Haunted

THE GHOST
WOOD

IT WAS THE last day of Will’s holiday, and although the sun was shining and the moor was his favourite place in the world, everything was made sad by the weight of knowing that tomorrow there would be the long drive home, the shops and houses squeezing in closer and closer on each side of the busy roads, the sky getting tangled and trapped behind nets of wires and overhead cables. On the last day of the holiday, he thought, you had to look harder at everything; listen carefully to all the sounds, and breathe in all the smells; try to fix the wild places in your memory so that they would last you through a whole year back in the town.

Maybe that was what made the wood feel so strange. Maybe he had looked too hard, or listened too intently. It was only a little, stunted tangle of low oaks which straggled for a mile or so along the hillside above a clattering river, but as soon as he stepped into its shadows, running ahead of Mum and Dad down the footpath from the rocks on the hilltop, he had thought, I love this place, because it looked like a place for elves and orcs and wonderful adventures. Now, exploring alone among the trees while Mum did a drawing and Dad sat studying the Ordnance Survey map, he was starting to wonder if ‘love’ was the right word for what he was feeling. He couldn’t imagine ever saying, ‘I love Poldavy Wood,’ in the way he sometimes said, ‘I love chocolate biscuits’ or, ‘I love Warhammer’; the wood was too old and strange and somehow serious for that.

Wreaths of mist were rising into the sunbeams from the wet moss which covered all the tree trunks and the rocks between them, and the shadows of the twisty branches reached down through the mist, and the dry leaves whispered, and everything shone with the wetness of the shower that had just passed. Beards of grey lichen trailed from the branches, brushing Will’s face and catching at his hair as he ducked under them, climbing uphill towards the top of the wood. The cry of the river came clearly through the trees behind him. He’d got that phrase out of dad’s guidebook: the cry of the river. And when you heard it like this, the sound muffled by trees and tugged about by the breeze, it did sound like voices calling. He thought how, if he was in a story, like The Hobbit or something, the river might have started speaking to him, telling him things. He even stopped and listened, to see if he could make out words, but if the water was talking to him it spoke in its own language, one that Will did not understand.

‘Will,’ called another voice, much closer.

Will started. Dad had come quietly through the wood while Will was daydreaming, and now he laughed and said, ‘Sorry, Will, I didn’t mean to make you jump. Mum’s about ready. We’d better push on. Tea at the pub tonight?’

‘Yeah,’ said Will, trying to look keen. He was keen; he liked eating at the pub. It was something they always did on the Friday of these autumn half-term holidays, and he liked the food and the feeling of being allowed into that secret grown-up place, the smell of the wood fires and the burr in the voices of the old farmers who sat at the bar. But thinking about it now reminded him that this was the last day of the holiday and that he wouldn’t see real hills for another whole year.

Dad had been reading the guidebook. He said, ‘Seems this was once part of the forests that covered the whole moor back in the old days. The whole of England, probably.’

‘When was that? In Roman times?’

‘Oh, long before the Romans. There are only a couple of scraps of the old wildwood left now, and this is the largest. It’s meant to be haunted, of course. They say the devil kennels his hounds under the boulders.’

Will looked about. Beneath their thick, shaggy coats of moss the boulders themselves looked like sleeping beasts, and the steam that rose from them where the warm sun touched was their hot breath. The trees crouched over them, watching, waiting. It wasn’t hard to see why people had believed this place was haunted, Will thought, and he shivered.

‘Come on,’ said Dad, starting downhill, arms stretched wide to help him balance as he stepped from rock to rock.

‘Coming,’ said Will, with a last, long look into the green shadows under the trees and all the secret corners of the wood that he might never get to explore.

Nearby a tree had fallen; brought down perhaps by the sheer weight of moss and lichen that had gathered on its branches. Its ragged roots stuck up into the air, with ferns still growing out of them, and little mushrooms shining wetly as the sun touched them. Down in the dark, peaty hollow where the tree had stood, something else gleamed too, and Will crouched down and tugged it from the soft earth. It was a smooth, dark stone; a river stone; small, but heavy in his hand. At one end there was a hole, and Will thought at once that if you threaded a string through it you could wear it around your neck, although the hole was smooth-edged and natural-looking, not like something anyone had bored.

