by Ali Shaw
‘We’ll get lost if we do that,’ said Seb immediately.
‘Not if we stick to the compass. We want to go almost due west, anyway. Going in a straight line would be quickest.’
‘There’ll be rivers and things. We’ll get stuck.’
Hannah flapped another map she’d brought with her. ‘We can use this one to find the crossings. It won’t be hard, I promise.’
‘What do you think, Adrien?’ asked Seb. ‘I think we should stay on the roads.’
Adrien swallowed. He had absolutely no desire to plunge at once into the deeper forest and leave all signs of civilisation, but nor did he want to look like a coward. He was grateful to Seb for doing the fretting for him.
‘I don’t want you to be uncomfortable,’ he assured the boy, ‘so I think we should stick to the roads for now.’
Hannah didn’t try to hide her disappointment. ‘I suppose I’m outvoted,’ she said, ‘but let me know if you change your minds.’
They followed the coloured lines of the road atlas west. Sometimes they overtook fellow groups of evacuees, although more commonly they only heard them, for the forest grew too tangled to see far ahead or behind. Disembodied voices reached them often, snatches of conversation heard beneath the wind that rippled the leaves, and sometimes they were sure they were about to catch up with a large group of travellers only for the voices to fall silent for another hour or more. More frequent than the wandering living were the stationary dead. They marked the road like milestones, some stuck to the steering wheels or doors of vehicles that had burned black, others still strapped in their seats wherever their cars had collided with risen trunks. Several times Adrien had to pause and hold his head at the sight of them, waiting longer each time for the cold and dizzy feelings to pass. That their deaths went so undisguised was his only protection. Afforded no dignity or final respects, their passage neither recorded nor relayed to their loved ones, sometimes the dead seemed too unreal to have been actual people. If, however, some identifying mark was on display, be it a wedding ring or the contents of a handbag turned out by a carrion animal, Adrien would skip on past as quickly as he could, and focus on keeping his stomach in check.
Progress was slow, mostly because of Adrien’s luggage. His rucksack weighed him down and his holdall unbalanced him whenever he shifted it grip-to-grip. How the hell, he wondered, did explorers travel the length and breadth of deserts and arctic wastes? Bastards had husky dogs, he supposed.
Eventually Hannah stopped him. ‘Adrien, you shouldn’t be carrying this much.’
‘Thank you,’ he said, impressed by her kindness. ‘It’s very good of you to offer. Perhaps if you could each put just three or four of my things into your packs . . .’
‘No, Adrien. Seb and I have already got the tent and the sleeping bags, the cooking gear and the rest of it. I meant that you should leave some stuff behind.’
He gaped around him at the trees. ‘What? Here on the road? How would I ever find it again?’
‘You wouldn’t.’
‘But . . . these are my things!’
‘And yours to dispose of. Do you really need, for example, that pair of polished shoes dangling from your straps?’
He hung his head. Then, item by painful item, he set aside over half of his luggage, and the holdall itself, piling everything neatly at the foot of a tree. ‘Although I don’t know,’ he moaned, ‘whether I’ll have enough clothes to get by. We’ll need to do laundry in the next few days, else I’ll have nothing left to wear.’
‘We’ll make what we’ve got last longer than that. We can rinse stuff in a river when we cross one. Don’t look so horrified. It’s your own smell, Adrien, and nothing to be ashamed of.’
They pressed on, and it was true that Adrien found things easier with a lighter load. The road became even grimmer as the day warmed, and in places they walked with their sleeves across their noses and mouths. They all stopped mid-stride when the bloodied driver of a minibus lurched out of his seat and raised an arm to hail them, but a moment later they realised he was just another traveller, with a bandaged wound in his arm. He said he had been resting on the padded seat, and was heading from another town towards their own. After they had bid him farewell and good luck, Hannah turned to the others and said, ‘Are you still sure you want to do this on the roads? It will be much less gruesome going cross-country.’
Adrien and Seb remained unwilling. ‘I’m scared, to be honest with you,’ admitted Seb, and Adrien was grateful not to have to say so too.
