Shadows & Tall Trees (21 page)

T
he Greyhound bus wheezed to a stop, its doors hissed open and the driver said, “Only seats for two more.”

“Not to worry,” Malcolm said, usually the spokesman in these situations. “Karl doesn’t mind standing.” He grinned at Karl. “Yeah, thanks mate,” Gareth said, in his uninflected voice, swinging his rucksack off his scrawny shoulders and preparing to board.

“Sorry lads,” the driver said, not looking all that sorry. “There’s no standing in the aisle allowed. Not safe on these roads. Go over the limit of thirty-nine and my job’s on the line.”

Karl was too tired to smirk at the rhyme and the jobsworth who was pretending not to have noticed it himself. Passengers watched from presumably every seat but two.

“Could one of us
sit
in the aisle?” Malcolm said. He smiled, teeth clenched.

“Nope,” said the driver, looking ahead, mentally filing his fingernails.

Each waited for one of the others to volunteer to tramp alone the three miles to the village on the hard, winding, up-and-down blacktop. A lot to expect after five hours of the horseshoe of hills, then the knee-capping descent down Wetherlam—all under the late summer sun.

The driver revved the engine to indicate his reserves of patience weren’t unlimited, then, as the three conferred, the doors whispered that a decision had been made for them and the bus moved off.

“When’s the next?” Karl asked, aching, hot. A disappointing end to the last of their roughly tri-annual hikes, the final get-together before Malcolm and Gareth relocated to the east and south coasts. He’d enjoyed today, though he’d never liked the walking as much as the views from the tops, the spread of hills like the backs of faceless beasts with muzzles buried in lakes, rivers and forests. Before the sun had burned it away, mist strands were like sheep’s wool snagged on coarse pelts of woodland, stuck to glue-like yellow blobs of gorse.

“An hour—and that one might be full too. The Tilberthwaite Country Fair is on today.” Leaf shadows dappled Malcolm’s bald crown and owlish face as he examined the Ordnance Survey map. Karl and Gareth watched the bus disappear, along with what had been the prospect of a beer or two in Connerstone, then the Stagecoach service’s uninterrupted hundred mile run to Manchester.

Karl said, “I can hear it, the fair.” A faint voice over a Tannoy system, commentating, cajoling.

“Don’t think so, Karl,” Malcolm said, making one ear bigger with his cupped hand. “It’s two or three miles away.”

Sheep shearing, wrestling, dog races, stalls selling everything from jam to woolens held little appeal for Karl, nor stifling shuffling crowds.

No longer audible, the festive noise must have been blown elsewhere.

Gareth pushed his glasses up the bridge of his sweat-shiny nose and lifted his slim-line camera to frame a stile in the stone wall. An arrow sign pointed to Guards Wood. Malcolm said it was the start of a longer route to the village which would be kinder to their feet, and offer more shade. He looked at them for agreement and they nodded, having no better suggestion. While Gareth immortalized the partially rotted stile, Malcolm edged his barrel-like torso through the gap. Karl and Gareth followed.

A path went by a thin band of ash and birch. Karl guessed it was Guards Wood which glowered, a green-flecked massive wall of lumpy tar three or four tilted, misshapen fields away. The dark cloud directly above could have been the woods’ blackness reflected against the blue sky.

“That might get us before the finishing line,” Malcolm said, relish at the challenge in his energetic stride along the ash path. His map was stretched between his hands; it was more necessary here than it had been up in the hills, where there had been one clearly indicated route. Sheep watched them approach, their faces stupidly noble, before prancing away under bouncing burdens of ragged wool.

A gate overgrown with weeds was the first indication of a dilapidated property; it was enclosed by a chaotic hedge with upright slates, the size of encyclopedias, running along its base. Gareth snapped at them with his camera. A crooked tree grew through a partially collapsed roof. There was a crumbling barn and a grassed-over yard. A farm once, so long out of use it no longer stank.

“They’ve all got stars engraved on them,” Karl said, peering down at the slates.

“Pentagrams,” Gareth said, blasé, as if you saw them all the time.

“What, to keep demons out?” Karl said. “These broken ones where they got in? Actually, the sheep do look sort of devilish.”

“Now chaps,” Malcolm said, “we’d better get a hurry on. The only evil here is that dratted black cloud.”

