The Darkest Part Of The Woods

by Ramsey Campbell

  She was hoping this would coax an answer out of him even if he didn't show himself, but the only sound the woods produced was a single piercing note of birdsong. As she ran towards his ambush, a bird that she'd taken for a bunch of fallen leaves darted across her shadowy path and took cover behind an elm tree scaled by ivy. Was Sam beyond one of the elms? It seemed unlikely, since all the thick trunks were canted as though to indicate or reach for Goodmanswood.

  Perhaps she would find him behind the walnut tree whose branches were raised almost vertical in a gesture suggestive of a blessing or of some more occult sign, or the sycamore encircled by concentric patterns of its own withered wings, or the birches patched with silver she remembered taking as a child to be a sign that a hidden treasure was coming to light, or the low secretive masses of box, although to use those for concealment he would need to crouch. Never before had the woods seemed so intensely present to her; it must be an effect of her scrutinising them for any trace of him. A sudden notion that he'd doubled back towards the ruins of Selcouth's tower made her twist around, but she could see neither Sam nor the clearing. She faced forward just in time to catch sight of a movement dodging behind an oak.

  Its lowest branches were rooted in the ground as if the tree was bent on uniting earth and sky, and it was more than broad enough to hide Sam, even if those weren't his fingers on the edge of the trunk, which bore several excrescences like knobbly wrinkled hands, their nails painted with moss. When she rounded the oak, her lips parting to emit a murmur of relief, it proved to be harbouring only a contorted tangle of branches as tall as a man. She could only think she must have glimpsed the squirrel that was leaping from treetop to treetop. As she watched the thin grey shape vanish like windblown mist across the canopy of greenish branches, she was struck afresh by how few places in the forest offered a clear view of the sky; perhaps only the space around the ruins did. That wasn't important now, only Sam was, and he surely couldn't be far—could be hidden by one of the hawthorns, their trunks split like ancient bones and rearing their spiky branches to claw the sky down. "Sam, don't keep going away from me," she begged, "not now," but her shout only sent up a virtually silent flight of birds from high in the trees, as though the sky enmeshed by branches had splintered to reveal its underlying blackness. Some aspect of the forest seemed oddly wrong, but she couldn't spare it any of her attention while she had yet to find Sam. He wasn't behind any of the gathering of willows—each of their boles was split into three, rather too reminiscent of the fingers of half-buried malformed hands—nor beyond the fir trees lined up like skeletons of Christmas. She remembered the tree Sam had brought home, and immediately knew where he had found it. She had never noticed fir trees in the woods.

  Then, with a lurch of her consciousness that felt as if every tree had taken an unseen pace towards her, she realised there was more to it. Her search wasn't just showing her the woods in greater detail than she had ever seen in her life.

  She was unable to recall having seen them clearly even once.

  A bird the colours of several dead leaves flew out of the cage of the roots of an oak with a single chirp. It might almost have been responding to her thoughts, but it was the wrong response, because it reminded her that she had never seen a bird find a perch in the woods. Until today she had only observed birds flying over, and her memory of any birds or other creatures she'd encountered was very approximate, just convincing and detailed enough not to arouse her suspicions and yet so vague it might have been designed to forestall examination. Before she could consider this, she caught a glimpse of Sam.

  He was peering through a rank of beeches whose grey trunks she'd taken for a mist. She might have continued in the error, since they were so much more distant than she would have expected him to be, if his face hadn't made clear the spaces between them. "I can see you," she cried, which immediately ceased to be the truth. If nothing she said would persuade him to wait for her, she could only strive to catch up with him. At least he seemed to be leading her out of the forest, and she didn't mind admitting to herself that wasn't entirely unwelcome. When she came back for Sylvia she hoped to be with more people, though not Sam.

