by F. G. Cottam
I think now that Amelia got them through it. I do not know how she accomplished it and I am still not sure of her motives in doing it. She did not employ medical expertise learned on his lap as a child from her doctor father. There was no doctor father, we later discovered, when we also discovered that she had never been heard of in the village from which she claimed to have come.
She damped their brows and sang to them in a dialect alien to me through night vigils when we could hear our maze crackle beyond our porch and windows with unruly growth and the world seemed in thrall to a strange sort of enchantment.
We held our breath. What we had planted swelled to monstrous size. Our girls hung on and time itself seemed frozen and perpetual. And then one morning, suddenly they were well again.
‘It’s a miracle,’ my wife said at breakfast, uncertainly.
‘It’s something of the sort,’ I said, unwilling to subject this strange cycle of events to rational analysis.
It was by now September. ‘I don’t want to winter here, Alfred,’ Rachel said. ‘The prospect is too bleak.’
I nodded at her from the other side of the breakfast table. She was right, in both senses.
Our daughter Dorothy came into the parlour. I asked her, ‘Where is your sister?’ She looked quite well. It is remarkable how resiliently the young recover from illness, I remember thinking.
She said, ‘Muriel has gone with Amelia to choose a spot at which to begin her wood.’
I said, ‘What wood is this?’
‘Muriel wishes to plant a willow tree. She might also plant a silver birch.’
‘Might she indeed. Was this Amelia’s idea?’
‘It was Muriel’s, father. Amelia said that if she plants a single tree, others will grow around it. She used a long word to describe how. She said it is what nature does.’
I glanced out of the window at the wall of hedge grown to the height of a rampart bordering the eastern extremity of our maze. It was so high now that when the sun set, its shadow stretched almost to the fence around the house. ‘Regeneration,’ I said.
‘That’s it precisely.’
‘And do you, Dorothy, have ambitions to reforest the land hereabouts?’
‘I would like an apple orchard.’
Her mother laughed. It was an unhappy sound. She dabbed at her mouth with a napkin. She said, ‘One can only speculate on the size to which the fruit would grow.’
Rachel sounded more than defeated. She sounded afraid. I resolved in that moment that we would leave for somewhere entirely different before Christmas came upon us. I have always been intrigued by myths. I did not wish to find myself living trapped in the midst of one. And that is how it did feel that day at Loxley’s Cross, claustrophobic, despite all the stupendous space around us.
There is only one route out of a maze. To put it another way, a noose will tighten, even if the scaffold it hangs from is sited in a wilderness. That is what nooses do. That is their bleak and only purpose. I had the feeling of being led, bound, to somewhere I did not wish to end up. There was a tingle down my spine of trepidation not far removed from the feeling of dread.
‘We have to get rid of her,’ I said to my wife.
‘Indeed we do,’ she said, emphatically.
She made no fuss. She asked for no explanation. I offered to pay her wages until the end of December but she refused to take a single penny more than was her due. She went and we never saw her again and the girls grieved for her in their sad, subdued way until the excitement of the prospect of relocation came fully to occupy their thoughts and youthful imaginations.
A sweet-natured Welsh grandmother called Mrs Owen took charge of our daughters on those rare occasions when some social or commercial obligation necessitated our absence from the house. This happened only a handful of times before the fateful evening in Cardiff when we attended a recital and decided to make a romantic night of the event.
We returned on the afternoon of the following day. It was getting dark, as it does early in late December. By then most of our belongings had already been packed and shipped and were in storage in London. The house had an empty aspect to it, as though we had lived there only in our imaginations; as though it had never really belonged to us at all.
Mrs Owen was lying rigid on the cold slate of the kitchen floor, the victim of a stroke from which she died without regaining consciousness. The girls were nowhere to be seen.
I think I knew where I would find them. And find them I did, wrapped in one another’s arms in death’s embrace in the folds of that monstrous privet folly we had planted the previous year, their pitiful corpses pale and not remotely life-like in the flare of yellow brightness provided by the lantern I used to determine my path through the labyrinth.
