The Collected Short Fiction

In The Trees (1986)

Threlfall saw the aftermath of the crash as he slowed for the detour. Beyond the police cars and their orange barrier, smoke veined with flames smudged the gray sky. Braking, he thought of matches a child had been playing with, matches spilled from a box. They were telephone poles that had fallen from a lorry, blocking both westbound lanes of the motorway and smashing a car. He hoped the driver had got out before the car caught fire, hoped the police hadn't recorded his own speed before he'd seen them. He cruised past them off the motorway, off his planned route.

He was already late for the next town, the next load of unpopular books. He stopped in a parking area with a padlocked toilet and a bin surrounded by litter, and dug out his road atlas from among the week's newspapers. It looked as if the most direct route was through the green blotch on the map and the horizon: pines.

He swung onto the road with a screech of gravel. The road ploughed through the flat landscape, past stubbly fields relieved only by a couple of derelict farmhouses and rusty scraps of cars, and the forest seemed no easier to reach than the blob of sun in the sky. When at last he came to the forest, he had to drive alongside for miles, until he began to suspect that the road through was closed. No, here it was, and he braked fiercely as he turned.

The trees cut off the sunlight, such as it was, at once. He hadn't realized the road would be so gloomy. He might have felt the trees were closing their ranks against him and his vanload of books, pulped wood on the way to be pulped again, books returned by the bookshops because they were too late for the fads they'd been written to cater to. Still, he didn't suppose butchers felt uneasy driving meat past animals. He switched on his headlights and was picking up speed when the children walked into the road.

The sight of the coach parked by the road must have alerted him, for he was braking almost before he saw them—luckily for them, since they dawdled on the road as if he weren't there or had no right to be. They were boys in their early teens, a classful of them accompanied by a disheveled teacher whose long legs seemed bent on tripping him up as he scurried after his class. "Hurry up," he cried. "Stop talking. Leave him alone, Selwyn. On the bus, all of you. Double quick."

He saw Threlfall's car and held up one hand. "Could you let them cross?" he shouted. "Would you mind?" Perhaps it made him feel less ineffectual. He turned on the boys behind him. "Leave that, Wood," he cried.

Or it might have been "Leave that wood," for the three boys who were arguing about how many fish and chips they could afford were dragging what looked like a branch. They stared blankly at him and dropped it. "Not in the road, you chump," he yelled and flung it toward the trees.

It wasn't just a branch, it was carved. Threlfall could see that much before he got out of the car. He felt entitled to be outraged by the boys, who'd piled onto the bus and were opening the windows so as to throw out the wrappers of chocolate bars, and by their teacher—all the more so when he saw that the carving at the thick end of the branch was a face. Why, it must have taken days of careful work, more than you could say for too many of the books in the van. "You aren't just leaving that there," he protested.

The teacher thumped on the window nearest the culprits. "Do you hear? You were told to leave those things alone. They weren't rubbish at all." To Threlfall he said apologetically, "You can't tell them anything these days. I'd make them put it back but we're already late."

"Sodding right we are." The coach driver climbed down, hands on hips, and glared at Threlfall. "He isn't a ranger, he's just interfering. Make up your mind if you're coming. Put it back yourself if you like it round here," he growled at Threlfall, and pushed the teacher up the steps.

The bus roared away, its headlights slashing at the dim trees, its windows spilling litter and the clamor of the schoolboys, three of them still arguing over two fish and three lots of chips, no, let's have three chips and two fish... Threlfall went back to the car, started the engine, stared at the dashboard clock, then abruptly he parked off the road and went to pick up the carved branch.

He didn't much care for it now that he looked at it closely. The eyes bulged like knots in the wood, the face looked tormented, struggling to open its mouth. At least someone had felt something while it was being made, not like the hacks whose failures filled the back of the van. It didn't matter that he didn't care for it, he still had a duty to save it: anything else was vandalism.

The overcast was tattering. Sudden sunlight picked out the trail the branch had made as it had been dragged through the pine needles, beyond a map carved on a board at the side of the road, a map of woodland walks distinguished by markers of different colors. He memorized the positions of the walks before hefting the branch and starting down the slope.

