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THE TOYOTA BLEW A TYRE somewhere not far north of Huntly.
Rachel twisted the steering wheel and swore, squeezing the brake and aiming for the side of the road. The car stumbled to a stop in foot-high grass, barely missing a fencepost many degrees from straight.
She was not surprised to learn the rental company had not included a spare tyre. Simon had told her to expect that sort of thing. ‘It's like travelling back to the seventies, especially when you get out of Auckland. Maybe that's why she picked it.’
She leaned against the cooling car and listened to the cicadas buzzing their arses off.
Her phone still had a signal, which at this point Rachel was prepared to consider a bona fide miracle. She had already dialled Simon's number before she remembered it was still three in the morning back in London. She killed the call. Simon couldn't find his reading glasses on his desk half the time. There was no chance of him finding a mechanic on the other side of the world.
Rachel reached through the window for the map Simon had printed for her. She'd just gone over a short bridge with a long name and it didn't look too far from there to where Simon had marked an X in blue ballpoint and written KSJ next to it. She grabbed her suitcase from the back and started walking.
The Toyota's tyres might have been shot but its air conditioning had been top notch. The humidity was jungle-strength. Five minutes walking and she was covered in sweat. Biggest interview of her career and she'd go into it soaked. Figured.
*
RACHEL HAD BEEN AT her desk in Sounding's tiny Earl's Court office when the call had come in. Maria, the receptionist, had looked over the top of her magazine at the ringing phone as if it were an alien. First time it had rung in a month.
‘Who was it?’ Rachel asked once Maria had passed the call through to Simon's office.
Maria shrugged and mumbled something. She only enunciated on the phone.
Rachel frowned. That couldn't be right. ‘Sorry? Did you say Katherine St. John?’
Simon burst out of his office so fast he nearly took the door off. ‘You. Pub. Now.’
*
‘WAIT, I DON'T – WHAT?’
Simon sipped his pint. He was loving this, being the one with a scoop for the first time in a decade or more, having Rachel hang on his every word.
‘That was Katherine St. John on the phone. She's about to release a new album and she's going to give exactly one interview. To us. Or more specifically, to you.’
‘To me?’
‘And only you.’
‘Shit.’
‘I know.’
Eleven-year-old Katherine St. John had come to the attention of the public in 1965. She had been camping with her parents on the edge of Bedgebury Forest in Kent when she went missing. The story held the front page for over a week. Black-and-white pictures of St. John's parents, arms around each other, stricken looks on their faces. Long lines of volunteers marching between the trees, trying to cover every square foot of a forest whose heart had been untroubled since the days of Hadrian. Then, as the days went on, rumours that the police were taking a particular interest in St. John's father. One telephoto shot of him being led up the stairs to the Maidstone police station for further questioning was published on Monday morning, a thin civil servant with a comb-over and a permanently crooked tie. The Sunday Mirror published a picture of a child's blue canvas shoe lying beneath a holly bush. In the opinion of the majority of the paper's readers, the man was clearly guilty, a trial just a formality on his way to the gallows.
A base of operations was established at the campsite, now deserted except for the St. John family's tent and their grey Hillman Minx, already starting to sink into the mud. On the Monday of the second week of the search, Detective Harlan Smith was eating lunch at his temporary desk in the prefab office when Katherine St. John walked in, looking as unruffled as if she had just been out for a brief stroll. No injuries, no malnutrition. Still wearing both her black leather shoes which, even scuffed and covered with mud, looked nothing like the one on the front page of the Mirror.
The papers printed full-page photos of the newly reunited family under headlines such as MIRACLE CHILD, but could find no more explanation for what had happened than the girl herself. In the few minutes after she reappeared she mentioned that she had been to see the ‘dancing man’. But she was unable to clarify who she had meant and, as the days went on, seemed to recant even that, claiming she had no memory of her time in the forest.
Nobody remembered the lost girl who had been to see the dancing man in 1978, when Katherine St. John's first album was released. It was a revelation. Her voice rose above her own sparse piano playing, then swooped low. People compared her to Joni Mitchell, to Laura Nyro, but that wasn't quite it. She more ethereal than her contemporaries, more otherworldly. Nothing about her songs should have worked: the surreal lyrics, the unorthodox keys and time signatures – none of it suggested commercial success. And yet there she was, barely sixteen, topping album charts all over the world. Her time as a lost girl was mentioned, of course, in the initial coverage, but faded away. The music obliterated her history as it propelled her on the way to inevitable superstardom.
St. John's follow-up album two years later met middling reviews. Punk was on the rise and it seemed that St. John's unique sound was going to be consigned to the same dustbin of history as Prog Rock. She had never toured, and with the poor reception of her sophomore effort she became even more reclusive.