Karl thought Guards Wood could run it a close second; it looked dense, airless.

They paused at a tree with gnarled twisting branches hung with shriveled bulbs, unlikely to mature into eatable apples. There were several opened bottles hanging from strings. “Shooting practice?” Karl wondered aloud. His heart pumped as it never had on the steepest slopes.

“None are broken,” Gareth said. “Looks like the old method to catch wandering demons.”

“Dear-y me, Gareth,” Malcolm said; he’d no time for such nonsense.

Darkened by foliage, a thick branch high up looped in a graceful extended S laid on its side. It didn’t seem to belong. Karl sucked in a breath as it shifted position. No,
he
had. Warm air hissed through leaves.

They walked on. In the ten minutes since the road, Karl hadn’t spied one other walker. He reflected that dedicated hikers kept to the hills. This was landscape you glanced at as you drove by it. It looked abandoned, sheep its custodians, masticating grass and watching with disdain as the three of them passed.

Five more minutes elapsed and the wood was a towering wave about to break. Malcolm stopped, eyed his map as he might a willful child in one of his classes, and complained at the scale being too small. A horsefly landed on it, mistaking it for the world. He batted the fly away and wiped at his gleaming forehead with his handkerchief. Being honoured with a name must mean the wood was of a size and character to deserve one. Karl couldn’t think of anything in its favour other than the shade it would offer.

“Ready?” Malcolm said, as if the brief stoppage had been primarily to give his companions a rest.

The path rose to a sagging stone wall. Malcolm went first, striding over the broken remains of a kissing gate.

No diminution of the heat. Karl felt they’d entered innumerable stuffy rooms, defined not by walls but by the pillars of the trees, furnishings a matter of masses of brambles and other unidentifiable greenery. Maybe they should have avoided the wood, the way the birds had. Sunlight falling into distant glades and rides darkened the heavy cover elsewhere. The mix of trees suggested it was an old wood. That was the extent of Karl’s arboreal knowledge and it was confirmed not long after. Gareth stalked forward, camera poised, towards a collapsed wooden frame the size of a TV screen. Under cracked glass, words, some not eaten by insects or dampened to illegibility.

“. . . birch, oak and ash, natural to . . . kingdom. Ecosystem thrives . . . maintenance of a continuous canopy . . .”

Karl thought the choking underbrush wouldn’t be as continuous if, as he suspected, woodland overseers weren’t as scarce as the birds. He’d no sense of how far they’d penetrated the wood—and there were no longer sightings of sunlit glades. Close, heavy air pressed. Pattering on leaves began slowly like hesitant applause.

“I think the trees have told the black cloud we’re here,” Malcolm said, shrugging off his rucksack and pulling out his waterproof. Gareth and Karl did the same.

They walked like beggars, heads bowed as the air filled with rain and the swishing of their waterproofs. They stepped carefully over roots intersecting the path like prominent veins on a wet hide.

Karl couldn’t be bothered remonstrating with Gareth, who was close enough behind to be kicking lightly at his heels. The hissing of millions of leaves sieving the rain focused into unintelligible whispered words directly behind his ear. Gareth hadn’t been previously given to japes and Karl was about to suggest he shouldn’t start now. Then he noticed his friend walking stolidly several yards ahead.

Karl flung himself around. Puddles had formed on the empty path. The rain hissed and crackled like fire. His own flapping wet trouser legs had kicked at his ankles.

“Sun’s back,” Malcolm called out.

Some distance ahead a glade overflowed with buttery light. Karl’s limbs un-stiffened. Abruptly, the rain stopped but for sporadic fingertip taps on his hood.

Moments later they stepped into a wide break lined with gorse. There was a litter of rocks and stones from a glacier that could have passed just yesterday. An empty wedge to the right in the trees revealed a pin-prick flash of a distant windscreen, a section of the lake like a bent nail, a flank of the mountain whose summit they’d reached in time for sandwiches and the midday news on Karl’s headphones.

They walked down the ride until it was clear the right-hand path Malcolm said to look out for had been grown over, or broke away from a different glade entirely. But here was another path heading off to the left just short of where the ride ended in dense foliage.

“Can’t see it on the map but it’s got to lead to somewhere,” Malcolm said.

