Darkest Part of the Woods

by Ramsey Campbell

  The skull was the worst, because it was nearly human. Sam might have attempted to believe that it had somehow been robbed of a mouth by the fire, but that could hardly explain the eye sockets, which were more than twice the size they should have been in proportion to the skull.

  Sylvia was watching him with an eagerness he didn't like at all. "What do you think it is?"

  "Was," he corrected, and tried not to imagine meeting the creature in whatever flesh it might once have had. Could anyone have encountered it crawling on all fours up the steps, its huge eyes swelling out of the dark? Or would they have met it loping upright through the woods or peering around the trees? What expression would they have seen above the absence of a mouth? "We'll never know," he said, willing that to put a stop to his thoughts.

  "Do you think it's what he wanted me to see?"

  "How could it be?" Sam protested, and made himself turn away from the room to frown at her.

  "You're right, there has to be more. Let's go find it," his aunt said and pointed the light down the steps.

  Darkness rushed across the room and through the doorway to join the darkness at Sam's back. Just a few steps up would take him into daylight, but how could he abandon his pregnant aunt down here? Her condition was affecting her judgement, he thought-there could surely be no other explanation for her enthusiasm. He might have said as much, but the illumination had already ushered her around the bend below him. When he followed, it felt altogether too much like hurrying to outdistance the dark and the misshapen skeleton. As he caught up with the edge of the light it halted, and he was able to believe it was waiting for him until he saw that Sylvia had found another room.

  She kept the light out of it until he ventured down to her, and so he was able to observe that the wall above the doorway was scorched. Anything beyond it must have burned, he told himself, but that didn't help him breathe as Sylvia sent the beam into the room. It was much like the first one: the same size and shape, and as blackened. Its occupant lurched forward from the far wall as the light discovered it, but only shadows were rousing themselves. Their prone source was dead and charred and fleshless, which offered little in the way of relief. If the remains of its face had been turned away Sam might have thought it had once been a child with an outsize head. Its long legs were drawn up almost to the elongated chin, and its hands were clenched on the ankles. All this made it seem dismayingly human, even if it had far more teeth than enough. Sam did his best to persuade himself that most of the round holes in the upper half of the skull could hardly have contained eyes, but he didn't know if any other possibility might be worse.

  Sylvia had returned to watching him. He faced her in a rage that was both provoked by and attempting to overcome his dread. Before he could demand what she was looking for, she reached up to cross out his lips with a finger. "Did you hear it?" she whispered.

  When she released his lips they almost didn't work. "What?" he barely said.

  "Something further down."

  "What?" he felt worse than stupid for repeating.

  "Moving about," said Sylvia, aiming the flashlight down the steps as though to summon whatever was there.

  "If there's anything it'll be rats."

  She flashed him a reproachful grimace of the kind a child might give someone who'd attempted to rob them of a belief. "We'll find out," she said, and followed the light.

  For a painful heartbeat the idea that it was about to discover or call forth something at large in the dark paralyzed Sam, and then the notion of her encountering that by herself sent him after her, into a luminous stone cell whose walls and ceiling he would have been able to touch-a cell that jerked downwards, dragging him deeper with each step his aunt took. A hint of decay and sweetness drifted up, one of the reasons he was holding his breath when the beam fell on another stretch of charred wall. Sylvia hurried down to send the light through the doorway below it, and he saw her mouth widen in shock.

  He had to force himself to peer around the doorway. While the sight beyond it seemed to bear no immediate relation to his fears, it failed to do away with them. In the middle of another curved stone room stood a jagged black pile several feet high. At first he thought it had been composed of bodies or parts of bodies, and then he identified the objects that resembled bones protruding from the mass as the spines of old-very old-books. He was taken aback to hear Sylvia murmur "That's awful."

  "What is?" Sam responded, barely audibly.

  "Can't you see?" she said with unexpected fierceness. "Just imagine how much knowledge may have been destroyed."

  "Depends what kind, doesn't it?"

  "No, it doesn't. If you don't have knowledge you have ignorance. I thought you were supposed to be working on a book."

  That struck him as so inappropriate that he wondered how little sense she had of the situation they were in. If the contents of the books had been in any way connected with the creatures whose remains he'd seen, he was glad the volumes had been reduced to lumps of ash.

  He was about to say as much when Sylvia advanced into the room.

  Darkness flooded down the steps and up them to close around Sam, but he wasn't anxious to follow her and feel even more trapped. He watched her stoop to the heap of ash and pull out remnants of bindings. "Of the embodiment of the spirit of a place," she intoned, "of the raising of the dead," and he realised she was reading titles or translating them aloud. None of the spines retained more than charred scraps of pages. Sam wished she wouldn't concentrate so much of the light on examining them, especially when he heard something dart out from the far side of the heap. His aunt swung the light after it in time to catch a whitish shape the size of a man's hand vanishing into a hole at the foot of the wall. "Like you were saying-just a rat," she said, turning herself and the beam towards the doorway with a smile he thought was intended to convince not only him. Then the beam jerked to one side of him, and he took her to have noticed something he couldn't see within the room until he heard a sound behind him.

