Bar None (15 page)

Sounds strange, a house falling in love with a person. But that's what happened. When I arrived to view, the front door was unlocked, even though the estate agent said no one had been inside for almost six weeks. I opened the door and entered, and I knew where everything was. I had never been here before—never even been to West Wales—but to the left was the kitchen, down the hallway and under the stairs was the door to the study, to the right was the living room, and if I walked through there and opened the double doors I'd see the dining room, painted white and dominated by an old oak dining suite rescued from a dilapidated manor house years earlier.

I
knew
. But I went through the motions anyway, mainly because I was
scared
that I knew. Perhaps I wanted to find something I did not recognise, a room I had never imagined which would make my recollection of somewhere I had never been imperfect. And that imperfection would bring comfort. So I looked downstairs and up, and found nothing out of place.

By the time I opened the back door and went into the garden, I knew that I loved the house. There was no fear or confusion, just a certainty that I should be here, and I sat on a flaking metal chair on the timber decking and rang the estate agent. He called back five minutes later to accept my offer. Four weeks later, I was in.

The sun was kissing the horizon. The wine sat in a cooler before me, resting on the metal table I had bought to match the garden furniture already there. I sat on the same metal chair; repainted now, and softened by a thick cushion. I closed my eyes and sighed.

"It's a beautiful night," I said.

I opened my eyes when somebody screamed.

The voice had come from the other side of the house. I dropped my wine glass, jumped aside as it shattered on the decking and ran indoors. Cool shadows welcomed me in and eased me back out, and I ran down the short gravelled driveway to the quiet country road beyond.

There was another scream just before I reached the front gates, coming from behind the screen of leylandii bordering my property. This scream was more controlled and considered, and more filled with panic.

I opened the smaller of the two gates, stepped out into the road and saw the girl in white. She must have been sixteen or seventeen, certainly no older, and her dazzling trousers and blouse were spattered with blood. She had fallen from her bike. She held her hand up in front of her, staring at the intermittent spray of blood showering from her wrist.

"Oh, Jesus Christ!" I said.

The girl looked at me, wide white eyes in a blood-mask.

As I ran to her I slipped the belt from my jeans and the phone from my pocket. I dialled emergency, knelt beside the girl and smiled as I waited for the connection. I switched the phone to loudspeaker and sat it beside me on the road.

As I spoke to the dispatcher, told her where we were and what had happened, I tied the belt around the girl's arm. Pulled tight. Slipped the clasp together and raised her hand higher.

I had no idea what I was doing.

The dispatcher insisted on remaining on the line, but it was the girl I spoke to.

"What's your name?"

"Jemma."

"What happened?"

"I fell off my bike."

I almost laughed. Stupid question, obvious answer.

Jemma's panic had lessened now that I had taken control. Blood still ran from the gash on her wrist and palm, but it no longer sprayed, so I hoped that was good.

"Is she woozy?" the telephone said.

Jemma shook her head and I said no.

"You live there?" she said, nodding back at the house.

"Yes. Not long."

"It's a lovely place," she said. "I was in there once, when the last owners were there. Couple of years ago. It felt like home." She looked away, embarrassed, but I nodded and told her I knew what she meant.

I asked Jemma if she wanted to come inside but the dispatcher told us to wait by the roadside, because the ambulance was on its way. So we sat in the sun, and I loosened the belt every few minutes to allow some blood through, and it was as though we'd known each other for ages. Jemma was no longer scared, and adrenaline kept me going.

It was later, when they'd taken her away and said she'd be fine, and the house had welcomed me back inside—my new house, my home—that I started to shake, spilling tears and gasping for air as massive sobs shook me to the floor.

I wake, sit up, crying. The Irishman is sitting with his back to me, and he doesn't turn around. I silently curse his politeness.

"Holy shit," I say.

"What?" Cordell is behind me, and I stand and turn around.

The house . . . that voice . . . my home?

