Darkest Part of the Woods (18 page)

"Let's say so if you like, but haven't we strayed from your point?"

"Which you think was..."

"You were calling yourself a bitch."

"Wasn't I one when I showed you how to hide from mom?"

"Sounds as if I must have been as well, and I was older."

"You remember what we did, then."

"I think I remember trying to be the quietest thing there was. We haven't had snow round here for years."

"It's the way the world's changing. What made you think of that?"

"Don't say there's something you've forgotten, how we used to try and walk like snow falling."

"You did, but I tried to do it like dead leaves. I'd feel them settling on the earth and starting to turn into it, and that's how I wanted to go. That was the beginning, I think."

"Of what?" Heather could find no excuse not to ask.

"Of learning what you can do in the woods."

"Nothing much that I can bring to mind."

"I thought you were remembering how we hid from mom."

"You mean when we were playing on the common and sometimes we'd sneak into the woods so she wouldn't see us when it was time to go home."

"Right," Sylvia said eagerly, "and do you remember how close we were to the edge of the woods? You'd have thought she would have been able to see us from the back gate."

"Maybe she did."

"You aren't remembering. You're trying not to."

"Honestly, Sylvie, I don't see the point of digging all-"

"Can't you remember how it felt?"

Heather didn't know if she was being accused of inability or reluctance. "It's been most of forty years."

"For some people that's less than a breath." Sylvia clenched her fists, apparently unaware that they were blackened with earth. "They're still inside us," she insisted, "the children we were. We just get bigger around them."

"I think there's a little more to it."

"In the end there isn't, Heather. They're the depths of us. Just let yourself feel."

"I've done quite a lot of that in my time."

"No need to feel lonely any more," Sylvia said, perhaps taken Heather's remark as an accusation. "I meant remember what I used to tell you to do."

"Strange how much of that you did though you were younger."

"Maybe that means I saw clearer. Remember what I said about the trees."

"I expect we both used to imagine things. It's part of being little."

"We're all little compared with some," Sylvia said, and stretched her earthy hands towards her sister. "Tell me you remember how we had to be like the trees that were so thin you could see in front of them and behind them both at once."

Heather felt as if she was in danger of dreaming while awake, which failed to appeal to her. "I never-"

"You did when I got you to understand it wasn't how they looked but how they felt.

Don't you remember feeling so thin you could hide behind a twig? You kept being afraid it was like dying, but it was only like we weren't there, just the woods."

Abruptly Heather saw Margo shouting their names across the common as she made a number of tentative zigzag advances towards the

trees, opening and closing her hands and clutching her breasts with them. The sisters had never hidden from her after that, having seen how upset she was-so upset they had been afraid to reveal themselves until she'd returned to the house. Or had Heather been most afraid of finding herself unable to grow visible? If so it had only been a childish fear, she told herself as the doorbell rang.

She hurried to answer it, leaving any memories behind. The hall smelled more like the depths of a wood than the site of a single tree. "Mum, you're early," she declared.

"Not too, I hope," Margo said, miming readiness to leave.

"Never that. Come in out of the chill," Heather urged, for the icy air appeared to be stealing their breaths.

Margo unburdened herself of a carrier bagful of presents like a tribute to the tree before shedding her winter coat over the post of the banisters to reveal the dress she'd worn at her private view. "Have you heard from the gallery lately?" Heather was prompted to ask.

"Lucinda was suggesting I could find another way of doing what I do, so I've treated myself to a video camera."

Heather might have sought to discover what Margo was leaving unsaid if Sylvia hadn't called "Get some coffee, mom. We've had ours."

Heather was disconcerted to realise she couldn't remember when, as though reminiscing had engulfed any other awareness. "Happy Christmas to us all," Margo was, saying. "Come down, Sam, if three girls aren't too much for you."

He'd swapped the towel for trousers and one of the very few Worlds Unlimited sweaters in existence, but looked embarrassed by her flirtatiousness, though she was too intent on hastening to Sylvia to notice. "How are you feeling?" she murmured, seizing Sylvia's hands.

