The Memory of Trees (26 page)

‘I was,’ Davies said, ‘until Isobel Jenks gate-crashed my life after hers was supposed to be over.’

Abercrombie had left the bar and was walking past a Greek Street sex shop with his mind on the Fitzrovia restaurant where he intended to dine when his mobile rang. The number on his display belonged to Tom Curtis.

‘Tree Man.’

‘You’ve got Alfred Crawley’s account of events at Loxley’s Cross, haven’t you, Saul?’

‘Who told you about Crawley?’

‘A professor named Andrew Carrington.’

‘This Carrington guy is becoming a royal pain in the ass.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing, and yes, I’ve got Crawley’s account. What of it?’

‘I’d like to read it.’

Abercrombie sighed and looked at his phone. ‘Then I’d better tell you where it’s kept,’ he said.

There were three of them. They were all in their late twenties. The leader among the trio, the one who suggested they do it, was a Russian from the Black Sea port of Odessa. The second of them was originally from County Cork. The third was a Pole from Danzig. Their shared passion was fishing. They worked on the dayshift driving the JCBs that filled the holes around the tree root systems before hand-held jackhammer teams moved in to tamp down the ground.

The work was repetitious and sedentary for these drivers. It was well paid and there was cause and effect to factor in; the fact that what they were doing amounted to something visually spectacular that literally got bigger every day. The food was excellent, the dormitory rooms were warm and dry and the beds were comfortable.

But the camp had about it an air of confinement. Entertainment amounted there to cracking a few beers and sharing in a communal sing-along. Otherwise it was hunkering down with your laptop or listening to something you’d downloaded through your iPod buds. It got boring after a week and tedious after two and after that it just depended on your temperament. Fights had broken out. Feuds had begun to flourish. Despite the limited opportunities communal living offered to do things in private, affairs had been started.

The Welsh men and women among the workers coped best because well-remunerated work was a novelty in this depressed part of their country. They were earning and not spending and they weren’t so far from home that the isolation got to them the way it did to some of the immigrant labour force. They counted their money and counted off the days and weeks till completion of the project.

The Russian, Peter, was less sanguine. He thought that a little night fishing might be just the thing to improve the situation. He had smuggled an inflatable dinghy on to the site. It fitted, with its pump, neatly into a backpack designed for the purpose.

He’d brought his gear too – telescopic rods that fitted into a cylindrical case less than a metre in length. He’d discussed his plan with Alex the Pole and Sean the Irishman and they were all very much up for it. And then the night came when the weather was serene and the cloud cover sufficient for them to cross the three or four miles of open ground before the concealment of the forest they were helping create enveloped them and concealed their progress to the cliffs and the shoreline completely.

‘What do you reckon we’ll catch?’ Sean said when they reached the cover of the trees. They’d plotted a route that would steer them well clear of the fresh planting progressing through the night to the north of where they walked.

‘Mackerel,’ Peter said. ‘But this is fishing for sport, my friend. We don’t have to eat our catch.’

‘Flat fish, too, in these waters,’ Alex said. ‘Very tasty flat fish, I should think. Dover sole and the one you call hake.’

Sean said, ‘What do you fish for in Danzig?’

And Alex laughed. ‘The harbour waters are too polluted to support any life but eels,’ he said. ‘They’re filthy and they’re ferocious and you wouldn’t want to eat one of them, my friend.’

Ferns brushed quietly against their legs. It was funny, Sean thought. The forest was so dense and silent that it seemed to have been there for centuries. He hadn’t seen any ferns planted. There was ivy too growing on the trunks of mature oaks and cedars and willows in such abundance that it seemed to have been there since its hosts had been saplings.

That wasn’t the case. Every single tree of whatever age and provenance had come in clean of parasites. And ivy was a parasite, however pretty it tended to look in a context such as this.

It wasn’t completely dark. A full moon glowered somewhere behind the thin cloud cover above them and it provided enough washed-out, gloomy light for them to see as they got nearer to the cliffs. There was no scent of the sea yet in Sean’s nostrils, they weren’t close enough. There was no on-shore wind and the land they tracked was too dense with forestation to smell of anything but bark and lichen and leaves and a mouldy suggestion of moss.

