The Memory of Trees

by F. G. Cottam

  He’d been hand-picked, obviously. But the guy had known what he was up against, hadn’t he? He’d have heard the stories from the cradle. He’d been an inhabitant of a different universe, one in which the few certainties were absolute and much was quite simply unknowable. You steered clear of the edge of the world and you kept the darkness at bay unless it was deemed your duty, as it had been his, to deliberately venture into it.

  Duty was probably wrong. Calling was more like it and the word he would have used in his lost language would probably most have resembled destiny among modern English words in meaning.

  Brother, brother, brother, Saul mused. His phone beeped in his pocket. Probably Sam trying to find out where he was and what he was up to. Sam hadn’t had his Saul fix that morning and it was his employer’s belief that he had become as addicted to the presence of his boss as he’d once been to cocaine.

  What’s Wrong With This Picture? That was nothing to do with Marvin or Aretha or even the Dead, was it? It was the title of an album by Van the Man. It wasn’t a Van Morrison classic up there with Astral Weeks or Moondance; it was a run-of-the-mill collection, a motley assemblage of songs and was not what had prompted Saul Abercrombie, still staring at stained glass, to ask the rhetorical question anyway.

  What had prompted it was the resemblance between the warrior in the depiction embedded up there in the wall and his tree man, Tom Curtis. It wasn’t just passing. You wouldn’t really do it justice by describing it as strong. Uncanny was what it was and because he didn’t really believe in coincidence, despite the warmth of his picnic blanket and the intimate summer memories it evoked, he shivered and felt goose-flesh momentarily coarsen his skin.

  Curtis was Welsh. The guy rendered up there in stained glass hadn’t been. He’d come from the West of England, from Cornwall, which had been a Celtic kingdom once with its own tongue. But he’d been an English speaker, or so the place names in what was now the Abercrombie domain suggested.

  He’d come in answer to a magician’s plea and the land had been his reward for what he’d accomplished once he got there. What spells and brews concocted in cauldrons had failed to do he’d done with his sword or, more likely, Saul reminded himself, the whetted edge of his battleaxe. That was the legend. That was what Curtis would be told. But he wouldn’t be told the whole of it.

  Saul chuckled, a choked sound from his afflicted throat in the stony acoustics of the space surrounding him. He had amused himself, momentarily, with the thought of how Curtis would react if he told him the whole of it. He knew himself to be desperate. He thought that if he confided all he hoped for from what he intended to have done there, his tree man would consider him not just desperate but clinically insane.

  Pete Mariner raised the unsteady hand containing his glass in a wobbly toast to good fortune. The stuff filling the glass was cider made exclusively from apples gathered from an orchard on Jersey that owed its continuing existence to the expertise of his friends and sometimes colleagues, Tom Curtis and Dora Straub.

  It was only eleven o’clock in the morning. But Pete had woken far from sober at ten after the herculean bender of the previous day and had needed to defer the inevitable hangover because, just then, he didn’t think he possessed the fortitude to face it.

  He would sober up. He would have to, wouldn’t he? He had a living to earn and a job in prospect that was a professional challenge to equal anything he’d ever accomplished in his entire adult life. The respect of Tom Curtis – the approval of Tom Curtis – was a quality intrinsic to his own self-respect when it came to what he earned his living doing.

  And there was Dora. Ah, yes, there was Dora, Pete thought, gagging as his system rebelled against the toxic assault of mature cider drunk so early in the day, and he was obliged to swallow back puke just to show it who was boss.

  He was in love with Dora. He thought that he might even be hopelessly in love with her, but that seemed to be an unduly pessimistic analysis as drunk as he was. He was tipsily buoyant, so he wouldn’t have it that the love was hopeless until the cold light of sobriety forced him to confront that stark prospect.

  Right now, he thought his prospects really rather fine. The deal Tom had offered him was generous. The job sounded not just challenging but in some almost mythic capacity, fabulous. It would present him with the close proximity of Dora in a way no one could possibly interpret as creepy or perverse. And events would have the opportunity to take whatever course they would consequently. What could possibly go wrong?

