Doctor Who: The Way Through the Woods (7 page)

‘I hope so too, Emily.’

Rory brushed the cinders from his hands and stood up. Emily was humming again – no, that hadn’t been her, had it… Before Rory could explore this thought further, Emily reached over, took hold of his chin, and kissed him firmly.

‘Ah!’ Rory squawked, when he had possession of his own mouth again. ‘Yes! No! I’m married!’

Emily stared at him. Her pupils were wide and dark.

‘
Married?
’

Somehow, she made the word sound like an accusation. She raised her hand and slapped Rory hard across the cheek. Then she turned and ran beneath one of the arches formed by the trees.

Rory came to his senses. ‘Emily! Wait!’ He dashed after her along the path, stumbling in his haste. Was it his imagination, or were the roots of the trees hindering him, slowing him? Soon the path forked. Rory came to a halt and looked desperately first one way, then the other. No sign of Emily – but on the ground lay a single white feather.

‘Emily!’ Rory cried. He wasn’t meant to lose her. He wasn’t meant to lose her…

Paralysed by indecision, unsure which way to go, Rory rubbed anxiously at his temples. The trees shifted, and scorching sunlight poured through the gaps between them. Rory’s eyes blurred and watered. Again he heard humming – no, not humming, not Emily, and not the water in the pool either, which had been still water and not running… The noise grew louder, more a throb or a thrum, and Rory realised that it was mechanical, as unlike birdsong or the gentle rustle of leaves as it was possible for something to be. Dark patches appeared in his vision. The trees began to spin around him. Everything began to ebb away.

I wasn’t meant to lose her…

‘Don’t say anything,’ said Amy. ‘I’m not quite finished yet.’ From the bag, she pulled out one last aerial photograph. She offered it to Jess, who took it with shaking hands.

Only from the grey line of motorway could Jess tell that this was the same area of countryside that she had seen in the other pictures; her part of the world, and generations of her family before her. Any other continuity with the past had been obliterated. All the houses – the 1930s villas, the 1960s estate, the new estate – they were all gone. In their place were empty fields. And where Swallow Woods had been there was a lake.

‘Before you ask,’ said Amy, ‘this was taken fifty years from now. Yes, in the future. And no – I don’t know what happens. I
do
know that it happens over the next few days. You’re the last to disappear, Jess. Nobody disappears after you, because there isn’t a town for them to disappear from, and there isn’t a wood for them to disappear into.’

It seemed to Jess that the everyday sounds of the pub – the laughter, the chatter, the chink of glasses, the cheesy tinkle of the quiz machine – were now coming from a great distance. Blood throbbed in her ears.

‘These are fakes,’ she said. ‘It’s easy to fake this kind of thing if you know how.’

‘Why?’ Amy sounded genuinely baffled. ‘Why would I do that?’

‘Some kind of hoax—’

‘Why bother?’

‘A grudge, then. Did I go through a red light while you were on a pedestrian crossing? Did I walk past you and not buy a
Big Issue
? Whatever it was, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it, and I’m sorry. But to do something like
this
…’ She crumpled up the newspaper cutting. ‘It’s cruel!’

‘I wouldn’t do that,’ said Amy. ‘For one thing, like I keep saying, I really don’t have the time right now! Besides, all this I’ve shown you – I’m not telling you anything you didn’t already know. But you’ve been denying it. The whole town has been in denial, for centuries. You, your friends, your parents, your grandparents – you’ve gone out of your way to avoid Swallow Woods. You’ve only built roads that keep a safe distance. Think of the council meetings, Jess! The planning permission committees! Everyone there, with the same thought in mind, none of them ever saying it out loud –
we mustn’t get too close to the woods
…’

Amy picked up some of the papers, flicked through them. ‘Back and back, through the centuries, all your ancestors, for as long as they’ve lived here, they’ve all thought the very same thing –
we mustn’t get too close to the woods
. Why? Why would they think that?
Centuries
, Jess.’

Jess looked unhappily across the pub. Charlie was still there with his friends. They looked happy and untroubled and as if they had a great future ahead of them.

