The Trees

by Ali Shaw

  ‘None of this is going to be much use,’ said Adrien. ‘Unless you’re planning to go jousting.’

  ‘Very funny. Although if you can rescue any of that stuff, I wouldn’t consider it wasted effort. It would be nice to have something to look at that wasn’t just huts and mud.’

  You already would have, thought Adrien, if you hadn’t chopped it all down.

  Roland sighed and made a sweeping gesture to indicate the hall around them. ‘Try to imagine it, Adrien. Sometimes I can’t, any more. But this place was so grand before the forest spoiled everything. You really had to be here to believe in it.’

  Adrien had visited a fair few overblown stately homes in his time. He reckoned he could imagine the opulence of this one.

  ‘We dined like kings, that night the trees came, we really did. The hotel lavished everything on us. Then, after our evening meal, the staff moved the tables aside and there was dancing.’

  Much to the dismay of some deeply buried part of himself (that part that Adrien nominally termed his dignity), he did his best to picture it. The room’s ornate tables and chairs would have been cleared aside in a far less unruly fashion than they had been by the trees. Likewise the floor would have been flat, not root-ridged, and the hotel guests would have been able to look across from one wall to the other without some imposter trunk looming in the middle of the dance floor.

  ‘Now I look back on it,’ said Roland with a contented sigh, ‘I can’t think of any better way to have spent my last night in the world we had before. Michelle, of course, was the most beautiful woman there. You should have seen her in her evening dress. Simply stunning. The epitome of beauty.’

  Adrien thought of his own final night, spent with his chicken balls and his westerns. ‘Why are you telling me this, Roland?’

  ‘She’s been rattled by your arrival. She’s normally a cool customer, but things have been getting to her since you came. Last night, for example. She didn’t react very sensibly to what happened last night.’

  Adrien shook his head. ‘Last night you made a mistake. That fox meant a lot to Hiroko.’

  ‘Those chickens meant a lot to me. And not just me. I don’t expect you to understand, but when you’re in a position of authority you have to make tough calls. The people here need to know that I’ll protect their interests.’ Roland narrowed his eyes. ‘What’s that, Adrien? Are you scowling?’

  ‘I think you went too far with Yasuo.’

  ‘Go on, then, enlighten me. Why was that fox so special? How many eggs would it have laid? And, while you’re at it, tell me what kind of system you’d run here. Would you have some sort of anarchy, Adrien?’

  Adrien thought about that for a moment. ‘I’m not very good at being in charge,’ he said.

  ‘Well there you have it.’

  ‘But I wouldn’t chop everything down and sit on top of what was left as if I’d made it better. And if somebody already had, then . . . then when I was put in charge I’d make sure that the trees could grow back. I’d fix the soil, if I could, and . . . and I’d protect each new sapling. I’d think long and hard about every last bit of timber I took, just like I’d think long and hard about how we could live in the forest, not in place of it.’

  ‘Is that what you were doing on that stump? Thinking long and hard? Was it getting anybody anywhere? My priority is our survival.’

  ‘I doubt that. And if it is, then you’re going about it all wrong.’

  Roland looked flabbergasted. Then, slowly, he began to laugh, and his laugh built into a snorting guffaw that echoed through the hall and made the leaves fall faster from their twigs. Adrien waited it out, for he had expected it. He hardly even listened. His ears were straining towards some other sound which he had just heard, coming from somewhere above him in the leaf-crossed ceiling. It was a whisper, faint and fluctuating.

  ‘Let’s forget this . . .’ said Roland, dabbing his eyes with his fingers. ‘Let’s talk about Michelle. Like I said, you coming here has got her all in a flap. I need you to go and tell her that her place is with me.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘She told me you didn’t love her any more.’

  ‘That . . . that was a private conversation.’

  ‘But it’s the truth, isn’t it?’

  Adrien stared at Roland, and the whisper from above him lisped on the edge of hearing. Quite suddenly he could not believe he had used to find this man so intimidating. Wolves were intimidating, not this.

