The Memory of Trees

by F. G. Cottam

  ‘Hello, Dora.’

  ‘You know my name.’

  ‘I know all your names.’

  ‘Then you have me at a disadvantage.’

  ‘Oh, the disadvantage is all mine,’ the woman said. She laughed.

  She sounded quite young and completely relaxed to Dora, who had still not been able to make out her features, shadowed as they were by the hood. She’d thought the fabric black from a distance. This close, she saw that it was an intensely dark shade of green.

  ‘You’ll have to explain that remark.’

  ‘There’s some question over ownership, Dora. There’s a modern saying that possession is nine points of the law. Saul Abercrombie has possession, but this land will never belong to him.’

  Dora didn’t think the saying sounded very modern at all. She thought it probably dated from property disputes at least as long ago as early Victorian times. She said, ‘You’re claiming an ancestral right to this domain?’

  ‘Historic,’ the woman said.

  ‘And you hate the idea of what we’re here to do?’

  ‘On the contrary, Dora, I love the idea of what you’re here to do. It’s utterly enchanting.’

  ‘Well, it will be,’ Dora said, glancing at the cairn, aware of having mentioned enchantment at that very place the evening before on first seeing it. ‘You lost your historic rights? Your title deeds were stolen or confiscated?’

  ‘We can’t right past wrongs, Dora. We can’t change history. No point dwelling on the past. We can only learn and try to profit from it. I think you of all people would appreciate that.’

  Dora had certainly profited from history. Her family referred to her great-grandfather’s war service euphemistically as his European tour. He had brought back souvenirs from Paris and Moscow, paintings her father had sold at auction for spectacular prices in the fine art boom years of the eighties, in the period just before provenance started to become a problem for German collectors.

  The money had changed their lives. She had been fourteen then. They had gone from living in a fairly modest Berlin apartment building to an estate with stables and a cherry orchard on the edge of the Black Forest. It was where her interest in what she did had first been sparked and formed her personal history but this woman couldn’t possibly be aware of it. Could she?

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Amelia.’

  ‘It’s a lovely name.’

  ‘Yes, it is. By contrast Dora is an ugly name, but that matters little with you because its owner is quite beautiful.’

  ‘Thank you. Why are you here? I mean at this spot?’

  ‘I came to look at the yew trees.’

  ‘They’re a mystery, the way they’ve appeared to multiply.’

  ‘Regeneration is what nature does.’

  Dora looked back towards the trees. ‘Yes, but I’m used to seeing that accomplished in less mysterious ways.’

  Amelia took down her hood.

  ‘Goodness. And you call me beautiful.’

  ‘I want you to do something for me, Dora,’ Amelia said. ‘I want to ask of you a favour. It won’t compromise your work here in any way, but it’s important to me. And if you can help me, I’ll be a good friend to you in return. Please feel free to say no. If you can find it in your heart to say yes, however, I’ll be enormously grateful.’

  Dora was mostly amused at the formal quality of this enigmatic little speech. But she was also intrigued. She liked adventures and she enjoyed surprises. She replied with an English phrase she’d heard but never used before. She said, ‘I’m all ears.’

  There was an argument before their departure over guns. Since none of them was held legally, Curtis felt they should be left under lock and key in the armoury. He reasoned that their ownership was a crime compounded by carrying them around loaded with the possible intention of using them.

  Saul Abercrombie disagreed. He said that since they had the guns, they might as well take them. If the creature Pete had heard in the cave was still there, they would inevitably corner it on their approach. It might become hostile and dangerous and if it did, the guns would be necessary.

  ‘We’ll be unschooled marksmen, firing off rounds in a confined space with the real danger of blue on blue hits and the hazard of bullets ricocheting anywhere off granite walls,’ Curtis said.

  ‘Except I’m not unschooled,’ Francesca said.

  Dora said, ‘Neither am I.’

  Abercrombie looked at Pete. He said, ‘Well?’

  Pete looked at Curtis. ‘Sorry, chief,’ he said, ‘I’m all for arming ourselves. I’m with Saul on this. It’s just foolhardy not to, a total no-brainer.’

