CHAPTER VI

The thin Saturday night traffic enabled Hazard to get to Helen Hearne’s block five minutes ahead of schedule. He was already regretting bitterly having given in to Steve Pearlman’s pressure, and was feeling distinctly edgy. He missed Jenny even more at the weekends than on weekday evenings, and all his complex resentments were seething within him, like lava ready to erupt. He pressed the buzzer on the intercom, and she answered instantly, evidently having been waiting for him.

“Wait there, Dr. Hazard,” she said. “We’ll be right down.”

She had switched off before he had a chance to react to the “we.”

His curiosity was not of long duration. The biochemist appeared within less than a minute, with Margaret Dunstable on her heels.

Hazard stared at them, letting his surprise and curiosity show.

“Still not an item,” Helen Hearne assured him. “When Steve told me about that poor boy I phoned Margaret to let her know the bad news. I told her that I was going back tonight and that Steve had promised to get you to give me a lift. She wanted to come along. You don’t mind, I assume? I’d have phoned you if I thought I needed to check.”

“Not in the least,” Hazard assured her.

When they were in the car, however—in the same formation as before—Hazard turned to the historian and said: “We’re a long way from your field now. Steve and his Fortean accomplice are playing it as a combination of scientific mystery and guilt trip—they reckon I owe it to both Moley and myself not to let his death go unexamined. They caught me in their carefully-cast net, and struggling only caused the toils to tighten. What’s your excuse?”

“I saw the beginning,” Margaret Dunstable said, “and I’d like to see the end. Simple curiosity. Also, I hadn’t got anything better to do.”

“Well, we can all say that,” said Hazard, his bitterness with regard to that particular issue. Before he could stop himself, his tongue bolted yet again with another half-formed thought, and he added: “Anyway, you might score. I think Claire Croly bats for your side.”

The historian must have heard way too many sly digs about her sexuality to take serious offence, although she did see a trifle surprised by the impoliteness. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “For one thing, I can spot a team-mate when I see one, and for another, she’d hardly be likely to fancy an old wreck like me if she were the gayest woman in Wiltshire. You’ve got more chance than I have, in spite of your lack of charm and the off-putting radiance of self-pity.” It seemed that Hazard was not the only one with a touch of the more toxic kind of Saturday night fever.

“Wow,” said Hazard. “You don’t pull your counter-punches, do you?”

“Training of a lifetime,” she said. “Anyway, we’re on first name terms now, aren’t we? We can have what anthropologists call a joking relationship, whereby we automatically construe apparent insults as innocent quips. It was an innocent quip you were trying to make, in your gauche fashion, wasn’t it?”

“It was,” Hazard confirmed, “and I apologize for the gaucherie—and the lack of charm. The ‘radiance of self-pity’ was a bit harsh, though.”

“Do you want me to ask Helen to serve as referee?”

“On reflection,” Hazard said, “no.” He glanced in the overhead mirror as he spoke. The postgrad seemed more astonished than amused. She wasn’t fully acclimatized as yet to the occasional acidity of academic wit.

Margaret Dunstable turned her head to look at the younger woman. “It’s all right, dear,” she said. “We’re just breaking the ice. We’re not strangers any more; we can begin to be friends.”

“With friends like that…,” the biochemist remarked, joining in the new game.

“On a more serious note,” Hazard said, “did you find anything in your test tubes?”

“I can’t exactly pop the stuff into the departmental mass spec and press a button,” the biochemist replied. “Anyway, that’s only magic in TV forensic science programs. If your sample is too complicated, all you get is a mess. I’ve barely had time to do more that look at the stuff under a good microscope, but it certainly looks odd. Swarming with bacteria, although you’d expect that. Surprisingly soupy, more colloidal than solid. Considering that I took the samples from near the surface, the leaf-litter seemed to have rotted down a long way, but I hesitate to say that some unknown agent had actually dissolved or digested the stiff.”

“Why digested?”

“The samples have a very low pH—much more acidic that soils usually are. That’s probably why new growth can’t make much headway there. If there was some pollution of the water supply before the spring dried up, it might be something simpler than a pesticide residues. No formicary smell, but a whiff of vinegar, so probably some acetic acid, and hydrochloric as well. Nordley didn’t mention his chemical findings to you?”

