Shadows & Tall Trees (22 page)

“Except for the incisors—they were a grownup’s.” Gareth was observant without ever being obviously so.

“Arms too small,” Karl said. “Perfectly proportioned, just . . . too small.”

“Oh, we are pernickety today.” Malcolm lifted a hideous china teapot. “Shall I be Mother?” he said, as always proceeding to be.

They drank and ate.

“Eggy. Too much egg,” Gareth said. Karl agreed—the strong flavour of egg yolk in the pastry battled with apple. “You fussy eaters,” Malcolm chided, smiling under his cream moustache.

He and Gareth finished theirs first. Malcolm lifted his cup. “To new beginnings.” His declaration rebounded off the trees like not-quite-articulated responses. Karl and Gareth echoed it in restrained murmurs then all three silently contemplated Gareth’s imminent departure to a life as a notably youthful mature student in and around Falmouth Art College, Malcolm’s recent appointment to a deputy headship at a Grimsby primary school. Karl was closer to a sacking than promotion at North West Energy’s call centre after losing his cool again and hanging up on an irate customer last week. A tally of two strikes; a third and he’d be out.

“It’s a word I use sparingly, but ‘heavenly’ just about sums up this place.” Malcolm leaned forward; a self-satisfied little gust of laughter. “These establishments—” Low-voiced—this was for their ears only. “They’re uniquely English. There’s usually an attractive young girl at front of house. Mother is formidable, matronly, has a farmer’s wife build, keeps to the kitchen.” They glanced to the window in which the shadowy bulk was motionless, as if watching them back. Malcolm went on, “Dad’s even more in the background. He does the books, the DIY. Always mysteriously busy. Probably early-retired from some significantly more demanding professional occupation.” Malcolm sat back. He was fond of making affectionately astute observations and was pleased with this one.

“Not surprised they’re packing up,” Gareth said. “Can’t be much passing trade.” Other people’s financial situations always interested him where nothing much else about them did. Despite a handful of exhibitions and positive reviews, photography wasn’t proving lucrative. He scraped a living from part-time jobs. He got out his camera, a small neat basic model he prided himself on finding wholly satisfactory for finding the strange in the ordinary.

Malcolm patted the solid mass of his stomach. “That was lovely. Simple and comforting.” With a slight frown, he smacked his lips around a lingering aftertaste. Karl pushed aside his plate, a third of the pie uneaten. Neither of the others offered to finish it off. Malcolm got up. “I’ll go and pay.”

He walked across the grass. Standing before the cottage, he pressed both hands to his stomach, frowned, then pushed at the door and stepped inside.

A listlessness came over Karl with the lynchpin of Malcolm gone. “Come
on
,” he said, impatient after three minutes or so.

“He could get a Trappist monk gabbing.” A skill Gareth didn’t have and probably didn’t envy. He got up and walked to the cottage door. He adjusted a function on his camera and photographed the slab of the doorstep, then stooped to the book on the window ledge. He wrote into it then tipped his head as if he’d heard a sound from the doorway. He went to it and stepped inside.

Karl listened. No voices, no birdsong, no brush of tree foliage. The treetops waved to such a slight degree it could just as well have been the blood pumping through his eye sockets. He felt observed, and not from the trees, though he had a peculiar sense of them “facing” the garden and cottage. Not from the window either; dense gloom within.

He stood before the window a moment later. Nobody inside. A bare plaster back wall; no sink or cupboards as far as he could tell.

It was an open foolscap-sized book on the window-ledge. On facing pages row upon row of signatures with attached comments all written in a brownish red ink. A visitors’ book. Gareth Shuttleby’s was the last name, written in a tiny pinched hand, with, typically, nothing else added. On the preceding line, “Malcolm Goodey” in a controlled flourish that would have looked more fitting on a legal document. A fulsome comment next to it: “Excellent: a Heavenly enclave.” One empty line left to fill at the bottom of the right-hand page. Karl took up the pen: it was cold between finger and thumb, a smooth texture like polished bone. The silence was acute; the trees, like an audience bound in shadow, made for a sense of intense expectation—he couldn’t think what else might.