We had loved and cherished them and so we mourned them. But the loss was easier to bear than might be thought. I am not a callous man. My wife is not a woman without maternal feeling. Life is precious and none more so than that of Dorothy and Muriel, taken at so heartbreakingly tender an age.
But the fact was that they should have died of diphtheria at the end of the summer. That was their poignant, natural fate. They had been predestined to die young of a fatal illness and had only survived it because nature had been obstructed in a way unnatural and perverse. Both Rachel and I knew this. We knew it in our heads and hearts and did not even need to discuss the matter. Some truths are obvious, even if only in retrospect.
We left the house at the end of December as planned. We moved for a while to my brother’s villa in the village of Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight. Philip is a gifted botanist and I charged him with an experiment in hybrid growth he pursued with enthusiasm. He had a hot-house full of species from the rainforests of Central and South America and it was seeing these one afternoon that gave me the idea.
I went back to Loxley’s Cross twice. The first time was at the end of January, when I returned to supervise the razing of the house I had built and the destruction of the maze we had planted. The latter had grown to gargantuan size and the uprooting was accomplished by steam-driven machines used usually for the lifting of large cargoes from the holds of transatlantic ships. It was an expensive procedure. I would have paid ten times what it cost.
Once uprooted, the vegetation was burned to ashes and the ashes ploughed under. I was satisfied only when no trace of our occupation remained at the spot. A ball and chain swung from a mighty crane arm reduced the house to splinters and rubble dust, also burned and riven in the earth.
I went back into the cave. It was worse than on the first occasion. This time there was a rank odour of decay that increased in strength with every step I took into the darkness. It was thick, this stench, miasmic, almost something you could stickily touch.
I heard her. I heard her singing. I knew that I was listening then to what the ancients warned of as the siren song. The singing stopped abruptly. ‘Mr Crawley?’ she said. ‘Welcome.’
Something large and heavy slapped and slithered in the gloom ahead of me. It grunted and squirmed along that granite corridor through the pitch blackness. I could sense the eagerness of its appetite. I reeled at the assaulting stink of it.
I fled. I have always been fit and strong, agile and quick. I boxed at Oxford where I exercised frequently on the gymnastic rings and parallel bars. I was considered more eccentric for doing so than for my morbid interest in mythology. But it was time profitably spent in terms of my physical conditioning. A terrified man can run in a straight line and that is what I did, out of that hellish place, not stopping until I was a mile along the beach in daylight, lungs at bursting point, exalted just to be still living.
Philip nurtured his thorny little creation. It had an interesting genesis. It was bred from an insect-eating plant, a parasitic vine and a variety of thorn bush that moves on only after it has strangled into extinction the host on which it feeds. My brother doted on this botanical abomination. He fed it sulphur in potash mixed with snake venom. When it was only the size of a bonsai tree
, it first hissed and seemed almost to snarl.
My brother has his specialism. But his interests are far reaching, his mind broad, his knowledge arcane and his skills considerable. He had been enormously fond of his dead nieces and I had told him the story of our Welsh sojourn and he had decided it would be far better if nothing was allowed to grow in the region where Amelia had planted in the mind of poor Muriel the idea of rooting willow and silver birch.
‘Drop it down the well you had dug, Alfred,’ he instructed me.
‘Does it not need light to grow?’
He laughed. ‘It will find everything it needs,’ he said. ‘It will not stay in the well. It will only begin there, once it has gathered strength and appetite.’
‘You talk almost as though it possesses a measure of intelligence.’
He seemed to muse on this. ‘Not intelligence,’ he said. ‘It’s more a sort of cunning when it comes to the business of survival.’
He placed the plant, potted, in a tea chest. He wrapped it in gun-cotton. He did so warily, his hands protected by heavy leather gauntlets. ‘There,’ he said, patting it, satisfied with his work, when he had nailed down the tea-chest lid.
