The Darkest Part Of The Woods

by Ramsey Campbell

  "Thank you for helping," the ballet teacher said.

  "Yes, thank you," said the pianist.

  Their gratitude seemed less than wholehearted, but Heather was preoccupied. As she preceded Sylvia along the pavement, through a lingering chilly scent the women must have left behind, she said "Do you think someone ought to be looking behind what the girls were saying?"

  "Willow and Laurel? I think you should always look behind things."

  "I just wonder if it's too simple to dismiss what they said as made up. Didn't some of it sound like trying to talk about child abuse?"

  At first Sylvia merely gazed at her. "Heather, sometimes your mind is really small."

  "I don't think it's small-minded to care about children. And while we're talking about them, I should be a bit more careful how you question them, even if you are researching another book."

  Of course, she thought at once, Sylvia had come home mostly for their father, which was why Sylvia said "I wouldn't want you to believe I'm here just to research." They left the glow of a streetlamp behind for the shadows outside

  Heather's house, and darkness seemed to well up from Sylvia's eyes, veiling her face.

  8: Forgotten Dreams

  Heather was in no hurry to emerge from a dense sleep featureless as fog when she became aware that she and Sam were no longer alone in the house. As she remembered the other was Sylvia she made to turn over in bed, hoping she could fit herself back into the sleep that the thought of restoring her family rendered even more peaceful, and then she found she was unable to move. The sheet between her and the quilt was pinning her down, trapping her on her back, arms pressed against her sides, as though a cocoon had enveloped her while she slept. A weight had joined her on the bed.

  She splayed her fingers on the mattress and opened her eyes a crack. Sylvia was sitting on the far end of the bed, arms folded, head tilted to watch her sister.

  She wore a black dress long and loose enough to conceal most of her gauntness.

  Whatever expression she bore was swept away by a welcoming smile. "Hey, you're awake at last," she said.

  Heather sat up against the padded headboard. "Why, have you been here long?"

  "Pretty much since the sun came up. I don't sleep a whole lot."

  A glance at the clock that was using her bedside novel as a plinth showed

  Heather it was nearly ten, which meant Sylvia must have been sitting there for hours. "What have you been doing?" Heather felt compelled to ask.

  "Remembering."

  "Much in particular?"

  "When we used to share a room."

  "Gosh, I couldn't tell you when I last thought about that."

  "Remember how we'd tell each other stories while we were going to sleep?"

  "It was like dreaming out loud, wasn't it? All the things we were going to do when we grew up. You had a phase when you were going to be an airline pilot and give us all free trips around the world. And I was going to be a doctor or a scientist and cure dad."

  "Something could change him. Nobody can stay the same for ever." Sylvia stood up as though the notion had jerked her to her feet like the puppet she was thin enough to be. "When will we see him?" she said.

  "As soon as you like once we're ready."

  "I've been ready for a while. Is Sam coming with us?"

  "You'll have to ask him."

  "Okay, I will."

  Heather hadn't meant immediately, but Sylvia almost ran to the door. She had one foot on the landing when she said "I don't suppose you'd want to share a room again."

  "I've got out of the habit since Sam's father decided Goodmanswood was too small for him."

  "Nowhere's small unless your mind is. Hasn't there been anyone since him?"

  "Sam's enough of a man in my life just now."

  "I can imagine. I meant share a room with me."

  "I think we've outgrown that, don't you? Is there something you don't like about your room?"

  "Couldn't be improved. I just don't think you can ever grow out of hearing stories in the dark."

  Had she been proposing to tell Heather some, or was she nervous of being alone with them at night? Before Heather could ask, Sylvia knocked on Sam's door, provoking the kind of unwelcoming mumble Heather expected, since he had Saturday off work. Nevertheless his aunt ventured into the room, and Heather heard them murmuring. "I'll be in the bathroom," she called.