Writing his name would feel like giving too much of himself. He felt a new-found appreciation of his anonymity answering calls at North West Energy. There, he was nameless—he liked things that way. No, he’d keep “Karl Crier” to himself. He couldn’t help thinking Malcolm and Gareth should have been equally reticent. He very much wanted to leave but first he had to find out what they were finding so compelling in the house. Malcolm might be deep in conversation but surely not Gareth.

He pushed at the door and stepped inside

—and down.

Shock, at the unexpected drop of a foot or so. An odour of leaf mould and mildew. Dirt underfoot and the remains of rotted floorboards, beneath the layer of dead leaves. There was a landing—and no way up to it with the wooden stairs below, collapsed and rotten, strangled by some parasitic weed. “Hello? Anyone?” he said, his voice tight. Why hadn’t either of them cried out when they stepped into this place? Karl just wanted to cry. Nobody had lived here in years, yet the girl had brought out food—he could taste it now and felt queasy.

Rough stone walls exuded coldness and damp. His boots pushing through leaves, he peered into the gloom at the back of the house. A florid tongue of leafy branches thrust down through a window to feed on weeds, rubbish and glass shards.

Discoloured chunks of white ceramic, mingled in rotted leaves on the floor, were the only indication that the room at the front may once have been a kitchen. Lighter than elsewhere, the space was harder to endure. Stepping backwards his foot squelched something soft. He looked down and his stomach rolled at the half-embedded worm wriggling in the decayed apple.

Stepping back outside, he saw that the visitors’ book was no longer on the window ledge. Were the staff and Malcolm and Gareth enjoying a joke at his expense as they hid not far off in the trees? In the gloom of the house he could have missed some other doorway—but nothing would persuade him to venture back inside.

“Yeah, very funny,” Karl called out, nodding as if it were. “You can come out now.” He thought someone was about to when he glimpsed movement.

Sunlight outside deepened the gloom in the kitchen, occupied again. The more he stared, the less he wanted the two shapes with the girl to be more clearly delineated. Alone out here, he refused to believe the human-sized pepperpot had a crescent of horns around a black muzzle with nostrils you could fit fists in. It and the girl were in the shelter and deep shade of a fleshy black canopy, like a warped mattress. In the pillar-box thick stalk that supported it were several dark pits like empty eye sockets.

The girl held a book before her. Karl could only think it was the visitor’s book. His limbs felt calcified. How long before perusal of the book was transferred to him? Twisting, he felt rooted in the lawn before a supreme effort freed him. He ran, grabbed his rucksack and then the gate’s latch snickered drily and puffed rust onto his hand as he pushed.

A random fleeing until the woods expelled him. More unknown paths dipped in and out of further misted islands of woodland, rose and fell on meadows and pastures ruckled like mouldy green bed linen. An arrowhead of geese honked laughter in and out of low cloud. Sheep fled from him on stick legs, matted fleeces leaping.

He was able to triangulate from the positions of the mountains a tortuous way to the village. A chill, a faint fuzzy patina of grey on tree and hill, as if summer had shifted into autumn in under an hour.

Connerstone offered little relief. Damp grey stone, grubby whitewash, faded stucco. Rumbling cars glided in slow lines. Voices bloomed and diminished on the crowded paths outside a mini-gallery, the gingerbread shop,
Souvenirs and Gifts,
cafes and pubs. He sensed lassitude—people filling the time before departure. Grey light washed colours from their clothing.

At a convulsion in his stomach, Karl tasted apples and foul eggs. The girl had been real but those companions must have been distorted reflections from the garden and the trees. Going inside to demand an explanation he would have found that out for certain—and the whereabouts of his friends. His phone would clear up the latter mystery.

Malcolm’s recorded voice introduced and instructed like a deliberate delaying tactic before Karl could say, his voice clipped, “It’s me. I’m in the village. Are
you
? Ring me back.” From Gareth’s number a ringtone like a robotic cough.

There was just over an hour before the Stagecoach service was due to leave the terminal. He’d kill time until then. He wandered, as much in the roadside gutters as on the paths.

He was returning along the main street when there was the unhealthy rattle of an engine and a bus began to draw past him. Karl looked up at the passengers. They were still, listless, like prisoners, each pair in their tiny shared cell. Despite the state of the bus—a
drab grey, dented, rust patched—their clothing suggested they were tourists or day- trippers rather than users of a regular local service.

