Genius Loci

by Edited by Jaym Gates

  Conversely, though, it was perfectly fine to lead them back into the trees. When we were done, the last plate stacked and the last pan boxed up—no grand dinner tomorrow, we’d be eating takeaway on our knees, or else going out somewhere local and easy—I said, “Okay, that’s that. Thanks for all your help today, Ben, you’ve been a star. Now you want a smoke, and I want a walk. Come with me?”

  “’Course, yeah.”

  Ten minutes later we were deep in the wood, our solemn progress interrupted by muttered teenage curse-words as Ben caught his new jeans on brambles and stumbled over rocks and dips in the path until I wondered just how much he’d been drinking through the day. Or smoking. Maybe that was fitting, because for sure Quin had never rationed us when we were kids. I am not Quin, but even so. I didn’t mind sending him home happy

  Or maybe he was just being sixteen, nothing to do with beer or pot. God knew, I’d been clumsy enough at that age; and it was too dark to watch his awkward adolescent feet, too dark to see anything much until blind memory brought me into a clearing at the heart of the wood.

  Here was a felled trunk we could sit on, under the cold stars. There was the flare of his cigarette as he inhaled. Just tobacco, I thought, probably.

  “So,” I said. “Good day?”

  “Awesome,” he said. Well-fed and well-satisfied and forty quid richer, that was enough for him. He probably hadn’t learned to value the ache in his muscles and the merits of working with other people for someone else’s good—but perhaps I was too cynical, because he went on, “It’s a bit sad, though, innit?”

  “Is it? Why’s that, what’s sad?”

  “Us finding you now, just when you’re all going. That house must’ve been awesome, and it’s been there all this time, and we never knew.”

  “Quin was fairly special,” I agreed, though he would have said that any nostalgia for time lost was an artefact, that Ben had no past until he’d found it necessary to invent one.

  “Not him. I mean, not just him. All of you. The whole house, all those books and things. That kitchen.”

  He’d been well impressed by all the spices. But it’s not about the house, and now at last I could say that aloud. “It’s not about the house. That’s just bricks and things. World’s full of bricks and things.” World was full of boys too, but I didn’t tell him that. I didn’t need to. Every boy knows how very transitory he is. Woven of moonlight in the trees’ shadow, there’s always another coming. Something in the wood compels them, unless it’s something in our lives, a need, an absence, a blank space ready to be filled.

  “Not my world,” he said. “That place was special, and it’s gone.” We only found it in time to tear it down, he was saying.

  “What you found was us,” I said stubbornly. “Not the house. The house was already in splinters,” and the splinters were in our hearts. “Each of us, where we go, we take something of that with us. And none of us is going far. It was Gerard’s home, not ours; he’s moving the other side of town, but most of us are closer. I’m ten minutes’ walk from here. The house gave us a focus, sure, but we’ll find another,” or else we’d fly apart, without Quin to bind us all together. I might have been expecting that, but suddenly I wasn’t sure any more. “Maybe it wasn’t the house at all.” Or Quin. “This place, here in the woods, we all used to come here all the time.” We came from here, some of us, if you want to listen to Quin. This is where boys happen.

  “This wood is like the bones of old England, jutting up—but the thing about bones, they run under the skin, further than you know. There’s not much left of it now, but it used to be much larger. That park, where we found you? That tree, that big oak we found you under? That used to be part of this, before the Victorians tidied everything up and put a fence around the pretty bit. So did the lane, so did everything round about here. That house was built on the memory of trees. We came out of the woods: you did, we did. We found each other. It used to be Quin who found us, but he wasn’t ever the start of it, and he isn’t the end of it either. It’s a cycle, a relay race, something. Something gets passed on.”

  He was busy lighting one cigarette from the butt of another, so he didn’t say anything. Maybe he wouldn’t have said anything anyway. But he stared out past the glow, through the smoke, into the dark heart of the wood; and maybe there was a splinter there too, and always had been.

  THE SLECK

  Keris McDonald

  Every suburb has a place that resists being tamed—a muddy patch of creek, a corner of the park that's always overgrown and shadowy, a culvert large enough to play in and small enough to be scary, an abandoned house. These places are parent repellent and kid magnets. Parents see these places and realize that the muddy creek is just deep enough to drown a child. That overgrown patch of park is the perfect place to hide a body. That culvert could flood, or be full of rats, or harbor tetanus. Kids see these places and see a place where no parents will watch them, and where they can have an adventure. The more parents warn their kids away from the suspect places, the faster kids run to them.

  These patches of wildness usually don't show up on registries of haunted places, but suburb kids can you tell you all about them. They know that the creek behind the school that parents fear is a safe haven, but the parking lot behind the donut shop is not. They know that you can hear whispers if you stand outside the house where the lady who collected all the parakeets died last year. They know the whole secret life of the suburbs, where their parents see only the surface.

  Suburb parents get a lot of things wrong but there's one thing they are right about. Kids may be great at seeing the secret life of the world, but they aren't very good about telling the difference between friends and enemies. The suburbs are full of shape-shifters and lurking monsters. That boy who seems so charming is really a wolf. That girl who says she's your friend is really a witch. Sure, the kids think the creek is a safe haven, but that's because the creek is clever. The creek and the meadow and the culvert and the old house are traps that can spring in an instant. "The Sleck", by Keris MacDonald, is a terrifying and heartbreaking tale of what happens when those traps are sprung.