Rachel couldn't remember the third album at all. Her own attempt at an English degree was already in flames at that point. She had spiked her hair to look like Siouxsie Sioux and spent every weekend going to see The Damned and The Clash.
‘It's a wind-up, surely. Every music magazine from here to New York would have got that call.’
Simon's hands were trembling slightly. Did they always do that? Why hadn't she noticed before? ‘I don't think you're hearing me. That wasn't St. John's agent on the phone. That was her.’
‘Shit.’
‘I know.’
*
THERE WAS NO GATE, just a break in the fence. No mailbox. The number 257 had been scratched into a piece of tin and nailed to the fencepost. Rachel checked the map again and shrugged. This was the place.
The bare dirt driveway ran along a stand of trees before turning right around the side of a shed. One of the suitcase’s tiny wheels had already crumbled from being dragged along the side of the road instead of a smooth airport floor, so she had to carry it. She heard a buzzing as she approached the shed. Then a smell that made her step back.
The corpse of a rabbit was balanced on the top of a fencepost, attended by a cloud of flies. It lay on its back, head lolling towards the ground, one dead eye looking at Rachel. The rabbit's belly was bloated, the blue mottled skin under its grey fur writhing with maggots.
Rachel backed away, holding a hand over her mouth and nose until she was around the corner of the shed. She leaned over, hands on knees, for a few moments, sucking in lungfuls of fresh air. The grass on the side of the driveway was long and ragged. She could see small patches of green in the middle of the bare dirt. Rachel wondered how long it would take for the grass to claim back the whole driveway.
When she picked up the suitcase again her arms were trembling.
*
THE FARMHOUSE WAS SMALL but tidy. It was surrounded by a garden that was a strange mix, English roses sitting next to native ferns and flaxes. There was no sense of untidiness; the garden had clearly been tended with great care.
The front door was pine, inset with stained glass. Rachel knocked and waited. A shadow appeared on the other side of the glass, stretched and rainbowed, so tall and wide that for a moment Rachel wondered if she'd got the wrong place after all. Then she heard footsteps in the hall and the shadow shrunk. The door opened.
Katherine St. John smiled and held out her hand. ‘You must be Rachel Mackenzie. Welcome. Come in.’
She looked like someone's grandmother, which was, Rachel thought, entirely possible. Her hair wasn't completely grey yet, but there were wide streaks around her temples. The wrinkles around the corners of her mouth were beginning to deepen, like streams in sand at low tide. Rachel was only a few years younger than St. John, but looking at her now it could have been a couple of decades. Her eyes, though, were still that deep, endless green, same as they had been thirty years ago when they stared from posters on tens of thousands of suburban teenage bedroom walls.
‘It's so nice to meet you, Miss St. John,’ Rachel said.
St. John waved her hand. ‘Just Katherine, please. I'm so glad you could come.’
The house was blessedly cool. Rachel nearly fell across the threshold.
Katherine led her into a kitchen that looked out to a small conservatory and took an old whistling kettle from the gas cooker. On the wall were paintings of English landscapes with fussy, gilt-edged frames. Bunches of dried flowers hung from the roof. There were no gold records on the wall, none of the awards St. John had won, just Devonshire granny chic. Not at all what Rachel had expected.
‘Where's your car?’
‘Down the road a little. Flat tire. No spare.’
Katherine pouted. ‘Oh dear. To fly halfway around the world and then have that happen. I'm so sorry.’
Rachel shrugged. ‘I've had worse.’
‘Still. There's a garage back by the river. I'll give them a call.’
‘You don't have to—’
‘Please. You're my guest.’
Rachel smiled. ‘I've interviewed the biggest names in rock for over thirty years and I don't think anyone's said that before.’
‘Well,’ Katherine said, passing over a mug of tea, ‘there's always the chance of something new, on any given day.’
*
‘WE CAN GO BACK TO THE house if you want. No need to start straight away. It's a terrible flight.’
Rachel shook her hear. ‘No. It's fine.’
The headache had started up while she was sipping St. John's tea, a buzzing like a badly earthed mic. Katherine had suggested they walk around the farm while they talked and Rachel had agreed, hoping the fresh country air would help clear her head.
The gumboots Katherine had given her looked ridiculous over her business slacks. Or perhaps it was the slacks that looked ridiculous out here in the country.
‘We'll start over here,’ Katherine said, leading the way to the milking shed.
Light through the looming black clouds rendered the land in high contrast. There was a heavy feeling in the air, as if a thunderstorm were imminent, but there was no smell of rain, just the sticky, oppressive heat.
‘It's a working farm,’ Katherine said, ‘although I don't get up early to do the milking. That's a young person's game.’
Rachel pulled out her tape recorder. ‘Do you mind if I use this?’
