The Treachery of Beautiful Things (2 page)

Nightmares, endless psychiatrists, counselors, hypnotherapy, regression therapy, that face of leaves and wood in her head, and Tom’s last, desperate order still ringing out.
Run, Jenny, run.

For seven years.

Well, she was finished running.

Jenny drew in a breath and the world fell to silence as she stepped onto the grass of the football field. The traffic on Guildford Road and sounds of the village faded to vague echoes. She twisted the cuff of her cotton shirt around her fingers, pulling the fabric tight.

The trees whispered to her, murmuring. She found it easier than she had imagined to cross the playing field and walk up the slope, certainly easier than it had been in all her many nightmares. She was like an ordinary girl walking up an ordinary hill. Nothing unusual here, nothing to see.

She and Tom had come from the other direction that night, but she couldn’t possibly have walked back down that path. Just the thought of approaching the trees that way made her stomach twist. And never in the dark. It had to be daytime, in sunlight. As she got close, a familiar
ache bloomed in her chest, and cold broke over her body. She stopped. The world lurched around her, as if she were dragged in an instant to the top of a cliff and tumbled over the edge, plummeting.

Jenny focused on her breath, on calming its ragged edges.

They’re only trees
, she told herself, a well-worn mantra.
This is just in my mind. They’re only trees, only trees. Who’s afraid of—

She’d tried this, any number of times, in a dozen or more places. And she’d always failed. The school trip to Sherwood Forest, the first time she actually made it beneath the canopy of leaves, had sent her into dizzy panic. Both breath and heartbeat spiraled rapidly out of control. She thought she’d seen it, just for a moment—that twisted face amid the trees. Just a brief moment and she’d screamed with all the air in her lungs. Loud enough that everyone came running. Loud enough that she’d never been allowed to forget it. How they’d laughed all the way home, a busload of mirth and mockery. And Jenny, sitting straight-backed and alone beside one of the scowling teachers, forcing herself to ignore them all.

They’re only trees. Only trees.

Who’s afraid of lonely trees?

She took comfort in the silly rhyme, running it through her head in a loop. It had started as a survival mechanism, a way of reminding herself that her fears couldn’t be real. The frustrating thing was, it never quite worked.

But she was here now. If she didn’t do this, she never would.

At the tree line, Jenny swung her bag around and took out the flowers. They were a bit crushed. She smoothed them out with shaking fingers.

On this, the seventh anniversary of her brother’s disappearance, she had come home from the boarding school to which her parents had banished her and gone straight to Branley Copse to say good-bye at last.

Putting it behind her meant moving on. Moving on meant she wasn’t going to be marked by something that couldn’t have been real, not according to the rest of the world.

But she knew what she had seen.

She knew, didn’t she?

Yes. Yes, she had to believe that, or she was indeed crazy.

She’d thought she would cry. Or at least feel something. Staring into the trees through the slanted sunlight, she felt nothing of the hoped-for release. Facing her nightmare, waiting for it to begin anew…

But nothing moved.

“Tom?” she whispered, her voice thin. “Can you hear me?”

Nothing, not even a rustle. Not even birdsong. The trees were silent.

“I wanted…” The words stuck in her throat. What did she want? To say good-bye and move on? It sounded
so simple. “I finished my exams,” she said instead. “And I’m done with that school. Thank God. I’m going away to university…to Scotland. Special scholarship. They don’t want me to, Dad especially. But I can’t stay here.” With them. With their grief. With the constant, unspoken reminder that she had come home, and Tom had not. Wasn’t it meant to get easier in time? But this last year had been worse than ever. The worst of seven terrible years. “Tom?” she whispered.

No answer. And there was never going to be. Tom was gone. Though photos still littered her parents’ house, though everyone said she looked like him, Jenny could hardly remember his face sometimes. His real face, not the still image in picture frames. She could remember his laughter that last day, though. She could remember the tune he’d played as they walked here, the tune that had stirred up the trees. Jenny shook her head and was about to turn away when her eyes caught something glinting in the grass.