  They travelled in two Land Rovers. Abercrombie judged the spot Pete had described to be about three miles inside the northern border of his land. When they reached terrain that looked like a giant golf links, Pete nodded, recognizing it. A few minutes after that they could smell the sea, then the shoreline came into view and they swung right along the strew of sand and pebbles parallel with the water.

  They passed the cave entrance three times, backtracking laboriously, before Pete finally spotted it, crouching across the rear seats of the vehicle he was in with his head at the height it would be if he were seated astride his bike. In its oblique facet of rock, the entrance, even when visible, looked more like a shadow than an opening.

  Each of them had a big Maglite torch, the sort that doubled as a club when used by police forces in America – heavily knurled metal housing long-life batteries and boasting a piercingly powerful beam.

  They became silent as they progressed along the cave’s length. They crept more than they walked. They were on a shallow descent, Curtis realized. After five or six hundred metres they had descended far enough underground for his ears to pop. He listened for Pete Mariner’s flapping monster, but all he could hear was Saul Abercrombie’s breathing, shallow and laboured. He’d looked shit that morning, as Pete had rightly observed. He really shouldn’t have come.

  Francesca said, ‘Can anyone smell anything?’

  ‘Only soot and petroleum from our two action heroes,’ Dora said. ‘They smell like a gas station forecourt on a hot day.’

  ‘You smoke too much to possess any sense of smell,’ Pete said.

  ‘And you should have showered, both of you.’

  Abercrombie said, ‘All continentals, Dora, are obsessed with personal hygiene.’

  To Curtis, despite his levity, Pete had sounded nervous.

  Francesca said, ‘I can smell something. There’s a dead odour, like decomposition.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Dora said, after a pause.

  A dozen more metres further on, the odour had become so sharp and pervasive that Curtis thought they all must be aware of it. His feet slid on something. He crouched and looked and Francesca banged into him from behind. He was almost tipped into the puddle of slime on the cave floor in front of him. Be thankful for small mercies, he thought. At least her bloody gun didn’t go off.

  ‘Ugh. Sorry. What is that stuff?’

  ‘It has the same viscosity as the mucus that comes off a slug. But it smells of the sea.’

  ‘A sea slug?’

  ‘There’s about a gallon of the stuff down there.’

  ‘Nothing’s that slimy,’ Pete said. He giggled. The giggle sounded nervous.

  Francesca said, ‘Well, clearly something is.’

  Pete said, ‘Dora’s Rottweiler.’

  Curtis rose and they pressed on.

  He began to think about Gregory, the warrior from Cornwall who came here to despatch monsters millennia ago. He didn’t know how much of the legend to believe. It bothered him that Francesca had described the account as a chronicle rather than a saga.

  He knew enough about history to know that the former meant a true account, often written under oath, at a time when scribes believed not only in God but in the prospect of eternal damnation if they sinned. A lie of that magnitude would be a mortal sin. He would have to ask Carrington abo
ut the significance of that, should he remember to return the professor’s call.

  Gregory had approached this place from the sea. He had sailed there and beached his craft unwitnessed. He hadn’t possessed a Maglite or a Glock pistol like the one holstered on Francesca’s waist or the short-barrelled pump-action shotgun Pete had slung from its strap across his back. He’d probably carried a makeshift torch topped with burning pitch and a battleaxe thrust into his belt. Worst of all for him, though, was the fact that he’d come here entirely alone.

  It would have been a hell of an ordeal. They believed in monsters then. They believed in demons and witches. Men of his class were bred for the quest, steeled psychologically for the tests they endured almost as a routine aspect of life. Heroism was an expectation that came with their noble station in life. But Curtis thought that even if you found no enemy to confront, exploring this place alone would be a fearful experience.

  There was something tomb-like about the cave. It was just a corridor hewn from rock. It gave the impression of narrowing the further you travelled into it, but that was just the knowledge that every step towards its end took you deeper under the ground and further away from the light. It wasn’t a tunnel, because it dead-ended eventually. He thought a catacomb must be like this.