  ‘Michelle is a very special woman,’ said Roland.

  ‘You think I don’t know that?’

  ‘I’m just trying to explain that I want to make her happy.’

  ‘Me too. More than anything.’

  ‘Then set her mind straight, Adrien, for God’s sake. Go and talk to her and persuade her that you think I should have her now. And if you do that I can overlook all your shirking and so on, and we can both be adults about it.’

  Faint as a tiptoe, the highest branches creaked. Something pattered along the length of one, but when Adrien looked up there were only the leaves in every shade of amber. ‘You surprise me,’ said Adrien, looking back down at Roland.

  Roland took it as a compliment, and preened.

  ‘You’re even more ridiculous than I thought. Have her? What kind of talk is that?’

  Roland gaped at him for a moment, before his gape twisted into a sneer. ‘Jesus, Adrien, it was just a turn of phrase. And do you know something? If you want straight talking, I think it’s high time that someone offered you a few home truths. And I tell you this for your benefit, not mine. I’m actually worried about you. What you’ve let yourself become. You’re a very bitter man. A closed man.’

  ‘My many failings aren’t exactly undocumented.’

  ‘But it’s that precise attitude that so riles me. That way you just accept your own failures. Oh, Michelle has told me all about you. Your self-loathing, your stubbornness and rattiness and the way you kept her up all hours by worrying. Your mood swings. The way you abase yourself to pre-empt others from doing so. The meals you spoiled by fixating on the burning candles. The bed times.’ He shook his head. ‘You’re a worm of a man, Adrien, wriggling around in the dirt.’

  Adrien nodded thoughtfully. ‘You’re right. I was an appalling husband.’

  Roland looked delighted. ‘I’m glad I’ve hit the nail on the head. Michelle can hardly be blamed for deciding enough is enough.’

  The whispering above peaked into a hiss. Adrien turned his eyes upwards and there one sat, a whisperer with a brassy yellow body, haired all over with dead, curled leaves. Its mouth was like that of an anglerfish, filling its face with teeth. Above it the trees’ leaves were countless, and bright orange fungi grew out of both bark and plaster. The trunks themselves were heavier than Adrien could comprehend, dragging water up from the mineral deeps to quench the thirst in their arching limbs. They all looked so huge that standing beneath them felt like being in a mountain cave, with all those tonnes of natural weight suspended above him. Roland had eyes for none of this.

  ‘Look at you, Roland. Your folded arms. Your smug sneer. How do men like you get put in charge of the world, when you don’t know the first thing about it?’

  Roland’s face darkened. ‘I get put in charge because I make the right calls. People can see that.’

  ‘I think you ended up in charge here because, even when the world got destroyed by a forest, you thought you were a match for it.’

  ‘That sounds like a bloody good reason to me. I will be a match for it. That’s something Adrien Thomas can only ever dream about.’

  ‘I don’t think you’ve ever doubted yourself, have you? Even now, when the woods have made it so easy for you, when you could get lost among the trees at the drop of a hat.’

  ‘You say that as if you think it’s a healthy thing. That approach, Adrien, is precisely why you’ve never got anywhere in life.’

  ‘You’re too bloody full of yourself to have room to be scared. While ever
yone else is frightened and trying to make sense of things, you waltz straight in and seize control. That doesn’t make you the one who’s best equipped. That just makes you the first bloody loudmouth on the scene. Or perhaps you’re genuinely convinced.’

  ‘Genuinely convinced about what?’

  ‘That the answer to everything is a man like you.’

  ‘Have you been drinking, Adrien? You sound like you have. Are you quite finished? Good, because I don’t expect to be spoken to like this. In fact, here’s how things are going to work now. Take a tent, if you want, take some supplies. But if you haven’t left the valley by, let’s see . . . this time tomorrow, I’m going to ask Leonard to escort you away. Understood? And believe me, if that happens you’ll see why men like me end up in charge. I won’t suffer shirkers and drunkards here.’

