The Shadow and Night (20 page)

The trees now were hanging over them and Merral looked up at them, feeling disoriented. These woods were somehow unfriendly. The idea puzzled him. It was, he knew, intellectually a nonsense concept. There were no unfriendly woods. They were bright woods and dark, even just possibly gloomy woods, but
unfriendly
was not an appropriate adjective. But yet, today, in defiance of all he knew, he felt that the word seemed appropriate.

Suddenly they turned a bend in the path and there was a gap in the trees to the right with a view overlooking Herrandown with all its patchwork of gray-roofed buildings buried to varying extents in the ground.

“Here,”—Barrand's voice was flat and without emotion—“in those trees. She said she saw it there.”

Merral's gaze followed his gesture. The bases of the trees were obscured by brambles, young grass, and some scrubby hawthorn bushes. He went up to the spot and looked carefully, feeling even more out of his depth. He could find nothing unusual.
What am I looking for?
Suddenly the whole expedition seemed stupid. After all, he thought, supposing there was another creature there, what would he say to it? “Oh, hello, do you realize you have frightened a girl?” And what language would he use? Communal, Farholmen, pre-Intervention English or French? He felt vaguely stupid staring at a clump of perfectly ordinary brambles.
Genus
Rubus, he told himself, as if finding taxonomy a safe retreat from this imponderable puzzle.
And don't ask me the species name; it's probably another new form. We can travel to the stars, but one hundred and twenty centuries after Linnaeus first gave organisms such names, the humble bramble still mocks any attempt at a usable field classification.

“Well, any ideas?” There seemed a hint of impatience in his uncle's voice.

“None worth stating, Uncle. Let me see if I can get into the woods behind this. You stay here so I know where I am.”

Merral walked back into the trees with Isabella following silently behind him. He picked up an old branch and used it to clear a way through the fringing scrubs. Once through the marginal growth, the undergrowth thinned out. Merral paused to let his eyes adjust to the gloom, which was broken locally by patches of brightness where the light entered through the fractured pine cover.

He sensed Isabella come close alongside. He whispered to her, “What do you think? You are very quiet.”

“You are asking the wrong person. Woods aren't my thing and I've got plenty to think about.” She frowned, her eyes half closed. “But you think there's something wrong, don't you?”

Merral realized that he might have known she would have detected that. “Wrong, yes. But what sort of wrongness and where? I have no hard data. Let's just listen.”

So, with pauses to listen, they moved quietly through the trees. Ahead something dark moved among the trees and Merral froze instantly, his hand swinging up to make Isabella pause. A moment later he relaxed and began breathing again as the squirrel saw him and ran up the trunk. Beckoning Isabella on, he made his way slowly round toward the strip of yellow light that marked the boundary of the path. Beyond the trees he could just make out Barrand in his dark gray jacket.

It must have been about here.
There was a feeling of anticlimax. There was nothing to see, no sign of a track or trail. He looked around. The view to the path ahead was obstructed by the combination of the low branches and the brambles. She had imagined it all, she must have.

He called out, “So, Uncle, can you see me?”

“Not well. Go further right, though.” Merral moved obediently that way but could see nothing.

“About here?”

“Yes, I think so.”

For a moment, Merral was nonplussed, finding that here there seemed to be only undisturbed branches. Then he remembered Elana had called what she had seen a “little man.” He squatted down.

Suddenly, through a gap in the bushes, he had a clear view of Barrand's ruddy face framed by vegetation.

“How interesting,” he muttered, his voice sounding as if it were from a distance. He turned to Isabella. “You have a look.”

Merral stood up and stretched his legs, trying to think clearly. He realized now that he had been assuming all along that Elana had imagined the whole thing. But the gap in the branches made that harder to believe.

He heard a sharp intake of breath from Isabella and then her voice, low and intense, drifted back up to him. “Oh. That adds a different dimension. I hadn't realized . . .”

Alerted by her tone, Merral knelt beside the bush again. “What hadn't you realized?”

“That you can see everything.”

As she slid out of his way, he looked beyond her. Barrand had walked away, and beyond the path, glinting in the weak sunlight, stretched the buildings of Herrandown. All of them.

He bit his lip. “Oh my. Oh my,” he said, almost under his breath.

The implications sank in one after another, like a succession of stones thrown into still, deep waters. There had been something here. Whatever had been here had been intelligent. It had also, it seemed, had a purpose—that of watching the hamlet. He swallowed, his throat somehow dry. An intelligent purposeful watcher: race or kind unknown.

“Isabella, say nothing to Barrand,” he hissed, pitching his voice as softly as he could. He didn't want to alarm his uncle and aunt further.

He heard Isabella answer, “I won't,” and recognized a quavering note in her voice.

Suddenly a minute color difference just in front of his face caught his eye. He focused on it. It was the yellow cut end of a tiny branch, thinner than a rose stem. But what had it been cut with? Merral looked around on the ground and found what he was searching for. Carefully, he picked up the other part of the thin branch and stepped back.

“What is it?”

“Whatever . . . whoever was here . . . no, that makes no sense.” He paused in desperation. “Anyway, there is a branch here which was cut in half. Somehow.”

He held the branch end under a shaft of sunlight and looked at it, noticing a strange, sharp, oblique cut. Aware that his hand was shaking, Merral imaged the cut as best he could on his diary.

Isabella watched him in silence. He saw that she had moved to stand with her back against a tree trunk as if it gave her protection.

Merral spoke to her, his voice little more than a whisper. “We'll talk later. I'm confused.”

