Shortcuts

by Grant Stone

  ‘So there was someone else in the forest?’

  ‘Not like you're thinking. I wasn't abducted by some local farmer. It was more that inside the forest there was – there was somewhere else.’

  ‘I don't understand.’

  ‘No. You wouldn't.’ Katherine looked out the window. Rachel felt like she was failing another test, but she was lost. Katherine St. John's lyrics had always tended towards the abstract. Rachel was not surprised to learn her conversations had a similar quality.

  ‘Tell me about him.’

  Katherine closed her eyes. ‘His skin was the colour of varnished oak. I sketched him once, when I was back at school. Imagined him as Pan, drew buds of horns sprouting from his forehead, but he wasn't like that at all. I remember his eyes, more than anything. They were golden. The things they write in those terrible romance novels about falling into someone's eyes. But him – when he looked at me, it was as if there was nothing else in this world. Or other worlds. And when I looked into his eyes I knew there were many, many other places. His eyes were like doorways.’

  The recorder sat in the middle of the table, the wheels of the tape still turning. Rachel felt another wave of exhaustion, found herself struggling to hide a yawn.

  Katherine put down her cup. ‘Oh, dear. It's not getting any better, is it?’

  ‘I'm OK, it's—’ another yawn. Rachel waved it away. ‘—just jetlag. 'Snothing.’

  ‘More tea,’ Katherine said. ‘That's the English answer, isn't it? Or perhaps a coffee might be better?’

  ‘No, tea's good.’

  Katherine stood to pour, holding the teapot far above the cup.

  Rachel blinked. What had they been discussing? She had the feeling they had wandered a long way from music, but now she couldn't remember. It would be on the tape, but she hadn't written anything down.

  ‘There's – there's something I've been meaning to ask,’ Rachel said.

  ‘Anything. It's what you're here for.’

  ‘Why me?’

  Katherine sat back down.

  ‘It may seem as if I'm a long way from the music business these days, but I keep up. I still read Sounding. Costs a fortune to get it shipped. I like your writing. And there's more. I—’ she sat for a moment, considering. ‘I think you and I have a lot in common.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Well, we're very rare ducks, aren't we? There aren't many doing what we do – either of us. How many woman reporters do you know, still covering music?’ At your age, though unspoken, hung between them.

  ‘You may have a point, for music reporters. But not you. I can think of plenty of songwriters of your generation, some of them doing the best work of their careers: Joni Mitchell, Stevie Nicks, Rickie Lee Jones—’

  Katherine raised her hand. ‘All promoted to the godhead, years ago. But it's not...’ she looked away, back again. ‘I don't want to disparage my heroes. But the ones who are still on the tour circuit – something goes out of them, over the years. A vitality. I'm not talking about age. It's about walking the same path time and again. Singing the same lines. It eats at you. I may not have been releasing albums, but I've been writing. I had to walk a strange path to get to where I am. And I read your articles and I know you're the same. We're the last of a dying breed.’

  Rachel opened her mouth to tell Katherine that she had it wrong. Reporting was just a job to her, nothing more. But she couldn't speak and while she was trying to think of the right words the world went fuzzy and slipped away.

  RACHEL WOKE AND FOUND herself lying on bed.

  She sat up. There was a noise in her head, a background roar, as if she were on an airplane.

  The curtains were drawn, but a thin light seeped around the sides. Rachel reached for her phone to check the time. It was past midnight. She had been sitting at the kitchen table with Katherine, then – she didn't know. She'd lost the better part of a day.

  Katherine must have helped her up the stairs, though how she managed it Rachel had no idea. She wasn't fragile by any means, but Rachel was taller and heavier. Rachel didn't know if she'd be able to carry St. John if the situation had been reversed. She was still wearing the clothes she'd put on that morning.

  A light was flashing on her phone. Voicemail. Simon, most probably, but she didn't check. She walked over to the window, pulled back the curtain, gasped.