  Adrien hadn’t been expecting quite so blunt a threat. Still full of unexpected confidence, he looked up to the whisperer for further strength.

  It had vanished, and with it went much of Adrien’s resolve. His shoulders sloped an inch.

  ‘I think I’ve made myself perfectly clear,’ purred Roland. ‘Your friends can all stay, but it’s high time you did some packing.’

  10

  Murderers

  Leonard’s shack was a cube of wood without windows, which he had built himself with no help or advice from those who had constructed the rest of the settlement’s shelters. Those others might have been built crudely, but they had at least been given corner posts and roofs of overlapping planks that kept the rain out. Their builders had done their best to replicate construction methods they remembered, but Leonard had simply built his shack through force of will, hammering timber onto timber until he had piled up thick walls and a heavy ceiling. The door he had taken from the hotel, and the silver ampersand of its handle was an elegant thing at odds with the rest of the structure. There was no hinge or frame to hold it in place. The door simply had to be dragged aside to be opened.

  Hannah had waited a full hour for the Alsatian to wander off, as it often did when it grew bored of the mud outside the shack. Never leashed, it sometimes roamed as far as the woodfringe, perhaps scenting some fowl or rabbit under the trees, but Hannah had never known it to actually enter the forest without its master. Wherever it was now headed, she was glad to see the back of it. If things turned nasty inside the shack (knowing Leonard, she thought she had good reason to suppose they might), she didn’t want the odds stacked even further against her.

  As soon as the dog was gone, Hannah hurried across the mud. She had stolen a steak knife from the kitchen tents and, to conceal it, pushed its blade through the lining of her trouser pocket. The cool metal against her thigh was not the reassurance she’d hoped for, but she stood before Leonard’s lean-to door and took deep breaths to restrain herself from knocking. She had not come here to be polite.

  The door was heavier than she’d thought it would be, scraping noisily against the wall when she moved it. That spoiled any element of surprise she might have had in her favour, and Leonard was waiting for her calmly when she stepped inside. The thick walls made the shack’s interior even more cramped than Hannah had envisioned. There was space only for some bedding, a few boxes of clothes and other basics, and an antique dressing table with a large and tarnished mirror. At this sat Leonard, topless and with his back to her, for he had been trimming his beard. He didn’t turn to face her, even as she dragged the door shut behind her, only watched her reflection.

  He was not as muscled as Hannah had remembered him being, but nor was he as slim as the gunman. There were fine hairs on his shoulders, and a birthmark smattered across the small of his back. Hannah tried to ignore such details of his body and focus on what he had done. The kirin. Yasuo. David’s grave.

  ‘Evening,’ he said eventually, then splashed water into his beard from a washbowl on the dresser.

  Hannah stopped herself from returning the greeting. She took a deep breath, and tried to sound as fierce as she could. ‘I’ve come . . . I’ve come to bring you a warning.’

  Leonard chopped a tuft out of his beard.

  ‘A warning,’ she repeated, when he offered no response.

  Leonard turned his jaw to look sideways at his reflection, his fingers probing the length of his beard beneath his ear. The dresser must have broken when the trees came, but he had since restored it using the same brute carpentry he’d used to build the shack. Its mirror was untrue, warping his reflection so that his shoulders were thinner and his features less blunt. ‘Go on, then,’ he said at last. ‘Warn me.’

  ‘It’s concerning David,’ said Hannah.

  ‘I see.’

  She darted forward and dumped the watch on the dressing table. At once she retreated for the safety of the doorway, but she felt her point was made.

  Leonard considered the timepiece for a long minute, twirling the scissors in his grip. ‘So what?’ he asked, eventually.

  ‘Don’t try to pretend that you’re innocent.’

  ‘Of what? Killing him? What makes you think I’m pretending?’

  ‘Is that . . . is that an admission?’ Hannah slipped her nervous hands into her pockets, there to grip the handle of her knife.

  ‘What have you got there? A blade of some sort? Did David mean something to you? Are you out for revenge?’