“No, although I can’t imagine that he’d neglect something as simple as pH measurement. His report is theoretically confidential, though—he probably only told me his pond hypothesis because he was pretty sure I’d already made the same guess, and wanted to appear generous in order to get me on side. Perhaps he already has the data that would explain the sudden collapse of Moley’s excavation. It’s difficult to believe that it had anything to do with the arrival of the beetles, though. Did Steve show you his three-gallon jar?”

“Yes—he must really have worked hard on that collection. It shows how much he wanted you to come back, Dr. Hazard.”

“I feel so privileged,” Hazard replied.

“You should,” Margaret Dunstable observed. “They cut me loose. I’m having to push my way back in.”

“You should have spun them a line about a neolithic burial site, or druidic human sacrifices. They’d have been all over you, no matter what you might think about Claire Croly’s straightness.”

“Don’t harp on, dear boy. You can’t imagine how tedious vulgar cattiness becomes by the time you’re in your sixties, even if you contrived to lived most of your life before Gay Pride made us such an ostentatious community. And it really doesn’t suit you. Just keep remembering that I’m old enough to be your mother.”

“Sorry,” Hazard said, again, thinking that what he really needed to remember was the old woman’s tendency to sharp overreaction. “That one really was innocuous, though.”

“Very much so. You seem to have a talent for it. No wonder your wife left you—no, hang on, that one just slipped out. My turn to say sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Hazard say. “Joking relationship, remember.” He couldn’t help casting a slightly resentful glance in the mirror, though, figuring that Helen Hearne must have repeated what he’d told her the previous night while the historian was in the churchyard. The biochemist didn’t meet his reflected gaze.

“Perhaps we should make this a regular date,” Hazard suggested, “since none of us has anything better to do with our Saturday nights.”

Nobody reacted to that suggestion, sarcastically or otherwise.

“Well,” said Helen Hearne, “it didn’t rain yesterday in spite of appearances. Maybe we’ll be lucky again tonight.”

“I should think so,” said Hazard. “There are gaps in the cloud. With luck, we might even get some moonlight, although lovely Phoebe’s only half full. Or do I mean that dark Hecate’s only half black?”

“If you weren’t far too conscientious to drink and drive, Dr. Hazard,” Margaret Dunstable opined, “I’d suspect that you’d been on the whisky.”

“Haven’t touched a drop,” Hazard assured her. “And it’s John now, remember.”

“You’re wound up somehow. You really are feeling guilty about not taking a closer look at the soil when the boy asked you to, aren’t you?—and deeply resentful of Mr. Pearlman exploiting the fact.”

Hazard shrugged his shoulders rather than making a sarcastic reply.

“It wasn’t your fault,” said the historian, in perfect earnest. “You really shouldn’t feel bad about it.”

“He was just a kid,” muttered Hazard. “I’d have reason to hate myself if I didn’t feel bad about it.”

The woman who was old enough to be his mother didn’t seem to have any difficult suppressing the remark about self-pity that must have been on the tip of her tongue.

“Well, ease up anyway,” she said, instead. “You’re responsible for our safety as well as your own while you’re behind that wheel. I’m worn out, but Helen might yet be a future Nobel Prize winner.”

“Provided that she avoids bad company,” murmured Hazard.

Even from the back seat, she heard him. “Do you mean Steve,” she asked, “or the two of you?”

“There you are,” said Margaret Dunstable to Hazard. “Now she’s joining in.”

“You did call her Helen,” Hazard pointed out. “And let’s face it, I’m not the only one who’s a trifle wound up. We’re all on edge—and why not? We’re heading for a haunted wood at dead of night, after all, where Moley’s ghost might be waiting to curse us for letting him die.”

That joke fell flat too.

“This was once a Roman Road, right?” Hazard observed, as he turned on to the A303.

“Fosse Way,” Margaret Dunstable supplied, obligingly.

“For the legions marching along it,” Hazard went on. “Tenebrion Wood must have been a visible landmark, like Stonehenge. Sometimes, they must have had to camp overnight nearby. Whether the surrounding area was under cultivation or not, it was probably a hunting ground for owls—about which the Romans were very superstitious, if that’s not anther scholarly fantasy. If the owls perched in the trees routinely, or nested in them…they could easily have become night-spirits, no?”

