The Martian in the Wood Read online

  She felt isolated. She missed her life in London and Paris before the War, although that was all disrupted now anyhow. Her own future was suspended; she had for now to assume the burden of the family. But that was what survivors of disasters always had to do, she supposed. She tried to suppress the resentment she felt, at Nathan for his absences – even at her parents for being dead, an illogical feeling and unworthy.

  And meanwhile, as I have said, the world, or this corner of it at least, seemed … strange.

  For one thing there was the weather, which, even from late August, was unusually still and dark and cold, with barely a gleam of sunlight breaking through a stubborn bank of low cloud, for day after day. There was no wind to speak of either. It was as if, she mused, a permanent high pressure system had installed itself over Holmburgh – and it was only here; if you went ten miles in any direction you encountered a much more reasonable mix of seasonal weather, sun and showers, wind and still.

  The air seemed to grow stagnant. When the stubble was burned, the smoke lingered for days, catching her throat.

  The farmers too were unhappy, it seemed to her as she took her daily constitutional walks to different parts of the estate. Unhappy and faintly confused. The harvest was poor, the grain swollen on the stalks but dry and powdery when it was reaped. The cows were giving thin and sour milk; the sheep, soon to be tupped, were fractious and prone to panicky bolting.

  The swallows and swifts and martins left weeks earlier than usual. Only the crows prospered, great clouds of them gathering unnaturally early over the shadowed Wood.

  Zena saw her brother only in glimpses, during visits back to the house that became ever shorter, ever more infrequent. He would fill himself with food, grab a fresh set of clothes, sleep a night or two – he would put up with his sister’s administering to his cuts and bruises, he even let her cut his increasingly ragged hair – and then he would disappear again.

  She clung to the memory that they had in fact been quite close as children, given they were only a year apart – in 1907 she was twenty-six, he twenty-five. They had always been somewhat isolated on the estate, and had never mixed with the children of the farmers. Now Zena tried not to be jealous, as she struggled with the still desolating aftermath of her parents’ deaths, while he was free to roam in his Wood as he pleased.

  Except that, she increasingly felt, he wasn’t free at all.

  * * *

  At the beginning of October, there was a rash of allegations by the tenant farmers of “sheep rustling”.

  Only a few animals had been lost, but with such relatively small flocks each animal represented a high proportion of a farmer’s annual income, and they counted every penny.

  All the animals disappeared entirely, save one – and this was a carcass recovered from where it had been hung up at the edge of the Wood. The farmer, as baffled as he was angry, showed Zena how the animal had been bound and suspended by her back legs, and then the blood had run out of the slit throat, presumably into some container – you could see the dried smears on her jaw and upper fleece.

  No blame was attached. Nathan’s name was not spoken. But his antics in the Wood were as well known to the farmers as they were to his sister.

  Wordless, Zena paid over the value of the lost animals to each tenant. She wondered in fact if the farmers’ angry silence hid some grain of sympathy for her.

  The tenants took to patrolling their fields. After a few gunshots, aimed, it seemed, at elusive shadows, the wave of rustling stopped.

  It was at this point that, casting around for help, she first thought of writing to Walter. It was the connection with the War, you see: the coincidence of that first fiery phenomenon in the Wood with the ending of the War, and then Nathan’s reported glimpse of a ‘towering skeleton’, what sounded – at least to her, who had seen no Martian close to – like Martian technology, those fighting-machines tall as steeples. And Walter Jenkins was in the news: badly scarred himself from his flight through the Martian killing fields, grave, authoritative, a name she had been aware of before the War, and now reincarnated as a source of commentary and wisdom on all things Martian.

  (You might imagine she could have approached the local police, or town council, before a figure like Walter. All I can say is that given my own experience of country bobbies, if she had come forward with such an ambiguous account as she had at that point, her reward would have been a patronising brush-off and a diagnosis as a hysterical woman.)