  A wind must have entered the forest. As she dodged between the trees, hurrying faster than she would have thought Sam could limp, she grew aware of movements overhead. Perhaps they were only the shadows of clouds, even if they appeared to be passing through the treetops rather than over them, but it had certainly turned colder, and she could hear more sounds among the trees than Sam was capable of making by himself. Indeed, she couldn't hear him—didn't know when she last had—and wished he would abandon his stealth. She thought she was hearing a nearby stream until the sound ceased, so that it must have been twigs rattling like pebbles and a liquid rush of foliage, though all around her the trees had stayed quite still.

  A sudden chorus of crows broke out as if to convince her she had often heard them in the forest, but the croaking was only a violent spasm of the treetops to her left. She'd begun to shiver and shiver again, because now it was apparent that the shadows were the source of the chill; each one felt like a stripe of ice penetrating her skin. An outburst of birdsong all around her failed to raise her spirits, not just because she could see no birds but since the various birdcalls sounded a little too sharp and thin, a little too similar. She opened her mouth to shout to Sam in the hope that would make him show himself, but her breath shrank from the task. She thought she might be close to the outer world, because surely she was hearing more than one cyclist race through the forest, even if it would be the first time she had ever heard one there. No, the noise was caused by restlessness in a mass of low bare bushes like a patch of fibrous ground mist ahead and to her left, although the trees around them held themselves quite still, or were their shadows hinting otherwise? She might have imagined her confusion was being mocked by hysterical laughter if she hadn't identified the uproar as a shrill flapping in the treetops. Her attention had no business up there while she needed to find Sam—and that must be his face peering around a fir, even if the distance made the trunk appear too scrawny to conceal him. "Just be sure you know where you're going," she shouted, but her nerves wouldn't leave it at that. "If you were a gentleman you'd wait for your mother."

  She thought she had managed to reach him at last. He didn't vanish until she advanced half a dozen steps towards him. At least there were only small areas of cover for several hundred yards beyond his hiding place. She ought to be able to see where he dodged, and she concentrated on trying as she sprinted across the slippery treacherous ground, dislodging fragments of its intricate decoration and a sweetish earthy scent that she found less alluring than it seemed designed to be—concentrated on ignoring the clamour of birdsong that sounded about to converge on a solitary note to reveal that its source was as singular, and the vast slow darkness that paced her through the highest branches, and the shadows rippling like disturbed water at the edge of her vision, although the trees owned up to no movement.

  Were the shadows betraying that pretence? The notion wasn't quite enough to stop her in her tracks, not when she was both desperate to catch up with Sam and anxious to ignore a stack of bracket fungi on an oak she had to pass, fungi unpleasantly reminiscent of a gathering of at least a dozen pallid lips—and then a further realisation seized her. "Sam," she cried, and faltered to a standstill only a moment before the shadows grew motionless. Their stillness might have been challenging her to believe they had ever moved, but her suspicion went deeper than that. If there was darkness overhead, how could the trees cast shadows at all?

  Not until she raised the flashlight as though it could somehow illuminate the problem did she notice that she hadn't switched it off, because she could see its beam climbing a pair of trees, etching blackness into cracks within bright patches of bark and throwing two elongated shadows ahead. At once those were the only visible shadows. Apprehension clenched her neck and shoulders, which felt as if a burden was riding them. She jerked the flashlight higher i
n a panicky attempt to locate Sam. Then everything she'd imagined she was seeing was extinguished, and a blackness vaster than the woods fell on her.

  For a moment she thought she was back under the mound—that she had never left the lowest room—and then she managed to distinguish through the branches that looked blacker than the sky a feeble star. By the time she succeeded in drawing a breath, another tiny point of light had shown itself, though its unsteadiness suggested that it was in danger of failing. The stars gave no illumination; only her flashlight did while shivering with the cold that was no longer confined to the shadows, or with panic, or both. Had she been searching the woods for so long that night had somehow fallen unnoticed, concealed by a pretence kept up by the woods, or was the darkness their true state? All she knew was that it had made her lose Sam.

