Darkest Part of the Woods

by Ramsey Campbell

  Heather watched him read the page she'd printed from the International Foundation for Occult Research website. Eventually he said "I take it the point of interest is that it's local."

  "Too

  much

  so."

  That visibly took him aback. After a pause he said "So what use will you be making of it?"

  She wished she knew. She'd lost patience with herself for not printing out the information when she had originally found it, but now she had it in her hands she wasn't sure why. She thought Margo would either dismiss it or take her to task for having sought it out, and wouldn't it simply aggravate Sylvia's obsession with the woods? She was trying mostly to convince herself by saying "As much as I can."

  "I don't suppose this is really the place."

  "For what, I'm sorry?"

  A cough that stayed inside his lips appeared to be the whole of his answer until he went as far as murmuring "If you'd ever like to, ah..."

  "I'm lost, Randall."

  "I wondered, well, I mustn't presume."

  "I haven't heard you do that yet"

  "It was only that if you ever need someone to talk to, of course I realise you have your family, but someone other than them, though I'm sure you have many friends too..."

  She'd lost nearly all of those once her father had betrayed his condition to them Those who'd wanted to stay friends had been prevented by their parents, either for fear that she might have been infected by his state and infectious as well or that Lennox was dangerous. No doubt the association with drugs had lowered her status further. "You're here," she rounded off Randall's sentence for him.

  "That's it, though as I say, perhaps here isn't ideal. If you ever felt like going out for a drink, or a meal if you'd rather, or by all means both..."

  Just now she felt her life was undergoing all the changes she could cope with.

  "That's extremely kind of you, Randall," she said.

  "Nothing to do with kindness. Please don't think that, especially if it means you'll say no."

  "It must have something to do with it, since you're kind."

  "Well, thank you, but it isn't only that. Not even largely." He turned as much of his back as seemed not unambiguously impolite towards the counter, where a student with her hair entwined in many colours was dumping an armful of medical books "Is it best left for the moment?" he murmured.

  "Thanks for understanding. If I ever need a confidant I'll where to come."

  It wasn't until his eyes grew studiedly blank that she realised he had!

  been proposing they continue the discussion without an audience. She was searching for a response that he would neither misinterpret nor find embarrassing when the phone rang. "I'll deal with that," he declared as though it had rescued him.

  "Thanks," Heather told the student, not only for the books, heard Randall say "I'll see if she's about."

  Though he wasn't looking at her, she could understand why might prefer not to.

  "Is it for me?"

  With a faint sigh at her having let herself be overheard he admitted "She's here now."

  "Who is it?"

  "Tommy Bennett."

  Heather shrugged at failing to recognise the name and took the phone from Randall's carefully aloof grasp. "Hello?"

  "It isn't Mrs. Price, is it?"

  She was being told that rather than asked, and by a woman's unfriendly voice too. "It used to be Miss and now it's Ms," she said. "Who did you say you were calling for?"

  "The person I'm speaking to."

  "On whose behalf," Heather said with decreasing patience.

  "Mine and I should think quite a few other people's."

  "But you're somebody's secretary."

  "I'm nothing of the sort. I'm a beautician. You've started imagining things as well, have you?"

  "I was given the name Tommy Bennett."

  "That's me." After a silence in which her displeasure seemed to remain audible the woman said "Thomasina Bennett. Laurel's mother."

  Heather remembered the small-mouthed woman, not least because each of Mrs.

  Bennett's remarks sounded as though it was further

  shrinking her mouth. "We met at the old school in your road. Your sister was encouraging Laurel and her friend to tell more of their nasty stories."

  Before Heather could take exception to that, a voice in the background tried to do so.

  "Mummy..."

  "Never mind that now," Mrs. Bennett said with enough force to be rebuking both of them. "Have you or any of your family been anywhere near our house?"

  "I wouldn't know where that is."

  "Pine Grove. The next along from your road. Have any of you been hanging round here?"

  "I very much doubt it. I certainly haven't, and I'd like to know what makes you ask."

  "Laurel saw one of you."

  "I didn't say that, mummy."

  A sound like thunder overwhelmed the handset, and it seemed that Mrs. Bennett had blotted out any discussion with her hand until Heather was just able to hear "What are you saying you said, then?"

  "I saw someone looking over our back wall."

  "They couldn't do that unless they were standing on something." Before Heather could judge if this was an objection or another accusation Mrs. Bennett protested "You said it looked like one of the Prices."

  "It was the man."

  "Which

  man?"

  "The sticky man. The man out of the woods. He's got lots of fingers now, and crawlies all over them."

  "That's quite enough. That's more than enough," Mrs. Bennett said, and flattened her voice against Heather's ear. "I don't know if you heard any of that."