She spread back the long blades, parting them with fingers that had started to shake again, not from grief this time. Her hand flew to the heart-shaped locket around her neck, the one Tom had given her for her birthday only a couple of months before he’d vanished. He’d told her to put a picture inside, but she’d never been able to do that. Not after.

The breeze rustled the leaves over her head now, and she heard the sound of a flute, only faintly, a tentative invitation. But she couldn’t tear her eyes off the thing in the grass—a gold locket, identical to her own.

For a moment, she couldn’t move, could hardly force breath into her lungs. Then she reached for it. The air shimmered, a small, isolated heat-haze beneath her outstretched hand. As she disturbed the earth, something stirred underneath, the mud parting and closing as if it breathed. She jerked back her hand and the locket was sucked out of sight, into the dark warmth beneath the grass.

“What—”

A flute struck a cacophonous note.

A voice swore.

Jenny’s eyes snapped up to the trees. Every hair stood on end. She scrambled to her feet, her bag spilling onto the ground as it slid off her shoulder. It lay there, forgotten, her phone, lip gloss, and Mother’s pills she’d picked up from the doctor tumbling out of it.

It had been a joke between them, that while he played Tom kept tempo with curses, that every phrase was punctuated by a profanity. It used to drive their mother crazy. That was before Tom became so good he could practically charm the birds from the sky. When he played, her heart sang in counterpoint. It was Tom’s voice now—Tom’s music.

It was Tom.

Jenny didn’t think, couldn’t allow herself a moment of doubt. With her breath dammed up in her tightening throat, she swallowed her terror and plunged into the shade of the trees.

H
eat struck her in a wave.

Humidity sucked the air from her mouth. Jenny gasped as beads of sweat freckled her skin. It was hot, hotter than she could ever remember an English summer being. Her jeans and shirt seemed to contract around her body, suffocating her. The boiling breeze made her feel as if she stood before an open oven. It was like the wind that had surrounded her on the beach in the Fuerteventura last summer—the scorching wind that had raced across the Sahara and the sea as if to snatch her away from her parents’ latest failed attempt to imitate a normal family.

Now the music of the flute came to life again, the same energetic jig she recognized as “Haste to the Wedding.”

Her feet were already moving. She called his name again. Her heart beat the tune’s quick rhythm in her chest, and before she knew what she was doing, she had broken into a run.

The path was narrow and twisted, treacherous with mud
and overgrown weeds. She pursued the music, but it was as devious as the trail, dancing on ahead of her and then—impossibly—behind her. Jenny tried to stop, skidded, and went down in a tangled heap. Her hands sank into the mud, cool and slick, sucking at her fingers like a greedy child.

She grunted her disgust and pushed herself back up, turning in a slow circle.

The tune continued merrily, beckoning her to the left, off the path and through the trees. She plunged through undergrowth, forcing her way through bushes taller than she was, adding her own curses under her breath, and only pausing occasionally to shout her brother’s name.

The piper struck a wrong note and spat out a word she didn’t recognize. It didn’t even sound like English, but something else, a language lyric and ancient. By its tone, though, unmistakably a curse. She pushed through two bushes, thorns scraping across her skin. It sounded as if he was on the other side, just a few feet away.

“Tom!” she shouted, and stopped just before the drop.

This time there was no music. The forest fell very still. No rustling of leaves, no fluttering of birds. Even the breeze had died down, and the heat had seeped away. She shivered. Beneath her feet, the ground fell away, a cliff of fifty feet that dropped into a depression, cut by a stream.

Where had he gone? Tom wouldn’t just run off. Not her brother. He’d always been there for her. Right up
until…until he wasn’t anymore. She turned around, searching the bushes with her eyes. Her heel skidded at the edge, but she caught the branch of the nearest tree, steadying herself. Nothing moved. It was like he’d vanished into thin air.

Jenny shook her head as if trying to clear a fever. This was all wrong. Branley Copse wasn’t big enough to contain all this, and certainly no stream went in or out of it. Branley Village wasn’t even this big. The forest surrounding her now was ancient, and it showed no sign of having a far side. If she doubled back, she wondered, could she even find her way out?