  The smell was rank and growing stronger, so strong that the urge to retch was becoming difficult to resist. Abercrombie’s respiration now was a shallow rasp and Curtis realized that their boss hadn’t spoken since entering the cave only because he didn’t possess the necessary breath.

  ‘We should rest for a minute,’ he said.

  ‘We should just keep going,’ Pete said. ‘The sooner we get to the end of this thing, the sooner we can get back out again.’

  ‘Seems reasonable,’ Dora said.

  Francesca said, ‘No, we should take five. Tired people make stupid mistakes.’

  And Curtis thought that she had noticed how distressed the exploration had made her father and was being as tactful as was possible. There was his ego to consider. However frail, he was in overall charge.

  After another moment, Abercrombie said, ‘This is me done, people.’

  Curtis said, ‘That’s a wise decision.’

  ‘I’d love to go on, brother,’ Saul said, ‘but the decision’s been made on my behalf. A throat like mine constricts the breathing. The further we go, the staler the air. Not a problem for you guys. For me, maybe a killer.’

  ‘I’ll stay with you, Dad. Come back with you, I mean.’

  ‘The bogeyman doesn’t scare me, honey. You go on.’

  ‘Continue if you want to,’ Curtis said to her. ‘I’m happy to go back now with Saul. There’s nothing down here but darkness and geology.’

  ‘And whatever secreted that slime,’ Pete said. ‘And whatever’s generating that stink, unless it’s the same thing.’

  ‘Which logically it would be,’ Dora said.

  ‘It must terminate fairly soon,’ Curtis said, ‘given how far we’ve already come.’ He looked at Francesca.

  She said, ‘Everyone? Turn off your torches.’

  They did. The darkness was abrupt and absolute. There was no hint of light. The only sound was their collective breathing. She said, ‘Nothing lives down here. The air is rank and nothing could tolerate this total absence of light. Maybe something hides here from time to time, makes of it a refuge when it feels threatened. But this place is uninhabited. There isn’t even a ghost.’

  Pete switched his torch back on. Curtis would have bet money he’d be the first to do so. Women were more practical than men, weren’t they? He felt pretty spooked and more uncomfortably claustrophobic than he ever had in his life. He didn’t feel merely confined, but trapped. Dora and Francesca, of the five of them, were coping best.

  He switched his torch back on. They all did. He said, ‘You wait here with Francesca and Saul, Pete. I’ll continue with Dora for another hundred metres or so. If it doesn’t play out, we’ll abandon. If it does, we’ll take a quick look around and come back. Give us the ten minutes Saul needs to recover his breath. Then we’re all out of here.’

  Everyone but Saul nodded agreement. He rested on his haunches against the cave wall with his head on his knees. It occurred to Curtis that the route back was one long, steady incline. He thought that had probably occurred to all of them.

  His hunch proved correct. About a hundred-and-twenty metres on, their torches revealed a gallery. It was where the cave ended. It seemed a natural feature, its walls and roof smooth, the dead stink that had accompanied them there possessed of a miasmic power here at the cave’s conclusion.

  They played their torch beams around. Dora’s lit on an aperture about eight feet up in the wall to the left of where they stood. It wasn’t much bigger than a crack, a chink of blackness at a blind angle it wasn’t possible, from where they stood, to illuminate.

  ‘Can you get me up there, Tom? I can reach it if I stand on your shoulders.’

  ‘It’s narrow. It probably leads to nowhere. You could get stuck. I don’t think it’s worth the risk.’

  She shrugged and smiled at him. ‘We’ve come this far,’ she said.

  He held on to the cave wall with both arms outstretched. She climbed up him, smooth and agile, and disappeared into the narrow opening with a kick of acceleration that ground the heel of her boot into his collarbone.

  He waited nervously for a falling thump or shriek of pain signalling she’d trapped herself. A minute passed. Two minutes became three. Her feet and legs appeared and she squirmed out and down. He caught her and delivered her to the floor. She felt lithe and shapely in his arms and he inhaled the perfume physical effort had just revived on her hot skin. She smelled of fresh sweat and Shalimar.

