The Dark Between the Trees, page 6
And then there was Deirdre, Alice’s own PhD supervisor, from the first time Alice had come to Sibbert Hill. The woods had already been fenced off by then, and they’d been there to excavate the hill, and perhaps to find out who the mystery attackers mentioned in the deserter’s account were. In the event, they had been out of luck—there was not a shred of evidence one way or the other, which had done nothing to sate either Alice’s curiosity, or Deirdre’s. But two decades ago Alice had been where Nuria was now—or a few miles to the south at any rate—stringing along in Deirdre’s wake, already casting jealous glances at those tantalising “KEEP OUT” signs while Deirdre did exactly the same. The wild theories had been Deirdre’s to begin with, and Alice found herself inflicted with the same fascination, drawn by the same compulsion to make it inside this place and see it for herself. Deirdre hadn’t managed it, in the end, and now Alice had gone where her mentor never could. They had said it was a lack of funding that was the problem, or else that it no longer “fit with the currents of contemporary research”, whatever that was supposed to mean, but the upshot was that every time she had tried to apply for permission to come here, she had no support at all from her department, and the permissions had been flat-out refused more times than she could count. It had taken twenty years of stonewalling and jumping through bureaucratic hoops, but she’d got here.
There was nothing for it, though. The park rangers had spoken, and that was the whole point of their being here in the first place.
She did her best not to sulk while they were packing up the tents, and eating their cereal bars and drinking their tea. It was hard not to, and there wasn’t a lot she wanted to say. She should have learned how to contain her disappointment, or at least not to show it so transparently, years ago. Maybe in other circumstances. Or anywhere else on the planet.
The mood amongst all the others was equally subdued, although for different reasons. Sue in particular seemed to have been shaken by the disappearance of the huge tree. Every so often as they were packing up, in the midst of everything else she would look like she was about to say something, and she seemed to be suddenly hyper alert, aware of any small sound or movement not only in the clearing but around to either side. Kim was all monosyllabic pragmatism in the way of someone used to dealing with extreme conditions. You could almost see the to-do list painted on her forehead, checked off item by item—focusing the attention, getting through this.
Helly was the opposite. She muttered to herself quietly and constantly, narrating what she was doing in a way that see-sawed between inaudible and one half of a conversation in which the others might be expected to engage. None of them took her bait. And honestly, thought Alice, that might just be how Helly naturally was, rather than her chattiness being any particular response to stress: of all of them, Helly seemed the most at ease with the… you know, the tree. Presumably it made some kind of intuitive sense to her, although whether that was anything like the sense it made to Alice was debatable. She would’ve asked Helly about it, whether Helly too had noticed something strange about the landscape around them—aside from the obvious, of course, but she was afraid Helly would say something embarrassing. And then the others would think both of them were strange, and it wouldn’t help Alice’s own chances of coming back.
It had been barely half past six in the morning when Kim had first got up out of her tent and seen that the tree had gone; by the time they had all argued over their decision, and eaten and cleared up their things to leave, it was shortly after half past eight. They should be out of the woods and back at the Land Rover round about eleven-ish, shortly after that they’d have reasonable phone signal back, and they should be able to let the department know they’d be home by the end of the day. It was a shame, of course, but for everyone who wasn’t Alice, that was all it was. It was all she could do not to be bitter about it, not to snipe at them.
The GPS unit was still not working. The batteries—“Fresh yesterday morning! You all saw me put the new ones in!”—were completely flat, and even when Sue replaced them with a backup set, it wouldn’t acknowledge any satellites.
“Did you charge the camera, too?” said Helly.
“Yes, before I left the house yesterday. Don’t say it’s—”
“Down to its last bar, yes. Must be those magnets,” she said, carelessly. “My phone battery went in the night too. Not that it’s much use in here. You did say you’d left yours in the car, didn’t you, Alice?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“And I know Kim has a charger in the glove box. We’ll be fine, then. Not too long without. I’ll take a last couple of pictures, anyway.” And she did so, of the space where the tree used to be, and where now was nothing. It looked normal. It looked like there ought to be nothing there.
Kim said, “It’s a bit dodgy in this place, but I do have a proper compass with me, just in case.” She extracted it from a pocket of her bag and hung it around her neck from a string. “We’ll be alright. We’ll just do it the old-fashioned way.”
So they set off, back the way they had come.
Where the previous day Alice had been at the front of the group she now hung back. She was being childish about it, and she knew it—but to have the brakes applied so cruelly and so quickly on the fulfilment of such a lifelong dream was more than a person should have to bear. The morning was overcast and gloomy, and the greenery was thick and seemed to intersect their path with a frequency that felt almost deliberate, just like it had done the previous day. Nevertheless, they had walked for barely more than twenty minutes, when she began to get a vague hunch that they were not in fact retracing their steps. Really she wanted to keep quiet about it and let them get further in, to spend as long as she was allowed in this forest, but she was not as childish as all that so she said, “Have we been this way already? I don’t believe we have.”