  Pete took another celebratory chug of cider. This time the swallow reflex didn’t work its previous magic and he barfed about eight hours’ worth of stale booze out over his living-room carpet. He thought he heard it fizz as it settled into the worn pile, but realized that was probably just his ears singing with relieved pressure after lightening his body’s poisonous load.

  He knew his limitations. He knew them really well because he had tested them so often. The problem was that he had no respect for them. And they, frankly, had no respect for him.

  It took him an hour with a towel, a bucket of hot water and the best part of a bottle of Dettol to clear up the mess and, when he’d done so, he could still smell a faint sour residue under the disinfectant.

  But the energy and focus required by this distasteful task sobered him somewhat, as did confronting the pretty squalid nature of his domestic crime. There was the lad-mag lifestyle of carefree hedonism he was a good decade and a half too old for. And there was the slippery slope that led to a bed on a public ward and a sign around your neck saying Nil by Mouth.

  It was just after noon when he slid back into bed. His bed had not even grown completely cold from its earlier occupation. He closed his eyes and mercifully the dark world doing so invited did not spin giddily. Just for an instant he imagined what it would be like to have Dora Straub, slender and perfumed, stretched out on the mattress next to him.

  It wouldn’t do at all. His breath stank of stale booze. His tooth enamel felt dry under his furry tongue from the acid in the puke. He knew he was sweating liquor from every overworked pore. But he had time, thankfully, before the real encounter with Dora came, and when it did he would be bright-eyed and spruced-up and entirely sober.

  Pete remembered the dream, then. More accurately, he remembered remembering the dream before, the way you did when they were recurrent, or you just imagined they were in the haunting manner dreams had because they were so elusive and insubstantial in their basic character.

  In the dream he was being pursued. The pursuit was deadly and, when he remembered the substance of the dream, he remembered with surprise that he always endured it in a state of sleeping terror.

  He had been pursued on a couple of occasions through forest. That had happened to him in life. The first time had been on the edge of the African veldt when he had become briefly the prey of a leopard. But this leopard had been a bit timid and half-hearted, and had lost interest in a confrontation in a clearing when it had seen the size of its prospective kill and factored in the work necessary.

  The second occasion was more serious. He’d been working for a Russian billionaire restoring a depleted forest of conifers around his dacha eighty miles north of Moscow. Pete had been clearing dead and dying trees with a chainsaw one chilly April morning. But the noise was insistent and the weather wasn’t chilly enough, because his industry woke a brown bear from hibernation and the bear came-to very grumpily.

  Pete fled, literally, for his life. He could hear the bear gaining on him, careening through undergrowth, the growl of its breath and its paws scampering on the ground getting louder all the time. He could almost feel the heat of its breath on his neck as he ran and it closed the distance.

  He scaled a tree. He reckoned later he climbed it faster than he’d ever climbed anything in his life. Inspired by fear, fuelled by raw adrenaline, he stopped forty feet up only because he ran out of branches and stood gripping the tree’s swaying, resin-sticky summit in the embrace of both his trembling arms.


  The bear shook the base of the tree. But it didn’t climb up there after him. It was a large and intelligent creature and, even drowsy and irritated as it was, must have known that the branches of the tree would not support its weight.

  With his feet scissored high up on the swaying trunk, Pete fumbled his short-wave radio out from his jeans pocket; it squelched into life and he summoned help in his feeble Russian. A guy riding shotgun in a Range Rover scared the bear away with a few blasts skywards from his pump-action twelve-bore and they all laughed about it good-naturedly afterwards for days.

  This dream of pursuit he was having now wasn’t like that, though. It wasn’t anti-climactic, like his encounter with the leopard on the veldt. It didn’t have the Carry-On comic quality of his encounter in a Russian pine forest with an irritated bear. It was far more ominous than that. It was somehow vastly more despairing in the mood it inflicted. Escape from it seemed a hopeless enterprise.

