Darkest Part of the Woods (7 page)

If she was talking to any extent about the view the window shared with Sam's, Heather had to assume she meant how it would look in daylight. Just now all that she could see through the reflection of the room was the dim common stretching beyond her seven-foot garden fence to the dark woods. Sam planted the shopping bags on the quilt and told her "I can make dinner if you like."

Heather moved to stand beside her sister. "Shall we leave you to-"The barking of dogs made her lean towards the window, and she interrupted herself. "What was that?"

At once it wasn't there. It must have been a trick of light, a headlamp beam so fleeting she hadn't perceived it as such-had seemed to see only a dark shape not unlike a man but as long as a man's shadow in the depths of winter, gliding swiftly as a snake towards the woods.

At the moment when its pace would have brought it to the trees, she imagined she saw the darkness thicken beyond all of them. "Just my eyes," she said. Then, somewhere close, children began to scream.

7

The Sticky Man

WHEN Sylvia pushed up the lower half of the window, a scent drifted into the room. It must be some kind of night blossom that Heather didn't recognise.

Lurking beneath the sweet almost cloying odour was another smell, of decay or growth or a marriage of the two. At once it withdrew into the night, and there was nothing to distract her from the screams, which were coming from the direction of the old school. She leaned across the corner of the desk to crane out of the window and shivered, because the night had grown much colder since she'd entered the house. Before she could see anything except the deserted schoolyard and the boxes of darkness that were back gardens, Sylvia was out of the swivel chair like a dervish. "Better go and look," she declared.

She left the house so fast that Heather could only follow. Sam was on the stairs when Heather reached the front door. "Do you need me as well?" he seemed not to hope.

She didn't know whether any of them would be more than a hindrance. "See what you can do to tempt your aunt instead," she advised him, and shut the door.

She was hugging herself to fend off the cold, and its absence was a shock. It must have been emanating from the common. The screams were subsiding, or the children had been taken indoors, or both. Sylvia dodged through the old iron schoolyard gates as Heather's friend Jessica flustered out of the house opposite. "Jessica," Heather called, hurrying to catch up with her at the gates.

"Is it Rosemary?"

If possible Jessica was even more dishevelled than usual, her red hair that always looked windswept sprouting more random curls than ever, her thick-lensed thin-framed spectacles in danger of sliding off her token nose and down her broad face. She was wearing a voluminous dark green dress and a plastic apron printed with bunches of cherries big as apples and spattered with traces of whatever dinner she'd been preparing. "She'd never make a noise like that unless something was terribly wrong," she said.

It wasn't clear whether that meant she thought one of the distressed children was indeed her granddaughter. Heather followed her into the j entrance corridor as the nearby dogs stopped prompting one another. J It was smaller than it had seemed in her childhood. Several pensioners I in artists' smocks had emerged from a classroom to stare along it, past posters for flower arranging and wine appreciation and bookbinding as a hobby, towards the double doors of the former assembly hall. Sylvia opened the doors to reveal a huddle of small timid ballerinas, one of whom bolted towards Jessica. "Rosemary," Jessica cried. "Was that you giving me a fright?"

"It was Willow and Laurel trying to scare us," her granddaughter said, clinging to as much of Jessica's waist as she could encompass.

Two girls were isolated on the far side of the wide high stony room. "Isn't anyone looking after them?" Jessica protested.

"Their mummies aren't here yet."

"We'll take care of them, won't we, Heather?" Sylvia said, and hurried to them.

The ballet teacher and the pianist, two tall middle-aged women whose makeup had begun to fray around the eyes, were doing their nervous best to calm the other children. "Who are you, please?" the " ballet teacher called in the high sharp voice Heather had overheard telling the ballerinas to be trees.

"She's a friend of mine from just along the road," said Jessica.

"And this is my sister," Heather said more protectively than she'd known she was about to speak.

"They can help till the parents arrive," Jessica said with some briskness.

"You're trees like me," Sylvia was telling the girls. "Let me guess. You have to be Willow."

