The Darkest Part Of The Woods

by Ramsey Campbell

  Heather rubbed the corners of her eyes as she turned to Dr Lowe. "Someone will have called an ambulance, will they?"

  "Of course. It should be any minute."

  "There's more people I'll be bothering," Margo complained, "as if the hospitals haven't enough incapable old wrecks to look after."

  "You aren't one of those yet, mum. You won't ever be."

  "I don't think I'm quite senile yet at any rate. I know I was distracted, so I can't be."

  Sam felt a question stir within his lips, but his mother asked it. "What distracted you?"

  "Maybe you'll think I still am. I know you won't like me saying this, Heather. I heard something and I nearly saw it as well. I thought it was Lennox."

  "You mean you know it wasn't now."

  "I don't, no. It had his voice."

  Sam's mother glared over the tangle of fallen trees into the forest as if to dare her father to appear, and Sam felt as if the entire woods had leaned minutely forward to listen. "So what," she murmured with a pause that suggested she'd finished commenting, "did you think he said?"

  "I wish I could tell you. It sounded like he couldn't find the words for it. Maybe there aren't any," Margo said and visibly lost patience with herself. "I can tell you how it felt to me if you think that'll be any use."

  "You know you can tell me whatever you have to, mum."

  "I got the impression he wanted to let me know something that's going to happen.

  Either that or what he's like now." With some defiance Margo added "Or both."

  "Try and stay calm till someone's had a look at you."

  "I'm as calm as I'm going to be." As though to demonstrate her self-control Margo said almost indifferently "My camera got smashed, you know, and I'd filmed things today I never imagined I'd see. I guess it's round here somewhere."

  When she raised her head shakily Sam's mother supported it with one hand, though

  Sam could have told Margo that the camera was crushed under a rear wheel of the Nissan. "Well, here we still are at the woods. Do you know, when I did this to myself it felt like they were pulling me back in," Margo said, and then her gaze and her voice acquired some sharpness. "Where's Sylvia? Didn't she come?"

  Sam's face grew hot with the question. When he turned towards the woods to hide however he was looking, they gave him the impression of pretending to be innocently still. "She's off on the research trail again," his mother said.

  Margo slapped the clammy tarmac, either out of frustration or in an abortive attempt to sit up. "Where?" she protested.

  "She only went this morning. Before we knew you were hurt, you understand. She hasn't been in touch yet to say where."

  "Are you telling me she's gone away by herself in her state?"

  "I'm sure she'll be fine, mum. She always has been, hasn't she?" Sam's mother sent a frown in search of the ambulance before insisting "She's old enough to know what she's doing."

  "Maybe she doesn't. The closest I ever came to losing my mind was when I was pregnant. With her, not with you."

  Presumably the distinction was intended to forestall any guilt Sam's mother might experience, but some part of Margo's response appeared have given her pause. "I'm certain she'll be in touch," she said, "as soon as she knows where she's ended up."

  Sam thought that had little chance of reassuring Margo but could summon up nothing to say that might help. His only thought was that since his aunt had managed to leave after having told him she couldn't, perhaps he could too. He was gazing into the forest as if to share an uninvited secret with the heart of the bristling labyrinth when Dr Lowe said "I think that's the ambulance."

  Sam turned to see fierce lights throbbing like a storm as they swam up from the haze along the bypass and hauled their source after them. "Don't try to get up," his mother had to tell Margo as the ambulance swung onto the hard shoulder ahead. Sam could only feel redundant while the ambulance crew tenderly examined his grandmother and brought a stretcher. They were lifting her into the ambulance when she said through more than one grimace of pain "I hope the police believed me. I wasn't looking where I was going and the driver did his best to stop. I wouldn't like to think I was a trouble to him as well."

  "You aren't to anyone," Sam's mother assured her, handing him the car keys.

  "You'll find us at the hospital, will you, Sam? I should take the chance to have that talk with Dr Lowe if he's free."

  "I've half an hour if there's some way I can help," the doctor said.

