Doctor Who: The Way Through the Woods (5 page)

‘It’s time,’ said the strange young man with the madcap hair and the clownish bow tie and the fathomless eyes. ‘Amy and Jess. It’s time.’

England, now, the Fancy Fox pub, shortly before 7 p.m.

Jess got to the Fox early. She claimed the big table to the right-hand side of the pub, dumping her leather bag on it to mark the territory as taken. She got a gin and tonic, and then sat checking her text messages, hoping she looked busy rather than worriedly waiting for a group of people who might not turn up. One of her messages was from her sister, Lily:

An ARREST?!!!? Wots this all about, LOIS? Any news on Luara? :-(

Jess was in the middle of a lengthy reply (Jess made no concessions to the form: her text messages contained full sentences, accurate punctuation, and no missing or misplaced apostrophes – she would also manage to spell ‘Laura’ correctly), when she realised that someone was sitting at the table.

‘I’m really sorry,’ she said, adding the last full stop and hitting
send
, ‘those seats are taken— Oh. It’s you.’

For it was indeed the alarming Amy Pond, clutching her plastic bag as if it bore a designer label. ‘Don’t run off again,’ she said. ‘We don’t have time, OK?’

‘Please leave me alone,’ Jess said, in a clear and carrying voice. A couple of the other patrons looked round curiously, decided Jess could handle herself for the moment, and went back to their drinks and conversations.

‘Look, OK, all right, I know we got off on the wrong foot—’

‘You practically
threatened
me!’

‘—but it’s really important you hear what I have to say.’

The pub doors swung open. With a gale of laughter, Charlie and his friends entered the Fox. Through clenched teeth, Jess hissed, ‘You are about to ruin what could be the most important moment in my career.’

‘
This
,’ Amy hissed back, ‘is the most important moment in your career. Story of your life, Jess. Happening now, whether you like it or not.’

Charlie, who had ordered at the bar and was looking round, saw Jess. He grinned dashingly and waved.

‘I want you to go away now,’ Jess said.

‘It’s about the woods, Jess. Swallow Woods.’

Jess’s heart stopped, gulped, then started again. ‘The woods?’ she whispered. ‘What about them? What do you know?’

‘I know an awful lot about them – not everything, but a lot. The rest we’ll have to find out as we’re going along.’ Amy stood up. She smiled, rather grimly. ‘Oh, you’re
so
coming with me.’

Jess glanced across at Charlie, who was now trying to pick up four pint glasses. ‘Tomorrow,’ she promised. ‘Come and see me at
The Herald
tomorrow.’

Jess had never actually seen someone tear at their hair before. Now she had.

‘Aren’t you
listening
? Tomorrow? It’s now or never!’

Charlie arrived with his friends and his tower of drinks, and set the glasses carefully down on the table. The introductions went round. Charlie smiled at Amy, towering and glowering over Jess.

‘Hi!’ he said. ‘Friend of yours, Jess?’

‘Not exactly…’

‘Oh…’ His ears almost twitched. ‘A lead?’

Story of your life
, Amy mouthed at Jess – and Jess knew she couldn’t resist. She pushed her specs back up her nose and beamed guilelessly at Charlie. ‘Eighty-fourth birthday party,’ she lied. ‘Twins. Big story for me. Huge. But I’ll come back later and tell you your horoscope.’

‘We’ll be here, Lois. We’ll cross your palm with silver and then you can buy the beer.’

‘I’ll be five minutes,’ Jess promised. ‘Um. Maybe ten.’

Amy marched Jess over to a table in a quieter corner of the pub, glaring at the man already sitting there until he got up and left.

‘You are very strange,’ Jess remarked, as Amy started emptying the contents of the plastic bag onto the table. Piles of printouts and photographs.

‘I don’t have time not to be strange,’ Amy said. She sifted through some of the photographs and made a selection. ‘Right. Best place to start is probably with the aerial shots – hoo boy, did they ever creep me out! – yes, we’ll start with those.’ She handed one of the photographs to Jess.

Jess put the photo down on the table and studied it. As Amy had said, it was an aerial shot of a piece of countryside. A thick dark smudge of woodland took up most of the centre of the picture. Curving around the woods, at the bottom right-hand side of the page, was a strip of grey road. The town took up the left-hand vertical strip of the page. It was very familiar.