She nodded sharply. “And I . . . I feel strange here.”

He forced a smile, trying not to put his unease into words.
I can understand that strangeness; I've been in these woods for years and I have never felt as I do today. I want to get out, and I want to be in the warmth and coziness of urban Ynysmant surrounded by people.
Forcing those thoughts away, he carefully cut off the end few centimeters of the stem with his knife, put it in a sample bag, and sealed it.

If it came here, then there will be a path to and from this place.
Having worked with some of the larger mammals like deer, Merral knew a little of tracking. As he looked into the depths of the woods, he felt he could make out a possible trail between bushes running down into a depression.

He called out to Barrand. “Uncle, we are just going for a walk into the woods. Ten minutes?”

The deep voice boomed back. “Yes, yes. If you need to. Fine. I'll wait here.”

Slowly, Merral walked back into the woods, looking for any clue as to what had passed this way. Within a few paces he began to have doubts that there was a trail. Surely he was fooling himself into believing that these depressions were footprints? Might it not simply be the trail of a lynx, a fox, or even a deer?

Yet what he felt might be the trail went west in a fairly straight manner and started to drop down toward the Lannar River. A few dozen meters on, just as he was on the point of giving up, the trail suddenly became very obvious. He found crushed grass stalks and what might have been small and rather angular footprints. But of what creature he had not the slightest idea.

“How much farther, Merral?”

He looked at Isabella, aware from her face as well as her tone that she was unhappy.

“Just another minute or two!” he called out and was rewarded by a fixed, determined smile.
She's right though. We should be going back.
Anyway, the going was becoming rougher, as the trail was now leading down into a steep-banked tributary that fed into the main river.

A large fallen larch trunk partly blocked the way and Merral stooped to get under it. The branches had been snapped off in falling so that the underside of the trunk was punctuated by a series of jagged, splintered protrusions.

“Be careful, Isabella, mind your head.”

Merral stopped, his attention grabbed by strands of brown hair hanging on a sharp broken branch. He peered at it carefully in the poor light, just able to make out that the fibers were long, coarse, and wiry. Isabella came and peered at it. Merral pushed her hand away as she reached out to touch it.

“No,” he told her, “You'll contaminate it. I'll take it for analysis. We'll get the DNA out and it will tell us what we have.”

“Of course. Can you do it?”

“Not here, but I'll get the main lab in Isterrane to do it. An old friend of mine, Anya Lewitz, will organize it.”

He imaged the hair on the diary, and then carefully wrapped a sample bag around it. As he did he bent over and put his nose to the mouth of the bag. There was a faint, pungent odor, a smell of something unpleasantly rancid, as if food had been left out in warm weather.

Isabella gestured. “Let me. . . .” Her nose wrinkled in disgust. “Ugh! That's horrid! What creature was that from?”

“I really don't know. There's nothing I can think of here that it's from. And look at the height above the ground. Whatever it was is probably as tall as you or me. Taller, if it was stooping.”

Isabella shuddered and looked round.

Merral rubbed his face, as if trying to see the situation more clearly. Not only did this fit nothing in his experience or training, it fit nothing that he had ever heard of.

“It makes no sense at all. It wasn't from what Elana saw, but from something else.”

Could there be two unexplained creatures? That seemed hard to believe. He wondered whether two impossibilities were more or less probable than just one.

However a more pressing issue was the need to decide what to do next. Merral paused, weighing up all the options. Should he try and pursue the trail? Take a dog or two and follow it? There would be no problem for a dog following a creature with such a smell. But he was not equipped for a trail that could lead to a day's walk or more, and he had to be back home today in order to be in Isterrane the day after tomorrow. Besides, something like that would raise the status of the whole affair and would inevitably make it a major crisis. And, if it was a false alarm, then harm might be done to his uncle's family. He made his decision.

“Isabella, we will go back now. Anyway, we said ten minutes.”

“A good idea,” she answered, relief in her voice. “What are you going to do?”

“I will take advice in Isterrane. In the meantime, I think we are neutral about what we have seen. The data, after all, needs analysis.” Merral began to walk back toward where his uncle was.

“I suppose you are right.”

Barrand was sitting on a tree trunk whittling away at a piece of wood with a knife. “Ho! I was wondering where you had both gone to.”

“I found something that might have been a track and I picked up some samples for analysis.”

Barrand seemed almost uninterested. “Some faunal anomaly, I'll bet. Well, we'd better get back for lunch.”

Lunch was an oddly subdued affair, especially by comparison with the other meals he'd had at Herrandown. Elana preferred to stay and eat in her bedroom. Barrand and Zennia were pleasant and affable, and the food was good and plentiful, but Merral felt a tension. Every so often Merral noticed glances between his uncle and aunt that hinted that all was not well between them.

After lunch Barrand and Zennia disappeared into the kitchen to make coffee, leaving Merral and Isabella alone in the small family room that he had sat in with his aunt and uncle just before Nativity. That reminded Merral that he really ought to try and raise the issue of the recording. It was not a prospect that appealed, and thinking of the best way to approach it began to occupy his mind. While Isabella sat looking at a portfolio of his aunt's paintings, Merral got up and, trying to clarify his thoughts, opened the window and leaned out, enjoying the fresh spring air.

As he did he realized he could hear what his aunt and uncle were saying.
The kitchen window must be open,
he thought, and the breeze came from that direction. A second or two later he realized that the conversation was also very animated.

His uncle's voice, loud and ill tempered, drifted past. “You shouldn't have got me to bring him in. It's something
we
can handle.”