  "Poor Sam, are you having problems with your nerves as well?" Margo called from the ambulance. "Thank God we have your mother so there's at least one stable one among us. I don't know what Dr Lowe must have thought of the way I was carrying on just now. See if you can convince him the Prices aren't really mad."

  Sam had less idea than ever what was required of him. He watched his mother climb into the rear of the ambulance with a brief anxious glance at him. The vehicle sped to the nearest gap and doubled back towards Brichester. As the haze melted it and swallowed it Dr Lowe said "Do you mind if we talk in my office?"

  Sam found that no more unappealing than the prospect of the talk itself. "Will you drive us over?" the doctor suggested.

  Sam walked to the Civic and opened the door for him. The doctor was silent as Sam manoeuvred the car across to the Arbour. Perhaps he was waiting for Sam to volunteer his problem or give some inadvertent sign of it, a thought that made

  Sam feel scrutinised, and not only by his passenger. As the car swung through the gates he saw the woods spring into the mirror while feigning stillness.

  The reception desk and the pair of staircases that rose like outsize horns behind it were deserted. So was the stubby corridor that led to the doctor's office past framed landscapes that struck Sam less as abstract than on the point of transformation into some unimaginably fluid state. Dr Lowe hung on the back of the fat black chair behind his desk the tweed jacket he'd retrieved from the road, and moved to the window. "We'll have this open, shall we?"

  Since Sam couldn't tell how loaded the question might be, he confined himself to a shrug. Surely the doctor wasn't raising the sash to enable the forest to listen in, though as he stepped from behind the desk and gestured at a chair opposite the one he took, he brushed a stray lock of hair away from his left ear as if readying it to receive instructions audible only to him. He placed his fingertips not quite together, short of praying, and advanced his gently quizzical face an inch. "Are you recovered enough to talk?" he enquired.

  That made Sam feel worse than defensive. "What from?"

  "Why, from your grandmother's accident. I thought you seemed the most upset of anyone."

  If that was true, Sam wondered what else he mightn't realise about himself. "I can talk," he admitted. "I just. . ."

  Dr Lowe gave an intent sympathetic look time to help before saying "Is it something to do with just yourself?"

  If anyone besides Sylvia and Sam knew their secret, the woods and whatever they concealed did. It surely followed that if Dr Lowe was in league with them he wouldn't need to be told the secret. For a moment this felt like a profound insight, and then Sam became aware of the sly imprisoned unfamiliar way in which his mind was working. It frightened him so deeply that he blurted "Suppose I caught it from my grandfather?"

  "What do you think you might have?"

  "I can't go away and I'm afraid to stay here. My dad fixed me up with a job interview last week and I didn't even get as far as London."

  "Your parents are divorced, aren't they?"

  "So what if they are?"

  "I understood from your grandfather that your mother felt she had to stay while your father needed to move because of his career."

  Sam saw where this was leading, and it was wholly irrelevant. "Right," he muttered.

  "This interview, would it have been the first one he's arranged for you?"

  "Right."

  "Do you think you may be afraid you'll estrange one of your parents whether you stay or leave? That
kind of conflict can be paralysing if it's not faced."

  Wasn't he meant to allow people to talk towards the truth? Sam was beginning to wonder if the doctor simply wanted to get rid of him—he wasn't a patient, after all. "It's worse than that," he said desperately. "If you knew how bad you might have me in here."

  "What do you feel that would achieve?"

  "Maybe you'd find out my grandfather, I don't know, infected me, passed something down to me."

  "Could that be what you're most afraid of?"

  "Suppose it is?"

  "Then by all means admit it to yourself, because it isn't possible. What happened to your grandfather was the result of a drug he wasn't in contact with till after your mother was born."

  "Unless they set off something that was already in him. If you've any chance of being schizophrenic that kind of drug can trigger it, can't it?"

  "I don't believe that occurred in his case. There was nothing in his history to suggest any tendencies of the kind."