  The sky was wrong. It was light, far lighter than it should have been for this time of the night. There was a burnt look to it, a dark-tinted orange that made her think of fires burning in a desert at sunset. The milking shed and recording studio stood out like exhibits in a museum. The trees behind the studio remained resolutely dark.

  There was movement, on the grass below her window. Someone was standing in the shadow of the house. The orange light reached tendrils into the shadow, picked him out in shards and flecks. A boy, no more than thirteen surely, wearing an old vest and threadbare trousers. He looked up to her window. Their eyes met and his teeth grinned orange.

  Rachel pulled away from the window and leaned against the wall. When the hammering in her chest slowed a little, she peered around the edge of the curtain again.

  The boy was strolling across the lawn, back towards the milking shed. Slowly, as if he didn't have a care in the world. As if he wanted her to follow.

  Rachel hesitated, for more than a moment. The boy disappeared around the corner of the milking shed and the orange moon shone on the empty paddock.

  She turned back to the bed and fumbled for her shoes.

  As she placed her foot on the first stair, a sound made her stop, turn. She listened, looking into the darkness of the hallway.

  There was a whisper from Katherine's room. Rachel couldn't make out what Katherine said. Her voice was muted, heavy, as if she were talking in her sleep.

  Another, deeper voice made a reply.

  Katherine said something else, followed by a silence again. Rachel stayed where she was, almost holding her breath, but she did not hear anything else.

  She began to move down the stairs, hoping each time she put a foot down that the stair wouldn't creak beneath her.

  THERE WAS NO SIGN OF the boy when she rounded the corner of the house. She set off across the lawn at a jog, hauled herself uncomfortably over the fence. She peered around the corner of the milking shed. She was sure the boy had been moving in this direction but there was nobody here now. Perhaps she had paused too long on the staircase, listening to Katherine and – whoever it was. She'd missed her chance.

  The moonlight stained the side of the shed a burnt orange. Rachel stared at the face of the moon. Perhaps it was a mist from the river, blown across the farm. There had to be some explanation.

  The moonlight surged, so bright she had to close her eyes and turn away and as she did the buzzing came again. She steadied herself against the wall of the milking shed, closed her eyes. When she looked again the moon was just the moon, though still wrapped in that sickly orange glow. But the thought lingered that, just for a moment, it hadn't been a moon at all but a weird and malevolent sun, older and angrier by far than her own.

  Rachel saw movement in the shadow of the trees. The boy stood at the edge of the forest. Something dead dangled from his right hand, blood pulsing slowly into the grass. He placed it reverentially on the top of the last fencepost. Then he looked directly at her before walking into the forest.

  Rachel remained where she was. She could leave. She could go back to the house, try and get some sleep. She could leave tomorrow morning, although she might have to call a taxi. Katherine had said she'd get the car towed to a local garage, but Rachel realised she hadn't asked about it. How many days had she been here, anyway? The dizziness had played havoc with her sense of time. Surely she'd spent enough time with St. John, got enough on tape. She could go back to Auckland, type everything up in a hotel or even the airport departure lounge. It didn't matter, as long as she got away. There was something about the farm she didn't understand, but she had the feeling that t
he farm understood her all too well.

  She could feel the dizziness again and she shook her head; she wouldn't, couldn't fall asleep now.

  The blood of the thing on the fencepost was a glistening black.

  She had to know.

  She stepped forward.

  A rat, eyes open and staring sightlessly at the orange moon, its mouth wide, almost in a grin.

  She stood directly in front of the trees and from here they looked different, although she couldn't exactly say how. Larger, perhaps. There seemed to be more of them, as if it really were a forest and not just a tiny stand of trees in the middle of a paddock. She couldn't see through to the other side now. The orange moon picked out a bare patch between the trees, the path the boy must had taken. She stole one more look at the slaughtered rat, its paws brought close to its body in an attitude of prayer, then stepped beneath the trees.