‘It’s getting foggy,’ Peter said.

Sean chuckled. ‘Focky?’

‘Yeah, and fuck you, Mr Linguist. How’s your Russian?’

‘OK, point taken.’

‘My point, smartass, is that there’s a mist descending.’

‘We’ll be OK,’ Alex said, ‘so long as it doesn’t thiggen.’

‘Fine,’ Peter said. ‘Poles are supposed to be stupid.’

Alex said, ‘Only in Ameriga.’

‘Guys, guys,’ Sean said, pausing, ‘there’s a serious point at stake here. If the fog really is thickening, do we want to be in an inflatable boat at sea when no one knows we’re there and the only distress tool we have is mobile phones?’

‘Fuck, yes,’ Alex said.

‘You heard the man,’ Peter said, ‘come on.’

They reached the cliff edge, the margin between land and sea, about twenty minutes after that exchange. They were about a thousand metres to the south of the Puller’s Reach cairn. But that was a landmark none of the three men had ever laid eyes on. It lay by now at the heart of a large cluster of yew trees in a part of the forest’s edge that had not required their efforts to flourish and expand.

It was safe to use a torch. The work going on that night was several miles to the north of them. A night trawler might see their light twinkle from out in the wastes of the Irish Sea. But they were confident no one else would be alerted by its beam. They used it to search for a pathway down to the shore. The cliffs were not particularly high at the spot from which they had emerged, perhaps eighty feet, but it was still a descent that required caution. They wanted to fish, not to maim or kill themselves.

After ten minutes they identified a route and then took it, deliberately, carefully, perhaps aware that though the mist hadn’t blanketed their path to the beach, it did seem to be growing denser.

They each had on a backpack. Peter’s held the craft they intended to fish from. Alex’s was filled with lures and barbell hooks and jars of the worms they’d collected from the earth during their working day and brought along as bait. Sean’s was filled with a case of beer. And as Peter inflated the dinghy they cracked open a Heineken apiece and discussed the threat the worsening weather represented to their planned night of recreation.

‘What was that sound?’ Sean said, when their discussion ended and the rubber boat was taut with air.

‘It was your empty beer can, moron, which you’ve just tossed on to the pebbles,’ Alex said.

‘I don’t think it was,’ Peter said, frowning. ‘It sounded like a splash.’

‘Fucking fish are throwing themselves out of the sea in their eagerness to be caught,’ Sean said. He belched, happily. ‘Kamikaze mackerel, boys. Hake suicide squads.’

‘Flounder, floundering,’ Alex said.

And Peter raised his can in a salute earned by his Polish friend’s impressive facility with the English language.

There was another noise, which they all heard. It sounded through the roiling mist like the dull slap of something heavy on the sand and stones where the waves broke in the opaque vista before them.

‘I’m not totally liking this place,’ Alex said.

The splash recurred. It was more of a heave, laboured, substantial in size and somehow hurried.

‘I’m liking it here less and less,’ Peter said.

Sean had become aware of a smell. It was more of a stink than a smell, something fundamentally rotten, decayed and corrupt and somehow wrong, like a sick joke made at the expense of nature itself. It was a contradictory stench. It was to his assaulted senses, the odour of death living. It crawled through his nasal cavities. It filled his soul with a sick sort of dread.

He sensed something loom and then lumber out of the fog. It was massive and when its barnacled maw slathered against his exposed neck it was cold and rough in the brief nightmare the rest of his existence had abruptly become. He felt the skin seared away and sensed the arterial rush of his blood sucked hot and greedily out of him. It had wrapped limbs or tentacles around him and they bound with a grip that was inescapable.

He struggled, screaming, hearing the dying screams of his companions as the fog thickened further and the stinking creatures overwhelmed them and emptied them of life.

British Columbia, April 9, 1864

T
his is my account of the events at Loxley’s Cross. They will seem strange and outlandish to you, their reader. Every word written is written truly, though, in horror now and with the heaviest of hearts. Those events began in hope in the spring of 1862. They ended tragically in December of the following year.

