.
Francesca went over to the pile of canvases leant against the wall and fingered through their stacked edges until she came to the representation of the knight from the stained-glass window in the church at Raven Dip. When she got the opportunity, she resolved there and then that she would inform Curtis of his real identity. She would tell him who he was and what it was said that he had done. That much at least, he surely had the right to know.
Curtis worked till midnight. He wasn’t disturbed again. He slept soundly but rose just after six thirty, fully alert, rested enough but strangely eager to see how the tree he had planted had fared through its first night on this remote and secretive domain. The sun was just creeping over the eastern horizon as he zipped on his jacket and fired up a quad and set off westward, chasing his own shadow, towards Puller’s Reach and the edge of the new world he was now involved in creating.
Fog had rolled in off the sea. It lay opaque in a low bank in front of him. It was uniform in its density, the low sunlight unable to pick holes or fissures in it anywhere so that it gave the impression of being solid. It was unmoving, like it had settled there forever, obscuring the land, making a sudden, lurching trap of the cliff edge for anyone blundering into it.
Curtis didn’t blunder. He ditched the bike before the fog bank enveloped him and felt his way into a grey and uniform universe that felt damp and cold on the skin and smelled intensely of the sea. It whitened the ground under his feet, the blades of grass dim and petrified. He held out his own hand and looked at it: the flesh was pale, corpse-like and indistinct, a memory summoned from a sinister dream, right there in front of him.
For no reason he could have rationalized, he began to feel a chill of foreboding. He told himself it was the silence imposed by the mist, which deadened sound, as mist is apt to. He told himself it was the chill and the fact that, unable to see what it was he might share the mist with, he felt suddenly vulnerable.
He progressed. And the world he knew retreated at his back. The fog seemed to thicken, slyly increasing in density. And the silence became more profound, deadening his tread over the earth and the noise of his breathing.
It seemed an eternity before he saw the tree. His sense of direction had always been excellent and the fog had thrown him off only a few degrees so that he came first upon the dim green cluster of pebbles that was the cairn, before looking to his left and seeing the green cone of the tree, anaemic and still in its solitary spot on the cliff top.
The cairn made no sound. The stillness of the fog had silenced it, he thought, grateful to be spared its shrill and gleeful crooning. He tried to make out the sea, but there was nothing in the space where the land ceased but greyness. Fog filled the void with its dumb emptiness. The sight and the thought made him feel momentarily lonely. Then he went back to feeling the trepidation that had grown with every step taken towards his destination since he’d climbed off the bike.
It had got worse, hadn’t it? He recalled the feeling he’d had after clambering down the cliff face to the beach. Such a climb would likely be fatal in these conditions, but he felt it again, didn’t he? He felt scrutinized, watched. And he did not think the study friendly or even neutral. The watcher felt to him wholly like a powerful physical threat.
He eased through the pale blur of the yew’s branches and felt the solidity of its trunk. He ran fingers over the wrinkles in the bark. The tree was substantial and secure, something real and solid in a world reduced by the fog to speculation and whatever menace it hid. He felt it in the raised hair and chill on his skin.
The cairn emitted a sound, then. It was sudden and short and sounded to Curtis’ ears like a chuckle of laughter. He shivered, his hand recoiled from the rough surface of the tree he stood next to and he tried and failed to rationalize what his ears had just registered. He hadn’t imagined it, had he? No, he hadn’t. The spirit evoked by the cairn, the capering phantom it stood in stone tribute to had judged him and found him absurdly wanting. It had laughed at him; at his blindness and at the terror gripping him.
Something splashed below him on the shore, at the edge of the sea. It sounded large, whatever was doing the splashing. He heard a sort of sucking noise as something that sounded bulky and soft blindly gained the shore and clambered closer over the shingle.
Curtis sank to all fours and crawled the six feet to the brink of the cliff. He could see nothing below him when he reached it. There was that weird sucking sound and a rising smell of something so foul it made him retch and stung his nostrils. Then there was a scream and the scream was altogether inhuman, a wet wail too deep and savage to emanate from any human throat; too prolonged in the mournful outrage of its fury and pain.
The world went silent again. Curtis rolled on his back in frustration. He turned his head to his left and thought he saw the outline of the cairn, silent and innocent now, more clearly than he had before. The fog was lifting. When he turned back to the view from the cliff edge – where the view ought to be – he could make out white foam on anaemic pebbles where the waves broke below him. But as the view gained detail, there was no beast to see crawling, reeking from the sea.
The fog disappeared. The world clarified.
Freemantle did four sets of twenty bicep curls to end his workout in the gym. The gym was one of three rooms occupying the basement of the property the new guy hadn’t been shown. It was the biggest of the three. The others were the comms room and the armoury.
He dropped his dumbbells to the rubber floor with a thud and decided on a couple of rounds on the heavy bag. It was an addition to his usual routine but he felt like throwing some leather. He pulled on a pair of bag gloves and did three rounds, shaking the 100lb bag with each heavy blow on the chain it hung from, the staccato thud of his punches echoing around the room.
When he finished and pulled off the gloves, he saw that friction had rubbed raw the skin from the two most prominent knuckles of his right fist. He should have wound bandages to prevent the friction from doing that but he hadn’t. Hitting the bag had been a spontaneous urge. Wrapping bandages was a laborious task. The lost skin was an only slightly painful tribute to the weight of his shots.
The gym was there because Saul Abercrombie had not really believed the prognosis when his specialist had determined it. Instead, he’d sought a second opinion that transpired to be just as bleak.
He still didn’t
believe it. Most people thought that doctors were somehow God-like. They had the power, didn’t they, of life over death? Surgeons were especially God-like because in the operating theatre they presided over modern-day miracles.
But Saul, by contrast, didn’t really buy any man’s superiority over his own human capabilities. He had achieved staggering wealth. He had provided a workforce of thousands in a dozen different countries with their livelihoods. He had given millions away. To him a doctor was only a specialist in the same mechanical way a software designer or an actuary was. They had a set of professional credentials and a given area of expertise. There was nothing really awe-inspiring about them. They could as easily be right as wrong.
So before the disease really gripped, he had the gym built; as though exercise could counter a lifetime’s contempt for routine physical exercise and heavy indulgence in bad habits. Of course, it hadn’t worked.
But it was good news for Freemantle, who took his responsibilities to his employer very seriously, who liked to keep in shape and who believed very strongly in checks and balances. There wasn’t a man born who didn’t have a few bad habits. But you could counter the damage they were likely to cause unchecked by compensating for them with some good ones.
The gym was one of his good habits. It kept his cholesterol and blood pressure down and helped with his resting pulse. It made him physically strong and sharp and it countered the natural aggression that could sometimes cause him to act regrettably when someone chose to provoke him. He liked how his gym work made him look. He had been given a pretty good start genetically, but had built on that foundation over the years.
The comms room was necessary to the smooth running of Abercrombie Industries. Freemantle didn’t know how Saul managed to juggle so many balls with the skill and enterprise he did. Even sick, he kept everything in the air. It would have a second use now, of course, that the planting was to begin. They would get accurate meteorological information. Weather prediction was pretty crucial in so vast a challenge as planting a mature forest of the size they intended.