  "Maybe you didn't go back far enough."

  "I don't see how I could have gone back further."

  Neither did Sam, nor indeed why he'd made the comment except to break any silence that would leave him alone with the knowledge of how little the doctor could help him. He was about to conclude that he'd done as much as he could to comply with his mother's request when Dr Lowe said "I should have thought there was a question you'd need to answer."

  "What?" Sam felt forced to respond.

  "If we're talking about problems that have to be triggered, what set them off in you? Have you been experimenting with drugs?"

  "No." Sam was almost desperate enough to admit to his first encounter with Sylvia in the forest but found the disclosure too shameful to contemplate. "I wouldn't after what they did to my grandfather," he heard himself declare.

  "I'm sure that's entirely wise, but I wonder if you're often afraid of following in his footsteps."

  "Sometimes."

  "Perhaps that fear exacerbates the conflict we've discussed and vice versa till you're unable to separate them in your mind."

  Even if that was a possibility, it only made Sam realise how little of his experience he'd managed to communicate. He was seized by a dread that more of it was dormant, awaiting words or something else to rouse it—something that loomed at the edge of his perception like the woods brandishing their greenish antennae beyond the window. He was hardly aware that the doctor was saying "Do forgive me if I've covered all this too quickly. I hope I've given you some food for thought at least. Unfortunately with all the demands of this hospital I'm not available for consultation, but I'd be happy to refer you to one of my colleagues in Brichester if you feel the need."

  "I'll let you know if I do," Sam said, which was the opposite of a promise.

  "I'm hoping that means I've been some help, does it?"

  "All you could have been."

  "That's the most any of us can ask of ourselves." If Dr Lowe suspected any ambiguity on Sam's part, there was no hint on his face, which managed to appear steeped in concern and at the same time bland. "So I gather your aunt's on her travels again?" he said, standing up as Sam did.

  In the midst of the released creaking of their chairs Sam thought he heard rapid stealthy footsteps retreating from outside the door. Dr Lowe either didn't notice or had trained himself not to react; he made no especial haste to open the door on the deserted corridor. By this time Sam had muttered "She went this morning."

  "Do you think you might take that for an omen?"

  Sam had to swallow a sour taste of guilt before he could demand "How do you mean?"

  "Perhaps not the best choice of word. For an example, then. Do you think if she feels able to travel freely even in her condition you might see if you're up to it? Perhaps"—the doctor raised a hand towards his left ear as though he was receiving an inspiration—"you could go to your interview if it's still on and tell yourself it doesn't matter if you succeed or otherwise, only that you tried."

  Sam had lost count of the points Dr Lowe was missing. "That sounds like an idea," he said as a way of making his escape.

  He was bracing himself to be met at the stairs by whoever had been in the corridor, but the stairs were deserted. As he hurried down he saw the woods lowering themselves beyond the open front door to greet him as though they were sinking out of the sky. He'd almost reached the doorway when a woman came through it in what was meant to resemble a stroll, widening her already protuberant eyes in far too much surprise. "Mr. Price," she cried.

  "Hello," Sam said as conversationally as he was able, and dodged around her, fumbling his mother's keys out of his pocket so hastily that he almost dropped them. He was nearly at the Civic when the woman he'd last seen at his grandfather's funeral darted ahead of him to pat and stroke its roof. "Nice car," she said as she might have addressed a pet. "Doing well for yourself."

  "It's my mother's."

  "Ah," said the woman, and adopted a lopsidedly knowing look. "I'm Delia, you know."

  "I didn't." That said, Sam could think of nothing to add except "Good."

  Delia rolled her eyes upwards while she considered that, then fixed her gaze on him. "Pleased to make your acquaintance."

  "And yours. Now I've really got to -"

  It was her knowing look that made him falter before her words caught up with it.

  "We saw you in the woods."

  The resurgent taste of guilt would have kept his lips shut if he hadn't needed to find out how much she knew. "When?"

  "Just before the old lady, Lennox's wife was in the crash."