Then another, more worrying thought struck her. Which way
was
the way back? She had no idea. Carefully, she skirted the edge of the hollow, where a path more suited to mountain goats led her down the steep incline. She was forced to cling to overhanging branches, leaning out perilously to avoid the tangles of briars. At last, the slope grew gentler and the tree cover began to thin. Slender birches replaced the cruder thorn trees, their bark like slivers of tissue paper curling away from the trunks. Green tones stained the sunlight as it fell through their pale leaves and the earth greeted it with a sea of bluebells.

Jenny wandered on, lost in the idyllic surroundings. Once she had watched a horror film someone had snuck into school, in which the main characters had gone astray
in a forest, unable to find their way out. Along with the other girls, her sometimes friends, she had laughed at the simplicity of the solution the characters failed to see—to just find a stream and follow it out. She bowed to that advice now, picking her way along the bank. She tried to ignore the fact that she had been walking for much longer than it took to circle the copse, let alone cut through it. She tried to ignore the fact that the flora was different here, that overhead the sky was a clear and cloudless blue rather than the polluted slate-gray-striped-with-jet-trails she had left behind. There was no sign of airplanes, no traffic, no music. Nothing at all.

The silence gnawed at her, an unnatural, dangerous silence, but after a while birdsong slowly returned, and she heard the clamor of various insects she could not hope to identify beyond a grasshopper or a bee. The breeze rustled the trees once more. But the piper, it seemed, was not coming back.

“Looking for someone?” asked a voice.

Jenny stifled a shout and jumped back, but there was no one there, and no heavy undergrowth around her now—nowhere anyone could be hiding. She turned in a circle, searching for the source of the voice amid the birches, and looking, at the same time, for a stick with which to beat off any attacker.

The voice laughed, as surprised by her reaction as she was by its presence.

“Who are you?” Her words came out in a rush. “
Where
are you?”

“Look up once in a while.” A boy was sitting in the tree above her head, perched amid the slender braches. His skin was as pale as the birch bark, his eyes unnaturally green. He had golden hair and could be no more than six years old. His legs swung back and forth, heels tapping against the trunk. He went barefoot, his soles stained green, and he wore some kind of tunic, almost the same color as the bark of the tree, like strips of it wrapped around him. She stared, trying to work out what it was. “Are you lost?” he asked.

Jenny blushed and looked up to his face. “I…I think I am,” she admitted. “I’m looking for someone. Perhaps you’ve seen him. He was playing a flute. He must have come this way.”

The boy raised pale eyebrows. “You’re looking for the piper? He was here, yes. But…Why are you looking for the piper?”

The piper? It had to be Tom.

“He’s my brother.” Was it her imagination, or did he draw his dangling legs up out of her reach? “Are you lost too? Or stuck up there? Do you know the way out?”

“You only get one question,” the boy said. “He’s going back to her, to the castle. Like he always does. If he doesn’t, he’ll make her mad. And no one wants that. Now go away.”

“What castle? What are you talking about?” The only castle nearby was the remains of Guildford Castle, and that was maybe ten miles away. Jenny strained her neck, trying to see the boy as he scrambled higher up his tree. “Come down here,” she said, trying to be firm. “I need your help.”

“Help? I don’t give help. I shouldn’t even be talking to you. If you need help, ask the others. Ask the Folletti—they’re all over the place and see everything. Ask the air or the stream. Leave me alone.”

“What are Folletti?” she called, but the boy was too high now. “Come down. Are you on your own? You shouldn’t be in the woods alone.” She tried to walk back, to get a better angle on the tree, but her foot snagged on something in the undergrowth and she went sprawling. The ground hit her heavily, driving the air from her lungs, and her head cracked off a stone hidden in the long grass.

Jenny’s vision blurred and re-formed, leaving her stunned and aching. She shook her head, rolled onto her side awkwardly, and froze.

A small figure was hovering over a nearby clump of rough grass, bright light suffusing the air around it. The creature had delicate, childish features, set in a curious expression. Tiny wings beat as fast as a hummingbird’s, a blur of blue behind its back. Even as she focused on it, it moved away, flitting back and forth, never staying still for more than a fractured moment.