  She had to know.

  THE FOREST WAS THE world.

  When she'd stood in the paddock (had it been yesterday? It was hard to remember) and looked at the sad stand of trees, she had wondered why they had been preserved in the middle of all that grass. There might have been ten of them, scraggly and poor, shaped through years of wind until they bent over like ancient crones. But these trees were straight-backed and tall enough to hold up the sky and there were so very many of them. She turned around. Though she hadn't taken more than a few steps, she couldn’t see the paddock. Only more trees, and the trail and she knew, somehow, that if she followed it she'd walk for untold hours and never find her way back to the yellowing grass and the recording studio and the fencepost with its tribute rat.

  The air smelled full and wet, like moss under ancient roots, and she could feel the inrushing energy of every breath. She should have been terrified, was, perhaps, on some level, yet she could not suppress a smile, grinning like the dead rat had grinned at the moon. It was as if a secret belief that she had held her whole life without knowing had been confirmed.

  She followed the path, not bothering to look back. Any exit was ahead, not behind. If one appeared, what would she do? Would she take it? It should have been no question at all, but now there was the thought, lurking. Why would she? Why not stay?

  There was music in the air, just on the edge of hearing and she recognised it immediately. The same melody she'd heard in Katherine St. John's recording studio. A choir, she had thought at the time, but there was no choir in the forest. The sound didn’t come from any particular direction. It was as if the leaves of the trees were a choir, their song quiet but insistent.

  Don't go.

  Don't go.

  Arms of trees reached out across the path, hiding the sky, but the orange moonlight found a way through, washing everything, making every shadow deeper. They looked like oak trees, but there was something about them – they seemed, somehow more real than any trees she had seen before. As if these were the models that all other trees aspired to. Their size and the deep cracks in their trunks marked them as immeasurably ancient, yet there was a youth about them, a vitality that she knew would last forever. This was the Forest Beneath, the leaves whispered to her, and it was between and beneath and around all. The forest was the world.

  The boughs of the trees covered the path entirely now, so she walked in almost total darkness. Just a few small patches of orange moonlight on the path like running lights along the aisle of an airplane. She could see a larger light ahead, but she could not judge how far away it was. And still the singing, quiet still but slowly becoming louder.

  Don't go

  Don't go.

  Then the light was close enough to touch and then she was in it. She found herself stepping into a glade. The path ended here, giving way to a wide space of low brown grasses and nightflowers. The orange moon hung fat and full above, draining the scene of nearly all other colour. She stepped forward, walked to the centre, where a circle had been marked in white sand, too perfect to be any kind of accident. She saw now that there were several paths through the trees besides the one that had brought her here. The one directly ahead seemed to continue in a straight line, but the three to the left of her and four to the right seemed wilder. The last one on the left curved uphill somehow, though there was no hill there. The sight of that path leading impossibly up brought forth an ache, an overwhelming feeling of loss that she did not understand. These are the paths of the Dancing Man, though he has not come these ways for an age, said the voice in her head that was hers and yet was not.

  She turned around, looking at the trees that were the perfection of all trees. Still singing, louder now—

  Don't go

  Don't go

  —as if it were not just the song the leaves happened to sing. As if they were singing directly to her. In warning.

  Don't! Go!

  Don't! Go!

  Don't—

  The song stopped so suddenly that the silence rang.

  The boy stepped between two trees on the other side of the clearing. He walked towards her, barefoot, stepping lightly on the balls of his feet, as if he were a ballet dancer and this was all a performance. His right hand held the dagger he had used to split the rat, long-bladed, the edge broken by dents and cuts turned rust-coloured by the moon. He stared at her and there was rage in his eyes but something deeper too, some skill or power of command that he had not mastered – but he would and when he did the world would scream.

