The Darkest Part Of The Woods

by Ramsey Campbell

  "So long as you don't let him know in advance that you're here," Margo said, apparently no more certain than Heather if the question had expressed eagerness or nervousness, "otherwise he'll never be able to sleep."

  She left Sylvia with another hug and restrained herself to a single backward glance. As Heather's party made for the Civic, Sylvia nodded at Sam's limp. "The wounded knight," she mused. "Mom was telling me how you hurt yourself fighting for the trees."

  "Fell out of one, that's all."

  "I doubt it's anything like all, Sam."

  He was silent as a tree-stump until Heather took out her keys. "Shall I drive so you can talk?" he suggested.

  "Girls in the front, boys in the back," Sylvia said at once.

  Heather was silent while she drove through the evening migration. Indeed, nobody spoke until most of Brichester had withdrawn over the horizon and the woods loomed ahead like a storm cloud fallen to earth, its eastern edge flickering with headlights on the bypass. Abruptly Sylvia said "When were you last in the woods, Sam?"

  He took so long to reply that Heather almost urged him to speak up. "Must have been yesterday," he said.

  "You didn't say you'd been there," Heather objected.

  "Granddad wanted me to."

  "In that case it was kind of you. Will you have much to tell him?"

  "I don't know what he'd want to hear."

  "The truth, I should think, unless there's anything that might distress him."

  "Don't a lot of things?"

  She would have had to lean sideways to observe Sam's face. Ahead the interior of the woods was fluttering with elongated shadows, and she caught herself wondering how that might appear to Lennox—as though a vast dark shape was flexing all its legs? Perhaps it was this sight that prompted Sylvia to ask

  "What do you think we'd find in there now?"

  "Whatever's usually there," Heather said.

  "And what's that, Heather?"

  "The sort of things woods generally have in them."

  "Are you saying that because you read my book?"

  "I'm saying it because it's just a wood."

  At the limit of her headlamp beams a lorry shuddered half out of the inside lane. "Have there been many accidents along here?" Sylvia said.

  "More than there used to be before they widened it," Sam told her. "The workmen had some with their equipment when they were. They kept saying someone in the woods was distracting them. Wouldn't you know they said it was us."

  Sylvia peered into the oncoming forest, and Heather resisted imagining how it might look to their father, as if the dark or something else as vast was stalking many-legged under cover of the trees. Her sister seemed entranced by whatever she was seeing, until she demanded "Is that him?"

  Heather gripped the wheel as the car threatened to veer. "Who? Where?"

  "Dad."

  Of course, the Arbour was in sight on the opposite side of the bypass. A man was standing in the gateway, back-lit by the floodlights of the hospital, and lowering from his mouth a trail of smoke. "He'll be a nurse," Heather said.

  "Where's dad's room?"

  "Upstairs at the front."

  Sylvia covered her face and made herself as small as she could without removing her seatbelt. The car had rounded the curve towards Goodmanswood, and the trees had put out the lights of the Arbour, before she lowered her hands and sat up. "Mom said I shouldn't disturb his sleep."

  As Heather turned onto the Goodmanswood road the woods and their mass of shadows continued to sidle alongside until the first crooked line of small ungainly cottages intervened. Once the houses had grown larger and newer the High Road sailed by, keeping, its shops and scattering of restaurants alight for almost nobody just now. A side street bulky with pairs of houses brought the Prices to

  Woodland Close, where several little girls with coats over pale blue ballet costumes were being escorted by parents into the community centre. "Did you ever go to that school, Sam?" Sylvia said.

  "It wasn't one by the time I started."

  "There was so much to see out of the windows I don't know how often the teachers had to tell me not to look."

  Presumably she had been looking at the woods. Heather parked on the flagstones outside the house and heard the dogged rhythm of a piano underlining the voice of a ballet teacher: "All be trees." Sam took charge of the bags of shopping while Sylvia hoisted her shoulder bag, and it was only then that Heather thought to ask "Where's your luggage?"

  "I left it in London till I knew I had a place to stay."