Our arrival at our new home was not straightforward. There was a delay caused by the depth to which the well had to be sunk to enable our family to draw clean water for our dietary and household needs. It draws from a prodigious depth and was expensive to bore. But it was done eventually and we took up residence in our unique and spacious house in that desolate part of Pembrokeshire.

For me this relocation fulfilled of course a yearning I had endured since my student days, when I first read the chronicle detailing the exploits of Gregory of Avalon and the defeat of his mythic foe.

My fascination with English and Celtic folklore is too well known an aspect of my character for me to bother to dwell on it here. Suffice to say that it had, until two years ago, dictated much of the curious and curiously nomadic pattern of my life thus far. I went to Pembrokeshire principally to look, to study and to learn. I believed at the outset that this land, despite its open features, concealed secrets waiting for discovery.

The account of Gregory’s quest to slay the sorceress and her acolytes in the Forest of Mourning is familiar to scholars of antiquity. He was summoned by a magician or magus or an alchemist. In the terminology of our own advanced age, they would all be described as scientists.

This scientist had no specialism. He was presumably adept at many of what were then considered the more mysterious arts. But he sought the courage and resourcefulness of Gregory in solving a problem he had failed to tackle effectively by means of his own devices. Probably he was the source of the legend of Merlin. I believe he was, because Gregory came from Tintagel, which of course in my considered view was Camelot. But this Arthurian link is conjecture and a theory that will always remain unproven.

His protagonist in the ensuing conflict was described as malevolent almost beyond belief. It manifested itself in the female gender. It had disguised itself as a comely woman through millennia and caused chaos and tragedy wherever it chose to settle and thrive. Many authorities on mythology through the centuries had concluded that ever since the Fall, this creature has been living her antic, alien and destructive life, always at the expense of common humanity.

When Darwin’s
Origin of Species
was published four years ago I read it avidly. Indeed, I read it several times over, agreeing with almost all of his conclusions regarding natural selection. I see no contradiction whatsoever between my own beliefs and the scientific orthodoxy of the great observer of nature who has coined the term, the survival of the fittest.

I think it arrogant to assume anything about the natural world. Apparently we humans are the dominant species. But what if there are other species, equally or more intelligent, though not as prevalent as us? We humans breed as prodigiously as mice. But numbers alone do not endow us with superiority. If it did, the residents of the ant hills of the African continent would govern the destiny of our planet. It would be them or the great shoals of unimportant fish populating oceans.

I have examined and explored the myth of the Green Man. I have read all the accounts of the Pendle witches. I have been to the lake where I believe Gawain finally and reluctantly threw Arthur’s sword into the waiting hand of a being probably best described in theological terms as an angel.

My point, put simply, is this. I do not think we are the only species on our planet able to boast manifest superiority to the great apes. The world is shrouded in darkness for much of its life. And the sunless time it endures enables elusive creatures to pursue their own ends. Perhaps they avoid discovery because they fear us as much as we, in our folkloric stories, fear them.

They are capable of magic. We abandoned magic in the Age of the Enlightenment when rationality superseded the old ways with the methodology of the laboratory. What is magic? Magic is a door to which we have lost the key. But the door is there. Were it not locked, it would open on to wonders.

This was my reasoning upon our arrival. With that established, I will give a plain account of what took place when I committed the foolish sin of delivering my innocent family and most particularly my two beautiful and blameless daughters to the inherent evils of the place history knows as Loxley’s Cross.

There was an iron signpost a furlong distant from where I had the house constructed. It pointed to three destinations. They were Raven Dip to the south of it, Gibbet Mourning to the north and to the west, on the coast, Puller’s Reach.

The more I saw that signpost over the first weeks after our arrival, the more redundant it seemed to me. The nearest Welsh settlement to us was seven or eight miles to the east. No one crossed or visited the land we occupied. It had become the custom of the country thereabouts to stay away and rural customs become deeply ingrained and then followed without question until they achieve the status almost of rules.