All Gracey can taste in her mouth is paint, the taste of mungolia . All weekend, Mommy and Daddy have been painting more walls and another ceiling. Daddy let her have a go with the spongy roller but she made a mess and got the paint all over the floor and her hands, and got bored anyway. Even when Dad used chalk to draw a hopscotch grid on the floor of the hall, so that she could ‘amuse herself’, she was bored of that after two passes.
And now her mommy and daddy are standing on the sanded floor and looking round a room watching paint dry. Watching them do that is so boring the boredom aches. But her dad never stops talking about the things he’s fixing and her mum says ‘Mmm’ and ‘yes’ a lot.
Her parents each have a hand on the stepladder that she is not allowed to climb up and down, so the boredom in her belly burns redder. New Waddles is bored too and just flopping about in her hand.
Gracey scuffs her feet over bumps on the floor to the little woodland house that she’s built in the corner of the room. An empty paint tin under the dust-sheet forms a hill. Coloured blocks, stacked like columns, erect standing stones around the mound. A king and queen sit on top. She’s used her pig and rabbit. She wonders what might happen next in the woodland house game.
And then, she understands.
She closes her eyes and sees how many times she can circle the hill, walking backwards without losing her balance. She throws her arms into the air and completes three ungainly circles. Then she stands on one leg and points at her daddy, before realising that she’s hungry and ready for another snack. Before she can think about what kind of snack she wants, she hears her name called from afar by the same lovely voice that she heard among the trees at the real woodland house. The sing-song voice is inside the faraway distance of her head again. Maybe it’s outside too, rising from the bottom of the garden by the tilting fence.
Mum and Dad don’t hear the voice. She asks them if they hear it but they’re not listening and her dad is pointing at the corner of the ceiling saying, ‘It’s an old stain. Been painted over.’ Her mum says, ‘Still needs looking at. Might be water coming from the roof into the loft.’
There it is again, the lady’s voice travelling from far beyond the garden, drifting like the music of the ballet about swans she watched with her mommy. This is the sweetest song that she’s ever heard too; far, far prettier than Mrs Baxter’s voice in school assembly.
The voice opens a space in her thoughts as warm and inviting as a sunny garden filled with bees and rabbits. A golden and secret space. The lady in the trees offers to show her where to find such a place.
Gracey races for the stairs. She’ll hear the lady’s voice much better in the garden. ‘Archie-bear!’ she cries out as her feet thump down the wooden stairs. And, on cue, she hears the tinkle of a collar and the woolly flapping sound of Archie shaking himself awake in his basket. When she sees him, he’ll be looking at the kitchen door. She knows it.
* * *
Outside, Archie starts digging a new hole in the lawn; his third this week. Though Gracey was worried that he was digging through the ceilings of rabbit houses, what he was actually doing was finding metal bricks. Two dug up so far, all with funny writing on the sides. She hopes he’ll find a box of gold coins soon, so that her daddy will never run out of money again.
Archie’s eager scraping at the soil throws dirt on her feet while she stares at the bottom of the garden and listens hard for the lady’s voice to start up again. The wood is strange and tense like an empty room in a game of hide and seek, waiting to be searched. Further out, above the bushy roof of the wood, a wisp of smoke drifts. The sun is sinking and might have set the red and apricot sky on fire in places too far away to see.
When the lady of the wood’s voice rises once more, as high and thin as the smoke, Gracey nods her head, a smile playing around her mouth and eyes. ‘Yes. Yes, please,’ she says to the heavy fringe of branches overhanging the broken fence; those twisty arms with spiky hands, always groping inside to fumble at the weeds.
The whispering voice inside her ears, and inside the wood at the same time, tells her that lost Waddles is safe. But he’s noisy and never stops dancing. Gracey giggles, then looks to the rear of the house. Squinting in the silvery light of the sun, now finishing its arc from east to west, she scans the murky panes to make sure her parents aren’t watching. The open windows are black holes and she sees no faces.
Frowning her forehead into a scribble, she turns back to the trees. She doesn’t know what to do, so just listens to the lady of the woods some more, singing her song about the place inside the trees where friends and animals play. Lost Waddles is up there. A place that might seem far away but isn’t really when you get going. She imagines having two Waddles penguins. Twins on her new bed tonight.
‘Archie. Let’s go get the other Waddles. Lady’s got him. But we gotta be quick.’
* * *
A few steps from the garden gate and she is swallowed, the wood closing its scaly lips behind her heels. She’s crossed over, is inside now.
Today, more birds than she’s ever heard anywhere call out and answer each other inside the canopy that shields her from the red sky. Acres of scrub and trees, skinny and fat, shutter most of the light. The air is wet. Mulchy and muddy. Freshwater smells from wet bark and cold leaves fill her nose and chill her cheeks.