  "How could you think you wouldn't have?"

  "Maybe I thought you might feel I'd been away for so long I'd turned into a stranger."

  "You're no stranger than you used to be, Sylvie."

  "I'll take that as a compliment, shall I? I can't tell you how it feels to be home."

  Heather thought Sylvia's eyes must be unfocused by emotion, since she appeared to be gazing not so much at as through the house. Sam had barely opened the front door when Sylvia stepped over the threshold. As the keypad of the alarm ceased beeping under his fingertips she advanced to hang her shoulder bag over the end of the banister, then stretched her arms wide, embracing everything she saw.

  "That's where the trees came," she said, pointing to the corner where the staircase met the wall.

  "We still have one every Christmas," Heather said.

  "Here's where I used to lean my bike till mom got tired of the marks on the carpet," Sylvia said, and pushed doors open. "Here's where we watched too much television if you believed mom, except she thought any was too much. What's this room now, just somewhere to sit and read? We did a lot of that too, Sam, only it was our playroom as well. This is still the dining-room, I bet, and I know where the kitchen is. How about my room?"

  "You can have, it's the guest room now. It used to be dad's study."

  Sylvia scampered upstairs so fast she almost neglected to grab her bag. "That's where we used to hang our schoolbags when we came home," she remembered. "Who's in my room now?"

  "Right now, nobody," Heather said, since that was how the question had sounded.

  "It's Sam's room."

  "I hope you'll let me come in sometimes, Sam, for old times' sake."

  As Heather opened the door of the guest room she heard dogs start to bark nearby. The room was still recognisable as a study. The reference books and filing cabinet full of their father's papers had been transferred to the university, but Margo had left his desk and its chair as though they might one day summon him back. Heather found herself willing Sylvia to like the rest of the room, the plump green quilt, the fat green pillows, the wallpaper patterned with leaves, but her sister went straight to the desk. She sat on the chair, dropping her bag next to it, then interwove her fingers to prop her chin. "You don't know how much I appreciate this, Heather."

  If she was talking to any extent about the view the window shared with Sam's,

  Heather had to assume she meant how it would look in daylight. Just now all that she could see through the reflection of the room was the dim common stretching beyond her seven-foot garden fence to the dark woods. Sam planted the shopping bags on the quilt and told her "I can make dinner if you like."

  Heather moved to stand beside her sister. "Shall we leave you to -" The barking of dogs made her lean towards the window, and she interrupted herself. "What was that?"

  At once it wasn't there. It must have been a trick of light, a headlamp beam so fleeting she hadn't perceived it as such—had seemed to see only a dark shape not unlike a man but as long as a man's shadow in the depths of winter, gliding swiftly as a snake towards the woods. At the moment when its pace would have brought it to the trees, she imagined she saw the darkness thicken beyond all of them. "Just my eyes," she said. Then, somewhere close, children began to scream.

  7: The Sticky Man

  When Sylvia pushed up the lower half of the window, a scent drifted into the room. It must be some kind of night blossom that Heather didn't recognise.


  Lurking beneath the sweet almost cloying odour was another smell, of decay or growth or a marriage of the two. At once it withdrew into the night, and there was nothing to distract her from the screams, which were coming from the direction of the old school. She leaned across the corner of the desk to crane out of the window and shivered, because the night had grown much colder since she'd entered the house. Before she could see anything except the deserted schoolyard and the boxes of darkness that were back gardens, Sylvia was out of the swivel chair like a dervish. "Better go and look," she declared.

  She left the house so fast that Heather could only follow. Sam was on the stairs when Heather reached the front door. "Do you need me as well?" he seemed not to hope.

  She didn't know whether any of them would be more than a hindrance. "See what you can do to tempt your aunt instead," she advised him, and shut the door.

  She was hugging herself to fend off the cold, and its absence was a

  62 shock. It must have been emanating from the common. The screams were subsiding, or the children had been taken indoors, or both. Sylvia dodged through the old iron schoolyard gates as Heather's friend Jessica flustered out of the house opposite. "Jessica," Heather called, hurrying to catch up with her at the gates.