  She gripped the flashlight so hard it bruised her hands and tried to level the wavering beam. Trees appeared to lean towards it to hint at their shapes and absorb a portion of it while fallen leaves used shadows to help raise their insect heads, and she told herself she hadn't glimpsed the stack of fungoid mouths begin to part their lips with a dismaying randomness. Then, at the ill-defined limit of the beam, a figure stepped forward just enough for its face to be dimly recognisable. It was Sam.

  "You'll have to wait for me now," she called, struggling to hold her voice steady, "or you won't be able to see." Whatever the truth about the darkness might be, she had to bear it if it brought Sam back to her. She took a shaky pace towards him. She didn't see him retreat, but the beam swayed so wildly that she'd advanced less than a yard before it lost him.

  "Stay in the light, Sam," she pleaded, doing her utmost to stabilise it so that he could, even though the effort slowed her down when she was frantic to escape the woods. As she strained her eyes, which felt as though the dark was massing on them, she tried to see only him, not the trees that kept appearing to lean hungrily towards the light. That must surely be a consequence of the swaying of the beam, and the oppressive blackness had to be the reason why the trees seemed composed so nearly of the dark that they consumed more of her light than they should, or was she suffering the effects of some trace of the substance that had overcome her father? Of course, that would explain the tingle she'd experienced on handling the tree at the edge of the common—it would explain the movements she glimpsed here and there as if the light was awakening fragments of the woods. They were threatening to grow altogether too clearly defined by the time the beam relocated Sam.

  Before she could call out to him he limped away from the edge of the dimness into the dark. He must be watching her over his shoulder, for his face appeared to vanish an instant later than the rest of him. "Wait for the light," she cried.

  "Look where you're going. You'll fall over something. You'll hurt yourself."

  Her voice was wobbling as much as the light from trying to catch up with him.

  She tried to concern herself only with that, not with the sights that the beam persisted in rousing—a rounded variously gaping stump that nodded to itself as it returned to the dark, a whitish log that set about using the remains of a dozen or more branches to inch caterpillar-like towards her, a fallen tree split into fragments that resembled eyeless reptiles with deformed legs, especially once they began to lumber after her, splintering twigs and rustling dead leaves.

  They were the kinds of thing her father would have imagined he saw and heard, she made herself think as she watched an object she had taken for a fir-cone extend spindly legs covered with scales and scuttle away from the flashlight beam, although a child might fancy she was seeing faces in the lumps the size of heads the beam found on some of the tree-trunks. What sort of mind would have the notion that the forest had grown carnivorous, if insects and birds and small animals weren't sprouting partially formed from branches? At the edge of her vision, articles were scrabbling up and down the trees, a process that involved considerable alterations in size and shape, of which those that resembled giant spiders were the least alarming. She was beginning to feel like a child abandoned in the dark, and didn't know what kind of appeal she might have made to Sam if the beam hadn't offered her a glimpse of him. Even though it left her with the impression that he was limping forward away from her while continuing to face her, she dared to feel reassured. Through the trees beyond him she was just able to distinguish the lights of Goodmanswood.

  So he'd found the way out, and nothing else need matter. She wasn't certain if the beam had grown dimmer or only more diffuse because she'd raised it higher to greet the lights, but surely enough power was left in the flashlight to see her and Sam to the edge of the woods.

  The apprehension underlying that thought had to be sufficient reason for her to feel paced by a companion behind all the trees at once. She could ignore it if she concentrated on catching up with Sam—ignore the vast presence that loomed behind the trees from which she'd begun to think the frantic shapes were hatching or otherwise emerging, though some of the tree-trunks seemed content to display swollen wrinkled growths that peered and mouthed at her. She wasn't compelled to look at any of this, not when she could see lit windows, however distant, through the trees and better still, Sam limping while the flashlight beam staggered around him as if they were competing at unsteadiness. She was yet more relieved to hear his voice until she realised her mistake. "Mum," she imagined she heard. "Mum, is that you?"