  There was terror. But it was not of the galvanic sort that gives a fugitive his nimble energy. It was an enveloping sort of terror. It consumed the will and made flight a sluggish and futile notion.

  And there was the pursuer. Pete could not see his pursuer in this dream he vaguely remembered and even more vaguely suspected he might have had before and might be having, come to that, quite regularly. It wasn’t human. It wasn’t even warm-blooded. It was cold-eyed and reptilian and it was sickeningly quick, possessed of a savagery that didn’t seem to be of the modern world. It seemed ancient. It was primeval.

  He settled, his mind void, his abused body giving vent to a fart and a belch almost simultaneously, thinking of nothing, pursued by nothing he dreamed of, followed, if by anything, only by the fate or destiny of which Pete Mariner did not yet have any compelling cause to think might actually be his.

  The instinct was strong in him to do something decisive. He was frustrated that Saul wasn’t picking up his calls. It was a boss’s privilege. More than that, it was his right, since he answered to no one but himself and, without him, the machine of which they were all a part stopped running and fell to pieces, becoming so many useless component parts.

  But Sam Freemantle was frustrated all the same and felt that he should do something resolute and perhaps even defining while he still had the opportunity to impress, before Curtis the charismatic tree guy returned to take centre stage in the personal dynamics and greater goings-on at the estate.

  It was a drama, wasn’t it? Life was a drama and events had conspired to make Tom Curtis the star of this particular show. What he had to do, now, was contrive some drama of his own to occupy the spotlight and remind Saul Abercrombie that he remained a principal player and a force in the unfolding story to be reckoned with and respected. Or at least, he thought, taken into account.

  He was more comfortable with his machine metaphor than the more fanciful one concerning the stage. He was happier thinking himself the vital cog without which everything would very likely clunk to a premature halt. He was strong and functioned smoothly but his importance was totally overlooked. Consequently, the mechanism was out of kilter. The delicate balance needed redressing.

  Metaphors apart, it wasn’t personal. He respected Curtis and even, on their short acquaintance, found he quite liked him. He envied the man the obvious attraction Francesca Abercrombie felt for him. That was only natural. She was an alluring woman and Curtis had gained her interest without any apparent effort or intent to do so at all. Of course that was frustrating, but it wasn’t the man’s fault and he was clearly an expert at what he did professionally, taking Saul’s scheme and all of its preconditions very seriously indeed.

  He looked at his watch. It was just after midday. Curtis was expected back at about teatime. Francesca was presumably tied up doing what Francesca habitually did in her studio. Saul was exercising his vexing right to invisibility. He would be somewhere, obviously. But he wouldn’t be located until he wanted to be. Freemantle thought he might be up at Puller’s Reach, staring at the yew tree they’d broken the ground with by that creepy, whistling cairn of moss-stained stones.

  He was in the armoury. He wanted one of the sixteen bores, the single-barrelled pump-action, that brutal artillery piece of a gun that would blast its way through a barn door. Or a thorn bush, he thought with a grin. The gun was only for entertainment really, though. The real damage would be done by the twenty litres of petrol in the jerry can he had stored already in the rear of his Land Rover.

  The weather was dry, had been for days. It was overcast and though there’d been that recent bank of fog, the ground was solid and the thorn bush at Gibbet Mourning would burn like tinder, wouldn’t it?

  He had woken on his plan. He had thought to clear it with Saul, but Saul wasn’t answering his cell phone. And there was no need really to clear it with the boss. The bush had to go at some point over the coming days and weeks. It was an ugly obstruction. He was Saul’s to-do guy on the ground. He was entitled to use his initiative in the execution of his job.

  And to some extent, this was personal. He’d felt a bit impotent, to be truthful, witnessing the bush and its baleful antics in the presence of Tom Curtis. When it bristled as Curtis watched it, he thought it seemed a squalid affront that he should already have dealt with decisively. Its thorny defiance should not have been there for Curtis to see. It should have been a patch of scorched earth which was what, by teatime, he’d resolved over breakfast it would be.