  "Is it Rosemary?"

  If possible Jessica was even more dishevelled than usual, her red hair that always looked windswept sprouting more random curls than ever, her thick-lensed thin-framed spectacles in danger of sliding off her token nose and down her broad face. She was wearing a voluminous dark green dress and a plastic apron printed with bunches of cherries big as apples and spattered with traces of whatever dinner she'd been preparing. "She'd never make a noise like that unless something was terribly wrong," she said.

  It wasn't clear whether that meant she thought one of the distressed children was indeed her granddaughter. Heather followed her into the j entrance corridor as the nearby dogs stopped prompting one another. J It was smaller than it had seemed in her childhood. Several pensioners I in artists' smocks had emerged from a classroom to stare along it, past posters for flower arranging and wine appreciation and bookbinding as a hobby, towards the double doors of the former assembly hall. Sylvia opened the doors to reveal a huddle of small timid ballerinas, one of whom bolted towards Jessica. "Rosemary," Jessica cried. "Was that you giving me a fright?"

  "It was Willow and Laurel trying to scare us," her granddaughter said, clinging to as much of Jessica's waist as she could encompass.

  Two girls were isolated on the far side of the wide high stony room. "Isn't anyone looking after them?" Jessica protested.

  "Their mummies aren't here yet."

  "We'll take care of them, won't we, Heather?" Sylvia said, and hurried to them. The ballet teacher and the pianist, two tall middle-aged women whose makeup had begun to fray around the eyes, were doing their nervous best to calm the other children. "Who are you, please?" the ballet teacher called in the high sharp voice Heather had overheard telling the ballerinas to be trees.

  "She's a friend of mine from just along the road," said Jessica.

  "And this is my sister," Heather said more protectively than she'd known she was about to speak.

  "They can help till the parents arrive," Jessica said with some briskness.

  "You're trees like me," Sylvia was telling the girls. "Let me guess. You have to be Willow."

  The girl, who was even smaller and more big-eyed than her friend, shook her head, trailing long blonde locks over her bare shoulders. "She is."

  "Call strike one against me, then. I bet you're both nine years old."

  "She's eight and a quarter and I nearly am."

  "Gee, two strikes. They're real little maidens though, aren't they, Heather?

  Just like we were at their age."

  "Sometimes."

  The girls were too fascinated by Sylvia's accent to spare Heather more than a simultaneous blink or apparently to notice they were shivering. "Haven't you anything to put on?" Heather said.

  "Our coats are in the cloakroom," said Willow.

  "Then we'd better go and get them. It's all right to do that, isn't it?"

  The women in charge both had the grace to nod. Heather bustled the girls to the cloakroom next to the entrance to the building. It smelled of the wood of all the coat-hooks. Though the smell reminded her of childhood—of herself and Sylvia making as much noise as the rest of the children crowded into the doorless room—it seemed older and more oppressive than she would have expected. As Willow and Laurel wriggled into their padded multicoloured coats, Sylvia said "What will your teacher tell your parents, do you think?"

  "She'll say we frightened Lucy," Willow said.

  "And Gwyn," Laurel added as if that might be a reason for sly pride.

  "We told them if they came in the yard they'd see the man."

  "Which man?" Sylvia asked, more eagerly than Heather thought appropriate.

  The girls glanced sideways at each other, and Willow said almost too low to be heard "The sticky man."

  Sylvia moved closer to her, and Heather felt she also had to. "Why do you call him that?" Sylvia murmured.

  "You can see he is," Laurel said as warily as her friend.

  "And he's so thin he can put all his arm through the railings."

  "And if you touched his hand you'd get honey on yours."

  "Honey or whatever it is."

  "Then you'd try not to lick your fingers but you would."

  Heather was opening her mouth to suggest they'd covered the subject enough when

  Sylvia said "What else is he like?"

  "Sometimes his eyes are all green," Laurel confided.

  "And when you see them next they'll have got bigger," said Willow.

