Free Darkest Part of the Woods by Ramsey Campbell Page A

withdrawing its mist not quite far enough to unveil a rank of dripping shapes. "You see how you're appreciated," Lennox said. "You as well, Heather."

    As the stamping faltered and the cheers ran out of breath, the nearest man wheezed,
    "Introduce us."

    "This is Vernon, girls. He used to be a naturalist. Still is when there are flowers in the grounds."

    "They're what took me to the woods, the rarities," the man said with uneasy pride.

    "And that's Delia. Her mother used to take her walking there every Sunday."

    Delia clapped her fingers to her cheeks as if her protuberant eyes needed support.
    "Carried on after she was dead and buried."

    "You did," Heather felt it was advisable to say, "not your mother."

    "Her or something that kept looking like her."

    Heather regretted having spoken, not least because Lennox gave Delia a smile that might have greeted a witty remark. "And that's Phyllis next to Delia," he said. "Phyllis used to pick mushrooms in the woods about this time of year "

    "You are what you eat," Phyllis declared and used her greyish tongue to trace increasingly unappetising shapes around her lips.

    "I'm Timothy," said the man beside her, his head swaying from side to side. "I always knew there were rare birds in the woods. I could just never photograph them."

    "Something flies round the woods, but it isn't birds," his neighbour said. "Too big.
    Sometimes it's under the branches and sometimes up above, with a face I'm Nigel," he added with no apparent sense of incongruity "It's Lennox who sees furthest into the woods," said Delia, tugging at the skin beneath her eyes.

    "So far. Will you give me some time with my family now?" he said, and made for the hospital building.

    Heather was glad to leave his companions behind. Not only had they all been victims in the sixties of the mutated lichen, but now she realised they had formed the party he'd recently led into the woods He ushered the sisters up the left-hand staircase to his room, which was so warm it felt impatient for midsummer. He raised the window a hand's breadth, apparently as far as it would move As a smell of fog and rotting vegetation found its way into the room. He sat on the foot of the bed and beckoned Sylvia to join him. "Space for you as well, Heather," he said There barely was. "I'm not a sylph like her," she said. "I'll have the stool."

    "So long as it doesn't make you feel like the dunce. That's where teachers used to sit children who were slow on the uptake."

    "I did know that," Heather said, less sure of the relevance.

    "Sure enough, you're the reader." Perhaps that was meant less than positively, since he added "You have to concentrate on what's important. I've finished with most of my memories now, but I remember you before you were born.

    I remember when you were conceived, Sylvia."
    "Gee."

    "Do you know what I saw then?"
    "I
    don't."

    "Everything that has to be."

    When he turned to gaze into the blurred shifting noonday twilight under the trees, Heather tried to reclaim his attention. "What else do you remember about us?"

    "I saw you come out of your mother. I saw your sister do it with her eyes open, she was so ready to see."

    "I don't suppose you remember that, Sylvie."

    "Maybe I will."

    Heather assumed that was intended to appeal somehow to Lennox. "No need to be jealous, Heather," he said.
    "I'm
    not."

    As though to placate her he said "I remember how you were always taking her into the woods when you were children."

    "Hardly always, and only when she asked."

    "And your mother thought they'd been made safe." He might have been addressing the restless undefined depths of the forest as he enquired "So what are you going to do for me?"

    It was Sylvia who risked asking "What do you need?"

    "Let's see if your sister can tell us."

    Heather took this for an attempt to include her, but couldn't find much of a response.
    "I'll let you," she said.

    "The history of the woods."

    "I can find that in your library, can't I,