The woods seemed to respond with a noise suggestive of an enormous rearrangement in the dark before Sylvia said "I was just telling Sam a story."
"In the dark?"
"That added to it, didn't it, Sam?"
He closed his eyes as though to relive some aspect of the experience while he muttered "Must have."
"Why don't we find out how it lives up to a bit of light?"
"I ought to say I've Sam to thank for it."
"It was in the book he gave you for Christmas," Heather guessed. "A legend, then."
"More than that. There's a chapter on incidents that are too recent to be legends."
"I'd have thought the process was pretty fast like just about everything else these days."
"It was in the thirties." As if revising the sentence aloud, Sylvia said "It was in our woods. A woman got lost for nearly a week."
The window shuddered, and Heather seemed to glimpse the entire forest raising itself towards the black depths of the sky. "What kind of person could do that?" she objected.
"She had a reputation for being strange if that's what you mean. Some people thought she was crazy but most of them said she was some kind of witch because she kept being seen near our ruins, walking round them and talking to someone nobody else could see. You realise they believed in witches round here right up till when they started being scared of drugs instead. I expect the stories about her were why nobody bothered searching for her."
"But you're saying she turned up."
"She came out on a Sunday. She was changed, wasn't she, Sam That was the part that got to you."
"She looked as if she'd been praying so hard," Sam said, "nobody could move her hands apart."
"She couldn't have lived very long, then, or did they feed her for the rest of her life?"
"There wasn't much of that. She wouldn't let anyone feed her, said Sam.
"Then I expect there wouldn't be," Heather retorted, irritated by his speaking so quietly he might have feared to be overheard.
"Not because she wouldn't eat. She wasn't much older than me but when she came out of the woods saying words nobody could understand her hands were an old woman's hands. And when the rest of her caught up she died."
"I believe starving makes you look as if you've aged. And who knows what else she may have been up to in the woods," Heather immediately regretted having said.
"Sylvia and me won't be, don't worry. We'll make sure we're always out before dark."
Heather was thrown by his revealing her anxiety, not least to her. "I wouldn't mind if you didn't go at all."
"You don't have to be frightened, Heather," Sylvia said.
"I'm not. I should have thought if anyone was you might be after that tale."
"Why would you want me to be?"
"Of course I don't," Heather protested, though her feelings seemed increasingly hard to grasp. "But I can't help thinking you're in danger of becoming obsessed with the woods."
"It's like mom says, I need to come to terms. You'd understand if you'd been there."
Heather glimpsed the treetops straining themselves skyward in the tumultuous night and imagined how Sylvia would have needed to heave herself up from the earth. "Anyway," said Sylvia, "I'll have Sam to keep an eye on how I go."
"Are you sure you'll have time, Sam?"
"I will now. Andy says he doesn't need me or Dinah so many days at the shop."
"Sounds as if you should start looking for a better job."
"There's nothing wrong with it. I don't like letting people down."
"You can always tell me if you get bored with me in the woods," Sylvia said.
"I won't be. There'll be lots of stuff to see. There are things I wouldn't mind seeing again."
Heather wasn't about to ask what; she felt uneasy enough. "I'm going to try and catch up on my sleep," she said.
"I'll watch a while longer. I can from my room if you're ready for bed, Sam."
"You can stay if you want. I haven't finished watching." Heather tried to tell herself that wasn't further evidence of an obsession with the woods. Sylvia's might be understandable, but Sam's? Perhaps once she'd slept she would be better able to address that. "Turn out the light," Sylvia said as Heather reached the door, and she could find no justification for refusal that made sense. As she turned away she saw the treetops rise up as though to greet the silhouettes at the window.
20: The One That Called
Aleister Crowley, Peter Grace, Roland Franklyn and John Strong were among those who regarded Nathaniel Selcouth as the most far-seeing of their predecessors.