  ‘Led to nowhere, like you said it would,’ she said. ‘Could have been a storage space a thousand years ago but I’m with Francesca. No one ever lived here. It’s too dark, even for monsters.’

  ‘Let’s get out,’ Curtis said.

  The excavators would take the rest of the day and most of the night to be unloaded from their giant trailers and properly set up for their work. A team of engineers had accompanied them in transit. Once set up, they would only ever pause to re-fuel until their task was complete.

  They were parked just inside the northern gate. There, a section of fence had needed to be taken down to admit their bulk before being straight away put back up again. Curtis led the two-vehicle convoy to go and see them as soon as their party emerged from the cave mouth into light because he thought the sight of them would do Saul Abercrombie good.

  Saul was in the rear Land Rover with his daughter at his side and Dora at the wheel. Curtis sat in the passenger seat of the front vehicle making and taking the calls he needed to catch up on. Pete drove. He said, ‘That was a shit adventure, not very Enid Blyton at all, frankly.’

  ‘We’ll have lashings of ginger beer later,’ Curtis said.

  ‘We’ll hold the ginger, eh? Just concentrate on the beer.’

  ‘Enid’s version would have given us something cute and trapped to rescue. The monster usually turns out to be a puppy. We got nothing.’

  ‘Something left that residue on the floor. Something organic left that stink behind. I’m willing to bet it wasn’t plant-life. You believe I heard something in there yesterday, Tom?’

  ‘I came across that same odour in the fog at Puller’s Reach before you and Dora arrived here. I didn’t see anything. But there was something substantial at the edge of the water. I heard it. It wasn’t a puppy.’

  ‘Or even a Rottweiler,’ Pete said.

  It was about eight in the evening before Curtis became aware how tired and listless he felt. He knew the reason. He had spent a lot of adrenaline earlier in the day in the fire fight with the thorn bush. That was how he’d thought of it, he realized, as an opponent rather than just as an innocent obstacle. In the cave he’d been running on empty. Now he felt too depleted to do anything further concerning the demands of the job.

  H
e’d delegated some stuff to Pete and Dora, who were busy dealing with those various tasks in the comms room. Francesca was with her father, having a drink on the terrace. Saul Abercrombie was under a rug in a wicker chair with wheels looking every day of his seventy-odd years. They’d had an early dinner, the five of them, during which the conversation could not honestly have been said to sparkle.

  Curtis decided he would go to his computer and look up the Victorian family that Café John’s professor said had been located at Loxley’s Cross. Carrington had said the family were called the Crawleys and that it was all in the public domain.

  It was something mildly diverting that would take his mind off how tired he was and maybe enable him to relax sufficiently to get the sound night’s sleep he knew he needed. He kept thinking about how animated the scream made by the burning thorns had sounded. He kept thinking about the sticky residue left by whatever had secreted it in the cave. At least he wasn’t thinking about Charlotte. At least he wasn’t thinking about her all the time, anyway.

  He soon found out that Alfred Crawley was one of those polymath Victorians with a strong interest in English folklore. He’d been left a generous legacy by his father and hadn’t really needed to earn a living of his own. So he’d made a study of Morris Men and travelled to Cornwall looking for archaeological evidence of Camelot. He’d written a paper about the myth of the Green Man and why it had endured so persistently down the centuries.

  He’d travelled about when single in a Romany caravan pulled by a horse. He’d painted this prototype mobile home in a style that reminded Curtis a bit of William Morris wallpaper. He concluded from the appearance of the caravan that Crawley hadn’t been a man who cared very much what other Victorians thought of him.

  He’d first travelled to Wales as a young man intrigued by the legend of the sea monster said to inhabit the coastal waters off the port town of Barmouth. He’d tried to locate and catch it in a hired fishing boat, obviously with no success. From the illustrations of the monster, Curtis concluded that it had probably been an unusually large conger eel. They were territorial and could live for a very long time. It was longevity that engendered the sightings and stories inflated by fishermen over the years.