Katherine shook her head. ‘Not at all. That's what you're here for.’
Rachel had seen many different responses to her tape recorder. Back in the day, she'd had more than one rock star refuse to speak as soon as she'd placed it on the table. Never mind that these people had a tendency to make all manner of libellous and offensive statements in the media. There had been a power in the sight of the recording device once, she supposed. Why else would a shirtless, tattooed rock god who had been arrested in Texas six months previous for exposing himself on stage clam up at the sight of the turning wheels of the tape? More than once recently she had placed the recorder before some bright young pop star and had the impression it was the first time they had seen such ancient technology. Justin Bieber had snorted and asked why she didn't just use her phone like everyone else. She'd bought the JVC KD-2 in a store on Tottenham Court Road in ’82. It had cost her a fortune then, and several more since. Perhaps Bieber was right. But she liked the weight of it, the solid click of the buttons, the slow turn of the tape.
Rachel hefted the recorder. The strap dug into her shoulder. She suspected St. John might be the kind of interviewee who would just start talking without a lot of prompting.
‘Milking here. I had it all upgraded last year. We've got just over a hundred Holstein-Friesians. Which isn't much by New Zealand standards, but I don't think the land would take any more.’
The milking shed was impeccably clean. The concrete floor had been hosed down recently and the shining water reflected the corrugated iron roof.
Katherine led Rachel out a smaller door on the far side of the shed. A newer building stood on the other side of a paddock, near a stand of old, gnarled trees. They trudged through knee-high grass, Katherine doing a better job of avoiding the cow shit than Rachel did. ‘Some macrocarpas there,’ Katherine said. ‘Oldest trees in the area.’
They were an unimpressive collection, a handful of rough trees no more than fifty feet wide. They sat nearly exactly in the middle of the farm, the last remnant of a wilder time, before roads, before farms. The trees had been shaped by decades of wind, bent over as if they were trying, and failing, to support a great weight. Though the stand was thin and Rachel could see the paddock continued to either side, the trees were close enough together that she could not see anything but darkness between their trunks.
‘And this,’ Katherine said, tapping the side of the building, ‘is my studio.’
It was tiny and looked like it belonged on a building site. There was nothing about its plain white walls to indicate that this was where Katherine St. John had recorded her first album in nearly thirty years.
Katherine shook off her boots and climbed the steps to the front door and Rachel followed.
The room was dark, apart from the red and green lights of the moderately sized mixing desk that sat in front of a glass partition halfway across the room. On the other side of the glass a mic stand was set up. Several synths were arrayed in a semicircle and an old Rickenbacker guitar leaned up against the wall. There was a large window on the far wall, but a blind was pulled down over it, so the only light was a dim glow around the edges.
Rachel had never bothered too much with the technical details of how albums were made. But she had been in enough recording studios over the years to recognise that this was very well organised. The console was new and had to be worth at least eighty thousand pounds. An expensive iMac was mounted in the corner.
‘It took a lot longer to set up than I'd hoped. Then I had to learn how to drive the whole thing. But it was important to me that I do it all myself.’
‘So there was nobody else here when you were recording?’ Rachel couldn't see how that was possible. Surely Katherine would need at least one engineer, even for a console as small as this. Someone would need to run the board while she was in the other room.
‘Nobody else. Just me and my muse. Otherwise I might have finished sooner.’ She shook her head. ‘No. Wouldn't have worked. My muse likes to be alone with me. He gets jealous if there are too many people about.’
Rachel looked at the Rickenbacker leaning up against the wall. One of the defining characteristics of St. John's debut album was how spare it had been – mainly just her voice and piano. The later albums had a larger sound, but that had all been studio musicians. Had she taught herself to play the guitar in addition to learning how to drive the desk and all the software?
‘So,’ Katherine St. John said, ‘do you want to hear it?’
*
KATHERINE BROUGHT UP the first track on the monitors.
There was the sound of muffled footsteps so clear Rachel felt the urge to look around. The sound of a piano lid being opened, then a few notes, low down on the keyboard.
St. John's voice rose out of the mix, starting low and rising to a high C. Her singing voice was, perhaps, a little more ragged than it had been, but had lost none of its power. If anything, the more weathered tone gave her voice a stamp of authority that her first album had lacked.
He moves through the wood
Dragging the darkness like a shroud
He is the last.
There were more instruments in the mix, but so low down it took Rachel several seconds to place them. Strings and the faintest lilt of a penny whistle that filled her heart with an ache she couldn't place. It was barely there, but Rachel was sure she could hear a choir, singing the same two words over and over.
(Don't go)
(Don't go)
Katherine ran her fingers across the console, although she did not appear to be adjusting the mix at all. Rachel closed her eyes. It was possible she was the first person in the world apart from St. John to hear this. The song rose and fell, washing over her.