The nearest path was marked by a yellow post. The trail of the branch crossed the path and led under the trees. He had to slow down once the dimness closed in, chill as water. When his eyes adjusted he saw how he appeared to be surrounded by paths, a maze of spaces between the trees. Most of the apparent paths led into long waterlogged hollows. More than once the branch had been dragged through hollows, and he had to jump across.

Soon the trail crossed another marked path. It should be marked red, and when he peered along it, past the glare of sunlight on its stony surface, he could just make out that it was. Now he could hardly see the trail, even when he was among the trees and the glare had drained from his eyes. The piny smell made him think of a hospital, long dim deserted corridors that led nowhere. He stumbled under the weight of the branch and slithered into a hollow, ankle-deep in mud. He could no longer see the trail, either in front of him or behind him, but wasn't there a stony path between the trees ahead?. He had to stagger onto it before he was sure there was.

What was more, it led to a building. He could see a corner of the wall beyond the furthest bend in the path. Even if the building wasn't where the carving had come from, whoever was there could take it—Threlfall had spent too much time already in the woods. Which path was this? It ought to be the green one, as he recalled, and soon he passed a post that looked green, though with moss. Whoever was in the building would confirm the way back to the road.

He rounded the bend nearest the building, and nearly dropped the branch for throwing up his hands in frustration. The hut was in ruins: not a wall was left intact, and there was no roof. All the same, the interior looked crowded with figures, too still to be people. He went forward, trees whispering behind him, the face with its knotted eyes lurching in his arms.

The hut had no floor. The earth between the walls was planted with carved sticks that looked as if they were growing there, not sticks but stunted trees with atrophied branches. All had faces; some had more than one. All the faces gave the impression of being not so much carved as straining to free themselves from the wood.

He stepped through a gap between two walls. Tall grass snapped beneath his feet. If he couldn't find the spot where the branch had been stolen from he would have to leave it wherever there was room. He held it above his head and shivered with the chill that was sharper than under the trees. Perhaps he was shivering a little at the tortured faces too. Of course the carver must have based them on shapes in the wood, that was why they gave the impression of growing. No wonder they were so grotesque, especially the one that looked like a mother whose child's face was growing on her cheek.

He turned away and frowned, realizing that there was no space within the hut where the faces could have been carved. Something else was odd: seen from inside, the hut seemed less ruined than partly built and then overgrown. One side of the hut might almost have been a bush that had grown into the shape of a wall; weren't those its roots in the grass? But he was wasting time.

He'd grasped his stick in order to lay it down when the voice said, "What do you think you're doing?"

At first he didn't realize that it was a voice. He thought it was a crow that had made him start and glance round, or a chainsaw, or even a frog croaking close to his ear, especially since he could see no one. "Where are you?" he demanded.

"You'll find out, I promise you."

Perhaps the speaker thought Threlfall hadn't asked where but who. Was the voice coming from the wall that looked most like a bush? "I'm putting this back," Threlfall said.

"Putting it back now, are you? Too late."

"I didn't take it," Threlfall said, resisting a nervous urge to tell the speaker to show himself. "Some children stole it. I brought it back."

Himself or herself—with such a voice one couldn't tell. "You'll do," it said.

Threlfall felt obscurely threatened. He had a sudden unpleasant notion that someone was about to lift one of the carved faces above the wall, a face with its jaw moving. "Look, I'm leaving this here and I'm going," he said sharply, shivering. He laid the branch down carefully, then he fought his way through the grass between the carvings to the gap in the walls.

Nobody had appeared. Nobody was in sight when he looked back from the bend in the path. It wasn't worth trying to retrace his route through the trees; it wasn't worth the risk—he couldn't locate the trail he'd followed—and in any case the green path would soon join the red and so lead him back to the road. He turned the third bend and found that the green path petered out in undergrowth.

On the map the green had crossed the red twice. He could only go back, staring fiercely at the hut as he passed, doing his best to shake off the impression that a face was watching him from among the crowd of carvings. Perhaps one was, he hadn't time to see. He was glad when a bend intervened.