  ***

  Between two of the eight-foot concrete posts, a corner of the chain-link fence had been pulled up to make a gap. Rob could see a crumpled and rusty bicycle lying beyond, choked by the rough grass.

  Kids, he guessed. It was impossible to keep them out.

  "You idiots," he growled, leaning against his car where it was parked up at the curb. It had only been a year, for chrissakes. A year exactly, today. "You stupid wee idiots. You've got no fucking sense, have you?"

  If he'd been sober he would have left it at that. He'd only come to look, after all—to look at the fence and leave the bunch of flowers he'd bought at the petrol station from the Sikh woman who'd wrinkled her nose at the smell of beer on his breath.

  But he wasn't sober. It was a year today since Bethany had gone off to play with her friends in the Sleck. And Rob had been drinking since breakfast, just as June had been crying since she woke up. Slow and steady, like.

  Not that he was drunk drunk. He'd driven here without incident, after all. He might not be entirely sober, but he'd reached a state of myopic clarity. Everything in front of him—the fence, the downhill slope of grass, the scrubby willow trees lifting their yellowing leaves to the sun—seemed in perfect focus. Everything beyond—the sprawling housing-estate that spread in every direction—was blurred and irrelevant.

  Only the Sleck was real.

  The fucking Sleck.

  He remembered playing down there himself, as a kid. There's been fewer houses around then, of course. This road where he was standing had been allotment gardens instead. But the neighboring estates had grown together over the years—seventies’ red bricks giving way to modern yellow ones, and big gardens where men used to grow potatoes and leeks to feed the children now built over with tiny starter homes for the modern family unit. Yet they'd never built over the
Sleck, a teardrop-shaped patch of wilderness in a valley now trapped by the rising tide of development. Shallow at the narrow end, sloping down to a deep dell that was a swamp in summer and a pond in winter—maybe it was an old mine-working, some long-collapsed and overgrown shaft from the coal-fields hereabouts. It certainly had the look of a sinkhole. Even in his day, before the invention of Health and Safety, or parents giving a shit where the bairns were off to, it had had a dire reputation.

  What was it they’d said…? Rob, in his beer-fug, couldn’t quite recall. Yet now as then, it was a magnet for local children, though it was fenced off and strictly forbidden.

  Today all seemed quiet. The September school term had just started. If there were any skivers drinking cider and smoking weed down there, they were well-hidden amongst the trees. The only noise that came to Rob’s ears was from the occasional passing cars at his back.

  If he’d been sober he would have sat in his own vehicle and let the tears fall.

  Fuck it.

  Crouching right down, he ducked under the triangular flap of loose fencing, and through. The grass on the far side was uncut, knee-deep and studded with tall thistles, but a narrow path had been worn through the yellowing stalks and led away downhill. Brown speckled moths fluttered up around him as he took his first steps. He glanced behind him once at his car, which looked oddly forlorn on the roadside there.

  He could remember the scene a year ago—the fence pulled down, ambulance tracks gouged through the grass, and blue flashing police lights stabbing the yellow evening. And the crowd lined up along the pavement. Staring.

  They’d done their best, the neighbours. They’d turned out in their dozens to look for Bethany when June had become frantic with worry that afternoon. They’d cut through the fencing to let the medics in closer. They’d closed ranks and turned their backs on Elliot and Imogen’s families, expressing their disapproval. Imogen’s family had even moved away to another estate, unable to bear the blame heaped on their daughter.

  Rob and June had moved house too. Not out of guilt, but because they couldn’t stand walking past and seeing where it had happened.

  Where they’d found her.

  Down here.

  The path took him down the long slope at a diagonal. Nearest the road there was a lot of the usual litter and detritus dumped in the grass, but the further down the hillside he descended, the more the rubbish thinned out and the longer grew the grass in which the narrow paths wound and criss-crossed. It stood elbow-tall soon, the dry seed-heads scattering their pale ticks on Rob’s clothes, goose-grass and fat burrs clinging to his shoelaces and cuffs like an infestation of vermin. He reached the first of the scrubby sallows just as the incline flattened out. Lengths of plank propped loosely in the branches suggested that someone had had the idea of building a tree-house, but had not known where to take the plan. Ahead of him the trees grew thicker, and tall sedges with their feathery rust-colored heads showed in the gaps beyond. Bright spots of yellow announced the last flowers of the yellow flag-irises.

  Rob swatted away the flies that were circling his head. Now that he had dropped below the surrounding skyline there was no breeze. He could smell the damp too; that compost-heap aroma of mulching leaves. There was the beginning of something that looked like a crude boardwalk, mismatched planks laid end-to-end forming a trail that led into the trees. He moved toward it, hearing the slight squelch of moisture under his feet. The burned carcass of a motorbike marked the start of the trail. It was buried up to its engine in the earth, and thistles were growing up through the rusty skeleton.