  It was a scratching, a scrabbling. It sounded as if the cause of it was digging something up, perhaps itself. It was below him, but in the confined space he couldn't judge how near it was. His aunt hurried forward, thrusting her midriff at him, to search with the light. Sam never knew what prompted him-desperation, disgust with his own passivity, a last attempt to protect her by at least intervening between her and whatever was to be encountered-to snatch the flashlight and thrust the beam into the dark. Once that was done he could only follow it down.

  He felt by no means as much in control as he supposed he'd hoped. He was close to feeling that his aunt's bulky presence at his back was forcing him to descend. His limping shook the light, so that the narrow passage appeared to quake on his behalf. With every step he expected a face or less than one to lurch into view. The noises had ceased, but what might that imply? The sweetish decaying smell rose out of the dark as the beam lit another charred stretch of wall. Whatever was down there must have burned, he thought so furiously he almost announced it aloud. He stumbled down to the opening that

  presumably had once framed a door and jabbed the light into the blackness.

  The occupant of the room was crouching just inside the doorway. When it floundered at him as though it had been awaiting his cue, it took Sam a moment that felt like the end of his life to realise that it had only been pushed forward by its shadow. At first all he saw while he recoiled was what appeared to be its fist-sized mouth, which seemed to widen as the light shook. Then he distinguished that the rest of the face would have been under it-that the round toothless orifice was on top of the small skull, which displayed no other sockets. Otherwise the body looked to have been quite human and scarcely as large as a child's. It must have tried to escape from the room-perhaps even to follow whoever had set the fire-before the flames had seared its bones black. He started when his aunt spoke. "Sad," she whispered. "Another one that didn't make it."

  "Who'd want them to?"

  She didn't answer immediately upon o
pening her mouth. His nerves were demanding he reduce the question to one word when she said "We still have to find that out, don't we?"

  "No," he muttered-would have shouted if he hadn't been afraid that might draw some attention. He felt as though Sylvia and in particular her midriff were blocking his way back to daylight. When his response didn't move her he said not much more loudly or fiercely "Why, for Christ's sake?"

  "Oh, Sam." As well as disappointment he thought he glimpsed a secret loneliness in her eyes. "I know you'll see," she said.

  He was seeing the small body with its gaping cranium. He found himself striving to hold the light on it absolutely still rather than allow the dark to hide it while it was near him.

  Once he'd stayed immobile for some moments his aunt said "Are you going to carry on leading or shall I take over?"

  He ached to say that the answer was neither. He couldn't even tell which was worse. The light wobbled half out of the room as he took one faltering pace downwards. "Go ahead, Sam.

  You can do it," his aunt said as if she was amused by his behaviour. That angered him so much it almost overpowered his panic, and he limped down fast into the twisting stony dark. No sound came to greet him, and only a hint of an odour suggestive of more than decomposition seemed to be lying in wait as the steps fell away at the edge of the light. Then they ended, so abruptly that he snatched away from the wall the hand that had been doing its best to steady him and doubled his grip on the flashlight. "What is it?" Sylvia demanded, resentful of his nervousness.

  "I don't know yet," Sam protested, and forced himself to direct the beam into the rectangular hole below him. It was by no means as deep as shadows had made it appear. It had been exposed by the removal of a loose step that lay on its lower neighbour, the steps not having ended after all. They led to a doorway and, at the limit of the flashlight, were terminated by a blank wall. As he leaned towards the hole exposed by the step he willed it to be empty-to contain nothing that might tempt Sylvia to venture closer to the unlit room. He struggled not to react, but a grunt of dismay escaped him. "What is it?" Sylvia repeated, pressing her midriff against his spine in an attempt to crane over his shoulder.

  It was a book not much smaller than the shallow cavity. Sam considered saying there was nothing but knew that wouldn't satisfy her. He ran limping down the steps as the walls capered about him and the doorway worked like a hungry mouth.

  He grabbed the heavy book] and held it against his chest, though the black leather binding was cold as a reptile, a dead reptile that nonetheless felt capable of movement. He fled up to prevent Sylvia from descending more than a couple of steps to meet him and thrust the book into her hands. "That's all," he said wildly.

  He was praying that his urgency together with the prize would send her out of the cellars, but she gave him a quizzical look. "What else is down there, Sam?"

  "Nothing." He shouldn't have glanced back, he realised. "Isn't that enough?" he said, and managed to sound reproachful.

