by James Erith
‘Aha! Apples alive!’ Old Man Wood exclaimed. ‘The spirits of the trees. I see you!’
The old man noted that the larger trees had bigger elf-like creatures attached to them, and the young ones on the smaller stems ran up and down the trunks, their little legs disappearing into the wood and sometimes disappearing into the trunk of the tree altogether and then reappearing at the end of a branch dangling from their heads, or sitting at the foot of the tree trunk by the roots.
‘Crimpers!’ Old Man Wood said, as he hugged the biggest tree enthusiastically, the strange elfin creature standing with one foot attached to the tree and the other on Old Man Wood’s head. ‘How many are you?’
‘We’re now a family of sixty-seven,’ said a deep voice from behind him. ‘Loads of new little whips and a couple of small trees and, hum-hum, us big ‘uns just keep on growing.’
Old Man Wood closed his eyes. ‘Let me see if I can remember. Bethedi …’
‘Well, well, well, hum-hom. Isn’t that something?’ said a wiry, elderly tree-elf dangling off a big tree to the side of the brook. ‘He remembers my name! So your memory is still intact, huh?’
‘There’s the thing,’ Old Man Wood replied. ‘It isn’t. It’s been an awful long time—’
‘You mean,’ the tree-elf said, ducking into the tree and reappearing at eye level with Old Man Wood, ‘even with this great rain, you don’t know what’s happening?’
Old Man Wood groaned. ‘I feel a yearning – an ache in my bones, but my brain gets all clogged up. And strange nightmares that I don’t understand, with bits here and there that seem familiar and others that are a mystery. I’ve forgotten everything.’
‘But you do know who you are?’
Old Man Wood frowned. ‘I’m not really sure anymore.’
The noise of hum-homs and him-hims erupted around the brook as the elves absorbed this information. ‘You quite sure about this?’
‘Yes!’ Old Man Wood replied.
‘Then, hem-hem, you’ve come to the right place,’ said a soft, higher voice from the third large tree on the far side of the brook. ‘And in the nick of time, it would appear. Do you remember me? I’m Crespidistra, hem-hem?’
‘Crespidistra,’ Old Man Wood repeated, nodding. He propped himself up on the tree and looked over the water as the slender, feminine willow-spirit continued. ‘We lost Jonix a few seasons back,’ she said. ‘He died from a painful canker, but he had time to pass on his knowledge. We miss him dearly … but lately, a whole raft of new willows sprouted. Let me introduce you to our saplings.’ The elegant willow spirit turned to the nursery. ‘Say hello to our oldest and dearest friend, Mr Old Man Wood, hem-hem; the greatest and, indeed the only, being of his kind on this planet!’
With that, a huge ‘Hello Mr Old Man Wood,’ in an assortment of high and low voices called out over the gentle spring waters, followed by a range of um-ums and im-ims.
Old Man Wood beamed back at them, when he suddenly remembered Archie. He searched around. ‘I’ve found them,’ he yelled out, ‘Archie, here, they’re here,’ he repeated. ‘Come, look—’
‘Your friend left a little while ago, while you were, hem-hem … figuring things out,’ Crespidistra said gently, before disappearing into the tree and re-emerging higher up. She looked out towards the hill.
Old Man Wood followed her gaze and glimpsed Archie looking down at him from a distance up the bank. He waved enthusiastically but Archie waved back rather half-heartedly, shaking his head. Oh well, the old man thought. Probably just as well.
‘Can I say on behalf of all the willow-spirits, what a magnificent entrance that was, my old friend – you certainly haven’t lost your style. Welcome to the Bubbling Brook, where all things speak as one.’
The smaller tree-spirits erupted into laughter, pulling their stems one way and then the other, so that, very shortly, the noise of twigs snapping and cracking on one another filled the Bubbling Brook, like applause.
‘Took you a while to find us, though – the water’s been high for a couple of days now,’ the elf said as she sat at the end of a branch that hung over the water. ‘It’s been a long time since we last spoke, hem-hem?’