“And that’s exactly how scholarly fantasies are born,” the historian said. “A plausible story, based entirely on conjecture. It might even be true…but we can never know.”

“Alternatively, of course,” Hazard suggested, “the wood might really have been haunted, by some kind of entity that has since become extinct, leading us, in the absence of any evidence in metal or stone, to think that it never existed, as a mere product of the unfettered imagination. There must be entities of that sort—countless biological species that made no impression at all on the fossil record, because they were entirely soft-bodied. Maybe the Romans were more apt than they knew in calling spirits larvae…or biologists more apt than they knew in borrowing the term. Phases in a metamorphic process whose beginning an end we can hardly imagine….”

“Very poetic,” said Margaret Dunstable. “Is that where our multitudinous beetles came from, do you think? They were the metamorphic product of larvae in Helen’s vinegar-spiced soup?”

“I told you that biology was very amenable to scholarly fantasies,” Hazard reminded her. “And practically by definition, they’re sexier than fantasies about Roman legionaries mistaking owls for birds of ill-omen. But pedantically speaking, larvae don’t metamorphose directly into beetles; they have to pupate first”

“You really ought to write that book, you know, even if it does put you at risk of ending up like me.”

This time, Hazard succeeded in suppressing the joke that sprung unbidden to his mind like some kind of mischievous imp. He pulled into the lay-by. There was plenty of space tonight, its only other occupant being Claire Croly’s Saxo.

Hazard checked his watch. “Eighteen minutes to ten,” he said, “without ever exceeding the speed limit…well, hardly ever. We should make the camp with four minutes to spare, even walking in rubber boots.”

“I’ll have to borrow a pair again when we get there,” Margaret Dunstable remarked. “But that means I won’t slow you down in the interim.”

Hazard’s chronological estimate seemed sound enough as they marched along the lane at a steady pace while the last of the twilight faded away. Lovely Phoebe was only peeping through the clouds at rare intervals, but Hazard had taken the precaution of changing the battery in his flashlight before setting forth, and had pocketed a spare just in case. Unlike Jenny, he wasn’t in the least afraid of the dark, but he didn’t have a cat’s eyes and was just as likely as any common-or-garden coward to get himself filthy or hurt while blundering blindly around. He held the torch ready for action as soon as they reached the gap in the hedge that gave access to the wood.

A few stars were visible amid the clouds, but the light pollution from distant Newbury collaborated with the usual oxides and micro-particles to impart a curious salmon-pink stain to the strip of sky visible above the lane. The remaining patches of hedgerow seemed taller and closer by night than they had by day, and the impression was enhanced by a background susurrus that owed more to the stirring of slender branches in the breeze than to the movement of rodents and birds. Hazard heard an owl hoot once, but it didn’t come from the direction of the wood, whose branches were nowadays far too densely packed to allow fliers to perch therein with any degree of comfort, let alone to hunt there.

It was just as easy to find the way to the Last-Ditchers’ campsite by night as it had been by day—easier, given the number of booted feet that had tramped back and forth since Adrian’s accident and Dr. Nordley’s report of the presence of Colorado beetle on the wood’s further fringe. As Hazard moved away from the lane he played his light over the ground expectantly, but the only beetles he saw were glossy carabids out hunting. The beam reflected back more than once from tiny pairs of eyes, but they were only hedgehogs.

The track the three of them was following was now a well-worn path, and there was no need for Hazard to fight his way through tangled branches. A few trailing tips brushed his arms, but he was wearing a protective tracksuit top over his T-shirt and there didn’t seem to be anything intimate in the way the leaves slid across its synthetic surface.

Steve Pearlman and Claire Croly were waiting for them at the equipment dump. They had torches of their own, but they’d turned them down low in order to conserve power. They seemed surprised to see Margaret Dunstable, but not displeased. Hazard switched his own light off when he joined them, knowing that his eyes were already half-adjusted to the gloom. By the light of Pearlman’s torch he could see where the hole that Adrian Stimpson had dug had been filled in again, leaving a convex mound like an oversized molehill. Hazard knew that one always took more dirt out of a hole than was required to fill it again; it was a matter of compaction.

“Well?” said Hazard.

“It feels strange,” Pearlman said, looking around to signify that he meant the whole ambience rather than the heap of dirt marking the spite of the disaster.