I shake my head. "Bad dream." I look around, searching for a sign that there were reasons for that memory, but I find none.

"We should go," Jessica says. "You okay?"

I nod, run my hands across my scalp.
Damn! That was weird. That was . . .

I mount the bike, kick it to life and fill my head with noise before I allow myself to admit what has happened.

That was Jacqueline. I had one of her memories
.

A dozen miles later, travelling toward the falling sun, we see something that stops us in our tracks: a forest, starting immediately beside the motorway and spread up and across the low hills of Somerset. It sweeps away from the road, climbing slopes, spiking hilltops, and looking along the road's route I cannot see where the trees end. They look young and fresh—their leaves sporting vivid shades of green, visible trunks quite smooth and unworn by time—and I wonder how long they have taken to grow.

The others climb from the Range Rovers, I dismount, and we stand together beside the road.

"That doesn't look quite right," Cordell says.

I laugh, but it's a desperate sound. "I drove this way several times each year," I say. "This shouldn't be here. There should be farms out there, and a hotel up on that hill with panoramic glass windows, and barns and a field full of junked cars half a mile that way." I point at the trees, the trees. There's no sign of any buildings, anywhere. No power pylons, no flashes of tumbled masonry, and no fields outlined by wild hedges or old stone walls. Only trees, with dozens of birds spotting the sky above. We can see quite a long way into the forest, because the leaves seem not to have grown into a full canopy yet. But that's the only real sign that these trees have not been here for very long.

How long ago?
I think.
How long since Ashley and I came down here?
I'm not sure what to feel. I suppose I should be scared. We're standing before something supernatural, after all: a forest that was not here a year before. Yet so much has happened that the term
natural
has taken on new meaning, and continues to change.

"We'll go in," the Irishman says. His voice is lacking in his usual lightness. "There'll be plenty to see in there." He starts across the hard shoulder toward the overgrown hedge that marks the edge of relative normality.

"Hey," I say. "It may not be safe."

The Irishman turns and shrugs. "What is?"

The trees whisper.

I take a step back and almost trip. Jessica gasps and reaches for the shotgun. There was not even a breeze, and only a few leaves seem to flicker and shift.

The Irishman pauses before the hedge and stands on tiptoes to see over. He looks left and right, stumbling a couple of times as he tries to stretch higher. When he drops down onto flat feet he seems smaller than before. Shrunken.

"What is it?" I say.

"Dangerous in there," he says. He joins us back on the road and looks left and right, examining the motionless queue of vehicles. "Notice anything?"

We look, and yes, I have already noticed. Perhaps it just didn't register before.

"Doors are open," Jessica says. "We've seen a few before, but there are lots more here. As if there was something to stop and get out for."

"They're in there." The Irishman nods at the forest, then turns and climbs back into his Range Rover. He shuts the door, and the sun glares from glass so that I only see him in silhouette. Even then I know that he is shaking.

"Do you really want to see?" Jessica says. Cordell has started for the hedge, and even though I can answer Jessica's question I follow him. Some things need to be seen. The bodies in the cars can stay where they are, because they have chosen a very private death. The old cities clotted with dead and scattered with damaged survivors will never be somewhere for us, because they are so far in the past, awash with the stink of yesterday's rot and madness. But here, the supernatural gives us some way to glimpse something else. Something changed, perhaps, or of the future.

We reach the hedge together. I'm taller than the Irishman, and I can see more. Cordell finds a rusted paint pot hidden in the grass and stands on it. To begin with, we say nothing.

In this new forest, the trees are spaced far apart. The ground between them is rich with low plant life, some of it root crops gone wild, some wilder plants spread from the hedges or seeded by birds. There are none of the usual signs of an old, established wood: no fallen trunks, jagged stumps or banks of old shrubs. But there are people. I can see a dozen from where I stand, all of them involved somehow with the trunk of a tree. I can think of no other word that suits: they're
involved
.