Resolved as they were to stick to the road, it seemed that in places the road itself had other ideas. For long stretches it was broken into so many pieces that it was hard to discern its original contours. Slabs of tarmac lay scattered in every direction like the slates of some volcanic wasteland, or wedged sometimes into tree trunks like hard black fungi. In one such place there was no sign of anything but the woods, until Adrien felt something wet splatter his hand. He was surprised to find a streak of white liquid dribbling over his knuckles, and when he looked up saw a milk tanker groaning in the branches. They walked in the direction it had been driving, and both Adrien and Seb sighed with relief when they again saw bent lampposts and some cat’s-eyes still embedded in asphalted ground.
Another hour passed. Fairy-tufts of cotton began to blow out of the deeper forest, swirling round their heads without ever alighting. Then Hannah stopped in her tracks and clapped her hands. ‘Oh my God. Look!’
Without warning, she swerved off the road. Adrien and Seb did their best to follow, while she raced over a driveway and then a fence flattened against the earth. Beyond it they found themselves surrounded by flowers at every level, not only on the forest floor but strung like bunting through the canopy. None of them grew wild, every stem belonging to a flowerpot or grow-bag held at a jaunty angle by the branches.
‘This,’ Hannah explained, gesturing to all the colour, ‘is where I work.’
The nursery had consisted of a wide yard and car park, then three ranks of greenhouses and polytunnels. The panes had been smashed from the greenhouses and their frames swatted against the tree trunks, leaving legs of metal dangling from the bark. ‘I didn’t recognise it,’ she laughed, ‘I thought we must have missed it.’
She carried on into the middle of the nursery, turning around and around with her neck arched to better take in the destruction. ‘Ten years,’ she said. ‘That’s how long I worked here!’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Adrien. ‘It must be hard to see all that effort gone to waste.’
Hannah laughed. ‘Don’t be silly! Do you think I liked it that much? I mean, I used to, but . . . last year we got a new boss, and she and I had . . . differences of opinion.’
‘You hated her,’ clarified Seb.
‘I didn’t hate her, Seb. Diane is just . . . she just . . . started to put profit above everything.’
‘Doing what’s good for business,’ shrugged Adrien.
‘She put all the flowers into rectangles. Red flowers over there, yellow over there, just blocks and blocks in neat rows. Before Diane we grew all sorts of things, wherever they grew best. Even if we made a few hundred pounds less each year, we still made enough to get by.’
Adrien had to admit that the trees appeared to prefer Hannah’s system. They had jumbled all of the nursery’s flowers into a jarring mess of colour.
‘Is there anything you want from here, Mum?’ asked Seb.
‘No,’ said Hannah, ‘let’s leave it as it is.’
‘What about that bike? Who does that belong to?’
Adrien and Hannah turned to look in the direction Seb was pointing. A bicycle with a wicker basket leaned against a tree trunk, and at the sight of it Hannah’s breath caught. ‘That’s Diane’s bike!’ she said, then headed towards it.
‘Diane?’ she called out. ‘Diane, are you here? Hello, Diane? It’s Hannah!’
‘Mum . . .’ said Seb, urgently. He had not followed her towards the bike. Instead he was pointing at something
else now, and his arm was shaking.
It was Diane.
She lay in the shade of a hornbeam tree, a curly redhead with one or two locks of grey in her mane. Now her hair was the only way to identify her.
Adrien shut his eyes, but it made hardly any difference. The sight before him had seared itself instantaneously into his mind. A crow cawed overhead, and with that sound revulsion kicked in. Adrien veered away and clung to a tree trunk for support, his fingernails digging into the bark. He vomited across its roots, then vomited a second time.
He did not know what possessed him to turn and look again. Perhaps it was that same disbelief that he’d felt at the horrors along the road, perhaps some sort of need to pay respects. Hannah was looking, too, and Seb had his arms wrapped around her.