The dizziness returned, so quickly she opened her eyes and fell heavily into a chair. Katherine shot her a concerned glance but Rachel gave her a thumbs-up.
The song continued to build. Rachel hadn't been paying too much attention to the words. St. John's lyrics had always been cryptic, as if they'd been designed to be pored over by generations of teenagers.
Rachel noticed the light was stronger in the studio. The blind on the window had rolled up. The window framed the trees perfectly. Something was there, in the shadows beneath the branches. There was the shape of a man, leaning against the trunk of a tree, looking directly at her. The light changed, and the shape that might be a man bled, swam, like a thumb rubbing over wet ink.
Another wave of dizziness struck her. Rachel closed her eyes and sucked in fresh air. When it had passed, she looked again at the old wood.
Nothing there but trees and shadows.
It took her some time to realise the song had finished and Katherine was speaking to her.
‘—feeling any better?’
‘I'm fine,’ Rachel said, ‘just the jet lag, I guess.’
‘Why don't we continue this tomorrow?’
Rachel nodded, her head heavy.
As they return to the house across the paddock, Rachel turned back once. Nobody was standing beneath the hunched trees. She could see through them to the paddock beyond.
But she could still see the man in her imagination. Tall and thin. No shirt. Tan trousers. And a wide, tooth-filled smile that might not have been a smile at all.
*
EVEN IN THE AGE OF digital downloads and piracy, Katherine St. John's first album was a solid seller. A perennial, like Dark Side of the Moon or Rumours, each new generation discovering it and claiming it for their own. But apart from the recording studio at the other end of the paddock, Rachel couldn't see any evidence of St. John's royalties.
Katherine had chatted the whole way back, then insisted on cooking dinner herself. As if Rachel and Katherine were friends who hadn't seen each other for years, finally catching up. Katherine didn't speak about the new album and Rachel didn't ask, so tired she was barely able to keep her place in the conversation. She'd feel much better after a good night's sleep.
The guest bedroom was on the second floor and decorated just as garishly as the kitchen. It had to be nearly nine, but the sun hadn't completely set. Light leaked through the thick red curtains and made her eyeballs ache.
‘I'm right next door,’ Katherine said, ‘If you need anything during the night.’
Rachel's thanks were more yawn than word. She lay down, still dressed, and was asleep before Katherine closed the door.
*
SHE OPENED HER EYES in the darkness, no idea of the time, but suddenly wide awake. She fumbled for the phone and pressed it on. The screen was blindingly bright in the darkness. Simon would be awake now.
‘So how does it sound?’
Rachel opened her mouth to speak. Closed it. Tried again. ‘I've only heard the one track so far, but excellent. Her best work, no question.’ She bit her tongue so she wouldn't say anything more. The room was vibrating slightly. She hoped it was just the jet lag.
‘—rest of the interview?’
Rachel opened her eyes again, sat down heavily on the bed. Tried to figure out what she'd missed.
‘Tomorrow,’ she said, hoping that was noncommittal enough.
‘Good. Good. Get some sleep. You sound terrible.’
Rachel walked over to the window and peeked through the curtains. She could barely see the milking shed or the recording studio in the darkness. But the tops of the trees behind the studio were clear, as if picked out by a shaft of moonlight. The illumination did not extend to the space between the trees, which remained resolutely dark.
The window was open just a crack. Refreshingly cold air ran over the tops of her fingers. She shouldn't have called Simon. Now she was awake she'd have a hell of a time getting back to sleep.
There was a scream from the trees.
Rachel gasped. She waited, heart pounding, but the sound didn’t come again. Possum, she remembered, after a while. Simon had mentioned them. Nasty little bastards. Sound like a kid getting murdered.
As she expected, it was a very long time before she fell asleep.
*
RACHEL LIFTED THE KD-2 and checked the cassette again. There was still a decent amount of tape on the spools. She had another couple stashed in the pockets of the oilskin Katherine had given her before they set out. It would be scorching later, she said, but it was always surprisingly cold first thing in the morning.
‘Why now?’
‘It was time.’
‘You disappeared after your last album. It was as if you'd dropped off the face of the earth.’ Rachel regretted the words as soon as they had left her mouth, thinking of the faces of St. John's parents on the front page of The Sunday Mirror, but Katherine did not react.
‘Money has never been important to me. Nor has fame. The music, though—’
Katherine St. John stopped walking and squinted into the sun along the fence line. The air was full of the sound of cicadas in the trees.
‘My mother always used to tell me there was no point opening my mouth if I didn't have anything to say. And perhaps, for a long time, I didn't.’
‘And now you do?’