“That’s why I’m here,” Hazard said. “It’s supposed to feel strange. Goblins to the right of us, kobolds to the left….”

“It’s not like that,” Claire Croly said. “It wasn’t like that last night—but it wasn’t like this either. Something’s changed.”

“Sure,” said Hazard. “You’re down half a dozen ecowarriors—one of whom is lying in a mortuary—and you’re up one skeptic, who can’t feel a damn thing, one biochemist, and one spare historian who’s just along for the ride. Maybe it’s the breeze. Last night was still and overcast, whereas tonight is considerably less gloomy and breezier. That must make a significant difference to the background noise. Ears adjust their sensitivity in much the same way that eyes do, and they can play peculiar tricks on the town-bred. Your brain gets used to screening out familiar noises, but unfamiliar ones can seem very eerie when they become newly obtrusive. That was what spooked Jenny when we moved into the vicarage. I kept telling her that it was just a matter of adaptation, but she couldn’t wait.”

“Jesus, Doc, you really are full of bullshit sometimes,” Pearlman told him. “I’ve spent a hell of a lot of time sitting in trees at night, and Claire’s no novice. Did it ever occur to you that your wife had been living with you long enough for the seven-year itch to set in, and that she was suffering from an unease that had nothing whatsoever to do with the eerie silence of the countryside?”

Again, Hazard looked at Helen Hearne, who seemed to have spread the news of his personal circumstances around half the country. She was on her knees ostentatiously inspecting the heap of dirt that had murdered Moley.

“Let me take a look around,” said Hazard. “If the beetles arrive—or moths, or anything else out of the ordinary, I’ll be ready.”

“They should be here by now,” Pearlman muttered, obviously worried that the night-spirits were going to cheat him and stay hidden now that the skeptic had come to reckon with them. While he started rummaging in the dump, looking for a spare pare of rubber boots for Margaret Dunstable, Hazard slipped away into the darkness.

The crowns of the trees quivered in the breeze, as if in the grip of a sudden chill. With the aid of his flashlight Hazard had no difficulty locating the narrow passage through to the circle of flat ground surrounding Moley’s “test-drill” and the rampart of excavated matter he’d built half way around it. Hazard took out his clasp-knife and extended the blade. No one had followed him along the improvised trail.

Gingerly, Hazard made his way across the open space to the edge of the hole. There were moths in the air, but no more than he would have expected to see on any summer night in any other woodland clearing. Bats were fluttering back and forth, but he couldn’t see or hear any owls at present.

When he reached the rampart around the hole, Hazard played the beam of the torch over it methodically. There was some movement, but no beetle horde, nothing odd at all. After moving half way around the semicircle he stopped, and stood perfectly still, switched off his torch and tried not to make a sound, knowing that the darkness and the strain of keeping still would be bound to exaggerate the perceptions of his ears. In such circumstances it would only be natural to sense communicative effort in the whispering of the branches, and he was on guard against it.

The darkness was profound; there were no fireflies here. The crowns of the trees continued to shiver and quake in the breeze. If the wood really did have a spirit, Hazard thought, it seemed to be coming down with something, perhaps vegetable meningitis.

Thirty heartbeats passed while Hazard savored the quality of the feverish whisper. It wasn’t quite as clamorous as he might have expected—the density of the branches stifled the slight wind more effectively than he had anticipated. There were no birds moving in the crowns of the sickly trees, and it seemed that even the rats and mice preferred the regional hedgerows, because he could clearly hear a faint cacophony of scratching sounds, which he knew from experience to be the sound of hedgehogs moving through undergrowth and carabid beetles scurrying across the dried-out surface of leaf-litter. There might have been thousands of Tenebrio beetles following their own courses—or even taking line-dancing lessons—without their being able to add much to that slight symphony, because the discrepancy in size between the two kinds of insect was so very considerable, but there was still no indication of any unusual presence on the rampart.

After a while, Hazard continued around the rampart until he reached its terminus, and stood on the rim of the remaining semicircular edge of the excavation.

He shone the beam of his torch into the hole. It wasn’t very deep; there didn’t seem to be any danger of his being buried and asphyxiated if he lowered himself into it, but he didn’t want to do that because it would have made his clothes horribly filthy, and although they were old ones, he didn’t want to import black glutinous mire into his car while he drove home.