Passing from the dusty house and packing crates, paint stink, the blurting radio and Daddy’s grinding tools to enter this wood reminds her of walking off a beach covered in people and into the sea. Behind her the world hushes. Cool air softly washes her skin.
Giant trees, too high to climb, shrink her down tiny and she thinks of a girl dressed in red in her storybook. A picture of a small figure against dark trees that covers two big pages on which she tries to find every owl in the trees. But this wood is more than a picture. It’s alive, murmuring, growing, yet pauses its business to watch her.
She remembers the song they sing at school about a silent night and holy night. Some of that song is in this place and something else too that makes her nervous and she understands why Archie does a poo as soon as he gets inside these trees. Anxiety wants to shake her tummy loose too. And she wants to run screaming. It’s hard to breathe around her terror of getting lost and never seeing her mum and dad again. It comes up her throat like sick, though she doesn’t feel ill. But her need to walk into these huge, dark halls of silence is the same as the temptation to swim, if she is standing on the ledge above the deep end of the pool at the leisure centre.
She takes a step, deeper, then another. Then a few more.
The ground squelches. An exposed root, slippery as the banisters of her nan’s stairs, scoots one of her boots sideways and she nearly falls. But gradually she switches to the spongy track between the bony roots and is soon hopping over swampy puddles.
In no time at all, she’s much closer to the kind lady, whose song flows around the huge legs of the trees and calls her to the hill and the standing stones. Waddles is waiting for her and soon Gracey feels as safe as if her mum and dad are with her too, holding her hands. She can’t go wrong. One path in and out, to and from the hill, and kids are special guests anyway when the lady sings. The princess’s voice carries this message through the stillness and the further Gracey walks the more she feels like she’s having a good dream. The kind lady knows she’s coming too because the birds are piping her in.
It’s not far now. White flowers and onion smells thicken amidst crowds of blue flowers. Gracey recognises the tree that has fallen like a starving white man who’s tripped and thrown out crooked arms to break his fall. And here are the Christmas cake bushes with shiny berries and leaves like plastic; over there are the coils of barbed-wire vines.
When she’s near the hill and standing-up stones, Gracey stops walking. Now that she’s so close to the wood house, she’s a bit worried about who’s making the smoke that she can smell and could see from her garden. It smells really funny too.
She came here for the lady and Waddles but now starts thinking of the witchy woman and the bad-breath man wearing yellow trousers. When she wonders if they will be here today, the fear she felt last time comes back, prickling her tummy. She doesn’t want her flopping boots to make any sound.
A tangle of saplings and bushes fills the spaces between the trees and hides the grassy hill but there are plenty of peep-holes if you’re small. Gracey creeps to a spy-hole.
Two fires on poles flicker inside the glade. The grassy mound arcs between the tiny flames.
The fires are cupped in blackened metal bowls. Sooty exhaust spirals. One fiery bowl snaps and gutters on the churchy bit with the flowers, the altar. The second bowl of fire is at the other end of the glade. That one billows with the strange smell she can taste like marzipan and lemons and something bitter as Daddy’s brown beer the time he gave her a sip.
And today, the wood house is making Gracey remember a painting she saw in the museum on a school trip. A picture of little, hairy people wearing animal skins. They were as black as matchstick men and all stood around a huge bonfire. Tall stones circled the blaze too, throwing giant shadows. This painting was hanging on a wall behind a glass case with bones inside it; leg bones stuck inside rock. Everything inside the room made her afraid of time, as well as afraid of the notion that she was made of bones inside skin, and that when she died her bones would go into the ground and be stuck inside cold stones, buried under mud. It was too horrible to imagine for longer than a moment.
She’s getting the dreamy feeling a bit too now, like the one she had in the garden when the lady’s voice was sweetly singing inside her head. But this feeling isn’t so nice this time. The lady’s voice is back but sad and it makes her feel colder, and the tall trees with the black tunnels between them that disappear into big caves, the spicy perfume and red flowers, the old stones cold as ice, the hollow hill … all swirl about inside her head.
As if he knows something is going wrong, Archie whimpers behind Gracey. He sinks low to the earth and won’t come any closer when she looks at him, which is not like Archie at all. Instead, he’s looking up and nose-whistling. Gracey follows his eyes to a black lump hanging from a tree.
She closes her own eyes and can’t bring herself to see that again; the raggedy shape with a toothy face. And as soon as she’s seen it, the worst smell she’s ever known drops and swamps her like an old blanket made from rotten meat. No almonds, lemons and bitter perfume now.
A deep hum of flies vibrates the air. Gracey coughs and notices tiny white things dropping onto the mud near Archie, like seeds from a tree when the wind blows hard. But unlike seeds, the white things writhe. They’re the same kind of grubs that her granddaddy used for fishing. He kept them in a plastic box, inside the fridge.
A jumble of new voices starts from the hill, choking out a rough rhyme. She cannot hear the words in the rhyme and the lady of the woods isn’t joining in. She’s gone quiet. The birds have stopped singing too. Gracey nearly says ‘Hello’ so that no one jumps and gets angry when they find her spying. Because there’s two things in the glade now that might, or might not, be people.
