Grazing The Long Acre (33 page)

“You see,” said Aymon. “We were never lost.”

Viola stood on one foot and then the other, to shake scraps of leaf mould and bark out of her sandals. “We’d better hurry. There’s going to be a thunderstorm, I can feel it.”

Aymon took his best guesses at the route out, using the compass on the dash (there was still nothing but grey fuzz on their GPS). Eventually they saw an ochre-washed cottage standing by the track, though as yet no tyre marks, no vehicles, no signage, no human activity. Aymon pulled up and jumped out, eagerly. “Civilisation! C’mon, you’re the linguist, you do the talking—“

But the forest grew right up to the stained, derelict walls, swamping what had been a little railed yard. “I don’t think so, Ay.”

The cottage had been walled up. The bricked door and boarded windows stared at the intruders, somehow stirring inexpressible emotions…“There’s a plaque on the wall,” said Aymon.

Viola kept her distance, nervous as wild animal. “It’s an old forester’s house,” he reported. “It’s been fitted out as a bat refuge, a kind of memorial thing, wait there’s more, think I can find out where we are.“

Aymon knew that there was a village called Boucq around here. He’d never nailed the genealogy (people who check out their family legends generally find things they wish they didn’t know); but he believed the Bocks had come from there, long ago. And here was the name itself, on this Bat Refuge plaque, but strangely, it was the English spelling…

“Let’s get back on the road. I don’t need to know about bats.”

“Did you find out where we are?”

“No. We’ll find out by driving, we have to hit a real road soon.”

She sighed, concluding that his ability to read French had betrayed him: better not press the point. They returned to the car. Aymon punched the button, at last (always reluctant to give up the freedom of the open-top). The roof performed its slick, robotic manoeuvre, and they looked at each other, sealed and safe. Soon after that, the GPS screen came back to life.

“
Now
do we know where we are?”

“Never in doubt,” said Aymon.

Almost immediately they reached a junction, and they were back in the world of traffic, of powerlines, of isolated farms and miles of corn; and the sky finally opened. But Viola felt—maybe it was the sudden attack of the rain—as if the country had changed, as if she had to start “being in France” all over again, in much less confident key. She remembered her purchases, and couldn’t think what she’d done with them. Nothing in her purse. Where was that pretty raffia bag? Her arms ached with emptiness.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing…really.”

He kept his eyes on the streaming grey road. “Honey? Did you notice anything
strange
about that place we found?”

She’d have denied everything, doubting her sanity and/or the eglantine tea, but the tremor in his voice convinced her to speak. “I’m not sure. Tricks of the light, maybe. Or things I can’t explain.”

“Did you see the girl in black, the
gardienne
, turn into a water bird?”

“I didn’t see that. Did you see the transparent girl in the stream?”

“No. But I saw those tall pink flowers, the rushes, come alive, and turn into, er, people. What happened to
you
? After you followed that dragonfly?”

“Damselfly.” Viola shook her head, realising with a shock that she wanted to tell him
all
about it, but not right now, not in a moving car. “I don’t want to say, not yet. Aymon, what happened to us, where have we been?”

“You mean what did we take?” he countered, with a tight grin.

The windscreen wipers fought with pounding grey battalions.

“I don’t believe that. Oh, I know we took the eglantine tea, but we were in another world before that. You know it. You and that tiny frog, the way you were, you were
communing
with each other. Aymon, we should compare notes. We should do it right now, before we lose our nerve, before we stop believing.”

The rain was so hard he could see nothing but the starred red tail-lights of the truck ahead of him. The two lane road was narrow, crowded, no chance to overtake. Aymon’s heart was racing, better maintain the speed of the traffic but it felt too fast, almost uncontrollable—

Viola pressed her hand to her mouth. “In another world, my God. I’ve heard of a story like this, Ay, it’s famous…Two English women were visiting Versailles, in the nineteen twenties, no, earlier. They had a strange experience and published it, they called it ‘An Adventure’. They believed they’d been through a timeslip, back to 10th August 1792. They’d visited the Petit Trianon in the days of Marie Antoinette, and seen the queen herself.”