How had it come there, he wondered, so far up the hill from the river? Surely someone must have put it there, back before the tree grew, however long ago that was. Or perhaps an animal. His friend Jon’s dog carried stones about in her mouth when she went to the beach sometimes.

‘Will!’ called Dad, way down through the wood.

‘Will!’ called Mum.

He slipped the stone into his pocket for a keepsake and hurried after them.

That night in his room under the low, slanting roof of the holiday cottage Will’s dreams were filled with creaks and rustlings, with wordless whispers and the soft, small trickling of water. He dreamed of a smell he could not name; a wet earth smell, and a mushroom smell, and some other smell mixed in with it that was familiar but strange at the same time. Something moved on the landing outside his door. He woke, and he could feel it there; something big and motionless and quiet. He lay very still, listening, trying to filter out all the noises that he knew were just the noises of his own body, his heartbeat, and the whoosh of his blood through his veins. He listened, and he heard something scratch at the door. The door handle made a clunking sound, but that was just the weight of the thing outside pressing against the door and making it move slightly; the thing outside didn’t know how to turn the handle; all it could do was reach out its thick, heavy claws and run them down the wood of the door: scratch, scratch, scratch.

‘Mum!’ shouted Will, throwing off the duvet and scrambling upright on the bed . . .

. . . and there was sunlight coming in around the edges of the curtain, and Mum opening the door and smiling at him, saying, ‘Will, whatever’s wrong? Was it a nightmare? You’ve been asleep for ages. That hike up to the wood yesterday must have worn you out. Come and have breakfast. Dad’s packing the car.’

Only a dream. When she had gone back downstairs Will went on to the landing and looked at the outside of his bedroom door, half expecting to see it covered in claw marks, but the thick, shiny paint was undamaged, and a smell of toast was wafting up the stairs.

And then, as if by magic, they were home. Well, not really by magic; it wasn’t a question of snapping their fingers and saying some Harry Potter spell; just four hours in the car while Mum and Dad complained about the traffic and Will leafed through magazines and stared at the backs of their heads. But it felt like magic, to be home again; houses on the skyline instead of hedges, the town still there just as they had left it, the steady roar of the traffic on the main road. There were no trees here unless you counted the little clumps of spindly looking birches that had been planted outside the entrance to the supermarket, and Will thought those were worse than no trees at all.

The house was just as they had left it too, though it seemed bigger than usual after the tiny holiday cottage. As Will stepped over the threshold he caught for a moment the odd, comforting smell of home; the Mum-and-Dad-and-Will smell which he only ever noticed when he’d been away. In another minute or so he would stop noticing it, and then he would know the holiday was over.

‘A nice quiet day tomorrow,’ said Mum, bringing some bags in, ‘and back to school on Monday.’

Will went up to his room with his rucksack. There were all his things; his models and books; his Lego space hotel. He’d not exactly forgotten them while he was away, but he had not thought about them, and now it was good to be reminded of them, and to pick them up and look at them again as if they were new. He emptied out his rucksack. He took the special models which had had to go on holiday with him out of the egg box they’d travelled in and set them carefully back on the shelf beside the others. He took his dirty socks and pants and shirts to the laundry basket in the bathroom. At the bottom of one of the pockets of the rucksack he found the stone. He’d put it there the previous night, when he was changing out of his wet walking trousers ready to go to the pub. It did not look half so interesting now that it was dry, but it was still a treasure; a little piece of Poldavy Wood come home with him. If you pretended that the hole near one end was an eye then you could imagine the stone was an animal. It had a swift, leaping look; a wolf or a dog running fast with its tail stretched out straight behind. He set it on the bookcase beside his bed, next to his half an ammonite and his maybe-a-dinosaur’s tooth, and went downstairs to see what was for tea.