‘That’s Swallow Woods.’ Amy jabbed her finger at the dark green patch. ‘And
that
,’ she ran her finger along the grey road, ‘is the motorway.’

‘I know,’ said Jess, patiently. ‘I’ve lived round here my whole life—’

‘So don’t tell me you’ve never noticed.’

‘Noticed what?’

‘The
road
, Jess! The motorway!’

‘What about the motorway? It’s a stretch of motorway. It runs from Junction 11 with the bypass down
here
,’ Jess pointed to a place on the table just below the bottom left corner of the picture, then swept her finger up and round to a point just above the right corner, ‘to Junction 12
here
. Both junctions get backed up at rush hour. It’s a pain in the neck. I write about it every three or four months and nothing changes. Why? Because it’s a perfectly ordinary piece of motorway—’

‘Did you not see what your hand just did?’ Amy said. ‘The
shape
it made?’

‘If you’ve got something to tell me, get on with it. Because right now I could be networking my way into a job in London—’

Amy shook her head. ‘You’re not going. You won’t leave here.’

‘Once again, that sounds unpleasantly like a threat—’

‘Look at the
road
,’ Amy said. She pulled out another picture, another aerial shot of trees and field and road, and then a third picture. Jess shook her head, but she examined them both. There was no new town in these – only the old village, more or less where they were sitting now – and certainly no motorway – although the old road was there, following broadly the same route. But the shape of the woods was unmistakeable. These were aerial shots of the same piece of countryside, over time.

‘Look at the roads, Jess,’ Amy urged softly. ‘They
bend
. They bend around the woods.’ She lined the three pictures up alongside each other, and pointed to the one on the far right. ‘That’s the road the Romans built. They built it on top of the old trackway.’

‘Whoa, whoa, whoa – hang on a minute! The
Roman
road?’

Jess grabbed the picture. This road wasn’t a trace, a memory, the bumps and indentations that get left behind and overgrown, the kind of thing that gets Tony Robinson excited on
Time Team
. This was a road – a working road. A road in use. ‘This looks like the
actual
Roman road.’

‘It is the actual Roman road. You may remember,’ Amy said, ‘that Roman roads are famous for being straight, unless they’ve got a very good reason not to be. And you may notice that this one isn’t straight. At all.’

She was right too. At the point where the Roman road met what Jess, in her time, would call Long Lane, it took a sharp south-easterly swing. Eventually, where Junction 12 was now, it righted itself, carrying on its steady north-easterly progress. Jess could see how the road could have been straight. But it wasn’t straight. It bypassed the woods.

‘That isn’t the best one,’ Amy said. ‘Oh no, no sirree!
This
,’ she pulled out another picture, ‘is the one that really got me going.’

She handed Jess the picture. This time, the road was a narrow brown line. But it followed the same path, and it curved in exactly the same way. It curved to keep away from cutting through the woods.

‘Look at the pictures, Jess,’ Amy said softly. ‘The motorway bends around the woods. So did the old road. So did the Roman road. As long as people have lived here, they’ve gone out of their way to avoid the woods. That,’ she pointed to the thin brown line on the third picture, ‘is the trackway. It’s Bronze Age. And it bends away from Swallow Woods.’

Jess sat with the Roman photo in one hand, the Bronze Age one in the other, staring between them.

‘This picture,’ Jess said slowly, holding up the one showing the trackway, ‘looks like it was taken yesterday.’

‘Sometime last week, actually,’ Amy said. ‘Or six thousand years ago, depending on how you look at it.’

‘Oh, now you’re just being ridiculous!’

‘Jess.’ Amy put her hand upon her arm. ‘You’ve lived here your whole life. You know this town better than most. You know there’s something strange about Swallow Woods.’

Jess licked her lips. ‘They’re just stories. The kind of thing you tell to kids to stop them wandering off by themselves…’

‘Yet when I said I wanted to talk about the woods, you came at once. Those guys over there, you could be chatting away to them right now! Fixing up that fancy London job you’ve always wanted. But you aren’t. You’re here with me. Because you want to know the secret of Swallow Woods. All your life, Jess. All your life you’ve been wondering.’ Amy started sifting through her papers again. ‘You know that people go missing. That the woods swallow them. Not just Laura, not just Vicky – it’s been going on much longer than that. If you look into it, just a day’s work, you soon find out that people have been disappearing in Swallow Woods for as long as people have been living here. The trackway, Jess. It bends away from the woods. Those Bronze Age people, they knew. Everyone who’s lived here, they’ve known. Because there’s a pattern. Every fifty years it happens, give or take a couple of years. Take a look at these.’

