Free Hotel Midnight by Simon Clark Page A

made a cartload of sense. We didn’t have any trees so close to the back of the house. In fact, the only trees we possessed were apple; they were thirty metres away at the bottom of the garden.
    My heart beat hard; this made me so uneasy. Even so, I managed a philosophical tutting sound as much for my benefit as the dog’s. ‘Looks like someone’s been playing a joke on us, Woody, old boy.’
    Immediately I thought of the stranger who’d somehow flung a dart into Woody’s side. Now, branches outside the window? A mental image flared of a lunatic hacking limbs from a tree then propping them against the kitchen window.
    ‘Think it’s time you called the police,’ I told myself. A blowpipe attack, then branches? Did the madman plan to set the woodpile on fire? Was he even now pouring petrol?
    I knew I couldn’t sit and do nothing until the police arrived. First, I’d have to check that there wasn’t some psycho out there with a fuel can.
    ‘I need back-up, Woody.’ I muttered the words without thinking , yet the dog understood the need for solidarity. Canine instinct kicked in. Smoothly, he slipped off his bed to stick close beside me as I unlocked the kitchen door.
    When I opened it I wasn’t ready for what I saw.
    Or what I didn’t see.
    What I didn’t see was garden. What I did see was forest. Just a dozen paces from the back door were tree trunks. A wall of them. Masses and masses. Thick trunks with a silvery bark. Barely three metres or so above the ground branches erupted from the trunks in a billowing mass. A mobile mass at that. Higher up a night breeze was blowing. The motion of the branches, plus the rustle of leaves, produced that sound of the sea: surging into a near roar before subsiding into a whispery hiss. The outermost tips of the branches hung low enough to almost brush the kitchen window.
    Down here was still. Rich forest smells advanced on me as I stood in the kitchen doorway. I glanced at Woody. He stood with his head thrust forward. His nose twitched. He was fascinated. He smelled a million scents he’d never smelt before. Hearing a whole symphony of sounds, too. Most of those would possess frequencies too high or too low for my limited human aural capabilities. All I could hear was that sea-sound of air rushing through the upper branches, mixed with the faint creak of timbers as they swayed.
    What now?
    Be flippant in a cool, film-star kind of way, by quipping to Woody, We’re not in Kansas any more, Toto .
    The truth was I didn’t have any witty one-liners. I stood. Stared. Listened. Those shadows. That whisper of leaves. This sense of ineffable mystery … I couldn’t even muster a swear word that would be powerful enough to suggest the magnitude of what I saw. Or my surprise at how a forest manifested itself in my back garden.
    Without thinking it through, I found myself stepping forward into the night-time forest, wearing nothing but football shorts and a T-shirt. On my feet, leather slippers. Not the apparel of an explorer. Woody was as hypnotized by the miracle as I was. Sticking close to me, he walked forwards, sniffing, glancing from left to right, his ears flicking at every sound.
    Thing is I couldn’t see more than two or three metres ahead. The forest was that dense. Shining the torch upward, I saw an undulating ceiling of green. Still I felt the pull of the forest. Woody felt it, too. You couldn’t stop yourself. You wanted to push deeper into that dark, inexplicable interior. Was this the spirit of the wild hunt I’d read about in folk legend? The instinct to pursue and kill that over-rode all civilized notion of self-restraint.
    My heart thudded. Blood roared through my neck, over-feeding my brain with oxygen. The greens of the leaves seemed so bright. Tree bark had the brilliance of silver foil. Scents became richer. My ears homed in on the sounds of woodland creatures in the undergrowth.
    ‘Woody, we’re not in Yorkshire anymore.’ I managed my not so original