That night, again, he dreamed noises.

His bedroom at home was different from the one in the holiday cottage. It was full of noises most nights, anyway. They were town noises: the sound of the cars on the busy main road three streets away, and other cars, closer, driving at all hours up the quiet side streets; car doors slamming; people’s voices; far-off sirens; bursts of laughter; the sullen throb of music turned up way too loud in someone else’s house. But that night, in that dream-that-was-not-quite-a-dream, Will could hear none of those things. Instead his room was filled with the deep, undersea sounds of a wood at night; the slow creak and rub of branches, the dry rustle of leaves. The room was very dark. He waited for a car to pass, because the glow of the headlamps as they swept around the angles of walls and ceiling was comforting, but no cars came, and slowly, as he lay there, he started to realise that the light coming in through his curtains was not the yellow glow of the streetlamp on the corner but snail-silver moonlight, and where a stripe of it lay slantwise down the wall beside the window it was crisscrossed with the shadows of twigs and branches.

And then he thought that he could not be awake but must have only dreamed of waking, because there was no moon that night, and there were no trees anywhere near his house.

Dreaming or not, he slid out from under his duvet and went to the window. He twitched aside the curtain and peeped through. The twigs of a tree were brushing against his windowpane like little fingers, making faint, glassy squeaking sounds; winter twigs, holding up a few old papery leaves like tattered trophies. He could tell from the shape of the leaves that it was an oak tree. It was not one of the little, wind-writhen, goblinish oaks of Poldavy Wood, but a tall, strong, sturdy, forest tree, and through the gaps between its branches he saw more like it. They crowded close all round his house, creaking and whispering, shifting and rustling. A wood far bigger than Poldavy stretched away and away from him under the moon – a forest that had filled his road and engulfed all the neighbours’ houses. The steep streets beyond the main road were wooded hills now, hummocks rising from a dark and scratchy sea of autumn branches; a sea of trees. Far away the town centre, office blocks poked up through the oak tops, their plate-glass windows burnished by the moon, looking like the sort of towers where princesses got imprisoned in fairy tales.

A movement made him glance down towards the ground. It was mostly hidden by a fretwork of shadows, but here and there he could see a patch of moonlit pavement, and across one of these patches something big and black slid suddenly; too fast to see a shape or to know what it was, just an impression of size and loping movement and then, for a heartbeat, the moonlight catching pale in two eyes as it looked up at Will’s window. As it looked up at Will.

He jumped back, and the curtain fell with a swish. He sat on his bed and listened to the twigs scraping their little fingers over the windows and the wind hissing through the tree tops, and under it all he thought he heard the sounds of something padding round the house. It’s all right, he told himself, it can’t get in; it can’t possibly get in. But then, there couldn’t possibly be a forest outside, either, and there was; he could see the dim silhouettes of the swaying branches through his curtain. And now into his room crept that smell that he had smelled the night before; that wet earth and mushrooms smell, and the other smell mixed in with it, and he knew that the black thing had come into his house. He heard its snuffling breath outside his door. He sensed the door give slightly as a big weight pushed softly against it, and then, as he had known he would, he heard the long, slow, almost thoughtful scrape of claws.

He opened his mouth. He drew in a deep breath, and was about to let it out again as a shout when suddenly from somewhere outside the house there came the familiar warbling of a car alarm, and then, as if God had thrown a switch to turn the everyday world back on, the other sounds came flooding in; traffic on the main road, the rattle of a train on the viaduct. Yellow streetlamp light showed through the fabric of the curtain. He let out the breath as a long, shaky sigh and cautiously, cautiously, opened the door.

The smell of wet earth and rotted wood and some big animal hung in the air of the landing, but it was fading quickly, and soon it was only a memory.

The next morning, after breakfast, Will took the Poldavy Wood stone and went outside with it. He peered at the road and the pavements, looking for cracks which roots might have made; fallen leaves, dead twigs, dropped acorns. There was nothing.