He used the clasp-knife to peck away at the rim of the hole, slicing off fragments and letting them fall to the bottom. Thanks to the patchy cloud cover the night wasn’t cold especially within the canopy-blanketed wood. Hazard felt quite comfortable, although he put his hands flat upon his tracksuit top momentarily to take a hint of chill out of the fingers. There wasn’t the remotest suggestion of any kind of uncanny presence, supernatural or biological, unless he was prepared to count the inflammation of the metaphorical sore spot that Steve Pearlman’s last gibe about Jenny’s desertion had touched.

It had occurred to Hazard that the business about not being able to stand the quietness and isolation of the Old Vicarage had been an excuse, and that what had really sent Jenny scurrying back to London was the awareness—brought out by closer confinement and the suspension of customary support systems—that she simply didn’t want to spend the rest of her life with John Hazard, and might have found someone who seemed to be a more comfortable fit. That possibility still rankled, and it didn’t need one of Pearlman’s random darts to suggest that there might be more symbolic weight than ecological fascination in Hazard’s fondness for the cemetery that lay between his home and the corpse of the church.

When Hazard switched his torch back on, the rampart was still innocent of any unusual presence, but as he swept the beam around he caught sight of a saucer-shaped depression in the flat surface, some ten feet away from the rim of the test-dig, where there did appear to be movement. He couldn’t remember seeing it before, but that might simply be because it didn’t show up as clearly in broad daylight. Perhaps it was the remnant of a belated puddle that had reappeared after the pond had been filled in because of seepage from below.

Intrigued, Hazard moved over the surface of the mire, apparently virgin of footprints, to the edge of the depression. There were indeed beetles in the saucer-shaped dent, including Tenebrionidae, but they were not present in anything remotely like the abundance that would have been required to allow Pearlman to fill the jar he’d loaded into Claire Croly’s car as entomologist bait. Even so, they were there, and they were out of place.

Hazard suspected that Claire Croly would be able to quote numerous examples of instances in the rich history of psychic research when the presence of a single skeptic had been enough to banish all manner of paranormal phenomena that had been running riot while there were only true believers to bear witness, or at last reduce them to proportions that were only very slightly out of the ordinary. Perhaps that was what was happening here: the profusion that had been enormous the previous evening had been reduced to much more modest proportions in his level-headed presence: odd, but far from supernatural.

Hazard knelt down to inspect the saucer-shaped depression. He shifted the torch into his left hand and condescended to palpate the ground around with his right, even though he knew from glutinous experience what it might do to his fingertips. This time, however, the surface didn’t seem sticky. Indeed, it felt strangely soft, as if he were touching skin rather than soil. After a moment’s pause he laid his palm flat upon the ground, wondering why it didn’t feel cold even though it was damp. Then he reached out into the depression in order to grab a handful of the beetles that were swarming there in hundreds.

The beetle host gave way under the pressure of his hand; perhaps he had dug into the mass more forcefully than he had intended, or harder than he had consciously intended. He gasped in surprise, although he tried to strangle the sound. The hand sank into the mass, which no longer felt like beetles running over a concave surface, or thick vegetable broth, or compacted earth, or anything that might have seemed remotely likely.

His hand vanished into the black surface, and he honestly had no idea whether it was being sucked into the mire or whether he was actually shoving it in with all his might. The only thing of which he was certain was that his body was twisting awkwardly as the arm descended, as he tried to find a stance that would enable him to remain balanced in his wellington boots rather than falling over on to his side or—far worse—forward on to his face. He was by no means sure how he managed that, without even shifting his feet unduly, because the arm disappeared all the way to the elbow and then beyond.

For one horrible moment, Hazard thought that the process, whether it was a pull or a push, might not stop, and that he might descend into the earth entirely, shoulder first, them torso and head, and finally—long after he had drowned or asphyxiated—pelvis and legs.

But no; the arm didn’t descend entirely into the ground; the absorption came to a halt half way up the bicep.

The mud around his captive arm didn’t feel cold. In fact, it didn’t feel like anything at all; he had no sensation of his own arm as something separate and merely surrounded by something else, whether solid or liquid, inert or alive.