The deserted path wound on. Was there anyone in the woods beside himself and the unpleasant carver? The creaking that made him glance round must be wind in the trees. He hurried on, searching for a junction to interrupt the endless silent parade of trees, trees beyond counting on either side of him, trees massing away beneath their canopy until they merged into impenetrably secret dimness. There—a marker post in the distance, a reason for him to run—but when he reached it and stood panting he found that it didn't mark a junction, only the path he was on, and it was painted orange.

It must have been red until it was weathered. He was sure there hadn't been an orange path on the map. He must have walked at least a mile from the hut by now; surely he had to be near the road—and yes, he could hear voices ahead, where a dog was sitting patiently beside the path. It took him five minutes of running, giving way frequently to jogging, before he was close enough to be certain of what he was seeing. The dog was a tree stump with a root for a tail.

Then the voices had been wind in the trees. If he let himself, he could imagine that he was still hearing them further down the path, laughing or sobbing. Movement in the trees beside him made him turn sharply, but it was a display of inverted trees in a pond, intermittently illuminated as the clouds parted and closed again. He hurried on, past the sound that wasn't voices. Whatever was making that sound in the murk beneath the trees, he hadn't time to look.

The road couldn't be much further. Wasn't that a car passing in the distance ahead, not a wind? He was walking as fast as he could without running, his feet throbbing from the stony path. It must be the sound of traffic, and there at last was the junction with the yellow path. Nevertheless he hesitated, for the sound had seemed to come from directly ahead, beyond the next bend in the orange path that must once have been red.

He shouldn't turn now. Not only was he sure where the road was, but he could see shadows moving on the path where it curved back into sight for a few yards beyond the bend, shadows of people among the unmov-ing shadows of trees. Thank God that's over, he thought vaguely, and almost called out to the people round the bend—had his mouth open to speak as he rounded the curve and saw that the shadows were of bushes, so grotesquely shaped they looked deliberately sculpted.

They weren't shaped like people. He hadn't time to decide what they were shaped like, even if he wanted to, nor how their shadows could have appeared to be moving. It must have been a trick of the light, but it wasn't important, especially when he looked away from the bushes. A few hundred yards beyond them, the path came to a dead end.

He ran to it, not thinking, and stared into the endless maze of trees, then he took a deep breath and ran back to the yellow path. That had to be the way, though the paths seemed to have nothing to do with the map. He ran, lungs aching, round a curve and then another, between the trees that he could almost believe his run was multiplying, and let out a gasp so fierce it momentarily blinded him—a gasp of relief. There ahead, where a car swept round the dim curve past a filling station, was the road.

Thank God for the filling station too. He could ask his way back to the map and his car: he didn't trust himself to judge which direction to take along the road.

He looked both ways before crossing to the forecourt, though the curve prevented him from seeing very far along the silent road. He could see someone moving beyond the grimy window of the office. For a moment he'd been near to panic as he realized that the pumps were rusty, the filling station obviously disused.

He grasped the shaky handle of the office door, and cursed. The office was bare and deserted. What he'd taken to be someone was a torn poster, in fact several layers of posters, flapping restlessly on the office wall. He caught sight of a telephone on the crippled table that was the only remaining item of furniture, and he was struggling to open the door in case, miraculously, the telephone might still be working, when he saw that it was nothing but a knotted stick. Were they posters on the wall? Now he peered through the dusty glass, the figure looked more like layers of bark, and all at once Threlfall was walking away, round the bend in the road, which led to a few sawn logs and a forester's hard hat. The sawn logs would have been blocking the road if there were a road, but beyond them were pathless trees and growing darkness.

It was still a road, he told himself desperately. It must be a foresters' road: that explained the vehicle he'd seen passing. It had to lead somewhere, it was preferable to the paths, at least it was wider. He ran back past the disused filling station, and there, surely, was a forester, presumably the one who'd left his hat: certainly someone was standing in a thicket by the road and watching Threlfall through the dark green leaves.

Threlfall turned his back and waited for the man to finish relieving himself. Thank God for someone who would know the way out of the woods. He waited until he began to wonder if the man had been watching after all. Perhaps he hadn't seen Threlfall, but then why was he taking so long in there? Either he was breathing heavily or that was wind in the trees.