Sue was the one with the map—the 1960s map, that was, requisitioned since the GPS was out of commission—and she brandished it now. “I think we’re about here. We should be coming up along a ridge to our right, in a few more minutes.” And she traced their trajectory with the tip of a chewed-up biro, produced from the depths of a trouser pocket.
Alice nodded. This wasn’t her expedition any more, after all.
Kim held a hand out for the map. “Let’s have a look.” But she seemed placated.
Ten minutes later, they still hadn’t come across the ridge.
“Let me have a look at the compass,” said Helly fairly, and when Kim handed it over to her she said, “We’re going almost due east?”
Kim flushed. “That’s not what it said when I looked at it. Are you sure?”
But that was what it said.
“I could have sworn…”
“Let’s check it against the map.” But there were no obvious landmarks to compare with the map.
“Maybe we went past the ridge and didn’t spot it,” said Alice. “Should we double back?”
It was not the right thing to say. Sue shot her a filthy look, then returned her attention to Kim. “We definitely set out in the right direction.” It wasn’t a question.
“I thought so too,” said Kim. “And I’ve checked since then and it said south. But then, there is something wrong with the compasses round here. Magnetic.” She squinted up at the sun. “It’s so dark today, I can’t even see which way the shadows are going.”
In the end they changed direction, to what the compass insisted ought now to be due south. Sue clearly wanted to take control of the offending item herself, but since she was loath to give up the map she instead had to be content with handing the compass over to Helly, who kept it face up in her flat palm as she walked, as a show of good faith. It was a bad compromise, at least judging by Sue’s increasingly sour expression, but there was no way the map was getting relinquished to the possession of Mrs I Prefer To Understand Grid References Intuitively. Which on the whole was probably fair enough.
They went on, and although the silence among the group was more strained, and they could not be entirely sure exactly where they were, Alice felt herself start to slip into her own mind again. There was a weight in her chest, dense and heavy and recently chipped with the pain of failure, but at the same time the rhythm of walking was comforting, calming almost, and this place might after all be her favourite in the whole world. She ought to enjoy it while she could.
If they were not making their way out of the woods, though, then they must be instead going deeper in. Deeper wasn’t a bad word for it, not least because the tree cover here was so thick. She could see the sky only in intermittent patches. And there was something too about the smell of it, of fresh leaves and also of something earthy and damp. Now and again she thought she caught a whiff of wild garlic, but there was none to be seen.
Nuria had not said a word while they had been arguing over directions—nor in fact since they had left the clearing. That was just what Nuria was like, though, and another opinion in the mix would hardly have improved matters. Alice stole a glance at her now; she looked like she was trying not to cry, but it didn’t do to judge people like that and maybe Alice was reading into things. What was she going to do, ask? She looked away again.
One thing that she kept coming back to was that there shouldn’t be any paths in here, because nobody ever came through it, and yet there were—just now and again, criss-crossing the way they walked, and sometimes they followed one along for a bit before it dissipated into nothing again. Deer, she assumed, must be responsible for it, or some other animals, perhaps—but it felt like the paths were features of the wood itself, that somehow they were a way for the place to express itself. It was expressing itself, Alice thought, the longer she was inside it. The wood was a liar, but beneath that was buried something true, and fascinating, and the wood was telling her what it was, if only she could tune into it properly, or decipher it.
Whatever it was, it was something big. She thought of the oak tree again—the tiny, incontrovertible one on the two-inch screen of a digital camera, and the real one, or the maybe real one, which had so dwarfed everything else around it. How old did a tree have to be to grow that size? Well, let’s see: it was hard to tell the diameter of the trunk, since it was so gnarled, but let’s put it at five feet, or sixty inches. Multiply that by pi—and she was nearly getting somewhere, when Helly planted herself face first into the ground.
“Are you alright?” Kim was the first to react.
“Yeah,” said Helly. But she didn’t get up; she slid the rucksack off her back and sat down. “I think I’ve jarred my ankle.”
Then they were all concern, piling their bags to one side and rummaging for first aid kits and bottles of water. Helly winced when she tried to get up, and was nearly in tears the first time she tried to put any weight on it. The ankle, it turned out, was not just jarred but in all likelihood broken.
Kim pulled her phone out. “No signal. Of course not.” She waved it about. “Look, it only thinks we’ve gone about half a mile today. Definitely not right.”
“Mine hasn’t got signal either,” said Sue. “I don’t think it has since we left the boundary.”
“Two people should go ahead, then,” said Alice. “To get help.”
Sue looked like she was going to object, and Kim said, “Not if we can possibly help it. We’d never find our way back here, and the air ambulance would be no help in these trees.” She said to Helly, “If we bind it up, and you double up on paracetamol and ibuprofen, do you think you can walk for a while? Just back to the car.”
