Old Man Athey’s Orchard

DAMN STEWART AND his crazyhead ways. He’s still got that fly in his backside about something in the woods and in the morning when AJ lets him off his lead he heads straight across the field and has shuffled under the bushes and round the stile before AJ has a chance to do anything.

He is left standing there, swearing under his breath. He’s tired. He hasn’t slept. While Melanie eventually calmed and fell asleep, curled like a child in the crook of his arm, he lay awake, watching shadows on the ceiling, his head turning and turning. When he did sleep it was patchy. He was conscious of her there – as if her dreams and her fractured faith in him were leaping the barrier into his own nightmares.

In the end he gave up. It’s six thirty and still dark, so he’s put cups of fresh-brewed coffee on Patience and Melanie’s nightstands and has come out here with Stewart. All Stewart seems to want to do is whine and give him pathetic looks. And now he’s buggered off.

The kitchen window doesn’t cast enough light to follow, so AJ goes to the garage and gets a torch – a huge thing that frightens the wildlife – and starts after the dog. He finds him about twenty metres inside the forest, his tongue out, his tail wagging eagerly to see AJ following him.

‘Stewart,’ AJ hisses. ‘You total pain – don’t give me a hard time, I’ve got enough to think about at the moment.’

But Stewart gives him a look of such hope and faith that AJ sighs. He might live by the maxim that what he doesn’t know can’t hurt him, but he’s had enough of his dog and this emotional blackmail.

‘Come on,’ he tells him. ‘We’ve got exactly thirty minutes, fifteen out, fifteen back – let’s go see what all the fuss is about.’

They go through the forest and out the other side, over a field and up to the plateau. Though he doesn’t know exactly which turnings the path goes through, he knows where it could lead eventually. The place he doesn’t want to think about. The dog is beside himself with excitement. He runs with his stumpy tail high in the air, fantasizing he’s some sleek high-bred gundog. AJ follows at a short distance, grumbling every inch of the way. The fields are dark and the ground crunchy with frost. His nose is cold and he wishes he’d stopped to put on gloves – his hands are like blocks of ice.

‘This had better be good,’ he yells to Stewart, who is waiting at the top of the path, looking back at him, his tail wagging crazily. ‘Another five minutes and then we turn back.’

Stewart has taken him over the plateau, down the other side, and along the edge of the evergreen forest with the views of the village on the far side of the valley, a few lights coming on in the windows as the early risers wake. Old Man Athey’s apple orchard, the place AJ scrumps for Kingston Blacks, lies to his left in a cone-shaped section that bites into the forest. Ahead is the place called The Wilds by the locals because it seems no one knows who owns it. Could be it’s National Trust property, or the forgotten estate of someone decaying away in an oxygen tent on a remote Greek island. AJ has known about The Wilds all his life, but he can’t recall ever having set foot in it. Upton Farm lies beyond it.

Stewart stops so suddenly that AJ almost runs into him.

‘Hey, you lunatic. What the hell’s going on?’

The dog doesn’t move. He’s as still and obdurate as a rock – his ears forward, all his attention on the path ahead. Dawn has made a wash of white in the sky overhead, and enough light is creeping down here for AJ to discern individual trees without the aid of his torch. The path stretches into the forest, greying about fifteen metres ahead, then vanishing in the poor light.

AJ is a child of the countryside and nothing scares him. There is no reason for the way the hair suddenly stands up on the back of his neck. He holds his breath, strains his senses ahead in the wood. He can’t be sure, but he thought he saw something a little darker than the surroundings, a shape moving in there. Isaac Handel. AJ can’t shake the thought – the certainty. His skin crawls.

Stewart suddenly gives a whine and half turns to head back in the direction they’ve come, as if cowed by what’s in the woods. He gets a few metres behind AJ and hesitates, undecided. He turns his head back inquisitively, looking past AJ into the woods.

‘Hello?’ AJ shines the torch into the path. ‘Hello?’

His voice is thin and hollow. It is swallowed instantly by the trees. He takes three steps along the path.

‘Hello?’ he says again. ‘Don’t want to scare you, I’ve got a dog.’

Silence. Not even a crack of twig. Gathering his courage, he goes forward a few more experimental paces. He can see nothing.

‘Isaac? Is that you?’

Stewart creeps up next to him, tippy-toed and cautious, his rugged body pressed hard against AJ’s shin. Together they move further into the woods.

About five metres ahead, at the place the path seemed to disappear in the gloom, it opens instead into a wide and unexpected glade. AJ and Stewart stand at the end of the path and look around. Thready daylight creeps in, finding thin plumes of mist erupting from the forest floor, a few leaves dropping listlessly from the trees. In the centre of the glade is an object that for most would defy description. Even AJ is taken aback by it at first.

It’s a tree, but its trunk is three metres across. The branches are so thick that at seven or eight metres from the centre, bowed under their own weight, they stoop to the ground, as if the old tree at the centre was resting its elbows on the cold earth. Under the arching branches, the earth is dry and the air is silent and still, like a cathedral. And where the walking tree leans its elbows, it takes root, creeping outwards from the centre. Around it, an outer ring – a magic circle of seven trees. All identical, all cloned from the older one at the centre.

Taxus baccata: its needle-thin leaves, bark, seeds and sap are all deadly. The walking yew. A tree as old as time. As mean and still and deadly as a snake.

AJ lets out all his breath. Just a tree. Nothing to be scared of. Absolutely nothing here. He and Stewart stand for a moment longer, breathing in and out, in and out. Nope. Not a thing.

Even so, he’s not going to get any closer to the damn thing – and he certainly isn’t going to pass it.

‘Come on, mate.’ AJ clips on Stewart’s lead, turns him in the direction of the house. ‘Whatever you thought was there, it’s not there now. Let’s get breakfast.’