A naked man is pressed against one trunk, the wood holding him tight where it has grown to encompass his abdomen and stomach, and even the tip of his nose and lips seem to be held still. He seems to be dead, though his pale skin is unmarked by decay. His hair is long and tangled, and I can see insects crawling in and out of its mess. There's a woman to my left, legs and arms protruding from either side of an oak tree's trunk. Her face is almost entirely out of sight, only a cheek, ear and length of golden hair still revealed. I can tell it's a woman because one breast is also loose, hanging as though heavy and full. There's an old man high in one tree's branches, pierced in several places and held aloft while leaves cloak him green. A child—I think it's a boy, though I cannot be sure—is buried to the chest in the junction at the top of an elm. The child's head hangs to the left, neck apparently broken. Still, no rot.

"They're alive," Cordell breathes.

"No. I don't think so."

"But their skin, their faces. They're still whole, and if they came from those cars . . ." He points back over one shoulder with his thumb, never taking his eyes from the trees.

"I think they're being kept," I say.

"Kept?" He glances at me then back at the trees, and I see realisation settling.

"What do you see?" Jessica calls.

"Dead people," I say.

Cordell shakes his head. "Kept for what?"

I have no idea, but he looks at me, demanding an answer. I shrug. "Food?"

"Food. But it's not
all
of them. Not
every
tree has someone."

"No. Maybe just the lucky ones."

There's another whisper from the trees, and I instinctively look up to see the patterns of leaves waving at the sky. But there is almost no movement. No breeze. The whisper goes on, and I know it has come from deep within this new forest.

I expect a head to turn then, a fist to clench, an exposed eye to blink slowly, a mouth to stretch into a smile, but none of that happens. The bodies remain still but whole, kept and protected from the ravages of decay by their new tree homes. I wonder whether they share more with the trees than just space.

"We need to go," Cordell says. He steps down from the paint pot and walks back to the road, and I can hear him mumble something to Jessica.

I take one last look, because it suddenly seems important to see. Nothing changes; there is no revelation. The trees whisper again as I turn to leave, but there is no calling in that sound, no lure. Perhaps it's a language we were never meant to know.

As I ride alone, I dwell upon the memory I had from Jacqueline's life. She must have told me about it during one of those long, sleepless nights when we lay together, for comfort and company rather than anything else. We had talked a lot then, drifting in and out of sleep, to and from dreams, and I revealed much more about myself in that bed than at any time since Ashley. Jacqueline did as well. I cannot recall the actual conversation when she talked about her new home in West Wales and the bloodied girl out on the road, but it must have happened.
Must
have.

But that felt like a memory of my own!

I ignore the voice of reason in my mind, because it's surely mad.

That evening, as the sun finally sinks away, we park on the road and sit together in one vehicle. The sunset is giving us a wonderful display of colours as it settles low over the Devonshire hills. Cordell once said that the fine sunsets were caused by dust in the sky from a distant war. But he hadn't repeated that assumption for a while, and I was trying to forget.

"That's beautiful," the Irishman says.

"It is." I'm sitting behind him and I see the sunset through the frazzled ends of his long hair.

"We should be there tomorrow," Cordell says.

"You think so?" Jessica is in the driving seat. She's nursing the shotgun like a teddy bear.

"So long as the roads stay as clear as they have been, yes."

"What's happening?" she says. "What were those trees? Why were they holding dead people, like you said? What's happening?"

None of us answer for a while, and I feel the need to break the silence. "Michael told us things are moving on," I say.

"Great," the Irishman says. "Moving on to carnivorous fuckin' trees."

"They weren't eating them," Cordell says. "Not really."

"We stay to the road," I say. "We stick to the plan, get to Bar None as soon as we can."

"If it even exists." Cordell slips down in the seat beside me and looks at the Range Rover's ceiling. "Maybe Michael was a madman."

"You really believe that?" I ask. He closes his eyes.

"I have a plan," Jessica says. "If we don't find this place, I have a plan. There's a place on Bodmin, out on the moor, a hotel."