‘Did. This will be my last album.’
Katherine strolled off along the fence line, leaving Rachel standing, stunned.
‘You can't mean that, surely,’ she said, after she had caught up. ‘If the rest of the songs are anything like the one you played me, this is going to be the best work of your career.’
Katherine had picked up a long stick from the grass. She swung it side to side as she walked, knocking the flowers off the clover. ‘Thank you. I do hope people like it.’
‘So what then? If you're retiring, what's next for you?’
Katherine shrugged. ‘Just this. The farm. I could happily spend the rest of my days walking the land here. There's just something about it. It feels like home, more than anywhere else ever has. Does that make sense?’
Rachel thought about the number of years she'd spent on buses and planes, in expensive hotel rooms and seedy motels, tracking down the next story, following the latest rock god. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘perfect sense.’
*
RACHEL COLLAPSED INTO the big couch against the wall of the recording studio. It was still early morning but the sun was already beating on her like a mallet. She had no idea how she would cope by midday.
Katherine called up another track on the console. The sound of cicadas came through the studio monitors mounted on the wall. Then St. John's voice, breathy, barely singing.
So cool
Beneath your boughs
Inside the heart of the wood
Instruments emerged slowly. Rachel heard a harpsichord being plucked somewhere to the left, while a choir sang to the right:
Don't go
Don't go
echoing the song she'd heard yesterday.
Rachel looked out at the studio, frowning. Katherine had said she recorded and engineered this alone, so where had she recorded the choir? Katherine's voice and the harpsichord were clear but the choir was so quiet she could barely hear it. Perhaps it wasn't there at all, just some acoustic trick.
Rachel closed her eyes and fell into the song. She could feel loam under her feet, the mighty, silent presence of trees. There was a snare drum in there somewhere. Rachel could see an army marching. The soldiers wore deep blue-black tunics and sabres on their hips, decorated with gold braid. At the head of the column marched a drummer boy, no more than ten, a serious expression on his face as he set the pace for the men marching behind him. The boy wore something that might have been a tunic once, but was now little more than a vest. Loose threads dangled where the arms had been torn off. It hung loose on his small frame. There were dark smudges along both his cheeks, soot perhaps, or blood.
A buzzing started in Rachel's head. It felt like the room was rolling, as if she were about to fall beneath the floor. She opened her eyes, but the light did not immediately return. When it did, it was with a sticky slowness that clawed at her face. Katherine had already half risen from her chair at the console. Rachel waved her off.
‘Oh, god. I'm so sorry. I'm not coming across as very professional, am I?’
‘It's fine. Maybe it's still the jet lag.’
Rachel nodded. ‘Perhaps.’ She closed her eyes for a second. Jerked them open again.
‘Perhaps we should get out again. In the fresh air.’ Katherine looked across the studio to the window. ‘There's something I'd like to show you.’
*
STEAM WAS RISING OFF the grass, making a knee-high haze across the paddock.
The fresh air helped a little. The buzzing in Rachel's head had died away, although her worry about what it could be did not. Rachel had spent large parts of her career flying between London and New York, Los Angeles, Sydney. This was nothing at all like jet lag.
Katherine St. John walked several paces in front of Rachel, wearing a wide straw hat she had grabbed from the hook on the back of the studio door, in the direction of the macrocarpa trees. There was an easy confidence in her walk, as if she were far younger than sixty. Rachel had a sudden flash of the eleven-year-old St. John walking in just this way towards another forest.
She only had a couple more days before the flight back to London. Simon would be waiting for her at Heathrow, USB stick in hand. She needed to get the bulk of the interview done today. She switched on the KD-2 still hanging over her shoulder.
The fence line stopped abruptly before the trees. The last fencepost tilted to one side, as if whoever had put them in had suddenly found something more important to do.
Something was balanced on the post. Rachel's stomach began to lurch as she realised what it was.
Katherine clicked her tongue. ‘Ach. Little monkey.’ She picked up a stick from the ground and began poking at the little bundle of brown and red.
‘Fresh,’ she said. ‘This morning, or last night perhaps. Birds haven't been at it yet.’
The possum's head moved from side to side as Katherine poked it. It had been slit from neck to groin, then left broken-backed on the top of the post.
‘There was something like this near the gate when I came in,’ Rachel said. ‘A rabbit, I think.’
‘Really?’ Katherine frowned. ‘I've never seen one on that side of the property before.’ She hooked the stick deep into the possum's guts and deftly flicked it into the trees. Nothing was left on the fence post but a brown smear, drying in the sun.
Rachel's mouth was dry. ‘This happens a lot?’
‘More often these days. Just pests though: rabbits, possums, the occasional rat. He wouldn't dare touch the cows.’