And so I returned for the last time to that awful place. I did not linger for longer than it took to do as my brother had instructed me and then conceal the well cover with sods of earth.
Again, nothing remained of us. We left a hole in the ground as our legacy. My wife and I have a hole in our hearts. We believe, as I have said, that our daughters were destined to die in childhood. At least they were buried in the family plot in Oxfordshire, far from that baleful place. It is some comfort.
I write these words partly to try to exorcise the experience from my mind and memory. But there is another less selfish motive in describing this strange ordeal and it is to caution inquisitive men against dabbling in that which they do not and cannot comprehend. Some aspects of the world are blackly unknowable and best wholly avoided. We live on this earth. It allows some of us to flourish. We deceive ourselves if we think it is ours to rule.
I look at the artwork that survived the Dark Ages. We rationalise the monsters depicted in some of the surviving etchings and carvings and pictures as metaphors. But I think now that the monsters were real.
Our ancestors fought a grim fight against spirits bent on destroying humanity. I believe I came across one baleful spirit that survived the struggle. I encountered it weakened. It took a fabled warrior to effect the weakening centuries ago. But it lives. Restored to strength, I believe it would do all in its power to return to the lightless time in which it revelled and it succoured and destroyed.
Written entirely in God’s truth,
Alfred Randolph Crawley
Curtis finished the account and looked at his wristwatch. It was ten o’clock. He’d read it in his room. He had a few questions he wanted to put to Dora Straub. But first he wanted to talk to Saul Abercrombie. Saul would have finished his dinner by now. He wouldn’t be enjoying the cigar he once would have with his postprandial brandy. Smoking had given him throat cancer and his prognosis was as bleak as that of a seven-year-old child stricken by diphtheria in Victorian times.
‘You’re a slow reader, Tree Man.’
‘You’re replanting the forest because you think she’ll be grateful to you for restoring her domain.’
‘It’s a fair assumption.’
‘Grateful enough to cure you, Saul? It’s a stretch. She doesn’t strike me as overly compassionate.’
‘She cured those girls.’
‘No. That’s only what Crawley thought. That’s his assumption. And even if she did, it wasn’t out of altruism.’
‘Why do you think she did it?’
‘If she did it, she did it to earn the gratitude and trust of Alfred and Rachel. That plan backfired though, pretty spectacularly. She was influencing the girls. Muriel’s sudden passion for horticulture struck both parents as sinister.’
‘She needs the forest. It’s the source of her strength.’
‘I’d say the real source of her strength was the things Gregory took from her and Crawley assumed were buried with him.’
‘Even without the forest, she had the power to save the girls.’
‘But not much more than that, Saul. She was weak, denuded. Maybe she’s dead. Crawley’s account was written a century and a half ago.’
Abercrombie laughed. ‘She isn’t dead. She was around before we came and she’ll be hanging out here long after we’re gone. It’s as convenient for us to endow her with a gender as it’s convenient for her to adopt one. But she’s no more human than those trees you’re planting.’
‘You really believe in her.’
‘If you don’t, Tree Man, you’re more stupid than you look.’
‘It’s hard to credit you led your own daughter willingly into the cave, after reading about whatever it was that came after Alfred Crawley. I mean, how long have you had Crawley’s account, Saul? Are we talking years, decades?’
‘I didn’t lead, brother, you did. I followed. I wasn’t enjoying my best day health-wise. But I take the point you’re trying to make and think it way off key. We’re doing what she wants. Why would she wish to harm us? Everything is cool. Everything in the Forest of Mourning is completely simpatico. Agreed?’
‘No. Not fucking remotely. When do you get back here?’
‘I’ll be there by dawn tomorrow. I’ve chartered a chopper. That helipad you had built is an idea I should have had long ago myself, Tree Man.’