Diane’s body had been opened wide as a flower, with her bones its jutting stamens. It was obvious that there was less of her than there should have been, although pieces of something streaked the undergrowth.
‘Wh-what . . .’ began Adrien, under his breath.
Hannah gave a long, dry groan and gripped Seb’s arm for support.
‘What’s happened?’ asked Adrien, louder this time.
‘Eaten,’ said Hannah, very quietly.
‘Eaten?’ gasped Adrien.
Hannah held one hand to her head. ‘It must have been wolves.’
Adrien thought at once of the businessman outside the police station, who had claimed he’d seen a wolf running through the forest, just hours after the trees came.
‘Diane!’ sobbed Hannah, crumpling up so quickly that it was all Seb could do to lower her gently to the ground. The boy crouched with his arms around his mother, to block her view of the body, but at once Hannah strained to look over his shoulder and gave another anguished cry.
‘Don’t look,’ whispered Seb urgently, while strands of Diane’s hair blew against the roots. ‘Don’t look, Mum.’
All Adrien could say was, ‘Wolves . . .’
‘We should get out of here,’ said Seb.
Hannah shook her head. ‘We have to do something for Diane.’
‘Seb’s right,’ said Adrien, coming to his senses. ‘Let’s just go.’
‘But . . . we’ve got to bury her or something.’
‘We can’t,’ said Adrien, grabbing up his bag.
‘We have to! We can’t leave her like this!’
‘No, Mum,’ insisted Seb.
‘We’ll pay our respects somewhere else,’ said Adrien, and with that Seb pulled Hannah back to her feet. They retraced their steps, back through what had been the nursery’s car park towards the road. None of them spoke, but Adrien could tell that the other two were likewise listening to the noises of the forest, and praying not to hear a growl or gruff bark among them. They kept their heads down and moved as briskly as they could. Every bright flower was a reminder of the red they had just witnessed. Every tree was a thing of bones beneath its costume of foliage.
‘This isn’t right,’ said Seb, stopping after a few minutes.
‘Don’t stop,’ pleaded Adrien. ‘Let’s just get back to the road.’
Seb shook his head. ‘I mean . . . this is wrong. The way we’re headed. We never came this way.’
‘We did,’ said Hannah, checking the compass. ‘We have to have done.’
Adrien had been so preoccupied with what he’d just seen that only now did he realise they were walking on soil. They had crossed a tarmac driveway and a car park to get to the nursery, but had trodden on nothing but dirt on their return. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘The road has to be in this direction.’
They kept walking, but after a few more minutes had seen not an inch of tarmac.
‘You know your way, right?’ Adrien asked Hannah. ‘I mean, you said you’d worked here for ten years . . .’
Hannah looked like someone coming down with a fever. ‘Of course I know my way.’
They kept walking. No road appeared, nor any sign of one.
‘We’ve got to go back,’ said Seb. ‘We must have walked in the wrong direction.’
‘We can’t have,’ said Hannah, looking again at the compass.
‘But we’ve been walking for ten minutes now.’
Hannah chewed her lip and looked at the woods to left and right. ‘We should have seen something. There was a construction yard next to us. There were farm buildings.’
‘We’ve missed them,’ said Adrien. ‘We’ve just missed them, because we’re too preoccupied. It’s understandable. Let’s just keep going, and get away from where the wolves were.’
They set off again, but after a further ten minutes had found not one single piece of asphalt. It was all roots and dirt and dead leaves.
‘I don’t recognise this,’ muttered Hannah. ‘Not any of it.’
Adrien listened to the noises of the woods, his entire body primed with fear. He could feel it tingling on his flesh like static electricity. Any second now, he expected to hear a bone-chilling howl.
It did not come, but neither did the road.
8
Unicorn
The three travellers’ only option was to follow their compass west. They saw nothing but woodland for the rest of the day, and no other walkers and no built things of any kind. By the time the light began to fade it was difficult to tell what kind of progress they had made, and they pitched their tent in uneasy silence.