  Walter, however, at the time, though he was responsive by letter, could do little to help. He offered cold comfort with a speculation that there was much about the Martians that mankind had yet to unravel. And he urged her to contact him again, by letter or telegraph, if the need arose.

  Some days after that, with Nathan still absent, Zena steeled herself to go see the Wood for herself.

  * * *

  She donned stout outdoor clothes, sturdy boots, loaded her father’s shotgun, and set off along the trail to the Wood.

  She walked as close as she could bear to that dark tangle. Near the perimeter of the Wood the ground was oddly poor, the grass giving way to stubborn moss or lichen, even bare soil in places, dirt that looked leeched of its goodness. The Wood itself, at its very edge, looked normal, with saplings pushing through the leaf debris. She recognised rowan, elder, hawthorn, among the oak. But within this outer band the trees, mostly oak, grew thick and old and tangled and dark.

  She walked the perimeter – nine miles or thereabouts, it took her most of a short October day. The only sound she heard was the cry of the crows overhead, wheeling against that habitually dark sky – that and her own breathing, her uncertain footsteps. She saw no living animal, and no sign of the tenants’ lost sheep.

  But, as she walked, she saw the dead.

  Small animals: a fox was the largest, squirrels and stoats, even a badger. They were hung up from the low branches, suspended by bits of tendon ripped from their hind legs, so it appeared. Each of them with a crudely gashed throat; each of them apparently bled out. She did not touch these gruesome relics. When she looked deeper into the Wood, she thought she could see branches in the dense interior similarly adorned, as if with hideous fruit.

  And, as she approached the end of her circuit, she thought she saw movement. A human figure. Just a shadow, deep in the Wood, somehow running despite the density of the growth.

  Without thinking she pushed into the Wood herself, pressing between the crowding trees, or trying to. She soon ran into a veritable wall of tangled branches and densely growing trunks, and clinging debris under her feet. It felt, she would tell Walter, as if the Wood was deliberately excluding her. Pushing back.

  She called: “Nathan! Nathan, it’s me, Zena. Zee-zee! What are you doing in there, Nathan? Come home … Pierce has your meal ready whenever you come back. Cold meat, as you like it…”

  Perhaps it was that word “meat” that hooked him. She thought the running figure hesitated, just as it was on the verge of disappearing in the shadows. And it, he, looked back. A human face, pale, like a lantern in the wooded dark. Was it Nathan’s? The eyes seemed bright, restless. But then he – if it was Nathan, if anything was there at all, and not just a trick of the light or her own imagination – turned away, and ran on, and was lost.

  * * *

  In November the weather stayed dry, with little rain and certainly no snow, but was oppressively cold. Pierce and Zena took to huddling by the big fire in the old family room, partitioned off long ago by Zena’s father to give his wife and children somewhere cosy, in a house centuries old that could “leak like a sieve” in the wind.

  Nathan came back just once that month.

  He stayed only a few hours, at the end of an afternoon that was already darkling. He ate in the kitchen, almost wordless, and Pierce and Zena had to bring him his customary requirements: a change of clothes to replace jacket and shirt and trousers that were all but worn out, packs of food and medicines. He would not let Zena cut his hair this time, or h
is beard; the hair had grown out rough, shaggy, thick black. Again she found disturbing streaks of blood on his discarded clothes. Nathan himself seemed still more drawn, thin, pale, his eyes vivid and bloodshot in a face that was white under the dirt and the animal blood.

  He was gone before the night closed in.

  At the beginning of December there was a new crisis in the unhappy little community of Holmburgh, when Mervyn Chapman went missing.

  Mervyn, nineteen years old, tall, gangly, not very strong, was the eldest son of one of the tenant farmers. Rab Chapman, the father, was still, silent, grave, as the police were called and the area was searched, the buildings and the fields. Not a trace was found.

  The police penetrated the Wood itself. Zena watched them go in with dogs and truncheons and lanterns and torches, vivid sparks in a dull noon, swallowed by the trees. They were in there for hours, and repeated the exercise the next day. The constables emerged looking baffled if not fearful.