  It had acquired a very few items of Sylvia's: a toothbrush, a hairbrush crested with a comb, a zippered plastic bag. Heather took her time in the shower, but when she stepped out of the bath Sam and her sister were still talking. Steam had gathered on the mirror, to reveal that someone had been sketching with a fingernail on the glass; a circle and a tree-stump or a tower. She didn't think the artist had any future to speak of. She cleared the quarter of the mirror occupied by the sketch, and then the rest of the glass.

  "I don't know about anyone else," she called as she emerged from the bathroom,

  "but I'm having a bite to eat."

  She was halfway through a bowl of Sticky Rotters when she heard Sam's door open, and Sylvia hurried down to join her. "I couldn't persuade him to come with us," she said.

  "I expect he felt you should have dad to yourself."

  "You'll be there, won't you?"

  "If you don't just want me to drive you and stay out of the way while you get reacquainted."

  "I don't. I want you to hear everything," Sylvia said, and shook her head at an offer of breakfast. "I'll wait while you finish."

  "Coffee?"

  "The smell's enough to put me on edge right now," Sylvia said, demonstrating with a squeal of chair-legs on linoleum as the phone rang.

  Heather leaned her chair backwards and lifted the receiver down from the wall. "Heather Price."

  "Margo of that line. How's the family now it's back together?"

  "How you'd want it to be."

  "So long as you do as well."

  "I can't see what else I'd want, except for you to be here too."

  "Me and one other," Margo said, and with a cheerfulness that sounded only slightly determined "I'm used to having my own place and my own hours that don't disturb anyone else. It's enough to know I'm welcome when I want to be."

  "You know that's whenever. Would you like a word with Sylvie?"

  "I'll have one before I leave you in peace. I wanted to let you know I've been speaking to the Arbour. Lennox didn't sleep much last night, apparently. Neither did I, oddly enough. The piece I'm working on is giving me too many ideas."

  "I slept like a log myself. Like a piece of wood with no ideas."

  "Well, you were always the placid one. Anyway, I wanted to find out if you were likely to disturb him. Not you, Heather, I know you never could."

  Heather had to make an effort not to feel dismissed as predictable to the point of dullness. "You're talking about Sylvie."

  "Not in herself, just her showing up, but his doctor's sure it will do Lennox good to see her when he's been asking after her so much."

  "Is the doctor going to tell him she's coming?"

  "He thinks she may as well show up unannounced. Is she with you?"

  "Yes, and wondering what we're saying about you, aren't you, Sylvie?"

  Sylvia responded only by accepting the receiver. "I'm good," she told Margo, and

  "Like I'm back where I should never have left"and "Anxious to see him. Anxious how he'll take me ..." She was continuing along these lines when Sam padded not quite evenly downstairs. Apart from being barefoot, he was wearing yesterday's clothes. "Didn't you have a shower?" Heather enquired.

  "I will. I was going to make breakfast if anybody wants some."

  "Those who did have had it, thanks, Sam. But listen, I'm sure your aunt won't mind seeing you in your dressing-gown and nothing else."

  That was his normal morning attire on his days off work, but he looked so embarrassed that Heather changed the subject as Sylvia hung up the phone. "Who was drawing on the bathroom mirror?
"

  For a moment Sylvia and Sam regarded her with a blankness so identical it looked like a shared secret, and then Sam said "Sorry. Me."

  "No need to be sorry, but what was it about?"

  "Couldn't tell you. I was half asleep. Who was talking in the night and woke me up?"

  Sylvia resumed her blank look. Since she appeared to be set in her silence,

  Heather said "What do you think you heard?"

  "Someone."

  "Saying what?"

  "I didn't understand what it was muttering on about. It stopped when I got up."

  "I expect you dreamed it."

  "Like I dreamed the stuff I was trying to see what it looked like on the mirror."

  "As long as that's settled," Sylvia said, "do you think we could leave pretty soon?"