Joseph Curwen is known to have visited England in search of Selcouth's journals but failed to locate them. As a young man Selcouth travelled the world extensively and met both Paracelsus and Agrippa in the early stages of his research. Anecdotes suggest he was impatient with them and with John Dee, who later consulted him. Selcouth is said to have commented that none of his contemporaries dared gaze into the dark, let alone beyond it, even Count Magnus "de la Gardie", whom he attempted without success to meet in
Sweden. He spoke openly of having participated in witches' sabbaths in Europe and of gaining insight into necromancy from a study of the Broucolack, the vampires of the Greek volcanic island Santorini.
While he was born in London and spent his youth there, on his eventual return to England he built his final dwelling in woodland between Bristol and Gloucester, on a site he had identified as the focus of powerful occult forces. The large high building was perfectly round, and he declared it "rooted in the earth as any tree". Its shape was designed to allow observation of every aspect of the woods. His plan for his mature years is said to have been to create a messenger or servant that would mediate between him and the limits of the universe, both physical and spiritual.
A series of experiments was only partially successful. Sightings of the results in or near the neighbouring village led to his arrest for witchcraft, and necromancy was added to the charge when it was discovered that he had transported his mother'' corpse from London, apparently hoping to revive it. He was executed in 1567, and the bravest of the villagers tore down the round house. He remains one of the most mysterious English occult pioneers. Record of his birth have proved untraceable, Selcouth being the name he adopted to signify himself.
The website called itself the International Foundation for Occult Research.
Heather didn't know if its initials were an attempt to make the organisation sound friendlier or an inadvertent sign of how humourless its members were. She was inclined to assume the latter given the credulity the anonymous writer appeared to take for granted. Perhaps readers were expected to understand that the account didn't necessarily endorse Selcouth's beliefs, but Heather had her doubts. Nevertheless the site was helpful if it gave her an idea how Selcouth had become lodged in her father's head.
Lennox must have uncovered some hint of him while looking into the history of Goodmanswood. If that fell short of explaining why Selcouth had taken on such significance for him, at least it seemed clear that he'd communicated his obsession to his fellow patients a the Arbour. That wasn't all she'd hoped to learn by visiting the university this Sunday morning rather than wait to return to work in the new year, however. She'd wanted to find some way of confronting
Sylvia with the morbidity of her obsession with the woods.
If Lennox had become aware of Selcouth here in the library, i would presumably have been in the occult section. Heather shut off the computer and ventured among the shelves, which cut off her echoes and shrank her footsteps. Such books as were indexed betrayed no trace of Selcouth, and her leafing through the others failed to reveal his presence either. If her father had found any reference in one of the volumes from the locked case—tomes originally restricted because of their content and then for their extreme rarity—she wasn't about to discover it. Not long after Lennox had been hospitalised, a Muslim student had been given access to the contents of the case, only to spray them with lighter fluid
and set fire to them. Heather hadn't been sure how much she regretted the destruction of items she had never cared to open—the Necronomicon, the Revelations of Glaaki, De Vermis Mysteriis, and other tides as ominous—but she wished she had a chance to read them now, though perhaps not while she was on her own. The clunk of each book she returned to a shelf sounded wooden, while the smell of old paper reminded her of decaying vegetation. She couldn't pretend she wasn't glad to finish her search, even though it had turned up nothing. She collected her handbag from her desk and switched off the lights before locking the library and hastening down the shrill corridor.
Though the morning had been warm, the temperature outside came as not much less than a shock. Under a sky of a blue she wouldn't have expected to see for months it felt like spring, and inside her car it seemed close to summer. The trees around the university had stood up to last week's gales—indeed, there seemed to have been more upheaval in the forest behind Goodmanswood than anywhere else—and had been coaxed by the subsequent balmy days to let their buds appear. The world was changing, but the Sunday sound of bells reminded her of her childhood as she drove out of Brichester.