‘Who wouldn't dare touch the cows?’
Katherine cocked her head, as if trying to decide if Rachel could be trusted.
‘Calls himself Slipper. He's a good boy, really. Doesn't mean any harm. I think it's kind of a tribute.’
‘There's a boy doing this? Haven't you told his parents?’
Katherine sighed. ‘It's not quite as simple as that. And he's keeping the vermin population down. Sometimes I wish he'd do it a little more.’
There was a prickliness to Katherine's voice. Her mouth had contracted to a thin line. She looked nothing at all like the grandmotherly type who had answered the door the day before.
Rachel forced herself to smile. ‘These kinds of things happen in the country, I guess.’
Katherine was still moving towards the trees.
‘Can we—’ Rachel called, lowering her voice again when Katherine stopped and turned. Rachel held up the recorder ‘I'd like to ask you some more questions and this doesn't do so well when we're moving. Could we go back to the house?’
Katherine looked at the trees for a few more seconds. Then she smiled. ‘Of course.’
*
KATHERINE SIPPED HER tea. The teapot sat between them, a commemoration of a royal wedding that had lost much of its gilding over the years. Princess Di, faded and scratched, stared out from beneath her hair.
Rachel leaned forward across the table. Her pen and paper lay at her elbow, ready. She was lost, not really sure where to begin; the walk had cleared her head, but not entirely. Something still buzzed at the back of her mind, like a person seen from the corner of her eye.
Then Katherine began talking. Rachel clicked record and listened.
‘The family changed, after Bedgebury. My father the most. Did you know the police suspected he'd murdered me?’
Rachel nodded.
‘They both fell apart. Fell away from each other too. Not enough to actually separate of course. The swinging sixties took a long time to reach Surrey. My father didn't move out, but something else came in to live with us. I could feel its weight every time we sat down to dinner. The silence.
‘I forgot the forest. Much as I could, though a deliberate forgetting is really no forgetting at all. But after a while I couldn't remember what had happened to cause the rift between my parents. Except in dreams. My mother would hear me, singing in my sleep. In the beginning she would shake me awake, but when she did I'd scream, loud enough to wake half the street. After a while, if she heard it she'd just close my bedroom door.’
‘When you were first found, you said you'd been with the dancing man.’
‘I was eleven. I explained as best I could, but every time I tried, I could see them getting agitated. My parents, the police. It was easier to say I couldn't remember. After a while it almost became true. But it never really went away.’
Rachel hesitated. She hadn't expected to talk about this at all. They were a long way from the music.
‘What never went away?’
‘The memory of him.’ Katherine stared at Rachel over the rim of her teacup. ‘The dancing man is as good a name as any, I suppose, if you need one, although he never did. He just was.’
‘So there was someone else in the forest?’
‘Not like you're thinking. I wasn't abducted by some local farmer. It was more that inside the forest there was – there was somewhere else.’
‘I don't understand.’
‘No. You wouldn't.’ Katherine looked out the window. Rachel felt like she was failing another test, but she was lost. Katherine St. John's lyrics had always tended towards the abstract. Rachel was not surprised to learn her conversations had a similar quality.
‘Tell me about him.’
Katherine closed her eyes. ‘His skin was the colour of varnished oak. I sketched him once, when I was back at school. Imagined him as Pan, drew buds of horns sprouting from his forehead, but he wasn't like that at all. I remember his eyes, more than anything. They were golden. The things they write in those terrible romance novels about falling into someone's eyes. But him – when he looked at me, it was as if there was nothing else in this world. Or other worlds. And when I looked into his eyes I knew there were many, many other places. His eyes were like doorways.’
The recorder sat in the middle of the table, the wheels of the tape still turning. Rachel felt another wave of exhaustion, found herself struggling to hide a yawn.
Katherine put down her cup. ‘Oh, dear. It's not getting any better, is it?’
‘I'm OK, it's—’ another yawn. Rachel waved it away. ‘—just jetlag. 'Snothing.’
‘More tea,’ Katherine said. ‘That's the English answer, isn't it? Or perhaps a coffee might be better?’
‘No, tea's good.’
Katherine stood to pour, holding the teapot far above the cup.
Rachel blinked. What had they been discussing? She had the feeling they had wandered a long way from music, but now she couldn't remember. It would be on the tape, but she hadn't written anything down.
‘There's – there's something I've been meaning to ask,’ Rachel said.
‘Anything. It's what you're here for.’
‘Why me?’
Katherine sat back down.
‘It may seem as if I'm a long way from the music business these days, but I keep up. I still read Sounding. Costs a fortune to get it shipped. I like your writing. And there's more. I—’ she sat for a moment, considering. ‘I think you and I have a lot in common.’
‘In what way?’