  Once Zena overheard a detective inspector growl with frustration at the contradictory tangles that emerged when his men tried to map the routes they had taken in the Wood. She glimpsed these maps herself, and made discreet copies from memory. (Later she would show these sketches to Walter – and later than that he would compare them to mysterious sigils seen by the astronomers on Mars, and in the clouds of Venus. But that is another story.)

  Two days of searching yielded nothing, not a sign of Mervyn or indeed of Nathan. The police offered possible explanations. Perhaps Mervyn had simply run away, as farmers’ children will often do. Perhaps he was in Brighton or London, looking for work or love or just excitement. If he was lying rotting in Holmburgh Wood, he wasn’t to be found.

  The police presence wound down.

  The farmers organised themselves into patrols; they would go out two at a time, armed with shotguns, and march around the perimeter of the wood. Children were kept indoors. Animals were carefully watched.

  A few days before Christmas, Nathan came back to the Lodge.

  * * *

  This time he would not enter at all, though Zena tried to coax him with food.

  On a December afternoon, then, already darkling at four, Nathan sat cross-legged in the driveway before the main entrance, and ripped apart cold meat with fingers like claws, stuffing it steadily in his mouth. His movements were rapid, furtive, and his eyes were watchful, apparently unblinking. He was so pale.

  Pierce kept a discreet watch, intending to deflect any of the farmers who might come this way. Still it remained unspoken, but many on the estate clearly blamed “the loon out of the Lodge” for what had become of Mervyn, and the stolen animals.

  “Let me look after you,” Zena said at last. “Me and Pierce. Just like before. You know it’s what they would want.”

  He stared at her. “Who?”

  “Mum and Dad, of course. Come home. For them, if not for me.” Under the strain of yet another confrontation, her concern easily mutated to irritation. “Or is that why you’re running away? Is this your way of dealing with the fact that they died? How easy is it for me, do you think, stuck here?”

  Still he didn’t reply, though his head jerked this way and that, as if he was scouting for predators.

  “Night after night you must sleep in the rough. What do you do, heap up leaves? I remember when we were small, and you used to sneak out at night … But it’s December, Nathan. It’s so cold.”

  He laughed, around a mouthful of torn meat. “Not so cold as in there. Not so cold as it is for them. And they don’t mind.”

  She was baffled. “Who’s them, Nathan? Are there others? Are you meeting somebody?”

  He laughed again, but would not reply.

  “It’s nearly Christmas. Why not come in just for the season? Maybe until after the New Year. We could make the tree. Get the decorations down from the loft –”

  He dumped his food, stood up with one lithe movement, grabbed his goods, and was gone, just like that.

  But this time Zena was prepared.

  * * *

  She and Pierce had the routine ready. She was already wearing outdoor clothes, a heavy sweater and trousers. Now she grabbed her hooded leather coat, and forced her feet into her stoutest boots. Meanwhile Pierce brought out the pack she had been checking every day, with battery torch, whistle, small medical pack, and food and water bottles replaced daily – and a small pot of bright yellow paint. She was ready to go in a couple of minutes.

  As she loaded the pack on her back, Nathan was still in sight, hurrying along the track towards the Wood.

  “I ’ope nobody takes a pot-shot at ’im,” Pierce murmured.

  “I hope so too, Pierce. And indeed, I hope nobody lines me up either.”

  Pierce faced her, grave, more like an uncle than a butler, she thought. “You sure about this, Miss?”

  “What else can we do, Pierce? The Chapman boy was the final straw. We have to know.”

  “It’s gettin’ dark.”

  “It’s December. Can’t be helped.”

  He shrugged. “Leave a trail, like we said. And if you aren’t back sharpish I’m comin’ in after.”

  “He won’t harm me. You know that much, Pierce.”