  He locked the armoury and walked up the basement stairs and through the house, carrying the gun loosely in the grip of his left hand where its weight and solidity felt good. It smelled slightly of walnut polish and the thin oil he used to lubricate its action. The shells were looped in a leather ammo belt over his right shoulder and they smelled of their brass plugs and packed gunpowder. He put the ordnance on the passenger seat of his vehicle, aware of the grey light of the day, aware that he always felt more alive in possession of a weapon.

  He turned the key in the ignition and put the engine into gear, humming to himself. He was slightly surprised when he recognized the melody. It was an old soul classic, the Marvin Gaye tune, ‘What’s Goin’ On’. He’d never greatly cared for black music. He was more of a power ballad man, a Heart and Boston and Michael Bolton sort of person. Probably he’d become familiar with the song when sharing a cell. There’d been plenty of soul brothers behind bars, back in the day. Anyway, at that moment it seemed the appropriate choice.

  The bush seemed bigger than he remembered when he got close enough to clearly make out its coiled and tangled detail. The word ‘bush’ didn’t really do this obscene growth justice, he didn’t think. It had a significant mass and density and its overall size was so considerable it was almost alarming. Had it spread? He thought it might have in the couple of days since he’d last seen it and that would make sense. Spring was the time of growth in nature, wasn’t it?

  It was higher than he was, rising to about eight feet at its centre and it had to be forty feet across. Feathers fluttered across some of the surface thorns in a tableau of avian death he’d seen before but never fully understood. He’d always thought birds had a kind of sonar enabling them to avoid obstacles. They had night vision and most species had superb eyesight. Yet there they were, every time, a cross-section of winged wildlife impaled and forlornly dead, the breeze maintaining the illusion of life still in their teased spreads of wings.

  He had to admit, however grudgingly, that the sheer complexity of the bush was impressive. Its limbs were so thickly and intricately stretched and coiled. Even still – and it had not yet stirred – it had the look of a hellish nest of barbed serpents about it.

  At least, it did from a distance. Get closer and the limbs stopped looking snake-like and took on that anthropomorphic quality that had so dismayed Curtis at dusk a couple of days earlier. As Freemantle approached, the shotgun loaded, the reassuring weight of it held evenly between both hands, the limbs of the bush, under their horny protrusions, began to look busy with sinew and
muscle like something that might have evolved monstrously and complicatedly from man.

  He was twenty feet away when it began to twitch and move. One whorl in a particularly thick limb at the centre seemed to blink open and gaze blankly at him before closing slyly again as the bush shivered and rattled and spat.

  It was enough for Freemantle. It was more than fucking enough. He raised the gun chambering a cartridge and triggered a shot that exploded into the thorn labyrinth with a thud and then a tearing screech of destruction. Round after pulverizing round he fired, until the weapon was empty of ammunition, the barrel hot and the smell of cordite and freshly bled sap a stinking cocktail in his nostrils.

  He grunted, shouldered the gun and turned to go back for the jerry can of fuel he’d brought there to eradicate that baleful growth forever. He heard something slither and grind across the ground after him and, when he turned, surprised, tendrils, fibrous and as strong as steel cable, wound around his ankles and waist and hauled him juddering and suddenly bleeding and torn, surprised, into the barbed heart of it.

  ‘The knight in the stained-glass window was called Gregory,’ Abercrombie said. ‘In the Icelandic sagas he is sometimes referred to as Gregory of Avalon, slayer of dragons. So it’s fair to say his fame spread throughout Northern Europe and maybe even beyond. He was born in Tintagel. And of course, it was King Arthur he served.’

  ‘And now you’re going to tell me he came here answering a plea from Merlin,’ Curtis said.

  ‘The more remote the time, the less daylight there is between fact and fiction,’ Abercrombie said. ‘That’s the way it is with legends. That’s how myths perpetuate and grow.’

  ‘That’s the way they’re peddled,’ Francesca said.

  ‘But let’s stick to what’s verifiable. If he spoke the old Cornish tongue, he also spoke English. The place names here attest to that. This domain was his reward. He came on a quest to rid the region of something blighting it and he succeeded.’