The edge of the forest was a tangle of fallen trees. Those that had sprawled onto the. bypass had been cleared out of the way, though scattered twigs remained, snapping beneath the wheels with a sound and a sensation that put her in mind of treading on insects. As she drove past the Arbour she refrained from imagining how the gale and its aftermath had looked to her father's fellow patients. She rubbed at a pair of tears before accelerating away from the sight of her father's window, all too reminiscent of a frame emptied of an old photograph which had needed to vanish to make her realise how well loved it was. Then, through the confusion of entangled trees past which she was speeding, she glimpsed her mother.
She braked and peered into the mirror. Margo was examining a random arrangement of branches through the viewfinder of a camcorder. Heather reached to beep the horn and thought better of it, and wondered if she would only hinder Margo if she joined her. She was watching in the mirror as the trees closed around her mother when she almost lost control of the car, more so by clutching at the wheel. She'd seen that Margo was unaware not only of the vehicle but also of the presence at her back. It was Lennox, or a version of him.
The figure was crouching out of the shadows of a tree. It was thin as a giant withered spider or a spider's victim, and seemed to be twisted into the shape in which Lennox had given up his life. The next moment skewed trees intervened, cutting off Heather's view of the figure and of her mother.
She swerved into the first space she could find, almost running into the uprooted tree that had left the gap. She had no time to ensure her door was properly shut as a preamble to dashing the several hundred yards she'd had to put between her and her mother. Any breaths she might have used to call out to
Margo were snatched by panic. A swaying lorry roared by on the far side of the otherwise deserted bypass as she clambered through a mass of leaning trees, which clawed at her with twigs and branches while bark shifted under her hands.
By the time she was able to see her mother she'd made so much noise that Margo had abandoned filming to gaze in her direction, ignoring the presence at her own back.
Except that nothing was there apart from a bunch of branches sprouting low on a tree. Their shape was sufficiently reminiscent of Heather's final sight of Lennox to explain why she'd thought it was more similar, she told herself. Shadows that had aided the illusion must have moved on, and perhaps as she'd driven past the Arbour she had been reminded of the unrestrained comments that had brought the funeral to an end. She tried to finish off with a smile whatever expressions her face had been betraying as Margo said "Well, that was some entrance. What's the alarm?"
"I didn't want to lose you."
"Not much chance of that, I should think. I ought to know my way around at my age."
"I'm sure you do," Heather couldn't very well not say. "I was passing and I saw you but I had to carry on till I found somewhere to park. Am I interrupting?"
"I'm done for today," Margo said in a forgiving tone and held up the bagged camera. "You'll have to see what I've made. You'll be amazed how much this changes things."
Heather glanced at the clump of branches. Their outlines were absolutely precise under the bright clear sky, just as they'd looked when they had appeared to take her father's shape. For the merest instant she had the impression that the phenomenon had reproduced itself elsewhere, but scanning the area showed her only the web of trees. "How?" she said.
"Colours, perspectives, even what you can see and what you can't if you play with the exposure. I had it looking like the middle of the night before, and you couldn't be sure what was there."
"Is that good?"
"I'm certain it's better than anything I've been doing recently. It's giving me more ideas than I've had since whenever. Maybe I should come back in the middle of the night and see what I can make that look like."
"Do you think that would be -"
"Oh, Heather, don't take me so seriously," Margo said with a grin so wry she might have been sharing it not only with Heather. "I'm just trying to show you how many ideas I'm getting."
"I hope the rest are better than that one." Unless Heather's expression conveyed the response, she kept it to herself. "So long as it's working for you," she said aloud.
"You can buy shares in that, and I'll tell you one more thing—it's what Lennox would have wanted."
Heather kept her gaze on Margo's face and told herself there was nowhere else around them she need look. "I wouldn't have expected that to mean so much to you."
"Forgive me, Heather, I don't think you like me to say this, so let me try and put it positively. Maybe not having as much imagination as the rest of the family is one of your strengths."