  "Let's see," his aunt said, holding out one hand for the flashlight while she propped the book on the mound of her midriff.

  He didn't want to relinquish control of the light-to lack even that meagre defence against anything behind him. When he handed it to Sylvia his mind did its utmost to observe his actions as distantly as possible. He watched her sink into a crouch and open the book on her lap, then train the light on the first page. "Sam," she breathed.

  Her voice wasn't just appreciative, it was insisting that he look. He could tell she wouldn't move until he did, and so he bent his head over the page as she angled the volume towards him. The page was blank except for a very few words in a thick angular handwriting Sam took to be centuries old, though the black ink gleamed like an insect's carapace.

  Nat. Selcouth, his Journall.

  "That's great," he said, and altogether more sincerely "Had you better read the rest of it outside?"

  "Seems like this might be the ideal place."

  "You don't want the stone up there sliding down and shutting us in."

  At once he wished he hadn't thought that, let alone said it with the darkness at his back, but his dread must be worthwhile if it communicated itself to Sylvia.

  She touched the corner of the page to turn it, then let it he. "Could be you're right," she said, passing him the book as she rose slowly to her feet. "Will you look after it for me?"

  "I'll do that," he said-surely little enough to undertake if it sped them on their way. He hugged the book to his chest and planted his other hand on the wall, which felt exactly as cold as the binding, while Sylvia took almost more time than he could bear over facing upwards.

  The light reeled around her, then steadied as she trod on the next higher step. Some illumination was reflected off the wall, and Sam risked a final backward glance into the dimness. Something had come to the doorway to watch.

  Its hands were gripping both sides of the entrance. The fingers were at least twice as long as his, though thinner, and there were too many on each hand. He could just distinguish that they encrusted with a substance that might have been lichen. He glimpsed long arms reaching out of the darkness from a shape that he was profoundly grateful to be unable to see in any detail, especially whatever face might be found on its huge pale head. The sweetish odour drifted up the steps, and Sam wondered if that was its breath.

  When he grew aware of bruising his chest with the book he only clutched it harder, to keep in any sound that might halt Sylvia. He had to turn his back on the doorway in case she saw him looking and wanted to know why-worse, insisting on finding out. As she climbed towards the daylight he followed almost close enough to trip her up-to send both of them tumbling into the dark.

  The curve of the passage intervened between him and the lowest room, but that was no relief. His aunt seemed to be finding the climb significantly more of a task than descent had been. His ears throbbed with listening for any hint of pursuit, until he could scarcely hear.

  Sylvia switched off the flashlight before he'd quite escaped the dark. He limped quickly into the daylight, only to have to wait while she sidled past the fallen chunk of stone. He hadn't emerged from the passage when she halted and looked down at him. "Block it after us, Sam."

  He wouldn't have needed telling. He thrust the book at her and dragged the stone fragment onto the mound, then planted his feet on either side of the opening and dug his fingertips behind the upper edge of the rest of the slab. It was too heavy to move. No, he was able to wriggle his fingers further behind it, scraping off skin. His feet wavered on the brink that was slippery with earth.

  He felt himself falling, and hurled himself backwards, heaving the slab with him. It tottered on its edge and then, just as he dodged, fell into place with a stony crash that sent up a whiff of decay. As he manhandled the remainder into the gap it had left, Sylvia handed him the spade. "Better cover it," she said.

  He could think of plenty of reason, but he needed to know hers. "What for?"

  "We don't want anyone else seeing, do we?"

  "Why not?"

  "Because they wouldn't understand." In a tone close to wistful she added "I'm not sure you do."

  She was right about that, he thought, and wondered if he should be glad. He began to fling spadefuls of earth on the slab as the trees pranced in celebration of their capture of the sun while their lengthening shadows clawed their way towards him. He didn't finish until the area that hid the steps was piled with earth. He flattened the patch before limping hastily after Sylvia to abandon the spade among the trees. If he was going to forget some or all of the day's events once he left the woods, part of his mind welcomed that. He thought he would prefer to be unaware of fearing that neither the slab nor the weight of earth could imprison the creature he'd glimpsed in the dark.

  24

  The Gift of Vision

  RANDALL waited until Heather had finished printing out from the computer. Once he'd stroked his bushy eyebrows he used the forefinger to hold his tentative smile still.
As she took hold of the page, which felt as unnaturally warm as the January day outside, he said "Something of interest?"

  "There wouldn't be much point otherwise," Heather said with studied gentleness, "would there?"

  "Sorry," he said hastily, blinking his pale blue eyes less wide. "I didn't mean to..."

  "No, I am. Don't take any notice of me."

  "I don't know how I'd stop doing that, supposing I wanted to." Having earned himself a fleeting smile, he said "May I see?"