‘I hope you’ve got some juicy things to tell—?’ said another, named Willip. ‘It’s so boring here. Did you ever manage to find your way into that storeroom?’
‘How is that vegetable patch of yours?’ said another. ‘Some of the birds told us you’d grown star-shaped carrots.’
‘And what of that young lady?’ asked an elf called Shodwonk who, as his name suggested, was a little lopsided.
‘And did you ever hear back from that friend of yours with all those ideas?’
Old Man Wood looked startled and scratched his head.
‘You know, him-hom, about five hundred and thirty-two seasons ago. Mr Len Vinchi?’
‘Oooh yes,’ Crespidistra added, ‘such a nice young man, hem-hem. And how are your apple trees? The apple spirits don’t like to get out, always claim they’re too busy—’
‘Now, hum-hum,’ said the deeper voice of Bethedi, ‘fill us in, won’t you. How have you been getting along, dear friend?’
Old Man Wood clapped his hands together as a smile spread from one side of his gnarled old face to the other. He beamed at the curious clump with their little tree elves homming and humming. Then, after a bit of a fuss, he sat down respectfully on one half of Jonix’s stump, took a deep breath and began by telling the trees about the children, and how he’d found Mrs Pye in the woods at the bottom of a gorge, mangled and covered in blood and that they still didn’t know who she was, or where she’d come from.
He followed this by telling them about his beloved vegetable patch and his trusty cattle. He went into limited detail about his struggle with bolting purple spinach and how the answer to his carrot fly problem was to grow the vegetables in containers on the roof. All the while the willow spirits listened, asking questions when appropriate, and laughing at exactly the right moments.
Old Man Wood felt as if he was talking to his oldest friends. And, in a way, this observation wasn’t so far off the truth. For no matter how ancient Old Man Wood grew, the willow trees had the ability to remember in astonishing detail each and every word he’d ever told them, from the day they had first met. And this knowledge had been passed on from generation to generation.
These willow tree-spirits were information sponges – a perfect living memory bank. And if Old Man Wood asked a question about his past they would tell him because they held the answers within their sap … but this information would never be given freely.
If Old Man Wood wanted to know something, he had to ask the right question.
JUST THEN, two ducks flew through the branches and, with a minimum of effort, dropped into the middle of the pool of water. Automatically, the ducks dunked their heads and, moments later, surfaced shaking their heads from side to side.
‘Hey! You gnarled-old-pieces-of-timber,’ the first duck said. ‘What do you give a sick bird?’
‘Tweetment!’ the other said, before any of the tree spirits had the chance to respond. ‘Hey, and did you see that duck who came in here? He really … quacked me up! Whoaaa! I’m on form today,’ the duck continued. ‘And what about the owl, huh?’ said the second duck. ‘He couldn’t give a hoot!’ They both quacked with laughter. ‘Ha-aha, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy we’re good,’ the first duck said, ‘anything to liven up you boards. Whoa, geddit – boards – that’s terrific, ha ha!’ the birds sang as they lifted themselves out of the glade.
‘Cres,’ Bethedi said, ‘can’t we stop those blasted ducks flying in here, telling their appalling jokes?’
‘You know there’s nothing we can do and they’re a great deal better than the blackbirds who simply repeat things over and over again if they like the sound of it.’
Old Man Wood shook his head and laughed – the sound of his rich voice echoing around the brook. He’d forgotten how wonderful the world was when everything could talk – and spel
l – given the right circumstances.
He was overjoyed to be with old friends.
Right now, however, he needed to put the trees’ memory to the test and think of some good questions.
But where would he begin? And what sort of questions would be most helpful to all of them?
Just thinking of this quandary made his head pound and his eyes heavy with worry.
SIXTY-TWO
ARCHIE’S KNIVES
Archie squeezed between the old oak upright and the wooden door that had jammed tight against the cold concrete floor of the garden shed. Inside, he felt for the familiar course fibres of a pile of old empty sacks and fell heavily into them. His cheeks, red from running in the cold wet air, stung with the salt of his tears and the walk up the slippery hill had made his legs burn. He found the light on his watch. Not yet ten. It felt like lunchtime, especially as he’d forgone breakfast. Archie tried to get himself comfortable, to settle his mind, but he couldn’t think clearly for the noise of the rain, which now drummed hard on the tiles above his head.