Dora was on the sofa in the lounge, drinking beer, eating popcorn and watching a movie on a projection screen with Pete Mariner. The movie was an old Hammer horror from the look of the costumes and the blood and thunder soundtrack. It occurred to Curtis that his co-workers had made themselves very much at home. He assumed Francesca was in her studio. Then he remembered she only painted by day. He recognized the actor, Peter Cushing, in a cape on the screen.
Dabs of light from the projection painted velvety patches on Dora’s skin. She was dressed in jeans and a ruched top made of some clingy black fabric. It exposed her cleavage and then clung below it to the weight of her breasts. Her lips were dark and glossy, full and half-open. He was noticing more and more just how potently alluring she was. It had started in the cave gallery where she had lied to him about what she’d climbed up and seen.
‘I need to talk to you, Dora.’
They both twisted from where they sat to look at him. Dora stood and brushed popcorn debris from her lap. Pete got up and went and switched off the projector. Dora followed Curtis outside, to the terrace. He didn’t sit. Neither of them did.
‘When did you meet Amelia?’
‘On the morning of the day we explored the cave.’
‘Did you tell her we planned to do that?’
Dora frowned. ‘I might have. I can’t remember the specifics of the conversation.’
‘That’s not like you.’
‘I know it’s not. She was beautiful. She told me Dora was an ugly name.’
‘Where did you meet her?’
‘It was by the cairn at Puller’s Reach. She said something about some family claim to the land here. It’s vague, Tom, as though my memory is foggy.’
She lit a cigarette. She pulled on it and the skin grew taut across her cheekbones. She exhaled and the smoke plumed from her nostrils and shaped a brief halo around her head and hair. Curtis thought it a dirty habit, but Dora smoked like Dietrich or Greta Garbo playing the femme fatale in an old film. She was as powerfully seductive as a screen goddess from the golden age. The tip of her tongue caressed her upper lip, giving it a ruby glimmer. He felt a swell of arousal plump his groin.
‘You lied to me about what you saw when you climbed to that crack in the cave.’
Dora frowned. ‘What did I see?’
‘More than you admitted to.’
‘I don’t recall seeing anything at all. I swear to you, I don’t, Tom.’
‘How did Amelia strike y
ou, Dora?’
‘I’ve told you, Tom. She was young and beautiful. She was altogether really quite enchanting.’
She wasn’t making any sense. She was always precise and deliberate and so calculatedly self-possessed she was sometimes an intimidating woman. She sounded stoned. But she looked so alluring there in the night lights of the terrace that he felt like nothing more than tearing off her clothes and fucking her raw right out there prostrate on the decking.
Pete broke the spell. The kitchen door yawed open and he came out scratching his armpit and said, ‘I need to talk to you, chief. There’s some of what our employer would call serious shit going down in Dodge.’
Dodge. It was what they had come to call the workers’ compound, after Dodge City, which had sprung up in the Old West in response to the Western Gold Rush. Curtis nodded, absently. In front of him, wet-lipped, Dora Straub smoked and smouldered. Even after Pete’s intervention, he could barely lift his eyes from the grapefruit swell of her breasts.
‘With you, Pete,’ he heard himself say.
‘Later, darling,’ Dora said, her eyes a hard and unreadable glitter. Curtis wrenched his gaze away from her and followed Pete back inside the house.
‘We’re losing people,’ Pete said.
‘And your response is to sit here with Marlene watching old Peter Cushing movies?’
‘Who’s Marlene?’
‘Never mind, bad joke. How long have you known this for?’
‘About two minutes. One of the gangers at Dodge just called me. They’re losing about thirty a day.’
Curtis shook his head. ‘Jesus,’ he said. It didn’t make sense. The pay was good. The work was physically arduous, but the conditions and morale in the compound were excellent. You sometimes lost a proportion of immigrant workers but the Poles and Lithuanians generally stuck it out and the Welsh workers they’d recruited had seen the job as a godsend in a depressed region of a depressed national economy.