  "We can now," Heather told her, and immediately wondered how their father would react to Sylvia. That was far more important than speculating about the length of time Sylvia might have sat with her on the bed. There was no point in brooding over that—no reason to think it had been Sylvia's voice Sam had imagined he heard in the dark.

  9: In a Ring

  As soon as Heather drove through the gateway she saw Lennox. Of several patients in folding chairs on the lawn, he was the closest to the gates. She couldn't tell whether he and his fellow inmates were watching the road or the woods, which had trapped a morning mist, though the November sky was clear. All six twisted in their seats to observe her progress up the drive. So much of a reaction made her tense, so that she was glad to see nurses in the grounds and

  Dr Lowe in the front entrance of the Arbour.

  He was polishing his glasses. Without them his round face looked unprotected, not as competent as he would surely have preferred to appear. He held the glasses up as though to focus on some aspect of the woods, then emitted a gasp he might have wanted nobody to hear, and breathed on a lens that he rubbed afresh with a large sky-blue handkerchief. As Heather parked in front of a bay window he donned the glasses, clearing grey hair out of the way of their arms with his forefingers, and approached the car. Even when the Prices climbed out he remained in a welcoming stoop. "You'll be the long-awaited event," he told

  Sylvia.

  Lennox and the others had adopted various gnarled postures to face her. "Did you tell him we were coming?" Heather murmured.

  "Just that he might be visited, but he seemed to know that. I won't be far away."

  Presumably that was to reassure Sylvia. Heather was aware of little except her sister's nervousness as they crossed the lawn. The seated patients had turned to watch Lennox, who seemed almost to sprout upwards from his chair. He swung it aside and dropped it on the grass as he advanced on Sylvia, hands outstretched as if to measure her girth. "I told you she wouldn't let us down," he cried.

  Sylvia took his hands, and they gazed into each other's eyes as if sharing a secret or trying to discover one. "How did you know I was coming?" she said.

  "Because you were called."

  Heather could only assume her sister was pretending that answered the question.

  "You haven't changed. You're more the same," Lennox said. "You've only grown where it counts."

  He passed a hand over the crown of her head in a gesture not unlike a benediction before wrapping his arms around her, loosely enough to suggest that he feared she might snap. The seated patients cheered and stamped so loudly they would have been audible in the forest, which appeared to respond by withdrawing its mist not quite far enough to unveil a rank of dripping shapes. "You see how you're appreciated," Lennox said. "You as well, Heather."

  As the stamping faltered and the cheers ran out of breath, the nearest man wheezed, "Introduce us."

  "This is Vernon, girls. He used to be a naturalist. Still is when there are flowers in the grounds."

  "They're what took me to the woods, the rarities," the man said with uneasy pride.

  "And that's Delia. Her mother used to take her walking there every Sunday."

  Delia clapped her fingers to her cheeks as if her protuberant eyes needed support. "Carried on after she was dead and buried."

  "You did," Heather felt it was advisable to say, "not your mother."

  "Her or something that kept looking like her."

  Heather regretted having spoken, not least because Lennox gave Delia a smile that might have greeted a witty remark. "And that's Phyllis next to Delia," he said. "Phyllis used to pick mushrooms in the woods about this time of year "

  "You are what you eat," Phyllis declared and used her greyish tongue to trace increasingly unappetising shapes around her lips.

  "I'm Timothy," said the man beside her, his head swaying from side to side. "I always knew there were rare birds in the woods. I could just never photograph them."

  "Something flies round the woods, but it isn't birds," his neighbour said. "Too big. Sometimes it's under the branches and sometimes up above, with a face I'm

  Nigel," he added with no apparent sense of incongruity

  "It's Lennox who sees furthest into the woods," said Delia, tugging at the skin beneath her eyes.

  "So far. Will you give me some time with my family now?" he said, and made for the hospital building.