Gracey didn’t see them come in but they’re standing on one leg by the flames in the bowls and it’s they who are making the grunty rhyme.
The rhyme makes silence fill every lightless hollow outside the ring of rocks and turns the trees to stone. It’s like nothing inside the wood wants to be noticed by the two whitey things standing on one leg.
They are as still as statues until they start skipping.
Grass grows round and round the stones. An old clock telling strange times, of years and years, not minutes or hours.
Maggots curl their ribbed tails.
Gracey’s mouth dries because she can’t close it. All the blood runs from her face and she knows she’s as white as the woodwork her daddy painted yesterday. That’s who she wants with her now, her daddy. She’s so scared and might be sick too, inside the cloud of flies and the stink.
Backwards the whitey ones go now, around the grassy mound. They’re turning the big stone clock the wrong way and her eyes follow the backwards skipping and bulge from her face. Archie barks like he’s mad and can’t stop. Then he growls and she’s only heard him make that noise twice before: once at the vet and once at a delivery man.
Gracey can’t move her feet.
The whitey ones might be the ghosts of bad animals. That fatty one, which has dropped down and is scampering on all fours inside the grassy circle, has a scruffy black head with yellow tusks. Running backwards, it’s going faster than she can run forwards. The other one is skinny with sticking-out bones like skeletons in graves.
Gracey’s thoughts smash into bits and scatter like a stone has gone through a window inside her head. Only silly thoughts hang behind to try and stop her thinking about the skinny one, prancing through the gaps, so springy and up on its toes and going backwards like a horrible monkey with no fur on its cold skin.
Her whole body is shaking, she can’t get air inside, her eyesight is flickering and she doesn’t know what to do when a face appears on the other side of her peephole.
The skinny whitey with the black head must have stopped springing backwards and crept up to the edge of the clearing while she was watching the fatty one, because now the skinny is grinning as if to say, It’s no use at all. I can see you and I am going to get you .
Tatty and tufted mangy fur face. Big white eyes. And are them things on its head horns? Like bulls have? The bad kind that chase people through fields? But just as soon as she looks back at it, the bumpy muzzle and bulgy eyes pull backwards. Or maybe just disappear.
Gracey moves a foot. Falls on her backside. Throws away new Waddles like it’s his fault that she’s gone over.
Somewhere behind her, Archie is barking and pacing and barking. When Gracey turns her head and finds him, he’s not looking at her but at the two whiteys who are running again, round and round the hill, inside the ring of trees, inside the ring of stones. White legs and slapping feet going backwards, the wrong way, so her eyes go the wrong way and her thoughts bend into a circle that also turns the wrong way.
Gracey closes her eyes and struggles onto her hands and knees to stop seeing the whiteys. But sometimes, as they rush past, their black faces must be peering at her, from holes in the bushes. They know she’s here. She won’t look at their faces again but Archie can see them and goes crazy as the leaves rustle near her head and the horrible faces poke through.
When she opens her eyes, she’s looking at the mud that has seeped wetly through her dress to freeze her front and back-bottom. Upon the soil, the grubs twist and poke eyeless faces towards where the sun must be.
Archie creeps away from her on his belly and looks more like a cat than a dog. He’s going inside the ring of stones. Gracey would call him back but has no air inside her body. All that’s left inside her is a swirl of the horrible things she’s just seen, going up and down, round and round, like she’s going round the hill with them too and saying a name to get that lady singing inside the hill again.
When she scrabbles upright, she goes all giddy and dizzy. It’s like she weighs nothing and could float up to the hanging fox who is nailed to the tree and dripping grubs. There he is with his pink tongue looping black gums in a grinning mouth. His big yellow eyes are still open. His red legs are as thin as flutes. He has a white tummy. Black flies buzz about in the smell of him dead.
When Gracey opens her mouth to cry, fear sucks her distress back inside her body because the two whitey things that were running backwards around the grassy hill are now standing on top of it. And they’re keeping very still. Their scruffy black heads watch the sky. Archie is up there too, climbing up the fattish one as if it has food and he’s licking under the fat whitey’s legs. The skinny whitey is up on its back legs and the front legs dangle and twitch. Its long mouth hiccups at the sky.
Inside her head, her own voice tells her to run.
Gracey runs.
Tears scold and blind her eyes. Branches whip her skin. Her little legs pump the earth but are never fast enough.
There’s no sound in the wood. Everything here has closed its mouth and eyes.
A final peek backwards, to make sure they’re not chasing her, and she sees the skinny whitey leap off the hill and out of the ring of stones. Up it goes and out of sight, like an ape with long ears, flinging itself through a forest.
She never hears it land in the branches, so maybe it can fly. But if she sees it flying, she knows the fright will stop her heart.