Authors: Nick Gifford
8 How things are
For the rest of the morning Ben tried to sleep in the community hall, but despite his tiredness he couldn’t settle.
When Ben emerged, Walter put him in the care of his son, Zeb. “Show him around,” he told him. “Teach him the ways of the community, so he doesn’t get caught again.” He didn’t need to add: And so that he doesn’t lead the beasts back here.
Around the middle of the day, the two of them were sitting on the railway embankment, leaning back on some rocks to soak up the sun. As far as Ben could tell, they were a few miles farther north than the point where he had first crossed the railway, but he couldn’t be sure.
“You’d better watch yourself,” said Zeb in his soft voice. “Everyone listens to Walter, but it’s Alik that really makes things happen around here. If he doesn’t want you here then you’d better be real careful.”
Ben remembered the feel of Robby’s knife on his throat. “Life must be hard out here,” he said, changing the subject.
“We manage,” said Zeb. “There’s a lot of natural food in the woods. Deer, rabbits, eggs, fruit, mushrooms. We keep hens. We do some harvesting of local fields, too. As long as we don’t harvest too heavily from any one field we’re okay: a farmer sitting up on a combine harvester doesn’t notice a few bare patches in his field. They don’t notice a few cows milked at night, either. Some of us go foraging in town when we can.” He patted his jeans and grinned. “You’d think they’d learn not to leave clothes out on washing lines overnight.”
“How do you survive out here, though? All it would take is a single mistake to lead them back to the community and it would all be over.”
Zeb shrugged. “We’re careful,” he said. “The woods are a big place and we make sure we don’t give ourselves away. Anyway, I reckon some of the beasts like it that way: their own colony of ferals somewhere in the woods. Every so often one of us does make a mistake and gets caught. A bit of wild blood for the beasts, a bit of sport. Maybe they don’t try too hard to find us – don’t want to spoil their fun.”
Ben thought of how farmers in his own world left little corners of woodland and hedgerow alone for game birds and foxes to breed in. Was that why Weeley Woods appeared to be bigger here? Were the ferals conserved for sport?
Zeb glanced pointedly at Ben’s jeans and sweatshirt, and at his smart new Reeboks. “So how did you get here, then? If you’re really from some other world...”
Ben looked away. “I don’t know,” he said. “I was telling the truth, though. One minute I was
there
– walking home across Barlow’s Patch. And then...” He remembered the storm, the sudden sense of rushing air, of being pulled apart. “And then I was
here
.”
Zeb seemed to accept this and Ben felt a surge of relief that this wild man of the woods didn’t argue with his account.
“That’s how it happened, is it? Just some freak accident?”
“I suppose so,” said Ben. “All I know is that my world isn’t like this. I don’t know what happened, but somehow I ended up here.”
Zeb nodded, but said nothing.
Into the silence, Ben said, “Thanks, Zeb.”
“Hmmm? What for?” Zeb looked awkward, uncertain.
“For speaking up for me: last night and again this morning.”
“Oh...” Zeb shrugged. “People are suspicious. Some of them reckon you’re some kind of spy,” he said. “But I told them if you were a spy you wouldn’t come here in new, clean, town clothes, would you? You stand out too much.”
Ben was about to ask why nobody but Zeb believed him, but he stopped himself. Why should they believe him? If someone had told him the same story a few days ago he would never have accepted it.
“I’m not mad,” he said. “And I’m not lying.”
“Maybe,” said Zeb. “But if you’re not mad and you’re not lying, what
are
you?”
~
Zeb was a good teacher, but Ben had a great deal to learn.
That first day, he led Ben away from the encampment. Once they were through the thick screen of holly, it was suddenly as if the camp had been imaginary. No sounds of people reached Ben’s ears, and there was nothing to see that might indicate occupation.
They might simply be strolling through the woods – out for a summer walk. For a short time, Ben allowed himself to accept that fantasy, but he knew it was not true. The tall man he followed wore a coarse cape across his broad shoulders unlike any clothing familiar to Ben from his own world.
They walked for some time along a narrow trail that could easily be taken for an animal track. Along the way, Zeb pointed out the different kinds of trees and plants, pausing occasionally to indicate animal – and human – tracks in the mud. All the names of the plants and animals, one after another... Ben knew he would never remember.
Eventually they came to a rest.
Zeb looked at him closely. “Okay,” he said. “Where are we?”
Ben shrugged, unsure of the correct response.
“An easier one: which direction back to the camp?”
Ben turned, but he realised that the twists and turns of the trail had fooled his sense of direction and he had not been paying enough attention to their route to have a satisfactory answer. He shrugged again. “I... I followed you,” he said, feebly.
Zeb’s eyes narrowed. “Perhaps I should just leave you here, then,” he said. “If I was Robby that’s what I’d do.”