Awkward as it was, Hazard held his position while seconds dragged by—and then, perhaps, minutes. He lost track of time, although he didn’t lose consciousness or even suffer from vertigo. He merely had a peculiar sensation of emptiness in his head, as if the environment of his thoughts had been strangely depleted, leaving his present train of thought and sensation oddly naked and isolated.

Eventually, the arm began to emerge again. This time he was fairly sure—almost certain, in fact—that he was actually pulling it out, although he was unaware of making any conscious effort to do so. He was exerting the force with his legs and his torso, not with the arm itself. He couldn’t feel the arm itself at all; it was completely numb. He had the odd sensation that he sometimes experienced after going to sleep on his arm, that some kind of dead weight was dangling from his shoulder, without his being able to obtain any clear perception of its shape, position or nature.

Maneuvering the torch in his left hand, he played the beam over the entire length of the arm. The sleeve of the track-suit top was absolutely black, and seemed to be sopping wet. When he touched the sleeve, the fabric seemed bloated, and there seemed to be something squishy underneath, which was not his arm but something surrounding his arm.

Hazard set the flashlight down carefully and used the thumb and index finger of the left hand to pull up the sleeve of the tracksuit-top by a few inches.

The arm underneath was as black as the fabric, but even as he watched, its shape seemed to shift, becoming more recognizably the familiar shape of his arm, no thicker than its usual plumpness. He dismissed the idea that he had just seen some kind of slime being absorbed into his flesh as an optical illusion.

The arm was still completely numb, and the numbness did not seem to be wearing off, as it would have in an arm numbed by pressure from which the pressure had been removed.

It occurred to Hazard then that if the easing didn’t start soon, he was going to have difficulty getting home. He couldn’t drive with a dead right arm—not easily, at any rate.

“Shit!” he murmured, wanting to hear the reassuring sound of his own voice. “All things considered, a plague of beetles would have been preferable. This is just too weird for words.”

He tried to analyze how he felt, but he couldn’t. He didn’t feel quite himself. He had the impression that his point of contact with the world—with the material universe and its baryonic contents—had subtly changed its nature, and that he had imported some perverse shadow of new meaning into the fundamental sensation of his existence. He knew that something was amiss, and that it was not the kind of thing he had tried to put himself on guard against when he had set out to investigate the mystery of the clearing.

“Dr. Hazard?” The voice, coming from the opening in the thicket at the edge of the clearing, was Claire Croly’s.

The first thought that sprang into his mind—a naked, isolated thought, lacking the normal mental clothing provided by the virtual fabric of his mind—was that he did not want to become a case study in Fortean Times: a freak of nature, a damned datum, a cryptozoological phenomenon.

“Yes?” he answered.

“Are you all right?”

“Of course.”

“Have you found something?”

“A few beetles. Ordinary beetles, in ordinary quantities. They do seem to have flocked to this saucer-shaped depression, but the cause of the gathering is impossible to determine.”

“Pheromones?”

“I really don’t know. We’ll have to wait for the results of Helen’s chemical analyses. But as I say, the numbers aren’t extraordinary. Whatever you saw last night hasn’t been repeated tonight—not here, at any rate. If Steve had found something elsewhere, he’d have shouted, wouldn’t he?”

“I suppose so.” The Fortean seemed chagrined, deeply disappointed by the poor quality of the phenomenon, as the entomologist had reported it.

Hazard rose to his feet, slowly, afraid that if he did so too rapidly he might suffer from vertigo. He directed the beam of the torch at patch of ground that had just swallowed his arm—he decided to think of it in those terms, even though he doubted their accuracy—but there was no visible trace of what had happened on the surface of the soil….if “soil” was the right word for something so strange. But “mire” was no better, and the “mini-peat-bog” he’d improvised while talking to Dennis Nordley was just silly. The beetles were still running around, though, with no good reason for being there, even in moderate quantities, and in spite of their known fondness for leaf litter.

He shone the beam on his arm again. The sleeve was still filthy, but it no longer seemed to be sopping wet. While not exactly dry—rather slimy, in fact—it no longer seemed as wet or as bulky as it had been.

“Have you hurt yourself?” Clair Croly asked.

“Not seriously,” Hazard assured her. “I lost my balance and stuck my arm out to stop myself falling. I’ve jarred it a bit and got it absolutely filthy, but it’ll be all right in a few minutes.” He knew as he said it that it was a rather unscholarly fantasy, but it was a plausible story, worth sticking to and impossible to contradict.