"Kind of guilty."

"Who's been making you feel that way?"

"Me, all by myself."

"I hope you know you'll never be that again while any of us are around." Margo waited until this provoked a wistful smile. "What about?" she said.

"How we hid from you in the trees when we were supposed to come home at night."

"Then you're not the only one who should feel guilty, are you? Your big sister was meant to be looking after you." Before Heather could react more than inwardly, Margo said

"Anyway, you're both for-, given. I should have known you knew your way around the woods, and never got lost and always stayed away from where that poisonous stuff grew, because I'd asked you to. I'll be like that soon if I've anything to do with it."

"Like what?" Heather had to learn.

"At home in the woods. I'm going to explore everything about them. That's why I bought the camera."

"I'll walk with you if you hike," Sylvia said.

"No need, dear. I'll be finding my way gradually. Don't worry, you won't lose me."

"I meant I'd quite like a few walks in the woods."

"Would you mind very much if they weren't with me for the moment? I make my best work when I'm by myself. I expect someone will keep you company if that's what you're looking for."

Sam had joined them and was pouring coffee into his Fight For Foliage mug. "Me if you want," he blurted, and seemed instantly confused.

"Sylvie," Heather said, and felt too committed to her question to suppress it.

"Why would you want to go back there?"

"Heather, we all love you and wouldn't change anything about you," Margo said, "so don't feel hurt if I say you were never the most imaginative member of the family. Sylvia will tell me if I'm wrong, but I assume she wants to reclaim the place for herself."

When Sylvia nodded slowly twice as though her midriff was tugging her head down, Heather left the decision to her. "Shall we come back to today?" Heather said. "I wouldn't mind opening my presents."

They finished their coffee before heading for the front room, where Heather popped a bottle of something akin to champagne and filled four glasses with dwindling fizz. Once Margo's was topped up she rose with studied dignity to her feet. "Age gets to start," she said on the way to retrieving her packages.

She'd bought Sylvia a capacious dress and Heather one more fitting, and so expensive a shirt for Sam it could almost have been designed as a rebuke to his clothes sense. He seemed abashed by handing out the presents he'd been able to afford-a history of art for Margo, a vegetarian cookbook for Heather, a book on Severn Valley legends for Sylvia. "It's second-hand but I thought you'd like it because it's quite rare," he said.

"I don't think we even have it in the library," said Heather.

Sylvia's gifts to the women were delicate necklaces composed of seeds, while Sam's package proved to be a wooden box as black as a shadow. "That's for your secrets," she told him.

Heather's parcels were small enough to have sat overnight on the tree rather than beneath. As she recovered them from the branches, the irregular flickering of fairy lights brought feelers that were shadows groping around the tree-trunk.

She wasn't sure whether the parcels were slightly damp, but rubbed them with her handkerchief in preparation for delivering them. Everyone had silver earrings, since Sam had taken to adorning his left ear. His ring was plain, while Margo's and Sylvia's pairs bore tiny leaves. "Now we're even more alike," Margo remarked as Heather made for the kitchen to monitor dinner.

Nothing was playing hide and seek with her behind the tree except a many-legged insect shadow. All the same, on her way back she knelt and switched off the fairy lights at the socket on the skirting board, to prove to her presumably drunken self that she had the power to extinguish the appearance. The tree seemed poised to lurch at her-because she was looking up at it, of course, which let her see that it was slightly tilted towards her. She removed bricks from the plastic bucket and took hold of the rough spiky trunk to return it to the vertical. At once her grasp was full of the swarming of insects.

She didn't cry out or even recoil very far. She stood up quite carefully and strode to open the front door with the hand she wasn't staring at to convince herself it was bare, empty, clean. "Have we another visitor?" Margo called.

