Free Darkest Part of the Woods by Ramsey Campbell

downstairs.
    Apart from being barefoot, he was wearing yesterday's clothes. "Didn't you have a shower?"
    Heather enquired.

    "I will. I was going to make breakfast if anybody wants some."

    "Those who did have had it, thanks, Sam. But listen, I'm sure your aunt won't mind seeing you in your dressing-gown and nothing else."

    That was his normal morning attire on his days off work, but he looked so embarrassed that Heather changed the subject as Sylvia hung up the phone. "Who was drawing on the bathroom mirror?"

    For a moment Sylvia and Sam regarded her with a blankness so identical it looked like a shared secret, and then Sam said "Sorry. Me."

    "No need to be sorry, but what was it about?"

    "Couldn't tell you. I was half asleep. Who was talking in the night and woke me up?"

    Sylvia resumed her blank look. Since she appeared to be set in her silence, Heather said
    "What do you think you heard?"
    "Someone."

    "Saying
    what?"

    "I didn't understand what it was muttering on about. It stopped when I got up."

    "I expect you dreamed it."

    "Like I dreamed the stuff I was trying to see what it looked like on the mirror."

    "As long as that's settled," Sylvia said, "do you think we could leave pretty soon?"

    "We can now," Heather told her, and immediately wondered how their father would react to Sylvia. That was far more important than speculating about the length of time Sylvia might have sat with her on the bed. There was no point in brooding over that-no reason to think it had been Sylvia's voice Sam had imagined he heard in the dark.

    9

    In a Ring

    AS soon as Heather drove through the gateway she saw Lennox. Of several patients in folding chairs on the lawn, he was the closest to the gates. She couldn't tell whether he and his fellow inmates were watching the road or the woods, which had trapped a morning mist, though the November sky was clear. All six twisted in their seats to observe her progress up the drive. So much of a reaction made her tense, so that she was glad to see nurses in the grounds and Dr Lowe in the front entrance of the Arbour.

    He was polishing his glasses. Without them his round face looked unprotected, not as competent as he would surely have preferred to appear. He held the glasses up as though to focus on some aspect of the woods, then emitted a gasp he might have wanted nobody to hear, and breathed on a lens that he rubbed afresh with a large sky-blue handkerchief. As Heather parked in front of a bay window he donned the glasses, clearing grey hair out of the way of their arms with his forefingers, and approached the car. Even when the Prices climbed out he remained in a welcoming stoop. "You'll be the long-awaited event," he told Sylvia.

    Lennox and the others had adopted various gnarled postures to face her. "Did you tell him we were coming?" Heather murmured.

    "Just that he might be visited, but he seemed to know that. I won't be far away."

    Presumably that was to reassure Sylvia. Heather was aware of little except her sister's nervousness as they crossed the lawn. The seated patients had turned to watch Lennox, who seemed almost to sprout upwards from his chair. He swung it aside and dropped it on the grass as he advanced on Sylvia, hands outstretched as if to measure her girth. "I told you she wouldn't let us down," he cried.

    Sylvia took his hands, and they gazed into each other's eyes as if sharing a secret or trying to discover one. "How did you know I was coming?" she said.

    "Because you were called."

    Heather could only assume her sister was pretending that answered the question.

    "You haven't changed. You're more the same," Lennox said. "You've only grown where it counts."

    He passed a hand over the crown of her head in a gesture not unlike a benediction before wrapping his arms around her, loosely enough to suggest that he feared she might snap.
    The seated patients cheered and stamped so loudly they would have been audible in the forest, which appeared to respond by