“There are some paper towels at the dump,” the reporter told him. “You can wipe off the worst of the muck there.” She still hadn’t moved from the narrow gap in the densely-patched circular wall of tangled saplings, creepers, brambles and parasites. By night, at least, perhaps without being conscious of the fact, she was unwilling to step on to the surface of the clearing.

Hazard hadn’t had any such reluctance, but he had had a reason, an objective, in so doing. And anyway, as Steve Pearlman had said, the spirit of the wood liked him….

He cut off that lonely thought instantly. That way lay, if not madness, at least Fortean thinking: wild, undisciplined fantasy devoid of any but the most tokenistic scholarly dress. He tried, instead, to make a rational assessment of how he felt.

The arm was still completely numb; he couldn’t feel it at all from half way down the upper section. He could still swing it from the shoulder, pendulum-fashion, so it wasn’t paralyzed in the sense that it was stuck and immovable, but it was a dead weight, the hand and fingers devoid of sensation and the ability to obey any command from the brain to grip or carry out an action.

But how am I, in myself? Hazard wondered.

He wasn’t sure. He wasn’t even sure that he was wondering correctly, because although he was fully conscious and thinking rationally—seemingly, at least—there was still something odd about the environment of his train of thought, as if something in the background were missing—something that he could no more put his finger on metaphorically than he could have done so literally, just at present.

But I’m fine, he assured himself, sternly. Fundamentally, I’m fine. I’m thinking clearly. I just have a dead arm, as if I’d jogged my funny bone. It will wear off. It will definitely wear off.

Nevertheless, Hazard could not deny that felt a curious sensation within his own being, somewhere other than the precise location of his thought. It did not flow from the ground; rather, it seemed to begin deep in his own abdomen before reaching out into his limbs and through his extremities—not just the stunned arm and the temporarily-useless hand, but throughout his body, from his prickling scalp to his rubber-booted feet.

It’s in my blood, Hazard thought, suddenly. It’s traveling throughout my body, but it’s only paralyzed my arm, thank God. Now this really is interesting; this really is a phenomenon worth observing, worth analyzing, worth philosophizing about. But I’m the only one who can do it. I’m the only one who ought to do it. It’s in me. It flowed right through my skin, by some kind of weird osmosis, the way that dimethyl sulfoxide acts as a carrier to transmit other molecules through the skin and into the blood. There’s nothing supernatural about it—it’s a known, studied, recognized phenomenon, with therapeutic applications. It hasn’t been recognized in nature before, but that’s all the more reason….

“Are you sure you’re all right, Dr. Hazard?” Claire Croly called.

“Absolutely,” Hazard lied. “I just stumbled, and jarred my arm. It’ll be okay in a moment. I need those paper towels, though, to clean up my sleeve as best I can. I’m coming back now.”

He was walking even as he spoke. The reporter preceded him along the narrow trail. Branches brushed his face as he went, perhaps because he was slightly unsteady on his feet and couldn’t keep himself as rigidly vertical as usual, or perhaps because the spirit of the forest liked him….

Again he shut down that temptation to silliness, and made his way back to the Last Ditchers’ base, where Steve Pearlman was waiting, chatting to Margaret Dunstable. Helen Hearne was carefully placing stoppered glass tubes in the velvet-lined compartments of a carried designed to keep them safe from shock and breakage.

Good luck with that, Hazard thought, even though he was quite sure that he wasn’t seriously broken, or even more than a tiny bit in shock.

Claire Croly found him a roll of paper towels, and he handed her his flashlight while he began methodically using his left hand to remove the residue of the black slime from the outer surface of his track-suit top.

“What happened?” asked Margaret Dunstable.

“I tripped and fell into the mire,” Hazard told her, repeating his plausible story. “I put out my arm to stop myself, and hit a soft spot. It went in all the way to the bicep, but still took quite a jolt. The arm’s numb, but nothing’s broken. It’ll be fine in a minute.”

“He said that ten minutes ago,” Claire Croly observed.

“I’m fine,” Hazard assured them, as Steve Pearlman and Margaret Dunstable moved closer, showing concern. “It’s just a case of the old fable about the astronomer walking along in the dark looking at the stars and falling into a hole, except that I’m a biologist looking for beetles and moths, and I just tripped and jolted my hand. Nothing’s broken or even sprained.”