  "But now they're all brown and wrinkled."

  "They've got wrinkles around them, you mean?"

  "Not around them," Willow little more than whispered. "In them."

  "And he smells of sweets," said Laurel.

  So did the cloakroom. Of course it would when children still used it, Heather told herself as Willow objected "Sometimes he does, and sometimes it's flowers."

  "That's quite a tale," Heather said. "Did you make it up between you?"

  It wasn't just being met with mute impatience that took her aback, it was that some of it was Sylvia's. "What's his face like?" Sylvia said.

  "Sylvie, I really -"

  "All scrunched up," said Willow.

  "Like an old tree with crawlies on it," said her friend.

  "No wonder the other children made such a fuss if you told them all that," Heather commented.

  "We didn't," Willow said.

  "Not all, then. Some would be too much."

  "We didn't have to. He was there."

  "You saw him," Heather said, audibly meaning the opposite.

  "You don't need to."

  "You can hear him talking," Willow explained.

  "Then may I ask," Heather said more pompously than she was able to control,

  "what he's supposed to sound like?"

  "Like trees."

  "Like when you hear them when you're in bed," Laurel added.

  Heather could have done without imagining that the smells of wood and sweetness had grown stronger, and she started at a loud creak and a squeal behind her. The entrance door had admitted two women. "Laurel's in the cloakroom, Mrs. Bennett," the ballet teacher called. "So's Willow, Mrs. Palmer."

  Heather always tried to like people, and so she did her best not to take against the two women in expensive trousers and fat sweaters who marched into the corridor as though eager for a reason to complain. Their chubby petulant faces were newly made up and lipsticked, and their perfumes blotted out any other smell. "Are they in disgrace?" said the woman with the larger and redder mouth.

  "I'm rather afraid so, Mrs. Palmer."

  Mrs. Palmer planted her legs apart and gripped her hips, apparently as aids to glaring at her daughter. "What's she been up to now?"

  "Telling
you someone was hanging around at the back of the building, did you say, Gwyn?"

  "Someone nasty," said the child she addressed. "Someone horrible."

  "Only he wasn't really," another girl, presumably Lucy, said.

  "They just kept saying he was hiding and we'd see him in a minute," Gwyn remembered with a nervous giggle, "like anyone could hide behind a railing."

  "It's Laurel and Willow who are nasty and horrible," small-mouthed Mrs. Bennett said.

  "They've made up one story too many this time," Mrs. Palmer agreed, scowling harder at them.

  "They're a sight too fond of upsetting people with their nonsense."

  "They nearly made us crash last night coming back from Brichester, going on about somebody running behind the trees."

  "Don't you worry, girls," Mrs. Bennett told the ballerinas in the hall. "You won't be seeing them here again."

  Laurel began at once to weep. When Willow looked uncertain whether to join in,

  Mrs. Palmer told her furiously "And you won't be going to the hair salon tomorrow either."

  Both girls burst into sobs and cowered as the women stalked forward to drag them away. "Do you know what people are going to say if you keep making up stories like that?" Mrs. Bennett demanded. "They'll say you're on drugs."

  "The kind that drove people mad round here before you were born," said Mrs.

  Palmer, and frowned at Sylvia. "Are you waiting for someone in particular?"

  "We just came over to see what the trouble was."

  "Came over from America?" Mrs. Bennett said, not quite in disbelief.

  "We can do without Americans telling us how to bring up our children. That's when things started going wrong, Dr Spock and all the rest of them."

  "Came over from my house just up the road," Heather had been waiting for the chance to say. "Jessica knows me."

  This failed to impress either of the women. "Well, I hope you found out what you wanted to," Mrs. Palmer was insincere enough to tell Sylvia.

  "I'm starting."

  Both women stared at that but didn't speak. They had dragged their woebegone daughters to the exit when Mrs. Bennett offered a parting remark. "I didn't think you looked like mothers."

  "I wouldn't want to if it meant looking like them," Heather murmured, and gave them time to slam themselves and their children into a car before she called "We'll be off then, Jessica."