He’d planned to leave the stone in a gutter, or drop it down the drain, but it seemed wrong somehow, so in the end he crossed the road to where the houses were older and set back behind gardens, and stuffed it in among the roots of someone’s hedge. It ought to be among earth and growing things, that stone, he thought. It seemed to look up at him reproachfully with its empty eye, so he hid it under dead leaves and other stones and walked quickly away.

Later, on Dad’s laptop, he scrolled through the ghost sites; back and forth, back and forth, the words rising up the screen like smoke, sliding down like rain on a window; ghosttracker.com, spookseeker.com, famoushauntings.co.uk. Hundreds of ‘True Ghost Stories’ which even Will could tell weren’t really true. Stories of haunted inns and phantom airmen, friendly ghosts and deadly ones.

‘What are you looking at, Will?’ his Mum asked.

‘Ghosts, Mum. It’s for school.’

‘More homework? You never said.’

‘I forgot.’

She came and looked critically over his shoulder at www.apparition.com. ‘Headless horsemen and ghostly nuns? I hope you don’t believe any of this stuff, Will.’

‘Course not,’ said Will. And he didn’t. There was nothing on any of these sites about the ghosts of trees; nothing about someone being haunted by the ghost of a whole forest. For a moment he thought he would tell her about what he had seen and heard in the night, but it would have sounded silly there in the daylight, with Radio Two blaring in the kitchen.

‘Well, don’t give yourself nightmares,’ said Mum, and left him to it. He typed Poldavy Wood into the search engine of greatbritishghosts.com. Up came a picture of those familiar twisty trees under a stormy sky. The text retold the same legend Will already knew from Dad’s guidebook, about the Devil kennelling his pack of haunted hounds beneath the boulders in the wood. Underneath that it said, Black Dogs have been seen on the old funeral path which passes through the western corner of the wood. ‘Black Dogs’ was a link, and by clicking on it Will found his way to another part of the site, where a whole list of stories about ghostly black dogs had been gathered.

He closed the site and shut down the computer. He felt cold, and had the uneasy sense that someone was watching him, although Mum was clattering about in the kitchen and Dad was outside washing moorland mud off the car. And when he checked behind him there was nothing there. He thought of the dog-shaped stone, and of the black creature he had seen cross that patch of moonlight, slipping between the phantom trees. Black dogs; the Devil’s hunting hounds; harbingers of death. He shivered; told himself not to be so silly. It was a dream, that was all, and if it wasn’t, well, he’d got rid of that stone, hadn’t he? Poldavy Wood could not haunt him any more.

But that night when he woke he knew at once that the trees were back. The silver moonlight lay upon his wall; the twig-tips muttered at the glass. The damp-earth smell was in the room again, and as he lay there he slowly became aware that there was a great, warm weight on his bed; something was pressing down on his feet the way a well-filled stocking did on Christmas morning, only this was not Christmas morning, and Will knew that this something was alive. He could hear its breath; the soft, snuffling, steady breath of something awake and waiting.

Moving nothing but his eyes, he saw that the door stood ajar. Between his bed and the door a stripe of moonlight lay across the carpet, and in the moonlight, smooth and familiar and glistening wet, lay the dog-shaped stone he had taken from Poldavy Wood.

He lifted his head just a millimetre off the pillow, waiting to see what the thing on his bed would do. It did nothing. He peeked over the edge of the duvet and saw a darkness there. The smell was very powerful, and he knew now that it was an animal smell; Jon’s dog smelled like that sometimes, when she had been for a long walk and rolled herself about in wet earth and badger poo and stuff. He stared at the thing, and the thing raised its head and stared back at him, and moonlight reflected palely from its eyes and two black ears pricked up, pointy as cartoon tents against the grainy greyness of the dark behind it.

It’s a dog, he thought. And he knew that it was not some stray that had crept in out of the streets; it wasn’t an ordinary sort of dog at all, any more than Poldavy Wood was an ordinary sort of wood. It was as old and strange as those ancient trees; a dog from a time when dogs had only just stopped being wolves.