  Even if that had made any sense, she seemed to be hearing him somewhere at her back. It had to be as much of a hallucination as the rest of the misperceptions her mind was struggling to exclude. That was Sam ahead of her, imitating the unbalanced flashlight beam, and only Sam need be real. She was chasing him as fast as the trees and the slithery ground would allow—she'd abandoned trying to hold the flashlight any steadier than was required to keep him visible, however dimly—when she seemed to hear his voice again, more separate than ever from the sight of him. "Is the light you?" it said.

  It wasn't just its tone that succeeded in making her hesitate, though it sounded more desperately hopeful than she thought she could have borne to imagine; it was the notion of his being lost in the dark dreadful woods because she'd taken the light away from him. His voice had to be a product of her state, which must be worse than she was able to admit, but nevertheless she stumbled to a halt. As the flashlight beam steadied, so did the figure that was leading her towards the town. Only the swaying of the light had caused its gait to appear lopsided. As she realised that, she saw the figure remember to limp.

  She was jabbing the light towards it in a vain attempt to discern it and its reversed face more clearly when Sam's voice grew despairing. "Is it you?"

  "Can't you speak?"

  Tightness renewed itself on her neck and shoulders as though to fix her where she was, but she swung herself and the light in the direction of the blackness that had seemed to produce his voice. "Sam?"

  "I'm here. Can't you see me?"

  She couldn't deny him the light any longer, and yet she felt compelled to glance over her shoulder. Though it blocked more of her vision than she found reasonable, she was virtually certain that nobody was on the move between her and the town; indeed, the woods had become oppressively, intently still. "Not yet," she called as directly towards his voice as she could, and began to trail the flashlight beam across the waiting trees. "Am I pointing at you yet? Tell me when I am."

  Nothing moved except the net of dim shadows that she or the dark might have been casting for him. Whatever had been ranging up and down the trees had disappeared as though absorbed by the tree-trunks. Only swellings and the faces trapped in them remained on the scaly wood, faces that refused to own up to being hallucinations, however passionately she felt they should. She dragged the light across them, unable to move it faster in case she missed Sam, and then it shuddered to a halt on a growth as high as but larger than a man's head on a trunk that bore at best a token resemblance to a cypress. Though the excrescence was patched with glistening lichen and starting to collapse, it had her
father's face.

  The bulging eyes were no more than pale knots in the wood. The mouth that looked paralysed in the act of uttering a cry was only one of several holes in the face, and just as full of restless insects. It was all too recognisable, however, and so was its absolute helplessness. That seemed to gather on her, adding to the pressure on her neck and shoulders. Perhaps nothing could have jerked her out of her appalled trance except Sam's plea. "Why have you stopped?

  I'm over here."

  She forced herself to swing the beam towards his voice, and the night closed like black water over the ruins of her father's face. "Stay there.

  I'll find you," she had to swallow in order to call, and made herself walk away from the lights of Goodmanswood. She'd taken just one step when she felt the woods change.

  At first she wasn't sure how. She sensed only that the transformation was or was about to be immense and terrible. The air had thickened with the imminence of some event far larger than a storm, so that she was barely able to draw breath.

  The trees seemed poised to execute some movement—to cut her off from Sam.

  Whatever surrounded her in the dark didn't want her to reach him. She yearned to continue doubting its existence, but she couldn't if that entailed leaving him at its mercy. She managed a breath that aggravated her shivering, and pressed the heels of her hands together in case that might reduce the shaking of the flashlight beam, and pushed one foot in front of the other. "I'm still coming," she declared in not much of a voice.

  Shadows twitched ahead of her as if they were determined to find him before she did. As she told herself that was merely an effect of the light, they moved more than they should. They reared up in unison behind the trees that cast them, and each shadow merged with its source. At once it was apparent how much darkness was involved in the composition of the trees, which began to soak up the flashlight beam with a thirst so voracious Heather felt it in her shrinking fingertips. In a second the beam was twice as dim and reached scarcely half as far.