That first night of their journey was full of strange hoots and cries, as if every nocturnal being was celebrating the trees’ arrival. The forest creaked like an antique stage, and now and then a screech or a snort came so loud that it sounded as if it were underneath the canvas with them.
Hannah lay wide awake, her sleeping bag still open, trying to process what had happened to Diane. She listened to Seb’s breathing as it gradually steadied towards sleep, then to Adrien as he adjusted and readjusted his sleeping mask until he too caved in to dreams. After that, she listened to the busy gnats and insects outside the tent, then to a single childlike scream from a vixen. All the while, all that she thought about was wolves. How they could go for days without a kill. How when at last they fed they did so in a frenzy, gorging on every last morsel. They didn’t even wait for their prey to die. They ate as soon as it was defenceless.
Hannah might never have seen eye-to-eye with Diane, but she would not have wished her fate on anybody. It made her feel cowardly that her memory had already sanitised much of that awful scene. Her mind had blanked what scraps the wolves had overlooked, so that Diane was nothing but a redheaded wig and a tattered, empty outfit. It was as if she had left behind her hair and clothes, vacated them for a world less cruel than this.
How heartless, Hannah thought, she must have sounded in these last few days. All those poor men and women along the road, burned and broken, while she had just prattled away about how beautiful the woods were. She hadn’t a religious bone in her body, but she felt a sinful sort of guilt at not having buried Diane. They should have at least said some words. They should have turned back for the town and sought out Gareth, Diane’s husband. ‘Does he even know?’ Hannah whispered to the night. ‘Is he even still alive?’
Suddenly unable to bear the confines of the tent, Hannah grabbed her coat and let herself out, barefoot into the night. For the first time since the trees had arrived, since she’d rushed to find Seb with her whole world in the balance, she felt shaken. Adrien was right to be as petrified as he was. Seb was right to want to stay on the road.
With the cloud cover keeping the woods very dark, Hannah’s feet were her only way of knowing the world. The grass beneath her soles felt like damp hair, and each root was a bone massaged through skin. A deathly whisper passed through the leaves of tree after tree, and when a thistle sparked the tip of Hannah’s toe she hopped away from it with a sharp intake of breath.
It took some time for her eyes to accustom to the darkness, and even then she could only faintly make out the worming lines of the branches surrounding her. She wondered what Zach would
say about Diane’s death, and whether he was awake or asleep in his part of this forest. She could at least smile to think that, in a few days’ times, she and Seb would be reunited with him.
As if in sympathy with that hopeful thought, a firefly lit up the bulb of its tail. Then another began to shine, and another. In less than a minute the undergrowth was twinkling with miniature lights, but Hannah folded her arms and refused to be moved. Diane would never see such sights again.
The fireflies’ light was not very powerful, and could only illuminate other fragile things. It showed off the blur of a flying bug, or the shimmering weave of a spiderweb, or in one place both: a silver moth imprisoned in thread. When Hannah stepped closer, the moth’s eight-legged captor fled out of sight, but Hannah guessed it had not run far. It would be watching from the edge of vision, waiting to devour its prey alive.
It was a plump enough spider to forgo this one meal. Hannah reached out finger and thumb and broke the links of the silk. The moth stepped into her waiting hand and preened itself on her palm, its antennae soft and white as pillow feathers.
The moon split the clouds and the woods were splashed as silver as the moth. With a puff of Hannah’s breath the insect took to the air. It darted left then right, then upwards. Just when she expected it to vanish it came to another flapping halt, opening and closing its wings several times. Their pattern was a woman’s eyes, and the mascara was running.
Weightless as the light, the moth took off again and looped twice around Hannah’s head, tickling her ear. She did not allow herself to smile, even when a breeze combed the branches and the trees, like the insect, seemed to beckon her to follow.
She found a smooth seat on a log, and lowered herself onto it to try to think of some fitting way to remember Diane. Without prayer to believe in, some time in silent contemplation was the best she could offer, yet she found with frustration that none of her thoughts would stay still. They strayed from Diane’s death to another, and Hannah bowed her head when they did so.