“It wasn’t Marie-Antoinette.” Aymon gripped the wheel fiercely. “The Queen of that forest was
not
Marie-Antoinette.”

“That’s not what I’m saying. The account the authors of ‘An Adventure’ published didn’t check out. It’s famous as a hoax. But I think they’d added stuff, because something incredible
had
happened to them, and they, they wanted people to believe. That’s why we have to get this straight, you and I,
now
. Pull over, next chance you get.“

“Did you see the animal images on those boards come alive? As if they were getting directly into your brain, and
looking back at you
?”

“No, but I…something like that. Did you see the singing frog?”

“I’ve got a better idea. I’m going to find somewhere to pull over, a quiet spot, maybe a
bar tabac
. We’re going to call Piper, right now, tell her the whole thing, have her record it.”

Bette Piper was Aymon’s long time personal assistant, a very smart woman whom they both trusted implicitly.

“Yeah, yeah! Great idea, let’s do it!”

Viola felt twenty, thirty years younger. She felt as if something inside had shattered and been remade. She had a mission, a cause, this
would be big,
she had her own instincts, she could almost taste it. The natural world is
alive
, sexual, conscious, full of living spirits, I’ll write a book, a bestseller—

 “The nearest I can come,” she exclaimed, imagining the tv audience, trying out her lines on him, “to putting a name on what happened to us, is to say that we visited Fairyland. That’s not
adequate
, but it’s the word people have used, traditionally, for the dimension we entered: where, where every flower is conscious, and nature spirits inhabit insects, animals—“

“
Fairyland
???” Aymon exploded, hands still locked on the wheel, eyes fixed on those blurred tail-lights. “What the
fuck
? You are
shitting me
, honey. That was a
timeslip
. That was my future we visited. That was the future. Shit, those noticeboards: I can almost figure it. Information coded in light, direct to the cortex, and hijacking the processes of consciousness, that’s what causes that weird ‘everything is looking at me’ effect—“

“SHUT UP!” shouted Viola. “Shut up, shut up. You and your
codes
!”

He held the wheel, but inside he was shaking, reliving the moment when—spelling out that memorial plaque—he’d had the strangest conviction that if he read another word he’d discover the date of his own death. He knew he was right, oh God, he knew. But it was a crass error to shoot her down, far more important to get her to talk, get
her
experience on record: before vital clues to those unborn developments were lost.

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry, honey, calm down, didn’t mean to offend.”

“Maybe we’re both right,” whispered Viola, marvelling. “Maybe the future
is
a fairyland, and that’s what we have glimpsed.“

A tiny voice in his ear brought Aymon up short. He gripped the wheel harder, his eyes bulging. He couldn’t make out what the voice was saying, but he could see a little figure squirming up out of the walnut fascia, a tiny face, incredibly malevolent, made of
polished wood grain
, a flayed body—

“Think of the consequences!” it squeaked, waving its knobbly little arms. “Where is your evidence? What did you bring back? Nothing! No one will believe you. You’ll be treated as cranks! You will be ridiculed!”

Hordes more of them, a different variety, came pouring out of the strengthened glass and flew around their heads, jabbering urgently, flickering in and out of focus, liquid and abrasive.

“They will say you have ingested illegal substances, your trusted assistant will report you to the authorities, you will be ruined!”

Multicoloured creatures whose bodies were ever-shifting crowns and chains came out of the door panels and the floor, and cried out, passionately.

“We are not life, we were once life, deep in the ancient fern-forest time: we are naked chemicals, stripped and crucified now. Beware, beware,Viola! Our cousins in your brain have told us this: your happiness will vanish, if you betray your lovers.”

“Don’t betray us! Don’t betray us! We never betrayed you! Cowards! Cowards!”

The Eygptian Cotton fairies danced on Aymon’s shoulder, pleading to be heard, telling him how they had been forced to ruin their mother, the good earth, and after that shame, tortured into thread.