He reached behind one of the sacks, feeling for a bundle tied in a package of cloth.
Archie untied the layer of cloth, pulling out five stunning silver-coloured knives. He ran his hand over the sharp tips and shivered as he thought about the strange ghost, Cain, and the ruby-encrusted knife. He touched the scar on his chin. The power of a horse and the courage of a lion, he thought – ridiculous – even if he couldn’t get it out of his head. And he smiled as the image of himself, deeply muscled, entered his mind and he wondered if somehow, impossibly, he really had acquired strength of some sort. How had he managed to pull that tree out and carry Daisy and push the boulder out of the way? And yet, here he was, still his reasonably puny self. He tensed his arms and the muscle bulge wasn’t impressive. He patted his head and felt his spikes, which were hard. Maybe it had something to do with his spikes – something to do with being partially hit by lightning?
Archie’s knives were like secret friends. He knew how to hold them, care for them, balance them and hide them away. It was his one secret, albeit a badly kept secret, for Isabella knew and she hated them with a passion that Archie thought was way over the top.
He remembered the day he found them. It was two days after his seventh birthday and they were playing a game of hide and seek in the ruin. He spied a dark space beneath an outcrop of stone and, without thinking, crammed himself under it, working his body under until he had all but disappeared. As he scraped the earth furiously to give himself more space, his hand touched upon a cloth.
Instantly his curiosity was aroused. As he feverishly reached in and dug further, he realised that inside this cloth lay hard objects. Treasure? He remembered his excitement but, just then and much to his annoyance Isabella rounded the corner, saw one of his feet and dragged him out. He had left the bundle there, but even now he wondered why he hadn’t brought them out and shared his excitement with the others. Somehow, this was his own little secret. His, and no one else’s.
A few days later, he returned. His fingers touched the bundle again, and the same thrill passed through him. Using a trowel from Old Man Wood’s potting shed, he teased the package from the hard earth. Bit by bit, more and more came. And as he scraped, he found that the cloth was bound deep in the chasm holding the treasure within it. Archie pulled until eventually the bundle popped out like a cork from a bottle. With the evening drawing in he ran home and hid his treasure under the bed. Archie’s excitement meant he could barely talk through supper and the following day, with the girls in town, he opened the package.
The cloth itself felt unusual, certainly like nothing he’d seen before. Wound neatly round and round, the fabric was light and strong even though he’d tried to rip and pierce it. Inside were three knives, each one about ten inches in length, made from slender sticks of metal. The knives shimmered as he touched them.
The tips were slender, with sharpened edges leading to a point, like leaves off a plum tree. The handles, were flat, like a wider version of an ordinary kitchen knife. And he noted that as no water had penetrated the metal, no rust or discolouration showed, so he figured that no air had entered either – or the metal wasn’t steel. As he inspected them, right in the middle of each one, he found a pattern, a circle of lines swirling – mirrored – top and bottom.
It took him several days to work out how they should be used. As hunting knives they were all wrong; the blades weren’t long enough and the handles ungainly. In the woods, as he ambled along figuring it out, he held one in his hand, balancing it. As he rounded a corner, there, beside the carcass of a rabbit, was a rat. Without thinking, Archie cocked his arm back and let the knife go. It flew through the air and landed with a thud, killing the rat instantly. Archie stared in shock as a thrill passed through him. How had he managed to do that?
From that moment on, he knew knife-throwing would be his thing. He wanted to be the best in the world. At first, when the house was empty, he threw the knives from the end of his bed onto an old cork notice board that he kept hidden under his bed.
What he discovered, by a process of elimination and frustration, and with the help of Old Man Wood, who he’d secretly confided in, was that each knife had a different weight, and he figured that each one had to rotate through the air at either a different speed or at the same speed but from a different distance.