  Slipper walked towards her slowly and still she did not, could not move. She had not listened to the warning of the trees and now she would die here, in the Forest Between. She should have run, but something more than fear kept her standing in the circle of sand. Stay, said the voice in her head that was her voice but not and Slipper crept closer still. The rough vest he wore had once been a deep blue; time and the elements had faded it to a futile grey. The remains of a gold braid clung to one shoulder. He wore nothing beneath; the shadowed lines of his ribs stood clear on his sides. His trousers had obviously come from a far larger man; they were tied around his waist with a length of twine and hung slack to mid-calf, where they had been jaggedly hacked shorter, perhaps with the same knife he was holding out towards her, straight-armed as though it were a spear. He grinned, and his teeth were a scatter of angles. The knife was a hand-span from her eyes. With one more step he too would be standing in the white sand circle and that blade, she knew, would be at her throat.

  A shout.

  The boy dropped his arm and stared behind her, to where the path opened out on the clearing.

  The shout, again. Slipper whined and wrapped his arms around his stomach. His face softened, the slope of his shoulders changed and his projection of malice was swept away. He was no threat to her at all, just an emaciated and shivering boy, wrapped in the ill-fitting clothes of luckless and long-dead men.

  ‘Arrête!’

  Rachel turned. A man stepped from the trees. He was tall and moved confidently. Like the boy, he was barefoot. But the man's clothes were not old and frayed. He wore dark trousers that shone like silk and a small bolero jacket, embossed with gold braid. He looked impeccable, as if a team of tailors dogged his every step.

  The man shouted something else. He spoke French, or something close enough to it that Rachel could nearly make out the words. But they danced along the edge of her mind, meaning slipping away even as she grasped for it.

  Slipper hissed some more words and spat at his feet. He waved the knife dismissively, in the direction she had come, the path to the house.

  The man spoke again, a hint of steel in his voice. The words remained alien to her, but this time, she caught the meaning of a handful. She is a guest.

  She could chart the course of the conversation from the change in the boy's posture. Had the man not spoken when he did Slipper would have slit her throat. The man reached out a hand, palm down.

  Slipper shook his head vehemently and did not back away. Rachel stood between them, afraid to move in case she interrupted their delicate dance.

  The man
took a step closer, then another. Slipper remained where he was, the knife dangling from his fingers like a favourite doll. The man had covered half the distance to the centre of the clearing now, still speaking low and calm.

  Slipper hissed and raised the knife again and Rachel could not suppress a whimper of her own.

  The man shouted – something. He opened his mouth and sound came out, but the sounds were older than any language. The sound hit Slipper like a blow and he stumbled back a couple of steps. The man closed his mouth and the forest fell silent. But something buzzed in Rachel's mind, as if the power of the word was still draining away, dark and slow like black oil on the surface of the world.

  Slipper quivered, struggling against a force Rachel could not see. His mouth stretched wide in agony and a sound like a sob escaped him. A tear ran down his cheek. The knife tumbled from his hand.

  The man resumed his quiet approach. Slipper dropped to his knees and snatched up the knife. Then he turned and ran towards the trees. Rachel could still hear his loud sobbing long after he had disappeared from view.

  She let out a long breath, unaware until then she had been holding it. Her legs quivered.

  The man reached her and held out a steadying hand. ‘Are you hurt?’

  It took Rachel a few moments to realise she had understood the words. ‘No. I'm—’ Another shuddering breath. ‘I'm fine.’

  ‘You should not be here. It is not safe for you.’ The man's eyes were a deep brown that gave no clues to his age or origin.

  ‘I'm sorry. I followed him. He wanted me to.’

  The man gave a short laugh and looked towards the trees. ‘Yes. He did. He is a rough one. He is not used to—’ He paused, trying to find the words. ‘—gentle custom.’

  She remembered Katherine's words upon finding the slaughtered possum. Little monkey.

  The man smiled. My muse likes to be alone with me. He gets jealous if there are too many people about.

  ‘Go,’ he said, ‘before the little monkey comes back.’