The girl, who was even summer and more big-eyed than her friend, shook her head, trailing long blonde locks over her bare shoulders. "She is."

"Call strike one against me, then. I bet you're both nine years old."

"She's eight and a quarter and I nearly am."

"Gee, two strikes. They're real little maidens though, aren't they, Heather?

Just like we were at their age."

"Sometimes."

The girls were too fascinated by Sylvia's accent to spare Heather more than a simultaneous blink or apparently to notice they were shivering. "Haven't you anything to put on?" Heather said.

"Our coats are in the cloakroom," said Willow.

"Then we'd better go and get them. It's all right to do that, isn't it?"

The women in charge both had the grace to nod. Heather bustled the girls to the cloakroom next to the entrance to the building. It smelled of the wood of all the coat-hooks.

Though the smell reminded her of childhood-of herself and Sylvia making as much noise as the rest of the children crowded into the doorless room-it seemed older and more oppressive than she would have expected. As Willow and Laurel wriggled into their padded multicoloured coats, Sylvia said "What will your teacher tell your parents, do you think?"

"She'll say we frightened Lucy," Willow said.

"And Gwyn," Laurel added as if that might be a reason for sly pride.

"We told them if they came in the yard they'd see the man."

"Which man?" Sylvia asked, more eagerly than Heather thought appropriate.

The girls glanced sideways at each other, and Willow said almost too low to be heard

"The sticky man."

Sylvia moved closer to her, and Heather felt she also had to. "Why do you call him that?" Sylvia murmured.

"You can see he is," Laurel said as warily as her friend.

"And he's so thin he can put all his arm through the railings."

"And if you touched his hand you'd get honey on yours."

"Honey or whatever it is."

"Then you'd try not to lick your fingers but you would."

Heather was opening her mouth to suggest they'd covered the subject enough when Sylvia said "What else is he like?"

"Sometimes his eyes are all green," Laurel confided.

"And when you see them next they'll have got bigger," said Willow.

"But now they're all brown and wrinkled."

"They've got wrinkles around them, you mean?"

"Not around them," Willow little more than whispered. "In them."

"And he smells of sweets," said Laurel.

So did the cloakroom. Of course it would when children still used it, Heather told herself as Willow objected "Sometimes he does, and sometimes it's flowers."

"That's quite a tale," Heather said. "Did you make it up between you?"

It wasn't just being met with mute impatience that took her aback, it was that some of it was Sylvia's. "What's his face like?" Sylvia said.

"Sylvie,

I

really-"

"All scrunched up," said Willow.

"Like an old tree with crawlies on it," said her friend.

"No wonder the other children made such a fuss if you told them all that," Heather commented.

"We didn't," Willow said.

"Not all, then. Some would be too much."

"We didn't have to. He was there."

"You saw him," Heather said, audibly meaning the opposite.

"You don't need to."

"You can hear him talking," Willow explained.

"Then may I ask," Heather said more pompously than she was able to control, "what he's supposed to sound like?"

"Like

trees."

"Like when you hear them when you're in bed," Laurel added.

Heather could have done without imagining that the smells of wood and sweetness had grown stronger, and she started at a loud creak and a squeal behind her. The entrance door had admitted two women. "Laurel's in the cloakroom, Mrs.

Bennett," the ballet teacher called. "So's Willow, Mrs. Palmer."

Heather always tried to like people, and so she did her best not to take against the two women in expensive trousers and fat sweaters who marched into the corridor as though eager for a reason to complain. Their chubby petulant faces were newly made up and lipsticked, and their perfumes blotted out any other smell. "Are they in disgrace?" said the woman with the larger and redder mouth.

"I'm rather afraid so, Mrs. Palmer."

Mrs. Palmer planted her legs apart and gripped her hips, apparently as aids to glaring at her daughter. "What's she been up to now?"

"Telling you someone was hanging around at the back of the building, did you say, Gwyn?"

"Someone nasty," said the child she addressed. "Someone horrible."

"Only he wasn't really," another girl, presumably Lucy, said.