  So she wasn't talking about Sam and his aunt. It was only to him that everything seemed to be about them, he reminded himself. "No you didn't," he said, trying to hide his relief. "I wasn't there till after it happened."

  "It looked like you. The face did, anyway." Delia scrutinised him, tugging at her cheeks with her fingertips to let out more eye. "Maybe it wasn't," she granted at last. "You couldn't have been behind that many trees at once."

  Sam's relief was dissipating, and he reached with the key for the door of the Civic. "Anyway -"

  "How's the thin girl? Not so thin any more, eh?"

  He mustn't take that as an accusation. Swallowing, he said "She's gone away."

  "Can't be far."

  Sam thrust the key into the lock. "Why not?"

  "She's like us."

  He felt as if there were increasingly fewer words he dared speak, and regretted demanding "Who?"

  "You and me and the rest of us. All the ones who can't leave."

  For a moment he wanted to accuse her of having eavesdropped outside Dr Lowe's office, but that would only delay the question he was afraid to ask. "Why can't we?"

  At once her face looked about to crumple—whether with dismay or hysterical laughter he couldn't judge. "Don't you know yet?" she said in a voice driven high.

  She was mentally ill, he found it necessary to point out to himself—never mind politeness, she was mad. Nevertheless he couldn't help almost pleading "Tell me."

  She leaned towards him, and he fancied something vast and dark as a denial of the sunlight leaned with her. "The woods," she whispered, her gaze flickering from side to side. "Your grandfather's in there, and my mother."

  Sam wondered why he'd thought she could be any help to him. He was twisting the key when she said "And lots that are older. Everyone who's been that close is part of them."

  That needn't include him or be true, Sam attempted to convince himself. He snatched the car door open, and Delia lurched across the front of the vehicle at him. He felt as if something beyond darkness was descending towards him—as if it was about to part the pale blue sky. "We'll be like them. We'll all be the same," Delia said.

  She was running her fingertips spider-like over her cheeks. Sam had an appalled notion that she was checking her face hadn't been somehow transformed. He was about to take refuge in the car when she looked abruptly sympathetic, which was yet more disturbing. "Don't worry,
" she said.

  He had the impression of stepping over an edge into worse than blackness by asking "Why not?"

  "We're the lucky ones."

  "You think," Sam said, unable to laugh at the idea even inside himself.

  "We are, because we're what people call mad or whatever they say we are these days. They don't know that means we'll be readier than they are. We're already on our way, so it won't be such a shock. Just imagine being Dr Lowe and the rest of them when it happens."

  Sam's question was more an admission of despair at having to ask or at learning the answer. "What?"

  "You should have asked Lennox. You still could. He knew the most of any of us." Delia smiled and stepped back, fingering her lips in case they'd changed.

  Sam had succeeded in starting the car when she waved her left hand and arm, stiff and contorted as a branch. He assumed she was bidding him adieu, though he would have made it a farewell, until he heard her belated answer to his question. "What called Lennox here in the first place," she said.

  32: Sealed by the Past

  Heather almost managed to refrain from saying any of the things she'd vowed she wouldn't say to Sam, but it surely couldn't hurt to accompany him as far as the front door and wish him good luck. The words earned her only a grimace, however.

  "What?" he said as if he didn't see how they applied to him.

  "Try feeling lucky. No harm in that," Heather said, determined not to exert pressure on him and hearing herself continue to do so. "Sorry. Don't let me tell you how to feel. You feel whatever helps."

  "Like what?"

  She was beginning to wish they'd talked this through after all, though before it was time for him to leave. "Forget me," she said. "Forget your father. Just go because it's you that wants to. It still is, isn't it? You still want to try for the job."

  "I've got to go where I'm going."

  "You keep telling yourself that. And listen, I shouldn't think your father's friend would have rescheduled the interview if she wasn't biased in your favour, but there's no need to stake too much on it. If you don't get the job there'll be others, and the main thing is you'll have gone for it. You'll know you can."