Ben looked at him and he knew that he might easily do just that. Despite his kindness there was something edgy about Zeb, a wildness that was more animal than human. Survival was instinctive for these people and the safety of the community would always come a long way ahead of Ben’s welfare. They wouldn’t hesitate to sacrifice him if they had to, even Zeb.
“Walter asked you to teach me the ways of the community,” Ben said. “If I learn how to survive out here then I’m less risk for all of you.”
Zeb nodded. He took Ben by the shoulder and turned him to one side. “North,” he said. “See the algae on the tree trunks? It grows best in the shadow on the north side of the tree.”
Sure enough, the green smudges on the bark were densest on one side of the nearest trunk.
“If you’re in doubt, listen for the trains. You can always get your bearings from the direction of the trains.”
Zeb didn’t let up until the evening started to close in.
They ate with Walter and some of the others, and gradually Ben began to learn the names and relationships of the people he had joined.
And that night he slept. He was warm and dry and he felt safe. Even the floor of the big community hall didn’t seem so hard, as he settled down next to one wall and closed his eyes.
~
When he woke, his body hurt with all the muscle-pain and stiffness he had come to expect from sleeping on a hard floor, and yet somehow it did not seem to matter.
He felt as safe as he had ever felt in this strange world and there was a chance – however slim – that these people might accept him. Walter had offered him the woodlanders’ protection. Zeb had started to show him the ways of feral life.
He recognised the strange feeling that he had woken with this morning: it was hope.
Out in the clearing, one of the women waved him over to join a small group and a young girl handed him a carved wooden bowl filled with steaming corn porridge.
A short time later, a small boy with shaggy, shoulder-length hair, said, “Will you tell us again? Will you tell us what you telled us again?”
Ben hesitated, but all seven of the children had turned to him now. “Okay, okay,” he said, laughing, as an excited chatter broke out around him. “I’d been to see a friend and I was walking back across Barlow’s Patch. There was a big storm building up and it started to–”
“No! Before that!” cried the girl who had given him the porridge. “Tell us about the world where there aren’t any beasts.”
He stopped, and thought.
He thought of his parents, of Stacker and Arthur and Gav, of the skateboard park and the after school football knockabouts.
“I...”
He didn’t have the words. It hurt even to think about all he’d lost.
“It’s just a normal world,” he said. “People like us – we live in houses, in towns and cities. We go to school. There are good people and there are bad people, but there are no beasts. It’s–”
A sudden commotion cut him off in mid-sentence as Robby appeared in their midst. Suddenly Ben was sprawling in the dirt. His ribs throbbed where Robby had kicked him.
Tears and grit stung his eyes as he peered up at his attacker. Ben held his arms out in a feeble attempt to defend himself.
Robby had a knife – probably the one he had held to Ben’s throat not so long ago. He stood over Ben now, looking at him along the length of the blade. “You’ve been told,” he said, in a low voice. “We’ve heard enough of your lies and stories. Are you listening? You start stirring up trouble and you’ll regret it.”
Zeb came, then.
He put a hand on Robby’s back, and said something in his ear. Robby glowered at him, then turned and walked away.
Zeb leaned over, offering Ben a hand.
Ben stood, and brushed himself down. His ribs still throbbed where Robby had kicked him. He noticed that the children who had been listening to him had all been shepherded away by one of the adults.
“You need to watch out,” said Zeb, smiling awkwardly, trying to reassure Ben. “Stories can be dangerous things if people start believing in them. You should keep a low profile. Some people don’t think we should have taken you in, and they don’t want you telling stories you don’t understand.”
Stories. That’s all his words were to most of the woodlanders. “Do you believe me, Zeb?”
“You’re not one of us,” said the tall woodlander. “So you must have come from somewhere else. I don’t believe and I don’t disbelieve, but what I do know is that you’re here and you have a lot to learn. If you want to survive out here then you need to stop stirring up trouble – forget about whatever went before and concentrate on
now
, okay?”
Ben nodded.
“Come on.” Zeb turned and walked away. Ben followed, and soon they had left the settlement behind.
They walked some distance in silence and then paused in a patch of sunlight. Zeb touched Ben’s arm and pointed. Ben tried to see what it was that he was indicating and then he realised that he was alone. Zeb had used that moment of distraction to vanish.
Panicking, Ben recalled their first trip out into the woods when Zeb had appeared to consider abandoning him. He calmed himself and looked around, hoping for some sign of where his companion had gone. He listened, but heard nothing that helped him.
And then a hand fell on his shoulder.
Ben twisted, gasping, ready to flee, until he saw that it was only Zeb.
“You have to be able to conceal yourself at an instant’s notice,” Zeb said, patiently. “And you have to be able to move silently.”
Ben shook his head, amazed at how Zeb had so easily deceived him.
“Which way to the camp?” Zeb asked.