“And think, if you are believed,” shouted the Parisian artisan leather spirits, crawling out of the sleek hide of Viola’s purse. “If your visit can be detected as changes in your brain chemistry? What then? By interfering, by trying to make it happen, you may destroy the very salvation that you have glimpsed, that you so desire, and it may never come to be!”

Viola had succumbed to hysterics, she was trying to open the passenger door, sobbing and batting at the glass-sprites.

Never
come to be, never come to be
, hissed the whisper in Aymon’s ear, not a single voice but a varied choir: in fact the voices of the different materials confined in his pacemaker. He struggled to go on driving, though his heart was jumping like a jack-hammer, convinced, like his wife, that there was hope in flight…But the rain kept raining madly, the tail-lights were too close, and a party of young male deer, inspired by who knows what
diablerie
, decided to bolt across the road ahead of that truck, bounding from the forest margin.

“Ay!” yelled Viola, terrified out of her panic attack.

Aymon failed to apply the brakes, probably because he had already succumbed to a fatal heart attack. Viola, who had unclipped her seat belt whilst trying to escape, went through the windscreen, despite its toughness. She was technically alive when the Emergency Services arrived, but she never recovered consciousness, and died on the way to the hospital.

The Woodsman put away his axe. Many members of the commune preferred to cut and stack their fuel in winter, when the trees were sleeping, but he saw no harm in being open about these things. It was all regulated: they took nothing that the trees were not ready to discard. He stood beside his toolshed (which he had cultured himself, from living timber, a proud feat), scratching his chin and pondering. Those tourists now, where exactly had they got to?

There were Centres all over the world, where anyone who wished could experience, in forest, in meadows, desert, savannah or ocean, full communion with the woken world—or as much of that reality as they could stand. But foreign visitors who came to this oldest meeting place, the original Martigny Centre of the Forest of the Queen, often had very mistaken ideas. There was no raw primeval innocence here, for the forest was not
old
at all. It had died and been reborn as often as France herself, and shared the character of the human culture of the region. The
woken
world here (a misnomer, for it was the human mind that had been
woken
, almost by chance, by the seductive “invention”, meant for entertainment, that had triggered a revolution) could be mischievous, bawdy, disruptive: a little dangerous to the unwary.

Tourists who arrived in the flesh irritated the Woodsman. Why could they not be content with the virtual access, which was excellent? But he thought fondly of the American couple, for the sake of that remarkable grey steed of theirs; for the sake of a past which he remembered with the nostalgia of a survivor. Nowadays, the living world could
compel
human beings to deal with its peoples fairly and decently. Agreements had been made, laws had been drawn up, which humanity must respect. My God, yes, the human race had learned a hard lesson, when the change first came…But even now, in the peace after the ages-long conflict, there was bitterness, and one had to take care. It must be a challenge to keep a machine like that, from the old days, happy!

And perilous.

 His own car had been drowsing in a hazel thicket. He led it out and checked its skirts for burrs and prickles (its wheels were rarely deployed, they weren’t very practical for this terrain)—as he studied the satellite views of the forest and its environs, which he habitually kept open at the back of his eyes when he was guarding these gates. The grey steed was nowhere to be seen. No mark of their passage anywhere. Perhaps they had given up trying to find the Centre, and left the area while his attention was elsewhere.

“After all,” he murmured, as he gave the little white car a gentle touch on the wheel, to guide it across the water meadows—where it tended to shy at the rise of a heron, or the curiosity of the cattle. “It was a
very
old map.”

GRAZING THE LONG ACRE 

Copyright © Gwyneth Jones 2009 & 2011 

The rights of Gwyneth Jones to be identified as Author of this Work have been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Originally published in printed book form by PS Publishing Ltd. in October 2010. This electronic version published in July 2009 by PS by arrangement with the authors. All rights reserved by the authors.

FIRST EBOOK EDITION 

ISBN 978-1-848632-25-7 

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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