“Are you sure about that?” asked the historian. “Maybe you ought to get it checked out at a hospital.”

“Drive all the way to Newbury to visit A&E on a Saturday night, for a four hour wait among all the drunks? No thanks. It’ll be fine. I’d know if there were anything seriously amiss. I might know more about insect anatomy than human anatomy, but I’d know if I’d broken anything, and even if it were a sprain, there’d be no point taking it to hospital.”

Steve Pearlman, at least, still had his priorities in order. “Did you find anything, Doc?” he asked. There was no optimism in his voice.

“I found some beetles, and you only have to wave the torch around so see that there are moths flying—but not in unusual numbers.”

“They were unusual last night,” the ecowarrior insisted, doggedly. “You saw that jar. I didn’t fake it. I didn’t spend a week collecting the bugs just to trick you into coming on a fool’s errand. There really is something weird about this place, and it has something to do with beetles.”

“There’s certainly something odd about it,” Hazard agreed, “but even if there had been ten times as many Tenebrio in the clearing as there were, or a hundred times, we wouldn’t be any further forward in figuring out exactly what. The samples Helen has collected might tell us more, once she’s had a chance to put them through the mass spectrometer.”

“You do realize that I’m only a postgrad,” the biochemist put in. “I have to get permission and wait my turn. Dr. Nordley presumably doesn’t have that kind of hassle, so he probably already knows what it’ll take me days to figure out.”

“But he has an interest in not seeing anything interesting, even if it’s right in front of him,” Pearlman asserted, “whereas we….”

“You’re grasping at straws, Steve,” Hazard old him. “Whatever we might find, or whatever you hoped we’d find, back in the beginning when you first roped us in, it’s not going to cut any ice with DEFRA. They’re going to spray the wood, and even if they weren’t, there was never any more chance of having it declared a Site of Special Scientific Interest than an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. That cart track is going to be made into a neatly macadamed road with a white line down the middle and pavements to either side whether you like it or not, and in the fullness of time, your logic being all too plausible, it will be extended northwards on the other side of the hamlet that used to be a farm, and more houses will be built along the road on this side and that side, and the gradual erosion of the Green Belt will continue, inch by inch and mile by mile, and the air pollution will get worse and the climate will get hotter, and we’ll all die a little bit sooner than we might have if we’d been living in New Jerusalem. There’s no way to stop it; we just have to live with it as best we can.”

Stubborn as he was, even Pearlman got tired. It was the middle of the night, and the clouds were obscuring the half-moon. The flashlight batteries were all getting tired as well. Everything was fading away, in its own fashion. The ecowarrior had not yet accepted the inevitable, but he was ready for a brief cease-fire in the eternal battle.

“I need to go home,” Hazard added. “Helen, can you drive a Mondeo?”

“Of course,” the biochemist said. “But am I insured to drive yours?”

“It’s fine,” Hazard assured her. “I got the extended cover so that Jenny could drive it.”

“If your arm’s so bad that you can’t drive,” said Margaret Dunstable, “I really think you ought to get it checked out at hospital.”

“No way,” said Hazard. “I need a shower and sleep, not a four-hour wait in Pandemonium. It’s simple enough. Helen can drop me at my place, then take you home and take the car to her place. In the morning, she can drive it into campus and leave it in my usual parking spot. I’ll be fine, and I won’t need the car urgently, so I’ll get a taxi in on Monday and pick up the keys from her in Biochemistry during the morning, so that I can drive to Sherfield to give my statement for the coroner. Everything will be sorted, back in its proper place….except for Steve, whose vocation is to be in the wrong place, at least until the police come to arrest him, on whatever charge they can trump up. Can we go now?”

“You’re going to stay, right?” Pearlman said to Claire Croly. Again, there was no optimism in his voice.

“I think I’ve got all I need to write my article,” the reporter told him. “More would have been nice, but I have enough. I need a shower and sleep too—it’s been an eventful couple of days. I’ll keep in touch.”

Pearlman shook his head. It went without saying that he would stay. He would be on his own until his fellow ecowarriors came back with provisions, but that didn’t frighten him. Perhaps it should have, even though, in Hazard’s opinion, he wasn’t in any real danger from imaginary night-spirits, but it didn’t.