Immediately, Ben pointed through the trees.
Zeb clapped him on the arm. “You’re learning, you see?”
Ben grinned. “But I still have a long way to go, right?”
~
On the way back, they came to a point where their narrow trail crossed a broader path and suddenly Zeb plucked Ben’s arm and pulled him into cover.
Ben peered at him in silence. He listened, but heard nothing out of the ordinary.
Then, after a short time, he heard voices. A man, a woman. Walking along the path. Ben looked at Zeb and saw him nod.
Beasts.
They hid and waited. It was easy to forget what a dangerous world he now inhabited.
9 The Old Man in the Woods
“I’d like you to meet someone, Ben,” said Walter. “I think he might help you.”
Ben had been with the woodland community for three days now, spending his days with Zeb and his nights sleeping on the hard floor of the community hall. Slowly, he was learning how to find his way around, how to hide himself and conceal his tracks, what was safe to eat and what was poisonous. At times he felt that he was making good progress, but at others he still felt out of his depth – lost in a strange world.
He lived in the present: each day an achievement, another day survived. He tried not to think about what he had left behind and he dared not think too far ahead about what may come. He just tried to learn and to fit in.
“Where are we going?” he asked Walter. The community leader took him under the dark canopy of the woods, away from the brook where Ben had been helping two young women, Anna and Rose-Marie, to prepare some long stringy roots that Rose-Marie’s grandmother would boil down into a medicinal paste. While they worked, they’d been listening to the radio, the volume turned low: at first, strange music, and then a drama that seemed to revolve around who it was polite to share blood with.
“I want you to meet Old Harold,” said Walter. “He’s one of the wisest people I know. Must be about seventy years old. Lived alone in the woods all his life. He doesn’t talk to the rest of us very often, but I keep an eye on him – listen to his tales and make sure he’s all right. I think you have a lot in common with him, Ben.”
~
Old Harold lived in one of the oldest trees in the woods.
Walter and Ben had left the path some time ago. Now they were threading their way through a tightly packed thicket of young trees, spread over the gentle slope of a hill. “This area was felled some time ago,” Walter explained. “They were going to do some quarrying but for some reason it was abandoned and the trees grew back again like this. Harold says he likes it because it’s full of nightingales in the summer.”
After a time, they reached the far end of the young growth and soon they came to Old Harold’s tree. It was an oak, and its bark was near-black and ridged and knotted into endless patterns. The trunk was hollow and if there had been an opening big enough you could probably have parked a small car inside.
“Harold,” said Walter, poking his head into a crack in the trunk. His voice echoed inside the hollow tree. “I’ve brought Ben. I’ve brought the boy we talked about yesterday.”
He stepped up onto a raised root and then clambered through the cracked trunk and dropped inside.
Ben followed him. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Inside, the tree had been carved out to resemble a small room: there were shelves lined with jars and books, seats cut out of the wood, a long, low shelf where Ben suspected the old man slept.
A spiral of narrow steps wound up around the inside of the hollowed trunk. Ben’s eyes followed their course and then he noticed a face protruding into the circle of light above them.
It was an old man, with white hair tied back with a leather band and a thick beard that had been twisted into a series of little pig-tails.
There was a pause, then the man said, “Come on up, lad. Come into the light where I can see you.”
Walter turned. “I’ll leave the two of you,” he said. “You can find your way back, can’t you, Ben?”
Ben nodded. It was the first time he’d been left without a chaperone since he’d come to the woods. Perhaps they were learning to trust him, now.
He climbed the tiny steps, holding on to any handholds he could find. Old Harold must be very agile to use steps like these.
The old man was sitting on a bench cut into dead wood where the tree branched out from its enormous trunk. He was wearing a cloak, as many woodlanders did, and his bare knees thrust out from underneath it to provide a resting place for his chin.
Ben settled next to him. From this viewpoint he could see out across the tops of the younger trees to the main bulk of the woodland. The trees seemed to roll away for miles and miles, until they were finally lost in the distance.
“The boy from another world,” said the old man, after a long silence.
Ben peered at him, not knowing what to say. The old man was studying him closely.
“You make them uncomfortable with your stories,” said the man. “Your claims of a better world. They tell stories like that to the children, but they don’t believe. If they believed such a thing, then they would despair because they are here and not there. Do you see what I mean? You frighten them, Ben. That’s what Walter wants me to explain to you. He doesn’t want you damaging the community with your stories.”
Ben had already worked that out: ever since Robby’s attack he had stopped telling people about his world. He nodded. “I know,” he said. “But I had to tell them. I had to find out if they knew how to get back.”
“Back,” said Old Harold. “Back to another world that only exists in the stories we tell our children.”
“I’m not mad,” said Ben stubbornly.
“Not mad, perhaps,” said Old Harold. “But you believe things that cannot be true.”
