Dusk ages a low, already dark sky. What light there is silts down and makes Tom feel as if he’s suffering from a degenerative eye disease.
Once he’s clear of the garden and amongst the roots of the old wood, the sky’s dim sheen is entirely swallowed on the far western side of the woods, wherever that boundary is.
‘Archie!’
Ducking under brawny branches, batting at obstructive saplings, as his paint-spattered boots slip-slide about the track, he implores the dank earth to give up the dog and Gracey’s new penguin. But his vision can only strain at the murk as if he’s underwater, in a canal.
Between choking scrub and pillars of trunk bound by ivy, definition blurs to blackened clumps of nothing. Nearby, one thing climbs upon another and becomes something else entirely: tree into giant, bush into wolf on two legs, bracken into a face he almost apologises to; a fallen limb transforms into a caped woman, bent in grief. Voids spread, deepen. Treetops thrust their arms upwards and grasp at the dying sun with drooping fingers.
‘Archie!’
He staggers half-blind where wily things watch. Pale and warm like a trembling animal that smells of warm food and should be buried in its own burrow by now, he stumbles. His oldest instincts prickle for the pounce from behind or the side.
‘Archie!’
Being here so soon after the last futile search for another lost toy, and now a dog too, heats his low spirits into exasperation. It smoulders like the onset of indigestion. Yet here he is, seeking another penguin lost at the wrong latitude in alien terrain. Both of us stuffed.
‘Little man!’
Gracey wouldn’t have strayed from the track, so the toy, at least, should be on it somewhere. Part of the toy’s fur is white too. There is little opportunity to step off the rough crease grooved through the trees, maybe even by animals.
On he goes, with a stronger sense of confinement striking him as he bends and casts poorly adapted eyes about his murky feet. But he hasn’t progressed more than a few hundred metres when a whiff of corruption pulls him up straight.
Wincing at the miasma that seems intent on becoming a permanent taste inside his mouth, Tom peers about his feet. Nothing is visible. He swats at something that he doesn’t see but hears hiss past his ear. Then peers up and at an orbit of whining insects.
Peepholes in the canopy admit a blue, gassy light and outline a tail, limp yet bushy, hanging from a birch tree.
Tom stumbles backwards, his forearm across his mouth and nose. ‘The fuck?’
At first he thinks it’s a cat. But the drooping legs appear too hard and bristly to be feline. Only when a white throat is discernible below a triangular snout, which broadens to large, cocked ears, does Tom see the tortured remains of a fox.
He squints, disbelieving and weakened by horror, at the grin of sharp teeth, exposed in black gums, protruding through the shallow light and into his comprehension. A small dog frozen in the act of panting, or cleaning its mouth with a long tongue. A fox fixed against the trunk, the neck garrotted with a bracelet of dull wire. The tree turned gamekeeper.
Coughing, Tom withdraws as the carrion stench and cruel intent of this spectacle seep an unbearable dread into his thoughts.
A few days have passed since he’s ventured this far inside the wood but he recognises the fallen tree stripped of bark and made bony-white; one of few things still visible close to the ground. And no animal had been throttled against a tree trunk when he was here before. He’d been scrutinising the track but would have surely smelled it and heard the flies. So this carcase was positioned. A corpse installed like a thief in a gibbet to swing above the sole ingress from his garden gate; intended to deter visitors from stepping too far inside this old wood. Someone local is responsible.
Little Gracey has seen the dead fox too. An animal she’s only ever known as a character in cartoons, or in illustrations in tales of talking animals, twirling whiskers and wearing red coats. His child, a little girl, a lover of all baby animals, saw this . She can’t contemplate the death of a character in a storybook, let alone a butchered animal strangled by wire, blackened by blood and boiling with flies in the very wood that he’s pitched to her as magical.
This was to be a place of mystery and enchantment, surrounding a warm home that would forever glow in her mind as a place filled with love and light. Not this: impenetrable scrub as feral and depressing as their cold, sad house, in turn cursed by the trauma of a man’s ghost hanging in the hall.
And into Tom’s mind bursts an image of Mrs Moot’s absurd head; self-importance and innate hostility etched into a face loathsome to him. He can almost hear the patronising tone, yipping out of that lined, whiskery muzzle. Yisss?