He did not know how long he lay there, stone still, looking at it, while it looked back at him. His neck started to ache. His heartbeat pounded so loudly in his ears that he was sure the dog must hear it too. He wanted to shout for Mum and Dad, but he was afraid that if he made a sound the thing would spring at him. An animal so big, so heavy, think of the power it would have in its jaws! Think of its teeth!

But all it did was watch him. Then something thick and weighty slapped his feet through the duvet, and slapped them again, and again, and he heard the sound it made, a soft shushing beat against the duvet cover, and he realised that the black dog was wagging its tail.

A dog wouldn’t do that if it was about to attack. He remembered dogs in books and films. Its tail would go down. And its ears wouldn’t keep sticking up like that, either; they’d lie back flat, and it would growl.

Slowly, slowly, he drew one hand out from under the duvet and reached towards the waiting thing. After a moment he felt a cool, wet nose go snuffling over his fingers; and after another, like the swipe of a warm flannel, a long, wet tongue started to lick his hand.

‘Good boy,’ he said, in the tiniest of whispers, not so much scared of the dog now as scared that his parents would hear him and come and take the dog away. Mum and Dad had always said they couldn’t have a dog; that it wouldn’t be fair to keep a dog in the town, in a house with no garden, where everyone was out at work or school all day. ‘Good dog,’ he whispered, and it moved its head in the darkness and his hand went smoothing over the big, knobbly dome of its head, over the soft fur.

Carefully he slid his feet out from under the warm bulk of it and swung them off the bed and sat up. The dog climbed down with a big, soft sound and padded to where the stone lay in the bar of moonlight. It picked up the stone in its mouth and turned back and pushed it, all wet with dog slobber, into Will’s hand. Then it turned again, shoved the door open with its head and went out onto the landing. There it stood waiting for him, its tail wagging so hard that Will felt sure the swoosh swoosh swoosh of it would wake his parents.

He slid his bare feet into trainers, tugged on a hoodie over his pyjama top. ‘It’s all right,’ he whispered, ‘I’m coming.’

On the way downstairs the uneasy thought came to him that maybe the dog was only pretending to be friendly; maybe it was just luring him outside to do him harm. But the warm tongue that rasped at his hand while he unlocked the front door did not feel like the tongue of a creature with secrets to hide, or an appetite for eleven-year-old boys. He opened the door and they stood there for a moment together on the step while the damp smells of the wood came into the house. Then Will drew back his hand and threw the stone, and the dog brushed past his legs like a soft wind, bounding out after it into the street; into the forest.

Will followed it. All around him the ghostly trees towered, and above his head they spread their branches, and everywhere there was the same watchful, waiting feeling that he had sensed that day in Poldavy Wood. Dead leaves lay heaped knee-deep between the knobbly roots, crackling and crunching like drifts of cornflakes as the dog bounded through them; but they were only the ghosts of leaves; as he went kicking after the dog Will looked down and saw the pavement showing faintly through them. The huge roots had not cracked the Tarmac or pushed the paving slabs aside.

The dog found its stone and brought it back to Will, and Will threw it again and they went on, further down the street, deeper into the forest. Now he could see that some of the moss-furry boulders which lay between the trees were not boulders at all but his neighbours’ cars. Streetlamps shone dimly, twined with ivy and crowned with long, grey, trailing wigs of lichen. There was lichen too on the house fronts, which rose like dark rock faces behind the branches; lichen hanging from the gutterings; moss thick as green carpet on their walls and roofs, small trees sprouting from eaves and window ledges. Will turned a corner and then another, and the huge dog sometimes trotted beside him and sometimes ran on ahead, and he thought, How could anyone ever have been scared of him? He only wants to play. The dog wasn’t even black, not when you really looked at it; just a deep, deep grey, like dark smoke, and transparent like smoke sometimes too.