  It hadn’t taken the youths long to reclaim their territory, Rob thought sourly.

  He stepped onto the first plank and walked slowly out along its length, noting the way the spongy wood sagged. The first tree he reached had no single central trunk but instead a mass of stems, most of which seemed not to have the energy to lift themselves from the ground; the biggest branches sprawled horizontally before rising skyward, and to reach the walkway that continued on the far side he found he had to climb through the tangle of trunks and twigs. The bark was rough under his hands.

  I’m too big, he thought dizzily, forcing a path because he couldn’t focus far enough ahead to plan a route. Twigs snapped. Discarded plastic bottles winked up at him from the weeds like translucent toads. Dirt from the shaken leaves sifted down on the back of his head and slid down his collar. He scratched at his neck, feeling lodes of dust gather under his nails. His woollen donkey-jacket was too hot, and he angrily fought off the branches that smacked his face.

  After three more trees the beer was running out of him with his sweat and his left foot was wet where he’d slid off a branch and squelched into black earth that smelled of old eggs. But he stepped down onto the last plank, feeling it sag and suck beneath him, then out into full daylight. This was as far as the trail went, ending in a wooden industrial pallet resting on a crust of algaed mud. Beyond that stood a patch of reed-mace or bulrushes or whatever they were, shoulder high and growing straight out of the water.

  Rob shuddered, the breath coming out of his lungs in a rasp. What the hell were those stupid kids thinking of? Getting the pallet here must have taken huge effort. Was it supposed to be a raft or a jetty or what? Did they come down here to fish in the shallow water?

  Jesus, what did they think they could catch?

  He stepped gingerly onto the wooden slats and looked down over the far edge into the water. That lying surface reflected only the sky, as if it were equally infinite in depth.

  The pool had been six inches deep when they found Bethany face-down in it. Only six inches, so she should have been able to stand up, but under the water there was no solid bottom, just a thick sucking mud that it was impossible to push against.

  He thought about her little hands, pushing down frantically into the muck. Trying to raise her face above the surface.

  She’d only ever swum in inflatable armbands.

  “Oh Christ,” he said, sagging with pain.

  There was one last tin of Fosters stowed in the pocket of his jacket. He pulled out the can and cracked the ring-pull, grateful for the little hiss that was the only promise of comfort. Swigging from the can, he washed the beer around in his mouth, trying to dispel the sulfurous smell of the black ooze that rose from the beneath the beached pallet. Then he hunkered down on his heels. There was a Coke tin crushed and wedged in between two of the slats at his feet. He prodded it with one finger as he sniffed back his pain, craving distraction, but it did not shift. He sucked his dry lips and looked around him blearily. The loss of a little height had changed the view completely. The vegetation hid all sight of the surrounding houses and all but a patch of sky, surrounding him with a wall of greens and browns. He could have been in the middle of some marsh a hundred miles across, for all he could tell. Some primitive swamp crawling with druids and boar and woad-painted savages.

  Flies whined about his head.

  Setting the tin down on the wood, he reached into his jacket again, the inside of it this time—the so-called poacher’s pocket. Tucked away against his ribs were two small objects, and he drew them out now and held them reverently before him.

  A teddy bear. A soft-bodied doll with ginger woolen hair and purple-striped leggings. Mr. Paws and Chloe, Bethany had named them. Chloe’s skinny cloth legs dangled limply from under her dress. Like a drowning victim.

  Roy had clung to Bethany’s stretcher and kept pace as the paramedics carried it up the hill, but they all knew already that it was too late. “Why can’t they keep their kids out of this place?” he’d heard one constable mutter to another. The question hadn’t been meant to be overheard. Or answered.

  There were a lot of questions like that.

  Why didn’t we find her in time?

  What did we do to deserve this?

  They had retraced Bethany’s movements at last, after they finally found Imogen and Elliot cowering and sullen in their respective homes, hidi
ng from attention. The children admitted under duress that yes, she’d gone with them and some others to the Sleck. She’d gone into the water. They’d run away.

  Why didn’t you tell someone? June had screamed. Why didn’t you get help?

  There was no clear answer to that. The children’s accounts were confused, and it wasn’t even clear how many others had been present. Their story kept shifting: Bethany had slipped, she had tried to go paddling, she’d been pushed by someone else in the group. Elliot’s first version was that some ‘black lady’ had pulled her in, but the police discounted that as fantasy. There were no prosecutions. The children were too young to bear any sort of witness.

  It had been, on balance, probably an accident.

  No one’s fault.

  But Rob had blamed Imogen. A stout and bossy nine-year-old, there was nothing attractive about her but she always had a posse of younger children in thrall. Including Bethany, who’d followed her all over the estate.

  Rob could certainly imagine Imogen pushing Bethany. The mental picture had kept him awake many nights. He’d entertained terrible fantasies about what he’d have done to the nine-year-old if he’d somehow caught her in the act. Unforgiveable things that he would never voice. Not even to June.

  What was the point anyway? Bethany had been buried. Imogen’s family had packed up and relocated. The fence around the Sleck had been repaired and the local council had started on a long process of arguing about what to do with the place and how best to make it safe.