Gareth, in the middle of the back row, was neither. Karl stumbled, recovered, looked again.
Gareth?
Lacking any livery, the bus clearly wasn’t part of the Stagecoach fleet they were booked onto in less than an hour’s time. So what was Gareth doing onboard?

Karl kept pace, leaping, waving, shouting. Gareth stared forward, oblivious, his expression even more closed-off than usual. People on the path went about their business with bovine intent, Karl’s antics of no interest. The bus picked up speed. Some obstruction up ahead had been cleared, but then, short of that, it took a squeaking left-turn into a side road.

Entering a moment later, Karl could see no sign of it though he heard the diminishing rattle of an engine from within the trees bordering the village.

Karl went and sat in the Yewdale Arms. A grey cast to the light in the window. Wood panelling was dull, as if sandpaper had been applied to it. He barely touched his Guinness. It couldn’t have been Gareth on the bus. That would make no sense. Behind glass and the reflected street, just someone
like
him.

Later, when he arrived at the bus terminal, the Stagecoach vehicle was ready to go and nearly full. None of the passengers were Malcolm and Gareth. He could have taken his seat but the puzzle would have gnawed at him all the way home. Waiting outside the coach, he rehearsed to himself the diatribe he’d aim at the pair should they appear in the next moment. At a loss when they failed to, and as the coach slowly pulled away, he tried their mobile phone numbers again. No replies. He left the terminal and wandered again, bewildered.

There was a corner building with books on three floors. He browsed in the local section. In slim stapled volumes no references to Guards Wood; the origin of its name was lost in the hills, or knowledge of it buried in Connerstone Church graveyard. Guarding against what?

On the uppermost floor he looked over the roofs of the village to the upland approach to the fells. A dense fur of woodland draped over an incline must be a near edge of Guards Wood. Were Malcolm and Gareth still up there?

A dull silver mass edged into his eye corner and Karl gasped. The bus had shuddered to a halt on the opposite side of the road below. He was certain this was the same dilapidated vehicle as earlier.

With the passenger door at the front on the far side, it was hard to tell if anyone alighted or got on. No bus-sign or shelter, no line of traffic to hold it up. That it had stopped directly opposite him expressly to display Malcolm in the rearmost window seat was nonsense, though coincidence seemed even less likely. Karl’s heart vaguely complained as he ran down three flights of compressed stairs and out onto the path.

He stared across the road, and was struck that nobody stared back at his agitated presence—least of all Malcolm. Karl looked down at his own body in an involuntary check that he was fully present. For a moment he was unsure if it was Malcolm in the back seat, such was the unfamiliar set of his face. He and all his fellow passengers could have been victims of some terrible and inescapable fate. Pictured in a bracingly honest coach holiday brochure they couldn’t have been any more motionless.

Karl now knew for certain this was the same bus he’d seen on the main street. And that was definitely Gareth on the far side of Malcolm, still in the middle seat and facing down the central aisle. It was better that they were here. He could forget about Guards Wood now.

He ran, preparing to knock on Malcolm’s window—and the bus moved off. He yelled and waved frantically with both hands, saw the staring unyielding square page of the driver’s face in the side mirror. He sprinted after the bus until it took a turn into a tiny estate of grey-pink rendered rented houses. Its trundling speed in the confining streets was sufficient for it to elude Karl. It had exited at some point, for Karl knew he’d covered every yard.

He sat on a bench by a deserted tiny playground with his head in his hands. If this was a practical joke, to all appearances it was affording Malcolm and Gareth no pleasure. He returned to the bookshop. The manager didn’t look up from his examination of a till receipt and when he finally acknowledged Karl’s presence he’d evidently forgotten him hurtling by earlier like a book thief. He hadn’t heard of
Journeys End Refreshments
though he knew Guards Wood.

“Everyone does. If you’ve any sense you go round it.”

“Me and my friends went through,” Karl said, an ache in his chest like grief.

“Still there are they?”

“No. I’ve seen them on a bus. It was outside just now. Didn’t you see it? Grey. Looks a wreck.”

“Yes. Better the bus than the woods,” he said, oozing complacency. “You should have joined them.”