"Then I'd better hang onto how I am," Heather said stiff-mouthed.
"That's right, don't you change. I'm sure none of us would want you to."
Heather did her best to meet that with a smile before ridding them of the subject. "Where are you parked?"
"At home."
"You're saying you've walked all this way through the woods?"
"I still can when I want to. It's only an hour's walk," Margo said, then glanced at her watch. "Well, okay, maybe I was more. Shows how many ideas it was giving me that I didn't notice."
"Would you like me to run you home?"
"That would make me happy. We can talk a while longer."
Heather went second so as to assist Margo over any difficulty, but of the two of them her mother appeared to be more at home in the woods. Heather saw the surrounding trees rearrange their positions without moving, as if in a slow secret dance. Whenever she held onto a tree to clamber over it she felt the bark shift or prepare to shift, and remembered how the Christmas tree had seemed to change in her grasp. She opened the passenger door for Margo before hurrying around the car to shut herself in and send it fast into the road. "So where were you coming from?" Margo said.
"Work. Well, not work, but the library."
"Good to hear you're so fond of your job," Margo said as if she didn't quite have time to attend to Heather's words. "Is your sister any nearer finding one yet?"
"Not that she's told me. I don't know if she's looking very hard."
"She'll have too much on her mind, I expect. You'll remember how it can be, and of course she has a book to work on."
Heather remembered staying at work until Sam's imminence had bundled her off to the hospital on Mercy Hill, but she could see no point in arguing. "She isn't costing too much to feed, is she?" Margo said.
"Not much at all."
"That sounds like too little when she's no longer just herself."
"I can't stand over her and shove it in her mouth. I could never make her do anything she didn't want to do."
"Maybe she's afraid of being too much of a burden on the household, what with Sam not having much of a job either. Don't tell her in
case she feels obligated, but I'll help. Make whatever tempts her and a lot of it."
"Don't leave yourself short," Heather said, hoping she didn't sound jealous.
"You haven't told me yet why you were at work. Okay, before you correct me, not at work."
"I was trying to find out why dad kept saying Selcouth."
"And did you?"
"He was someone who used to live round here."
"That's all you discovered."
"No," Heather admitted and used a glance in Margo's direction to convince herself that only the depths of the woods were appearing to pace the car. "The story goes that he was some kind of, I suppose the term would be a black magician. You can still see the ruins of his house. That's where we found dad and the others the night he led them over the road."
"Will you be telling Sylvia?"
"Why, don't you think I should?"
"I can't see why I'd think that. It'll just be another reason for her to go in the woods."
Heather's dismay at realising this hadn't occurred to her must have been apparent, because Margo said more sharply "You haven't been trying to put her off again, have you?"
"I think I've given up."
"She'll be glad. You can respect her feelings even if you don't understand them."
"Fine, her feelings are her own affair, but I'm not so sure I like her involving
Sam in them."
Margo turned a gaze on her that Heather could feel on her cheek. "Being sympathetic won't do him any harm."
"Maybe I'm afraid she'll ask too much of him."
"That wouldn't be like Sylvia, would it? I'd say she asks too little of any of us." Margo kept gazing at Heather, less intensely now. "Don't feel excluded because they've grown close," she said.
"I don't," Heather felt compelled to say as the forest hid behind the first houses of Goodmanswood. In a couple of minutes she halted the car in front of the tall broad house, once a magistrate's, of which Margo occupied the top half.
"Want to come up and talk some more?" Margo said.
Just now Heather wasn't anxious to renew the confusion she'd experienced on visiting Margo's studio last week. Those of Margo's carvings that hadn't been included in the London exhibition were as vital as ever—far more so than anything in the retrospective had seemed. Heather had been unable to pin down an impression that the effect derived from some relationship between the shapes of the carvings and that of the forest visible over the roofs. "I'd better get back and see what they're up to," she said.
The Darkest Part Of The Woods Page 15