“If my memories aren’t true, then where have I come from? How did I suddenly appear here?”
“You’ve had a frightening experience,” said Old Harold. “Walter tells me you were held prisoner by the vampires. Who knows where you have come from? You’ve blocked your memories out and filled them in with stories told to you as a child: a magical, safe world where there are no vampires to hold you prisoner. It’s a natural thing to do, Ben. You’re not the first person to go through this.”
Ben shook his head. “It’s true,” he said. “I don’t belong here.”
“But you are here,” said Old Harold patiently. “And you are not in the hands of the vampires. You should, at least, be thankful for that.”
The old man’s voice was strangely soothing, convincing.
“The stories,” Ben said. “I don’t remember any stories. All I remember is living in a world that is not like this.”
“There are many stories,” said Old Harold. “They get changed about and mixed up in the retelling, as all stories do. We tell of worlds where everything is different. We tell our children of worlds where there are no vampires, Ben. Just the same as you tell. We tell of passages between this world and a safer one.”
He held his hands up, their backs turned to Ben, fingers spread. He moved them together so that the fingers interlocked. “We tell of worlds so close together that they are almost the same place, of passages between worlds where the two fit together. All stories. Fantasy. Sometimes a vampire from this world enters the safe world and causes terror. We use that story to frighten children, to remind them that the world is dangerous after all.”
Passages between the worlds, universes overlapping like the gnarled old fingers of Harold’s hands. What if it was true? Could that explain how Ben found himself here? A place where two worlds overlapped. Maybe that was where the vampire legends in his own world came from?
“Sometimes we tell a story where one individual has special powers: a sensitivity. That person can find the special places where the two worlds brush close together and he or she can use this talent to open up a passageway between the worlds. That story gives hope. It suggests that there is always something better that we may achieve.
“We use the stories in many ways, Ben. We use them to entertain and we use them to teach our children important lessons about the world. But they are always just that: stories.”
“But it’s true,” said Ben. “It happened to me.”
“So you are the special one, are you? You are the individual who can find a way between the worlds.”
Perhaps. Or perhaps he had just stumbled through by accident, when the passageway had been open – a freak natural event.
“You said I’m not the first to go through this,” said Ben. “Are there others who have made the same claims? Are they all fooling themselves with stories from their childhood?”
Old Harold nodded. He leaned forward, so that his head was close to Ben’s. “There have been others, Ben. I was one of them. That’s why Walter asked me to explain it to you: because I know what it is like to believe the unbelievable.”
Ben stared at him in surprise. “You?” he gasped. “You’ve been through this and you still tell me it’s not true?”
Old Harold nodded again. “I was young,” he said. “About ten years old. I wasn’t as lucky as you, Ben. I don’t know what happened to me, but I was wandering around the countryside, lost, when I was picked up by a vampire. He kept me locked in his coal cellar for weeks. There’s a very fine line between life and death and that monster kept me clinging to that line for all of that time. I had barely enough blood in my body to survive. I can still remember the terrible tiredness – I could barely move at times. And the pain, and the awful fear.
“For some reason the vampire left me alone for several days. I started to recover and I realised that might be my only chance. I worked and worked at the hinges on the door until one came adrift. The door twisted on the bolt and the remaining hinge, and I was so thin I could force my way through the gap.
“I ran and I walked and eventually I crawled and by chance I ended up in the woods and I was found by the woodlanders. I’ve never left this place since.”
“Where had you come from, before the beast caught you?”
“I don’t know,” said Old Harold. “But for a long time I told people I had come from a world where there were no vampires, where there were no beasts like the one who had locked me in that cellar and drunk me almost dry.
“I was fooling myself, Ben. I didn’t have anything else to believe, so I decorated my past with stories from my childhood.”
“How can you say that when you’ve just told me what you went through?”
“Because it’s true,” said the old man.
Just then a thought struck Ben. “You call them ‘vampires’,” he said. “That’s what we call them in my world.”
Old Harold tipped his head on one side and thought. “Vampires, beasts – what does it matter? What matters is what they do to you.” He paused, then explained, “When Walter came he told me they’d found a boy who ranted about vampires. It’s years since I’d heard that old word. I reckon it’s what we called them when I was a boy. Took me back to when I was a kid, all the terrible things that happened. Can’t remember when we started just calling them beasts. Long time ago, I reckon. They still suck your blood, though!”
He put a comforting hand on Ben’s back. “Do you see what I’m saying to you, son? I never came from another world because there is no other world, only this one. I know you don’t believe me, Ben. I know you probably hate me for trying to tell you that you are mistaken.
“But you will believe me, Ben. You really will. You need to accept the truth of that if you are to survive in this harsh and unfair world of ours.” He waved a hand to indicate the broad expanse of woods. “You need to accept that this is all we have.”