Helly was very pale. “Just about, if that’s how it has to be. I’m sorry, Kim, I don’t think I can carry my bag like this.”
“We’ll split it between us,” said Nuria. She held out a box of pills and a bottle of water. Helly took them, and popped two paracetamol into her palm.
“Will that be okay?”
Sue said, rather brusquely, “Of course. You can’t carry a tent on your foot.”
Assent now given, the majority of Helly’s pack was divided among them. They drank some of the water, and opened a few of the tins between them, since it wasn’t worth carrying them back to the Land Rover. Kim bandaged Helly’s ankle up and gave her an arm to lean on until a stick or two of adequate size could be found. It was all very straightforward. They were professionals, making the best of a bad situation.
Nobody mentioned the oak. Not once.
And, slowly, on they walked.
CHAPTER SIX
The Devil’s Dance
Gossip travels the length of a military marching line at speeds that shouldn’t be possible, even in double file. Part of the reason for that, of course, is that discipline often leaves a lot to be desired. In this case Sergeant Thatcher, who was supposed to be at the back and supervising the line ahead of him, was in fact one of the worst offenders. Sergeant Sam Harper, two rows from the front and resolutely staring at the back of Captain Davies’s head, knew that Thatcher had not been Davies’s first choice of right hand man—anyone with eyes could see that, not least Thatcher himself—but aside from Davies, Thatcher was the longest serving soldier here. He’d be damned if he wasn’t going to hang onto the crumbs of power and scoop them up with both hands where he could.
Frankly, Harper thought the captain was too lenient on Thatcher—on most of them, really. Maybe it was because the gossip hadn’t made it that far up the line. And here was Harper, the killjoy that was stopping it. It was better for everyone that way.
He himself, being a bit further along, could hear better what was being said at the back, and he didn’t like it one bit. Rod Thatcher spent far too long loudly contemplating the state of his immortal soul at the best of times, but now he was really taking it too far. Usually everyone else would agree about that—they’d all been subjected to it enough times. Not today, though. Today they were joining in. The parts he could hear were getting more and more far-fetched—now Charley Ames was sure that the ambushers on the hill must have been a rogue company of Irish Catholics set on driving them into this forest to their certain doom; now the Devil himself was watching their progress through His own domain.
It was strange. Harper’s own memory of the hill featured more of his own men than the others. He had been focused on Willis, for a lot of it. But he remembered next to nothing about the enemy: no colours, no uniforms, except maybe that they were red. No faces, or voices. All that was unusual. True, he had not fought anyone man to man this time—but Sam Harper remembered faces, often for longer afterwards than was comfortable. He could still bring to mind some of the men he had killed in France, although he didn’t like to if he could help it these days. He could picture the opposite line outside Banbury weeks ago—that was easy. And yet… He must have been too focused on Willis. That must have been it. He held the thought in front of him, as if in his hands, and then set it somewhere safe. Sometimes it was like that, immediately afterwards. You found out the truth of the matter sooner or later, if the Lord intended you to. Or you didn’t.
As for the rest of what Ames was bleating on about, now that there was a name to it, he could see there being some devil or creature lurking in these woods. It was unclear how it might be related to the disappearance of the oak tree, but there was more in this world than Samuel Harper understood, and demonic forces were as likely an explanation as any other he could think of.
When it came down to it, and now he was thinking about it in particular, Harper also believed the Devil could walk among them, if it chose to. You had to be on your guard. Whatever the others had to say about it.
To either side, taller trees had given way to thick, sprawling bracken. It reached its tendrils out, almost to waist height in places, whispering and snapping as the men in front brushed it out of the way when they passed. The tops of wide-canopied birch bent lower than they had done in the morning, their trunks gnarlier and more twisted. Older, maybe, or just different. There was an odd smell in the air, deep and verdant and cloying. Harper blinked.
Corrigal. The Corrigal. He had never heard of it. But now that the idea had been planted in his head… Yesterday it had felt like someone or something had been watching them. He had blamed the feeling on the fact that they’d just been ambushed.
He nearly tripped over a protruding tree root. Luckily none of the rest were paying attention. He could have sworn it hadn’t been there a moment ago—but then he had been peering through the trees, rather than down at his own feet, so it could yet be that he was mistaken. A freckle of damp touched the end of his nose. It was going to rain soon. He cast around again: did he feel like anyone was watching them right now? It was hard to tell.
At any rate it did not seem likely that there were demons running around uprooting trees and leaving no trace of them. For a start, the Devil was cleverer than that. But the thing that had shaken him most this morning was the fact that his sense of direction had failed him, and the captain the same. In all the years they had travelled in the same company, Harper couldn’t remember that ever happening before. Now north was not the way he had believed it to be, and the one whose gut feeling had been true was Cadwell, of all people.