  “Mebbe. But mebbe he in’t alone in there. He wun’t answer, wud ’e?”

  “I’ll watch my step. Is my pack done up? See you soon, Pierce – with, I hope, my brother.”

  And with that she was off, haring along the track. She did not let herself look back, to the house glowing with light and warmth, at Pierce’s comforting bulk. Instead she faced forward, staring at the Wood that was a black mass growing in her sight as she ran, and Nathan, a small figure fleeing ahead.

  III

  From the beginning the trees seemed to resist her. She thought the thick black trunks were like a crowd of inconsiderate men, their backs turned, through which she had to force her way.

  The trees themselves were heavy with age, the squat trunks weighed down by huge branches, and hollowed out by lichen and rot. Branchlets and twigs, gaunt, leafless and tangled, pulled at her coat and scratched her flesh where it was exposed, and snagged on the straps of her backpack. The ground was soft, yielding, a cake of rotting mulch and foul-smelling lichen; it seemed to suck at her feet, and the roots tripped her with malevolent purpose. She quickly tired.

  It was dark too, and the last of the December daylight would not last long.

  She tried to be systematic. She had brought that pot of paint; with a small brush she dabbed bright yellow splashes on the trunks she passed, every few yards. As she went on, and the dark closed in, she looked back at the line of yellow dots that receded back through the Wood, a track of her footsteps. A way out, and a guide to keep her straight as she pushed on into the Wood.

  Which method of navigation worked well enough until she came to the snow.

  There had been no snowfall in Holmburgh that winter, not yet. Yet here it was, a scatter of flakes on the ground at first, soon piling up into drifts that would further clog the way. Well, her boots and leggings were reasonably waterproof. She adjusted her gloves, pulled her fur-lined hood around her face, and pushed on, under a big bent branch a little like an archway into winter, and kicked her way through drifts that could be waist high. Still she marked her way with the yellow paint splashes. She knew the Wood was only three miles across – only a mile and a half to the centre. She was making slow progress, she knew, but even so she had no sense that she was nearing the heart of things, let alone emerging from the Wood’s far side. She had her watch, but her sense of time swam; she wished she had written down the precise time she had set off.

  Still she pressed on, still she made her marks.

  And then, quite suddenly, she came to a clearer space, where twigs and branches had been brushed aside and the snow trampled down, as if by the passage of huge hooved feet. On the trees she saw scrapes on the bark, even lengths of coarse russet hair. It was as if some immense animal, or a herd of them, had pushed through here. At least the g
round here was easier to navigate. She stepped cautiously over muddy slush frozen into ridges, following the more open path. The air was colder still, a dry, sucking chill. She tucked her gloved hands under her armpits, her arms wrapped around her torso for a bit of warmth.

  Then she saw brightness ahead, beyond the trees. It was as if she was nearing the edge of the Wood, as if the trees were thinning at last. But the light beyond seemed stark, pale grey or white, with none of the muddy green of the English ground that, she knew from her circumnavigations, lay beyond the forest. Not the end of the Wood, but evidently she was coming to the edge of a clearing.

  And there, beyond the last trees, before the grey light, huge shadows passed. She heard a soft ripping of turf.

  Instinctively cautious, she approached the open space but stayed tucked behind the final screen of trees. And she saw deer.

  She thought they were deer. Tremendous animals they were, with muscular torsos and rust-brown hair, and the big males sported sculptures of antlers that must have been ten feet across, chipped and scarred. As this herd moved, slow and graceful as grounded clouds, they worked steadily at the sparse grass that grew here; that was the soft ripping sound she heard. And she smelled their rank animal presence, the dung they dropped.

  She cowered back, into the trees, obeying instinct. She had never seen such animals, not in the wild in England, not in any zoo.

  The herd did not take long to pass. There were only perhaps a dozen individuals, she saw, including females and a couple of infants, leggy and uncertain. But they had blocked her view of the clearing. When they passed, she expected to see a wall of trees not far beyond.