  "Every word," Heather said as emotionlessly as she could.

  "You see the sort of ideas someone's putting in her head now."

  "I don't see who you're claiming is responsible."

  Mrs. Bennett emitted a noise too curt to be called a laugh. "Do you know what your family gets up to when you're at work?"

  "Do I get the impression I'm about to be told?"

  "Maybe you really don't know they've been in and out of the woods. Most people round here wouldn't let their children go anywhere near them."

  "Since you're so well informed I should think you'd know my sister was almost killed in there last year. She's trying to come to terms with that, perhaps you'll understand."

  "Sounds like she needs counselling or some kind of help."

  "She needs whatever works for her," Heather retorted, furious at feeling compelled to respond.

  "There must be something wrong with her if she has to go back where it happened.

  Just tell her to stay away from my house, and you may as well make that the rest of your family while you're about it. I don't want Laurel any more disturbed than she already is."

  "Then I suggest you try looking for the culprit somewhere other than my family."

  Heather would have liked to end with that and with gently replacing the handset on its stand, but had a question that was starting to feel like a headache. "Before I get back to what I should be doing, who else were you calling on behalf of?"

  "A lot of people. Pretty well everyone that knows where your son and your sister have been going, and that's a fair number, believe me." This sounded like a parting shot, but Mrs.

  Bennett had an afterthought. "I thought I'd get more sense from you," she said. "I spoke to your sister first, but I wasn't expecting much."

  All the protectiveness Heather had accumulated throughout her childhood surged through her, straightening her body like a sentry's.' "Then let me give you the warning you tried to give me," she said.! "Don't you dare disturb her any more."

  After holding its breath for a couple of seconds the handset replied with a drone that, if she'd wanted to indulge her imagination, she

  could have found mocking rather than simply mechanical. As she restrained herself to dropping the receiver into place Randall more or less glanced at her.

  "Sorry," he mumb
led.

  "For what, for heaven's sake?"

  "Forgive me for overhearing, but is this person threatening your family somehow?"

  "With gossip by the sound of it. Words don't hurt if you don't let them," Heather promised herself as she slipped the printout into her bag and retrieved the phone. "She's just a silly woman with too much time to think and too little to think with. Small town, small mind,"

  she said, and dialled home.

  There was no reply, neither then nor the other times she tried during the rest of the afternoon. She managed to get on with her work and Randall without, she hoped, either inciting or rebuffing him. No doubt Mrs. Bennett had sounded off to her daughter about Sylvia and Sam, which surely explained how they'd become mixed up with the rest of Laurel's fancies.

  Why, even Heather had momentarily convinced herself that she'd seen her father in the woods after his death. At Laurel's age she had been capable of imagining much more, though she had never been as fanciful as Laurel appeared to be.

  None of this quite satisfied her as she drove out of Brichester, following lights onto the motorway surrounded by darkness. Alongside the bypass, shadows angled for the blackness of the forest. As she passed the Arbour and her father's unlit window, she couldn't help picturing how this might have looked to her father, shadows dragging a vast blackness out of the woods to swoop in pursuit of her car. She had to admit to welcoming the first glimpse of illumination through the trees, and was glad to reach the edge of Goodmanswood.

  She opened her gates and parked in the paved garden and let herself into the house.

  "Hello?" she called, and then "What's that smell?"

  She was beginning to wonder uneasily where Sylvia and Sam might be when her sister responded from upstairs "Dinner."

  "Not that." Beneath the aroma of Indian spices lay a smell something Heather hoped she wasn't going to be asked to put it herself. "What else?" she shouted.

  "Nothing bad."

  Before Heather could be certain she was smelling earth and age, the odour vanished as though it had buried itself. She could live without knowing about it while she was anxious to learn "Where's Sam?"

  "Here," Sam's faint voice said.

  "Where's

  here?"

  "With me."

  Heather didn't know which door would open until Sam's did, revealing her sister.

  She felt as if Mrs. Bennett's suspicions were threatening to infect her as she said "So what have you two been doing?"

  "Nothing bad." Presumably Sylvia was grinning at the repetition and intending to look wry, but it gave her something of the appearance of a wicked child.

  "Reading," she said. "Reading to Sam."

  "He used to like that as much as you did."

  "He still does, don't you, Sam?" Sylvia rested her hands on her midriff and glanced over her shoulder to say "Maybe someone else appreciated it as well."

  Sam's rejoinder was inaudible, at least to Heather. "What else has been happening?" she said.

  Sylvia crossed to the top of the stairs. "You'll be pleased to hear I think I've finished using him as an escort."

  While Heather was, she'd had Mrs. Bennett in mind. "Why is that?"

  "I believe it's finished between me and the woods."