She handed Jess a sheaf of papers: old newspaper reports, from the nineteenth century and earlier. Before that was a selection of parish records, the steady rise and fall of births and deaths across the centuries – but when Jess looked closely at the records, she saw that some of the names had no death date, and that each of these had a green mark against them. Whatever the century, the same mark. Different hands, but the same mark; young men and young women, but the same mark. 1917 – two marks. 1861 – three marks. 1814 – one mark. At the bottom of the pile was the entry in the Domesday Book. There was the parish – St Jude’s – and there was the entry for the wood. Someone had carefully cross-hatched through the name. Nobody wanted to own Swallow Woods. Nobody would go near it.

Jess shoved the papers away. ‘You’ve done all this on a computer – I don’t know why, but you must have.’

‘All right. There’s another thing I have to show you,’ Amy said. ‘I think this will convince you. But you’re not going to like it, and I think you should prepare yourself for a shock.’ Reaching into the bag, she drew out one last piece of paper.

It was the cover page of a national newspaper. The paper was yellowing and slightly crisp to touch. Jess guessed it was probably a few decades old. She read the headline –
Third Girl Missing
– and then the start of the story beneath. One paragraph had been circled in felt-tip pen:
And with no news on either Laura Brown or Vicky Caine, fears are now mounting for 24-year-old journalist Jess Ashcroft, whose abandoned car was found parked on a country lane…

‘I’m sorry,’ Amy said quietly. ‘I didn’t want to have to show you that. But you have to understand, Jess – I know that you go into Swallow Woods tonight. I know that you’re the next to disappear. There’s nothing I can do about that. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve already gone. But this time – I’m going with you.’

The paper, naturally, was dated tomorrow.

Rory crashed through the trees. ‘Emily! Where are you?’ He stopped to catch his breath, bending over, his hands splayed out flat on his legs. ‘One job,’ he mumbled to himself. ‘One. Stay close to Emily Bostock. The Doctor’s going to kill me.
Amy
’s going to kill me…’

He felt something small and hard bounce off the back of his head. ‘Ow!’ Again – and then a third time. A muffled laugh came from above. Emily was perched up in the tree, legs dangling down, weighing one last pine cone like a cricket ball. She had taken off her hat, and loosened her long brown hair. It gleamed in the sunshine. She threw the cone at Rory. He fumbled the catch and it fell to the ground.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘You’ve had your fun! Are you coming down?’

‘Why should I come down? It’s nice up here.’ She patted the branch next to her. ‘Why don’t you come up instead?’

Why not? At least she wouldn’t be able to run away from him again. Rory grabbed an outlying branch and swung himself up beside her.

‘See?’ she said. ‘Isn’t it nice?’

‘Oh, yes. Lovely.’

‘You don’t sound like you mean that, Mr Williams. Here, you’re not cross with me, are you?’

‘No, it is lovely, just… Please, Em-Miss Bostock, I mean. Please don’t run off again like that.’

‘Gave you a turn, did I?’ She patted his hand. ‘All right, I won’t run off like that again.’

‘Thank you, Miss Bostock.’

‘Emily will do.’

‘Thank you, Emily.’

They sat for a while, each giving the other quick sideways glances, and then looking hurriedly away.

‘They’re stories, nothing more,’ Emily said at last, apologetically. ‘I know we’re off the beaten track in Foxton, Mr Williams, but even we’re in the twentieth century now! Mr Blakeley up at the big house – his son has a motor car! I’ve seen it!’ She swung her legs to and fro. ‘It wasn’t working, mind. Slid off into a ditch. The steam that was coming up from it!’ She laughed. ‘Mind you, they’re beautiful things. Imagine what it must feel like, speeding along, the wind in your hair…’

‘Maybe one day you’ll ride in one.’

‘Who, me? I shouldn’t think so. Nothing exciting happens here. A motor car might be real enough, but nothing happens in Swallow Woods.’

Rory gave her a sad smile. ‘But it’s already happening. Haven’t you noticed?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Look around. What can you see?’

‘Trees. We’re sitting in a tree looking at more trees.’