‘Yet not all of you could keep away, not entirely,’ Amy said softly. ‘Every fifty years, something draws people to Swallow Woods. It pulls at you, like a magnet. That’s why you stayed here rather than go off to London, isn’t it? You knew there was a secret here. Something huge. Something vast. The story of your life. That’s what’s kept you here, writing about birthday parties and shop openings and exam results. You were waiting for something to happen, something that would explain everything strange and unspoken about the town. Well, it’s happening now. I don’t know how it ends. I don’t know what turns this place from a thriving little market town to a lake and a ghost town. What I do know is that it starts tonight. It starts when you go into Swallow Woods. You’re going, Jess. You can go alone and be lost for ever, or I can come with you and maybe – just
maybe
– you’ll come out again.’

The jukebox blared out suddenly, the opening bars of ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’. Jess nearly jumped out of her chair.

‘Will you let me come with you?’ Amy said. ‘Or are you going alone?’

Before Jess could answer, Charlie sauntered over.

‘This birthday party is obviously going to be the event of the year,’ he said, with a curious look at Amy. ‘You two have been plotting all night.’

‘Unmissable,’ Jess said, as cheerfully as could be managed under the circumstances. ‘I’ll get you an invitation.’

Charlie laughed. ‘Well in case I have to be somewhere less thrilling, here’s my number.’ He passed her a slip of paper. ‘Anyone willing to skip drinks to do a report on an eighty-fourth birthday is either mad enough or dedicated enough to be my kind of person. Twins or not. Give me a call, Lois, if the partying doesn’t finish you off first.’

He went on his way with a wave and a smile as bright as city lights.

Jess stared at the mobile number scrawled on the paper. This was her chance, at last. She could go home, have a bath, watch
Newsnight
while Lily complained about it being boring, and tomorrow she could call Charlie and maybe get the interview she had always dreamed of…

A pleasant fantasy, one which Jess knew wasn’t going to happen. Instead, she would get halfway home, and then she would turn the car round. She would drive back to Long Lane and park somewhere dark and quiet. Then she would climb the fence and cross the field, and she would walk into Swallow Woods. And then?

‘Eighty-fourth birthday party?’ said Amy.

Jess stuck the piece of paper in a small pouch at the front of her big leather bag.

‘Twins, no less,’ she said. ‘Our cover story, you strange and alarming woman. Did you really want the paparazzi hanging round while we go into the woods?’

Amy sagged back in her chair in relief. ‘Oh, thank goodness!’

‘Story of my life, you said. What exactly am I supposed to do? I must be out of my mind, but I’m coming.’

He woke to a splitting headache and the certain knowledge that he was in trouble. It felt like this was not an uncommon occurrence, even if he was fairly sure that he had never surfaced feeling hung over on an alien spaceship before.

Because that was certainly where he was. Even with his eyes still shut, he could tell – from the throb of distant engines pitched for non-human ears, from the stale thickness of air pushed too many times through recycling. Yes, this was an alien spaceship. Interesting. He seemed to know about spaceships.

Then he opened his eyes, and his world became incoherent once again. Because through his blurry vision, it was quite obvious that he was in woodland; woodland in October, when the leaves were mottled green and yellow, suspended between their summer splendour and their fall, waiting for one mighty gust of wind to rip them from the branches. Yes, this looked like woodland – but it didn’t
sound
like it, and it didn’t
smell
like it…

Too much contradictory information at once. He clamped his eyes shut.

‘Where?’ he moaned. ‘When? And why oh why oh why?’

Somebody moved alongside him. He cracked open an eye. ‘Who? Who’s there?’

A young woman swam into view. She had a round pretty face and long brown hair. She took hold of his hand.

‘It’s me, Mr Williams. Emily Bostock. How are you feeling now? You’ve been away a while!’

She helped him to sit up. Blinking to clear his vision, he had to agree with his semi-conscious self that they were indeed on board some ship, in what seemed to be a small empty hold of some kind. The walls, when he put his hand against them, were metallic, but patterned like a wood in autumn. They were lit from within, and when his hand touched the surface, the light seemed to gather around it. All very puzzling, but it was not his most pressing worry.

‘Mr Williams,’ he said. ‘Um. Who’s that?’

The woman who called herself Emily sat back on her heels and looked at him in consternation.

‘Oh goodness me! Can’t you remember your name? You’re Rory. Rory Williams.’

‘Rory’ shook his head. Mistake. Black spots appeared alarmingly in front of his eyes, and for one moment he thought his vision was going the same way as his memories.