‘Well, we're very rare ducks, aren't we? There aren't many doing what we do – either of us. How many woman reporters do you know, still covering music?’ At your age, though unspoken, hung between them.
‘You may have a point, for music reporters. But not you. I can think of plenty of songwriters of your generation, some of them doing the best work of their careers: Joni Mitchell, Stevie Nicks, Rickie Lee Jones—’
Katherine raised her hand. ‘All promoted to the godhead, years ago. But it's not...’ she looked away, back again. ‘I don't want to disparage my heroes. But the ones who are still on the tour circuit – something goes out of them, over the years. A vitality. I'm not talking about age. It's about walking the same path time and again. Singing the same lines. It eats at you. I may not have been releasing albums, but I've been writing. I had to walk a strange path to get to where I am. And I read your articles and I know you're the same. We're the last of a dying breed.’
Rachel opened her mouth to tell Katherine that she had it wrong. Reporting was just a job to her, nothing more. But she couldn't speak and while she was trying to think of the right words the world went fuzzy and slipped away.
*
RACHEL WOKE AND FOUND herself lying on bed.
She sat up. There was a noise in her head, a background roar, as if she were on an airplane.
The curtains were drawn, but a thin light seeped around the sides. Rachel reached for her phone to check the time. It was past midnight. She had been sitting at the kitchen table with Katherine, then – she didn't know. She'd lost the better part of a day.
Katherine must have helped her up the stairs, though how she managed it Rachel had no idea. She wasn't fragile by any means, but Rachel was taller and heavier. Rachel didn't know if she'd be able to carry St. John if the situation had been reversed. She was still wearing the clothes she'd put on that morning.
A light was flashing on her phone. Voicemail. Simon, most probably, but she didn't check. She walked over to the window, pulled back the curtain, gasped.
The sky was wrong. It was light, far lighter than it should have been for this time of the night. There was a burnt look to it, a dark-tinted orange that made her think of fires burning in a desert at sunset. The milking shed and recording studio stood out like exhibits in a museum. The trees behind the studio remained resolutely dark.
There was movement, on the grass below her window. Someone was standing in the shadow of the house. The orange light reached tendrils into the shadow, picked him out in shards and flecks. A boy, no more than thirteen surely, wearing an old vest and threadbare trousers. He looked up to her window. Their eyes met and his teeth grinned orange.
Rachel pulled away from the window and leaned against the wall. When the hammering in her chest slowed a little, she peered around the edge of the curtain again.
The boy was strolling across the lawn, back towards the milking shed. Slowly, as if he didn't have a care in the world. As if he wanted her to follow.
Rachel hesitated, for more than a moment. The boy disappeared around the corner of the milking shed and the orange moon shone on the empty paddock.
She turned back to the bed and fumbled for her shoes.
As she placed her foot on the first stair, a sound made her stop, turn. She listened, looking into the darkness of the hallway.
There was a whisper from Katherine's room. Rachel couldn't make out what Katherine said. Her voice was muted, heavy, as if she were talking in her sleep.
Another, deeper voice made a reply.
Katherine said something else, followed by a silence again. Rachel stayed where she was, almost holding her breath, but she did not hear anything else.
She began to move down the stairs, hoping each time she put a foot down that the stair wouldn't creak beneath her.
*
THERE WAS NO SIGN OF the boy when she rounded the corner of the house. She set off across the lawn at a jog, hauled herself uncomfortably over the fence. She peered around the corner of the milking shed. She was sure the boy had been moving in this direction but there was nobody here now. Perhaps she had paused too long on the staircase, listening to Katherine and – whoever it was. She'd missed her chance.
The moonlight stained the side of the shed a burnt orange. Rachel stared at the face of the moon. Perhaps it was a mist from the river, blown across the farm. There had to be some explanation.
The moonlight surged, so bright she had to close her eyes and turn away and as she did the buzzing came again. She steadied herself against the wall of the milking shed, closed her eyes. When she looked again the moon was just the moon, though still wrapped in that sickly orange glow. But the thought lingered that, just for a moment, it hadn't been a moon at all but a weird and malevolent sun, older and angrier by far than her own.
Rachel saw movement in the shadow of the trees. The boy stood at the edge of the forest. Something dead dangled from his right hand, blood pulsing slowly into the grass. He placed it reverentially on the top of the last fencepost. Then he looked directly at her before walking into the forest.
Rachel remained where she was. She could leave. She could go back to the house, try and get some sleep. She could leave tomorrow morning, although she might have to call a taxi. Katherine had said she'd get the car towed to a local garage, but Rachel realised she hadn't asked about it. How many days had she been here, anyway? The dizziness had played havoc with her sense of time. Surely she'd spent enough time with St. John, got enough on tape. She could go back to Auckland, type everything up in a hotel or even the airport departure lounge. It didn't matter, as long as she got away. There was something about the farm she didn't understand, but she had the feeling that the farm understood her all too well.