  ‘I never met him. But I’ve come here to tell you that you don’t get to ride roughshod any more.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘And . . . and . . . you’d better listen to me, Leonard, because . . . I’m the same thing you are.’

  That gave him pause. The scissors stopped moving mid-twirl. ‘I’m not entirely sure,’ he said, ‘what to make of that.’

  ‘I killed a man not so different from you.’

  Leonard stared at her hard. He looked, for the first time since they’d found that rare pinkgill in the forest, enthused. Hannah couldn’t help but shudder.

  ‘And what makes you think,’ asked Leonard carefully, ‘that he was like me?’

  ‘Because,’ she said, against the tightening of her throat, ‘he was a man who treated everything just like you do.’

  ‘And how do you think I treat it?’

  ‘Indifferently. As if it doesn’t matter.’

  Leonard made a show of putting the scissors down on the dresser. He took a towel off the back of his chair and dried his hands methodically. ‘As if it doesn’t matter . . .’ he repeated, inspecting his fingers for any leftover moisture.

  Hannah had spotted his rifle. It leaned against the corner of the room, far enough out of reach that he’d have to turn his back on her if he made a dash for it. She kept hold of the knife in her pocket.

  ‘You’re trembling,’ he said, without looking up.

  ‘Killing makes me angry,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t it you?’

  ‘Not any more.’

  From a hook on the wall hung his shirt, which he took down and pulled on, then began to fasten the buttons. He gestured to another chair, beside the doorway. ‘Please have a seat, Hannah.’

  He retook his own and folded his hands in his lap, but Hannah didn’t sit, only watched him intently.

  ‘So . . .’ he said, after a moment, ‘are you just going to stare at me all evening? Or are you going to tell me how you did it?’

  She squared her shoulders. ‘I shot him in the head.’

  ‘From a distance, or . . . ?’

  ‘Close up,’ she said, as casually as she could.

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘Why are you doing that?’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Trying to make it sound like it was easy.’

  ‘I . . . I . . .’

  ‘That you shot him surprises me, though. I wouldn’t have thought you’d do it with a gun.’

  ‘Why? Why not?’

  ‘I just had you pinned as the strangling type. You know, in a red mist.’

  She stopped herself from objecting just in time. She wouldn’t play into his hands. Yet what had he just ins
inuated? That he’d only deemed her capable of killing in a kind of thoughtless frenzy? Or that a gun was such an easy way to do it? Or, worse, that he was impressed? She hovered by the door, unsure of the way things were developing.

  ‘So it was an execution,’ Leonard said.

  ‘No!’

  He held up his hands. ‘Who am I to judge?’

  Hannah thought of the gunman, tied in the chair where it had fallen against the wall of Zach’s lodge. Sometimes she wasn’t sure whether he’d ever truly believed she’d go through with it. Perhaps there had been time for a flash of realisation, in that moment between the movement of her finger and the bullet exiting the gun barrel.

  ‘You can tell me what happened,’ said Leonard, ‘if you want.’

  ‘Whyever would I want to do that?’

  ‘Up to you. Perhaps it would help to talk to someone who knows what it’s like.’

  Hannah watched him reclining there in silence, as relaxed as she was agitated. She opened her mouth to tell him that she had her own confidants, thank you very much, and they had been good to her and had not judged her and had done their best to understand, but then she closed her mouth again and swallowed. She was lucky, she supposed, to have had confidants at all.

  But none of them really knew what it was like.

  ‘You . . . you admit, then . . .’ she said, stalling for time. ‘You admit to doing it.’

  ‘That’s the reason you’re here, isn’t it? You said I’d better listen to you, because of this thing we have in common. So go ahead and let me listen.’

  Hannah didn’t answer at once, only twisted the blunt side of the knife against her thigh, trying to make it a hard cold reminder of why she had come in here to face him. She had made a bad start, she knew, but she had prepared herself for an argument or an altercation, or both. Never a temptation.