Archie spent hours trying to work it out. And slowly it came to him. Soon he could automatically judge the weight and the throwing speed of each knife. Then one day, much to his surprise, he rubbed the emblem in the middle and, as if by magic, a smaller knife unfurled itself from the body of the big knife. The same thing happened on each, but as with the larger knives, the smaller ones bore different weights. Now he had six knives to play with; three heavy and three light.
Archie played with the smaller ones indoors, against his cork board, and the larger ones on an old wooden log in the forest. He didn’t want anyone to know because he sensed that all hell would break loose, and he was right. In the end, it did.
One day, in the woods, while Archie thought the others were fooling around in the house, he set up a target which consisted of a woolly mop head and one of Daisy’s old shirts which he’d pinned against a tree. Archie had mastered his throw from ten feet and now he was attempting a new distance – thirteen feet, which meant holding the knife the other way round. The first two had clattered into the bark and fallen to the ground. Archie weighed up the final one. The heaviest of all. He pulled his arm back and, throwing a little harder, let go. But at that exact moment, Isabella’s head suddenly appeared by the tree.
Archie gasped.
The knife whistled through the air and, to his enormous relief, with a gentle thud, the blade nestled into the wood. For a fraction of a second, Archie wondered whether Isabella knew what he was doing. She looked at him curiously. Then her eyes followed his – to where he was looking. She moved around the tree and saw the end of the knife – straight through the breast pocket of Daisy’s old shirt.
Isabella went berserk, screaming at him for being reckless and stupid and for plotting to kill them. Archie protested but Isabella gathered the knives and ran inside.
From that moment on, his knives were forbidden and it was made clear that they would not be tolerated in, or around, the house. Finally, on his eighth birthday he was allowed to have them back on condition that he always told a grown up when and where he was throwing, and never, ever, anywhere near Isabella.
IN THE DIMNESS of the musty, rickety shed, Archie focused on the large log. He balanced the first knife in the palm of his hand, a sparkle of gleaming metal catching a ray of light that had crept nervously under the gap in the door.
Thud.
The knife flashed into the thick wood. Archie wanted to throw it quicker – venting this curious anger that kept welling up in him.
He rubbed his front hair spike that stood as hard as iron. He knew he would have to throw it twice as fast. The next kicked out a spli
nter of wood. Nice one, he thought, much better. Exactly in the right spot.
And while he did this, it gave him time to think, time to reflect, time to work out what his dreams were all about.
ON THE ONE HAND, his dreams had made him feel like a bloodthirsty thug intent on the destruction of everything. Then, a moment later, he remembered how the sensation departed and he’d be laughing and joking with his sisters and friends and he couldn’t remember being happier. And then his dreams would swing back to violence and this curious desire for power, which made his bones shiver because Archie’s violent feelings were contrary to his laidback approach to life.
He was an average kid; scruffy and carefree; “horizontal” and “chilled” were words often associated with him. He was friendly too, to … well, everyone; he got on with people – he always had – preferring to walk away, or talk, rather than head into a fight. Perhaps that was why Kemp liked him?
What shocked him most was how utterly real his dreams were, particularly the nightmare of the murder in which he had killed the Ancient Woman with a strength and anger he could not resist. He couldn’t tell how he’d done it, but she had died by his hand. And yet, in a strange contradiction, he wondered if this Ancient Woman wanted to die, enticing him to kill her, even if she meant no wrong.
And did Daisy’s dream – where she had screamed at him as though possessed by demons – mean that he was different? And what about the ghost of Cain, the weird spirit who had visited him, the ghost he’d run away from? How did Cain fit the puzzle? Cain knew all about them – and about the Ancient Woman and this crazy Prophecy of Eden – but if Cain truly existed, where the hell was he from? Could Cain really be the same spirit left over from the Bible story, the son of Adam and Eve?
If so, Archie thought, what did Cain want? And how did Cain know about the “strength of a horse and the courage of a lion”. Archie toyed with this thought. He had strength, yes – possibly. But courage? No, not really.