"I'm just-"Heather didn't want to explain until she'd finished. She pushed the door wide and hurried shivering to unplug the light and grab the tree with both hands. Though not even a hint of movement was visible, the trunk felt frantic with swarming-felt as though! it was about to hatch. As she heaved at it, trembling with the effort or with the chill that had closed around her like a sudden fog, the roots snagged in the bucket somehow. She could have imagined they were] determined to cling to their nest. She was opening her mouth to ask Sam to come and help when the tree sprang out of the bucket, waving] its roots.

It took her only six breathless steps to carry it out of the house, but in those seconds she thought it writhed in her grip-thought it felt] less like wood than like soft scaly flesh. She didn't just let go of it but] flung it away from her.

It fell against the house with a diffused thump, jingling its decorations like a jester's bells. "Was that you? Are you all right?" Margo cried.

"No," Heather called, "yes," which was no more uncertain than she felt. She was making herself reach to strip the tree of its lights when Margo and the others came to find her. "What on earth are you doing?" Margo demanded.

"Something's living in the tree. One of you, Sam, bring out the bucket and the rest of it as well."

"What's living?" Sylvia asked with an odd wide-eyed frown.

"I don't know exactly. I don't care. All I know is I don't want it in the house," Heather said, shivering more than ever as she unwound the flex budding with lights. "Get the bucket and the bricks, Sam."

Margo waited until he was in the house before she murmured "I didn't mean you had no imagination at all, you know. No need to go mad to prove you have."

For a moment Heather thought she had nothing but anger with which to respond, and then she found a reason to jab a finger at the tree. "I'm not imagining that, am I? You can see that too."

"You aren't imagining we can see what?"

"Something's grown on here," Heather insisted, using a fingernail to extract a dull truncated chime from a silver globe that anyone could see was greenish.

"I shouldn't be surprised. We've had some of those since Sylvia was born. Don't catch cold, Heather, and especially not Sylvia. Come inside."

"Not till I know what's coming in with me." Heather did her best to conquer her shivering as she examined every bulb and every inch of the flex before carrying the plastic vine of lights to the cupboard under the stairs. "Hurry up and take those out," she told Sam and watched to be certain he loaded all the bricks into the bucket while she stored the lights in their box. She followed him out with the carton for the rest of the decorations. "Don't touch those,"

she not much less than shouted at the sight of Margo lifting off the tinsel globes, "please."

"Then I won't do anything," Margo said, but observed Heather's scrutiny of all the globes, most of which she risked returning to the carton, leaving in place six that looked faintly coated with moss. "Is that the end of it now?" Margo hoped aloud. "Can we get back to Christmas?"

"I don't want any of this near the house," Heather said and seized the handle of the bucket. "Someone help me take it out the back."

She wasn't only loath to touch the tree. She wanted one of her family to experience at least a hint of what she'd encountered. Sylvia was making to lift it when Margo said "You take it, Sam."

"Be careful what you're touching," Heather was impelled to say.

"It's just a tree," he said, but nevertheless held it at arms' length as he bore it around the house, its roots waving as though in search of somewhere to cling.

As Heather dumped the bucket next to the dustbin he opened the gate onto the common and slung the tree into long grass. He appeared to have felt nothing untoward. "Don't forget to bolt the gate," Heather told him.

Perhaps the cold had stilled whatever insects were lurking in the bark, and that was why Sam hadn't noticed them. The important point was that they hadn't escaped into the house.

Heather managed to bury the incident deep in her mind well before dinner, abetted by her portion of another gushing bottle. Several more accompanied the meal while the day gave up its light, and another

helped the Prices play charades once they'd agreed that pronunciation should be English.

The games ended when Margo dozed, which was the cue for Syl and Sam to take their presents to their rooms. Eventually she woke to proclaim that it had been a far better Christmas day than she could have wished for. She refused to be escorted home. "This still isn't the kind of place where you need to be afraid at night," she said.

As Heather washed up the dinner things, belatedly aided by Sam, her attention kept straying to the back gate. Sam hadn't finished drying the plates when she wiped her hands on a towel in preparation for taking a flashlight from under the stairs. At least there was no sign in "