‘I’ll have to take your word for that.’ He looked at Emily suspiciously. ‘Er, I suppose I can trust you, can’t I?’

‘
What
? You cheeky, bloomin’—!’ The young woman slapped his arm, hard. ‘If anyone here shouldn’t be trusting anyone else, it’s me shouldn’t be trusting you! My goodness, I’m not sure you’ve said a straight word to me since we met!’

‘All right, all right!’ Rory (he’d go with that) pointed at his forehead. ‘Head injury! Possibly fatal! Fatal as in fatal death!’

He couldn’t, in fact, remember a single thing he had ever said to this woman, chiefly because he couldn’t remember ever having met her before, but the feeling of being in trouble with a girl with long hair was vaguely familiar. So was his general sense of bewilderment as to the cause of the girl’s fury.

‘Look, please, just stop…
beating
me, and let me think for a minute, will you?’ He put his hands to his head. The throb of the engine wasn’t helping.

‘So you’re Emily,’ he said at last.

‘Well, I told you that!’

‘And we’re on an alien spaceship.’

She blinked. ‘Is that where we are?’

‘Er,
look
.’ Rory gestured around. ‘What else is this going to be?’

‘How am I supposed to know? You’re the one who knew what was going on!’

‘You’re the one that ran off!’

‘Ooh, so you remember that! You rotten liar! What else do you remember, I wonder?’

‘Excuse me! Blow to the head! Fatal injury of fatal death!’

They glared furiously at each other for a few moments, and then Emily began to laugh.

‘You look so cross it’s comical. Sorry, Mr Williams, but you’re about as scary as a rabbit!’

‘Right. OK. So we’ve established that I’m Rory, you’re Emily, we’re on an alien spaceship, and that I’m a figure of fun. We’re definitely getting somewhere.’ He sighed. ‘But what we’re doing here is anyone’s guess.’

‘You said you were looking for the engine,’ Emily said unexpectedly. ‘You were going to dismantle it. You said the engine was leaking.’

‘I said all that? Doesn’t sound like me. Sounds… um, well, competent. What else did I say?’

‘Not much. You came into the pub, walked me halfway home, and then told me you had to find a machine in Swallow Woods to take it away. That was about the size of it. Oh, you said you weren’t a spy, but I’m starting to think you are. One of ours, though. I bet it’s some Hun war machine you’re after. And I’ll tell you something else for nothing – I wish I’d never laid eyes on you!’

‘A spy? That doesn’t sound much like me either.’ Rory stood up and looked round. There were two exits from the room – one on their left, one on their right – dark archways without doors and not much clue as to what might lie beyond them. ‘Right. Er. Which way shall we go?’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! Do you have a coin?’

‘What? Oh.’ Rory rummaged in his pocket and found a ten pence piece. ‘Will that do?’

‘That’ll do fine. Heads, we go left; tails, we go right.’

Emily flicked the coin into the air and it fell on the ground with a clatter. She stooped to pick it up. ‘Heads it is… Here, whose head’s that? Is this a foreign coin? You’re not a bloomin’ Hun after all, are you? That’d be the absolute limit…’ She turned the coin over. ‘Ten pence. Two-thousand-and-nine. You know, Mr Williams,’ she said, as she handed the coin back, ‘if I thought about it too much, I could be very scared of you. Nothing queer ever happened to me before I met you. Now look where I am. You could be a villain for all I know – following young women, luring them into the woods. I wish I knew if I could trust you.’

She sounded so woeful that Rory couldn’t help but feel a stab of sympathy for her. ‘I don’t feel like a villain,’ he said, ‘but then I don’t suppose anyone does.’ He nodded at the left-hand door. ‘Do you like the look of that way?’

‘Not much,’ Emily admitted.

‘Me neither. Let’s go the other way.’ He put the coin in his pocket, and his fingers brushed against something metal. He pulled out a small triangular object on which green lights were flashing. Something tugged hard at the back of his mind, but when he fumbled around for the memory, all he found was a black hole.

He showed the device to Emily. ‘Any idea?’

She shook her head ruefully. ‘You never showed me that. Here, what d’you think the buttons do?’

Rory’s thumb hesitated over one of them. But you couldn’t be too careful.

‘Best not,’ he said, and shoved the triangulator back into his pocket. ‘OK. Right-hand door it is.’