“Paths
always
lead somewhere,” Karl complained, stopping, rebellion inside him. “Let’s go back and look for the path on the map.”

“The map’s not reliable here,” Malcolm said. Karl felt the same about the wood. The trees looked too dense to even let a path through but Malcolm and Gareth were heading into them.

Karl followed and after a moment turf was light and springy underfoot and there were cushions of moss. “Had this place in mind all along,” Malcolm said, his grin signaling how untrue that was.

Like a faulty TV picture, the whitewash flickering between the dark tree trunks. At their feet, a winding series of stepping stones, flush with the grass. They ended at a short length of fence into which was set a low gate with a sign across it,
Journeys End Refreshments
. “Should be an apostrophe before or after the ‘s’ in ‘journeys’, but I’m prepared to forgive on this occasion,” Malcolm said.

“I’ve some water left if you want some,” Karl said. “Let’s just get back. I want beer, not tea.” Hidden here, the house’s saving grace was not being made of gingerbread.

“Keep hold of your water, Karl,” Malcolm said, lifting the latch with a sharp snap.

Karl went through last, the latch raining a rusty powder onto his fingers.

The whitewashed cottage was at the end of a long narrow lawn. Around the door was a trellis of faded red roses. There were windows at each side and two upstairs—all with closed shutters apart from the one to the right of the door. Murk behind the large single pane of glass.

They dropped their rucksacks by a lone round table halfway down the garden by the wall. “I’ll parley with the natives,” Malcolm said, anticipation in his face at what a delight this was certain to be.

“Sure there are any?” Gareth said to Malcolm’s back. The closed shutters and dark window gave Karl hope but then a face appeared in a gap in the doorway, and he noticed a shape, vaguely visible in the window.

A hefty someone. More likely a female, to judge from the profusion of banana-sized and sharp-pointed crescents of yellowish hair around the solid base of the dark block of the head. Working at a sink or worktop?

A few words were exchanged and Malcolm called back, “Apple pies and tea do for you?” Gareth said “yeah” and Karl raised his thumb, rather than his voice and affront the stillness of the trees. Malcolm had gone to the un-shuttered window where he stooped to a book on the ledge. He wrote into it then was strolling back to the table.

He asked Gareth how many photos he’d taken. Gareth checked, said “thirteen”.

“Lucky for some. A good day, don’t you think, Karl?”

“Not bad,” Karl said. The trees had twisted it out of shape, the house stopped it dead.

Malcolm said, “I envy you, still having hills on your doorstep when we’re gone.”

A hundred miles was no “doorstep”—and walking alone held no appeal, even if he’d known how to read maps. That’s why he’d joined the Hill Billies. Malcolm and Gareth had joined separately at the same time. A disparate trio of physiques and personalities bound together from the first day in a loose camaraderie. The Hill Billies group had folded four walks later. Karl had a vague notion the three of them had infected it in some mysterious fashion, thus ensuring its demise.

He couldn’t feel the breeze carrying the sounds of the country fair down corridors between the hills and over the dense carpet of woodland. Many voices, with one amplified and surging over the rest.

Karl said, “Hear that—?”

“Stand by your beds, gentlemen,” Malcolm interrupted, smoothing the altar-white tablecloth.

Tall and very slim, the young woman carried a loaded tray and approached with quick small steps of her tiny feet. The close-fitting maroon garment she wore down to her calves had a sheen in which darker shades billowed like smoke.

She placed the tray on the table; the pies had strikingly golden crusts and pillows of clotted cream. Karl tried to catch her eye, just to see if he could. She had large wide-apart eyes. Supposed to be an attractive feature, weren’t they? He’d beg to differ. Malcolm said, fulsomely, “Thank you. You’ve saved our lives.” Her lengthy thin-lipped smile encouraged him to go on.

“How’s business? You’re quite hidden away.” He could ask questions like that.

“Coming to an end,” she said, her voice sibilant, how the trees would talk if there were a breath of air. “We’re going home. We aren’t from around here.”

“No?” Malcolm said. Still smiling, and as if she hadn’t heard his invitation to expand, she turned and went back to the cottage.

“See her teeth? Like a baby’s milk teeth,” Karl said, pushing at his apple pie with his spoon.