Threlfall cleared his throat loudly before turning. The man hadn't moved. "Excuse me," Threlfall said: still no response. He walked around the thicket, making as much noise on the pine needles as he could, without being able to catch sight of the man's face. "Excuse me, are you all right?" The unresponsive silence dismayed him so much that it took more effort to step forward than to force his way through the bushes.

Twigs scraped his skin, the touch of dank leaves on his face made him shiver. Twigs hindered him as he gasped and struggled backward out of the thicket, which felt all at once like a trap. He hadn't seen the body of the figure, only its face grinning at him, the eyes bulging like sap. He hadn't time before he recoiled to be sure, and couldn't make himself go back to determine, that the carved face bore a distorted, almost mocking resemblance to his own.

He ran stumbling along the road, which gave out after a few hundred yards. He peered wildly into the depths of the trees until they seemed to step forward, then he fled back past the figure in the thicket, past the filling station where the figure on the wall was still moving, onto the yellow path. Why him? he thought distractedly, over and over. Why not the schoolboys, the teacher, the coach driver, the hack writers, the publishers, the booksellers, the bookseller who'd given him back the study of English forests with the comment, "I thought this would be different from his other mystical rubbish"? If only Threlfall had that book now, with its maps of walks! But it was in the van, wherever that was.

He had to stay on the yellow path, it was the only one he knew. There must be a junction he'd missed, there must be a route that didn't lead back to the hut and the tortured faces and, presumably, their torturer. The trees or the darkness between them closed in, urging him faster along the path, yet he felt as if he were still in the darkening thicket, not running, not moving at all. He'd mistaken several trees or roots beside the path for marker posts or figures waiting for him when a crumpled piece of paper came scraping toward him around a bend, along the path.

He couldn't have said what made him pick it up: certainly not tidiness—perhaps that it seemed infinitely more human than anything else in the woods. He unfolded it and stared, for the moment past comprehending. It was a map, a tracing of the carved map of the walks. It seemed a vicious joke, since he couldn't locate himself on it in order to find his way. He was preparing dully to throw it away when he rounded the bend and started, seeing where the map had come from. A man was leaning on a stick at the side of the path.

He had a long brown weathered face that hardly moved, a twisted nose, large ears. Threlfall stumbled up to him and handed him the map while he struggled to be able to ask the way, to speak. The man took the paper and displayed it to him, his cracked brown thumb tapping the paper to show where they were, then tracing a route: right here, left, turn back on yourself ... He handed it back to Threlfall, nodding stiffly, having spoken not a word.

Something about his eyes made Threlfall mutter a hasty thanks and hurry away—something about the way the man was supported by the stick. The route seemed more like the solution to a puzzle, and Threlfall wasn't even sure that he remembered it correctly as the dark welled between the trees, the wind snatched at the map until the paper tore, a croaking in the trees behind him began to sound like words as it came closer, first "Give that here" and then, almost at his back, "Look at me." That was the last thing he would do; he couldn't even have looked back at the man with the twisted nose once he'd realized how alike in appearance the stick and the man's weathered skin had been. Here was a junction where he could see no colored markers, and he had no idea which way to go. A wind took him unawares and carried the map away down one path, and a last instinct made him flee along the other, up a slope that seemed to be growing steeper, actually tilting, as he caught sight of the road beyond it, and his van. He almost dropped his keys as he reached the van, almost lost them again as he locked himself in. As he started the engine he thought that something like sticks clambered swiftly onto the road beside the carved map, croaking.

All the same, as soon as he was out of the woods he stopped the van. The bookshops he was supposed to fit in today would have to wait until tomorrow. He unlocked the back of the van and rummaged through the cartons, where eventually he found the book on English forests, published posthumously, he saw now. It said little about the woods he had escaped except that they weren't worth visiting; perhaps the author had felt that to say more might attract the curious. Threlfall closed the cartons and locked the back of the van and slipped the book into his pocket, then he let out the deep breath he'd had to take before turning to the photograph of the author. This was one book he wouldn't see destroyed, that he would always keep. He climbed into the driving seat and drove away, still seeing the photograph he'd already known was there: the long weathered face, the large ears, the twisted nose.