A sound came through the trees ahead; a steady rushing, a soft roaring that was almost like a voice. The ghost-dog stopped and pricked up its ears. At first Will thought it was the river that they could hear, but any rivers that ran through the town had long ago been buried in tunnels and sewers. It was the main road, still busy with traffic, and as he drew nearer to it he could see it faintly, a smear of moving light between the trees. If he looked hard he could make out the faint, vague shapes of the passing vehicles. He paused a moment, watching, while the dog snuffled about finding fascinating scents among the leaf litter. Then, taking a deep breath, he stepped out into the stream of light.

He half expected horns to blare and brakes to squeal, but the cars kept moving, the tired, frowning faces of their drivers visible behind the windscreens like the faces of ghosts. He held out his arm and watched a bus pass through it as if his hand, or the bus, were made of light. The dog looked up at him, curious, tail swinging from side to side, waiting to see what they would do next. And Will laughed, thinking of all those poor, silly drivers hurtling along the road under the blinking glare of the streetlamps with no idea that he and the dog and the forest were here. This wasn’t a dream or, if it was, it was not his dream. Maybe beneath the road, down under all the concrete and clutter that people had spread over it, the land itself was dreaming of the days when it was still all forest; when a squirrel could run from branch to branch all the way from here to the furthest tip of Cornwall and never have to touch the ground.

The dog barked; it was tired of waiting for him. Will found a stick and flung it, and together they went haring, leaping, bounding, tumbling through the ghostly trees until Will was tired out from running and laughing, and so far from his house that only the dog, with its clever nose, could find their way home.

‘There’s a peculiar smell in Will’s room,’ said Mum at breakfast.

‘That’s Will,’ said Dad. ‘Will’s trainers, anyway.’

‘Sort of a musty, earthy smell . . . It’s quite nice, really. So it can’t be Will’s trainers.’

‘Damp, probably,’ said Dad, who was getting ready to go to work and wasn’t really listening. ‘Have to get it looked at.’

‘I like it,’ said Will.

‘Come on, you,’ said Mum. ‘School.’

He ran upstairs to find his book bag. Mum had opened the window to air the room. The dog-stone lay on his bedside table. Outside, the houses were all themselves again; there was no trace of the trees. There was no trace of tiredness in Will’s body, either; he felt as refreshed as if he’d slept a good night’s sleep instead of running through a ghost-wood with a ghost-dog. Maybe, when he was in the wood, he became a sort of ghost too . . .

Mum called him again. He could not see the dog, but he sensed it was close, so he said, ‘I’ll see you later, dog,’ before he swung his bag onto his shoulder and hurried downstairs and out into the street; the ordinary, boring, treeless street. He didn’t mind it now. He had a feeling that that night, and the next night, and on all the nights from now on, his black dog would come and wake him.

The dog watched Will go. It heard the front door slam behind him. It lay among the roots of the trees which had grown ten thousand years ago on the ground where Will’s house stood; the trees which grew there still, if you knew how to see them. The dog was happy. Once, long ago, there had been a boy in the wood who had played with it, a boy at whose side it had slept by some leaping campfire in lost autumns. The boy had loved it; and it had loved the boy. The two of them had been among the very first to sense that special bond that exists between boys and dogs. It was the boy who had found that dark river stone and had worn it around his neck because its shape made him think of the shape of the dog. Perhaps some of his love for the dog had got into the stone, seeped into it somehow along with his sweat and the scent of his skin. Perhaps that was why the dog had remained, long after the boy had gone beneath the ground. Alone it had waited, sleeping mostly, while centuries fell past it like dead leaves. Sometimes, hearing people coming near the wood, it had roused itself and gone to greet them and been confused and saddened when they did not want to play. Most of them had not even seen the dog; the ones who did had run and not come back.

Now, at last, there was a new boy. He had found the stone. He understood. The dog would stay with him until he was too grown-up to run and play and laugh, and then perhaps he would pass the stone onto another boy, and another . . .

The dog closed its eyes and tucked its nose under its tail, and dozed, waiting for its boy to come home; waiting for the friendly dark, when they would run again together through the long dream of the woods.