  "Then you're right, I'm pleased. Shall we talk down here so we don't have to shout at each other?"

  "I don't think I was shouting, was I? I don't know why I would."

  Heather heard defensiveness in that. She waited in the hall as Sylvia! plodded heavily downstairs, followed at a distance and no more speedily by Sam. Once they were seated in the front room, Heather on the

  couch and the others facing her, she told Sam "I expect you'll be off on your travels now, then."

  "Where

  to?"

  "Anywhere you can get a job that appeals. It's time you saw a bit more of the world."

  "Now you're sounding like dad."

  "Nothing necessarily wrong with that, is there? We didn't disagree over much, you know. He felt he had to move away and I couldn't, that's all."

  "What stopped you?"

  "You know that," Heather said, thrown by what sounded like nervousness. "Family things."

  "And maybe staying where your roots are?" Sylvia suggested.

  Heather thought this so unhelpful it was close to disloyal. "You didn't answer my question," she said.

  "I've been answering quite a few lately."

  "From someone who lives not too far away, you mean. What did you say to her?"

  "Nothing as terse as I wish now I'd said."

  When she seemed happy to leave it at that Sam mumbled "You told her it wasn't just us she could see in the woods."

  "Who

  else?"

  Heather

  demanded.

  She might have felt nobody wanted her to know until Sylvia relented. "It wouldn't have been you, would it? Don't say you've forgotten mom."

  "Why on earth did you tell Mrs. Bennett she goes in there?"

  "So she knows it's not just crazy Sylvia who wants to." Even more furiously she added

  "Sounds like it didn't work if she got in touch with you. Who does she think you're supposed to be?"

  "Your big sister?" Heather said with all the gentleness she could find in herself.

  "You mean that entitles people to tell you tales about me."

  "I don't think she especially was, Sylvie. I felt she was blaming me just as much."

  "For not keeping me away from her daughter, you mean."

  "For being one of our family, more like. If you ask me, for reminding people of dad."

  "They'd better stay reminded. He knew more than anyone, and he faced it too."

  Rather than contradict that, Heather said "I know a few things as well, and I've had to face some."

  "Okay, such as what?"

  "Such as the name dad kept mentioning."

  Sylvia widened her eyes as if she was seeing more to Heather. "How have you had to face that?"

  "Not face it. Nothing to face, just to know," Heather said, opening her bag. "I found this on the net at work."

  Sylvia's eyes stayed wide as she read the printout-Heather might have thought she'd forgotten how to blink. Her sister's face changed so gradually that Heather wasn't sure when her eyes began to gleam and the corners of her lips to raise themselves in a smile that looked close to smug. "Things must be coming together," she murmured. "It's about Nathaniel Selcouth, Sam."

  "Oh."

  The syllable was doing its best to be toneless but sounded like the escape of a breath he'd tried to hold. "I told you I'd been reading to him," said Sylvia.

  "To Sam," Heather quite unnecessarily said.

  "About your friend here." Sylvia shook the printout until it flapped with not much less than life. "We've got his book."

  At once Heather knew what she'd smelled on entering the house, which made her not entirely want to learn "Where from?"

  "Someone who doesn't need it any more, shall we say?" Sylvia said, and passed Sam the printout. "Look, this makes sense of some of it."

  "Such as what?" Heather blurted.

  "He can pass as swiftly through the earth as through the void between the spheres," said Sylvia, "being composed in equal parts of both."

  Presumably she was quoting, given her reminiscent tone and the way she half closed her eyes, though that lent her a secretive appearance. "Who," Heather said with an attempt at a laugh, "this Selcouth character?"

  "Not him, his experiment." Apparently Sylvia needed to slit her eyes further as an aid to adding "Yet he is fondest of the dark in which he was conceived."

  Even reading the source of all this struck Heather as preferable. "Well, are you going to show me?"

  Sylvia took so long to raise her eyelids that she might have been intent on something within them. She levered herself out of her chair but halted at the foot of the stairs. "You'll think I'm taking over," she said. "It's your room, Sam "

  She stood aside to let him
limp upstairs, then followed Heather, bumping her more than once with her midriff. She pressed against Heather's back as Sam fumbled with his doorknob, and Heather felt as if she was about to be offered the sensation of movement inside her sister.

  Then Sam moved away from the open door, leaving the room unlit, and she had to tell herself he wasn't afraid to enter his own room A lump of darkness lay in front of the computer on his desk. It looked blacker than anything else in the room-as black as the depths of the woods. It was just a book, and she confirmed this by slapping the light-switch down. Nothing but the blackness of the binding made the volume appear to stay darker than it should. Heather marched forward, wrinkling her nose at the oppressive smell of senile paper, and opened the book.