What had she said… As a parent are you not concerned for your daughter’s safety? Then she mentioned something about Gracey’s imagination, about her getting ideas in an old wood … We scolded her for her own benefit… It is no place for children.
And then Tom is running away from the miasma of the dead dog in the tree and his breath is strangled. Gasps and exhalations want to become screams of rage. Into the darkness he races awkwardly, punching at anything that flaps near his head or crosses his chest like arms; branches designed to increase his torment, waylaying him, making him boil.
Until…
A shaking of branches above him, behind him, back near the fox; verdure protesting at the passage of a thrusting body. A commotion accompanied by the determined raking of paws or hands that seize and grip.
He stops. Turns, his fire of rage transforming into a hoarfrost of terror, growing from the pores of his scalp and icing the steps of his spine. So deep does this rupture of fear tear that his testicles clench, then shrink.
Peering up, he loses his footing. Snatches a hand into nettles. Wet skin on live wires.
His vision rakes the filigree and petrified coral that webs the underside of the wood’s canopy; a tatty basket weave projected by low light onto the charcoal screen of sky. Nothing moves. But any lump, any shape at all up there, might be the cause of the noise.
At ground level, a bulky form careens onto the track, dragging his eyes down. A few feet ahead of him it comes barrelling, kicking itself free of the scrub.
Monkey or monster? From the trees it came?
The impossibility of this moment slips cold fingers about his throat, to squeeze all reason out and through the top of his skull. And for a few unbearable seconds, his entire being strains itself through his horrified eyes to determine that this thing before him is not possible . He can neither move nor let loose a held breath.
Paws pad wetly. A small, shaggy shadow, black as the sky will soon be, waddles closer, crossing inky voids footing tree roots. Without a defining feature, save the low bulk and a sway to the gait, as if a heavy belly swings across wet soil, it comes. Right at him. Up to him.
Tom whimpers. Even turns sideways to brace for an impact about his legs that he expects to be terrible. He wishes he could raise both feet from the ground like a housekeeper frighted by a mouse in one of Gracey’s cartoons.
And then the thing sneezes, causing a steel nametag to tinkle upon a buckled collar. One step away from his shins, the loaf-like head, with drooping bedraggled ears, finally redrafts itself into a recognisable form.
‘Archie! You bastard! You nearly stopped my heart.’
His voice draws no friendly bark, nor leaping or reaching up his legs. No smile. There is only a subdued puppy here who has laboured to reach him, the stubby tail lowered, a flag in mourning.
He must have been lost. Abandoned by Gracey who fled the dead fox. Left here to mooch and get turned around, whining and snuffling for his people as the light thinned from the very air before his watery brown eyes.
Tom’s heart cracks.
From incandescent rage to the petrifaction of terror, pure and white, to a joy that brings tears to his eyes, Tom is left dizzy.
‘My little man.’ He drops to his knees and accepts the mooching bulk and its wet nose and sodden ears. From what he can see, the pup’s eyes seem sad yet grateful to find his master here. Tom picks up the spaniel and fusses it in the way he’d wanted to fuss his own child in the kitchen. But finds himself immediately inspecting Archie’s face, because of the dog’s constant licking of his muzzle, as if his mouth is hurt … until a branch snaps clean above at a cold, airy distance.
A hiss of air follows and makes Tom suffer the sense, rather than the sight, of a form much heavier than a bird or squirrel, flinging itself to another branch, high up, over his head.
Tom swivels about, his head thrust back, Archie clutched tighter to his chest. He scans the ink-blotted underside of forest roof but can distinguish nothing moving amidst the impenetrable lattice of twig, the blackened rafters of oak, elm, larch and birch. Up there, anything could become anything.
A bird? Big bird? An owl? And might it have been hunting Archie below?
Tom hesitates until the smell of Archie’s wet fur fills his sinuses and reminds him of home and the girls; some vestige of warmth and togetherness.
Archie presses his head into Tom’s chest and licks at his muzzle. A sick child. Take me home, Daddy. Tom knows the signs and wants to get out of the dreadful wood, the blinding thorns, this reek of compost and throttled carrion.
Cautiously, he moves backwards, glancing up and around himself as if wary of aerial attack, until he reaches the broken gate where the old crucifixes glimmer like dull pewter. Dim beacons reminding him he’s home.