"They just kept saying he was hiding and we'd see him in a minute," Gwyn remembered with a nervous giggle, "like anyone could hide behind a railing."

"It's Laurel and Willow who are nasty and horrible," smallmouthed Mrs. Bennett said.

"They've made up one story too many this time," Mrs. Palmer agreed, scowling harder at them.

"They're a sight too fond of upsetting people with their nonsense."

"They nearly made us crash last night coming back from Brichester, going on about somebody running behind the trees."

"Don't you worry, girls," Mrs. Bennett told the ballerinas in the hall. "You won't be seeing them here again."

Laurel began at once to weep. When Willow looked uncertain whether to join in, Mrs.

Palmer told her furiously "And you won't be going to the hair salon tomorrow either."

Both girls burst into sobs and cowered as the women stalked forward to drag them away. "Do you know what people are going to say if you keep making up stories like that?"

Mrs. Bennett demanded. "They'll say you're on drugs."

"The kind that drove people mad round here before you were born," said Mrs.

Palmer, and frowned at Sylvia. "Are you waiting for someone in particular?"

"We just came over to see what the trouble was."

"Came over from America?" Mrs. Bennett said, not quite in disbelief.

"We can do without Americans telling us how to bring up our children. That's when things started going wrong, Dr Spock and all the rest of them."

"Came over from my house just up the road," Heather had been waiting for the chance to say. "Jessica knows me."

This failed to impress either of the women. "Well, I hope you found out what you wanted to," Mrs. Palmer was insincere enough to tell Sylvia.

"I'm

starting."

Both women stared at that but didn't speak. They had dragged their woebegone daughters to the exit when Mrs. Bennett offered a parting remark. "I didn't think you looked like mothers."

"I wouldn't want to if it meant looking like them," Heather murmured, and gave them time to slam themselves and their children into a car before she called "We'll be off then, Jessica."

"Thank you for helping," the ballet teacher said.

"Yes, thank you," said the pianist.

Their gratitude seemed less than wholehearted, but Heather was preoccupied. As she preceded Sylvia along the pavement, through a lingering chilly scent the women must have left behind, she said "Do you think someone ought to be looking behind what the girls were saying?"

"Willow and Laurel? I think you should always look behind things."

"I just wonder if it's too simple to dismiss what they said as made up. Didn't some of it sound like trying to talk about child abuse?"

At first Sylvia merely gazed at her. "Heather, sometimes your mind is really small."

"I don't think it's small-minded to care about children. And while we're talking about them, I should be a bit more careful how you question them, even if you are researching another book."

Of course, she thought at once, Sylvia had come home mostly for their father, which was why Sylvia said "I wouldn't want you to believe I'm here just to research." They left the glow of a streetlamp behind for the shadows outside Heather's house, and darkness seemed to well up from Sylvia's eyes, veiling her face.

8

Forgotten Dreams

HEATHER was in no hurry to emerge from a dense sleep featureless as fog when she became aware that she and Sam were no longer alone in the house. As she remembered the other was Sylvia she made to turn over in bed, hoping she could fit herself back into the sleep that the thought of restoring her family rendered even more peaceful, and then she found she was unable to move. The sheet between her and the quilt was pinning her down, trapping her on her back, arms pressed against her sides, as though a cocoon had enveloped her while she slept. A weight had joined her on the bed.

She splayed her fingers on the mattress and opened her eyes a crack. Sylvia was sitting on the far end of the bed, arms folded, head tilted to watch her sister.

She wore a black dress long and loose enough to conceal most of her gauntness.

Whatever expression she bore was swept away by a welcoming smile. "Hey, you're awake at last," she said.

Heather sat up against the padded headboard. "Why, have you been here long?"

"Pretty much since the sun came up. I don't sleep a whole lot."

A glance at the clock that was using her bedside novel as a plinth showed Heather it was nearly ten, which meant Sylvia must have been sitting there for hours. "What have you been doing?" Heather felt compelled to ask.

"Remembering."

"Much in particular?"