  Heather was glad to leave his companions behind. Not only had they all been victims in the sixties of the mutated lichen, but now she realised they had formed the party he'd recently led into the woods He ushered the sisters up the left-hand staircase to his room, which was so warm it felt impatient for midsummer. He raised the window a hand's breadth, apparently as far as it would move As a smell of fog and rotting vegetation found its way into the room. He sat on the foot of the bed and beckoned Sylvia to join him. "Space for you as well, Heather," he said

  There barely was. "I'm not a sylph like her," she said. "I'll have the stool."

  "So long as it doesn't make you feel like the dunce. That's where teachers used to sit children who were slow on the uptake."

  "I did know that," Heather said, less sure of the relevance.

  "Sure enough, you're the reader." Perhaps that was meant less than positively, since he added "You have to concentrate on what's important. I've finished with most of my memories now, but I remember you before you were born.

  I remember when you were conceived, Sylvia."

  "Gee."

  "Do you know what I saw then?"

  "I don't."

  "Everything that has to be."

  When he turned to gaze into the blurred shifting noonday twilight under the trees, Heather tried to reclaim his attention. "What else do you remember about us?"

  "I saw you come out of your mother. I saw your sister do it with her eyes open, she was so ready to see."

  "I don't suppose you remember that, Sylvie."

  "Maybe I will."

  Heather assumed that was intended to appeal somehow to Lennox. "No need to be jealous, Heather," he said.

  "I'm not."

  As though to placate her he said "I remember how you were always taking her into the woods when you were children."

  "Hardly always, and only when she asked."

  "And your mother thought they'd been made safe." He might have been addressing the restless undefined depths of the forest as he enquired "So what are you going to do for me?"

  It was Sylvia who risked asking "What do you need?"

  "Let's see if your sister can tell us."

  Heather took this for an attempt to include her, but couldn't find much of a response. "I'll let you," she said.

  "The history of the woods."

  "I can find that in your library, can't I, Heather?"

  "Only what happened since anyone kept records," Lennox said. "Still, there'll be something before the manifestation that brought us here."

  "Manifestation," Heather said as a query or a challenge.

  "That's okay, Heather We don't expect you to understand all at once."

  She wasn't going to ask who else he thought he was speaking for besides himself.

&n
bsp; "Only don't give it too much time," he said. "We don't want you having to absorb it all in one go."

  She didn't know she was about to blurt "Like you did, you mean."

  "I haven't yet. There are changes on the horizon."

  The only visible horizon was formed by treetops, but that wasn't why she made herself say "Tell us about them."

  "In here," he said, tapping his forehead as if ascribing madness to someone else,

  "and out there, if there's any difference."

  "I think there is, don't you, Sylvie?"

  "Not once the woods get in," their father said. "Do you honestly suppose you could touch them and nothing would come of it?"

  He had to mean the felling that had made way for the bypass She was wondering whether to argue with him, and hoping that Sylvia would, when he stretched an arm in her direction before bending it towards the window as though to include her in an embrace "Look out there," he said "Tell us what you see."

  "Trees."

  She did: sunlit rows of them dripping like an army of the drowned, and more blurred ranks behind them—trees of the kind Sam had fallen from. For an instant the grey formless depths of the woods appeared to quiver as though considering what shape to adopt "That's all," she said

  She wouldn't have been surprised to hear disappointment in his voice, but it was quite neutral as he said only "Sylvia."

  Sylvia leaned towards the gap under the sash. The smell of leaves a-crawl with fog surged into the room, and Heather glimpsed a secretive movement the width of the forest She couldn't help holding her breath until Sylvia spoke. "I don't know yet."

  "That's the way. You will," Lennox said, and pushed himself to his feet by dragging the sash down. "I think that's enough for one day. I'll walk out with you," he said, and smiled rather wistfully at the doubts Heather was unable to conceal. "Only to your car."

  Dr Lowe met them at the foot of the stairs. "How was the visit?"

  "I think we've made a good start," Lennox said.

  "I'd say so," said Sylvia, and Heather felt bound to produce a murmur of agreement.