She could feel the dizziness again and she shook her head; she wouldn't, couldn't fall asleep now.
The blood of the thing on the fencepost was a glistening black.
She had to know.
She stepped forward.
A rat, eyes open and staring sightlessly at the orange moon, its mouth wide, almost in a grin.
She stood directly in front of the trees and from here they looked different, although she couldn't exactly say how. Larger, perhaps. There seemed to be more of them, as if it really were a forest and not just a tiny stand of trees in the middle of a paddock. She couldn't see through to the other side now. The orange moon picked out a bare patch between the trees, the path the boy must had taken. She stole one more look at the slaughtered rat, its paws brought close to its body in an attitude of prayer, then stepped beneath the trees.
She had to know.
*
THE FOREST WAS THE world.
When she'd stood in the paddock (had it been yesterday? It was hard to remember) and looked at the sad stand of trees, she had wondered why they had been preserved in the middle of all that grass. There might have been ten of them, scraggly and poor, shaped through years of wind until they bent over like ancient crones. But these trees were straight-backed and tall enough to hold up the sky and there were so very many of them. She turned around. Though she hadn't taken more than a few steps, she couldn’t see the paddock. Only more trees, and the trail and she knew, somehow, that if she followed it she'd walk for untold hours and never find her way back to the yellowing grass and the recording studio and the fencepost with its tribute rat.
The air smelled full and wet, like moss under ancient roots, and she could feel the inrushing energy of every breath. She should have been terrified, was, perhaps, on some level, yet she could not suppress a smile, grinning like the dead rat had grinned at the moon. It was as if a secret belief that she had held her whole life without knowing had been confirmed.
She followed the path, not bothering to look back. Any exit was ahead, not behind. If one appeared, what would she do? Would she take it? It should have been no question at all, but now there was the thought, lurking. Why would she? Why not stay?
There was music in the air, just on the edge of hearing and she recognised it immediately. The same melody she'd heard in Katherine St. John's recording studio. A choir, she had thought at the time, but there was no choir in the forest. The sound didn’t come from any particular direction. It was as if the leaves of the trees were a choir, their song quiet but insistent.
Don't go.
Don't go.
Arms of trees reached out across the path, hiding the sky, but the orange moonlight found a way through, washing everything, making every shadow deeper. They looked like oak trees, but there was something about them – they seemed, somehow more real than any trees she had seen before. As if these were the models that all other trees aspired to. Their size and the deep cracks in their trunks marked them as immeasurably ancient, yet there was a youth about them, a vitality that she knew would last forever. This was the Forest Beneath, the leaves whispered to her, and it was between and beneath and around all. The forest was the world.
The boughs of the trees covered the path entirely now, so she walked in almost total darkness. Just a few small patches of orange moonlight on the path like running lights along the aisle of an airplane. She could see a larger light ahead, but she could not judge how far away it was. And still the singing, quiet still but slowly becoming louder.
Don't go
Don't go.
Then the light was close enough to touch and then she was in it. She found herself stepping into a glade. The path ended here, giving way to a wide space of low brown grasses and nightflowers. The orange moon hung fat and full above, draining the scene of nearly all other colour. She stepped forward, walked to the centre, where a circle had been marked in white sand, too perfect to be any kind of accident. She saw now that there were several paths through the trees besides the one that had brought her here. The one directly ahead seemed to continue in a straight line, but the three to the left of her and four to the right seemed wilder. The last one on the left curved uphill somehow, though there was no hill there. The sight of that path leading impossibly up brought forth an ache, an overwhelming feeling of loss that she did not understand. These are the paths of the Dancing Man, though he has not come these ways for an age, said the voice in her head that was hers and yet was not.
She turned around, looking at the trees that were the perfection of all trees. Still singing, louder now—
Don't go
Don't go
—as if it were not just the song the leaves happened to sing. As if they were singing directly to her. In warning.
Don't! Go!
Don't! Go!
Don't—
The song stopped so suddenly that the silence rang.
The boy stepped between two trees on the other side of the clearing. He walked towards her, barefoot, stepping lightly on the balls of his feet, as if he were a ballet dancer and this was all a performance. His right hand held the dagger he had used to split the rat, long-bladed, the edge broken by dents and cuts turned rust-coloured by the moon. He stared at her and there was rage in his eyes but something deeper too, some skill or power of command that he had not mastered – but he would and when he did the world would scream.
Slipper walked towards her slowly and still she did not, could not move. She had not listened to the warning of the trees and now she would die here, in the Forest Between. She should have run, but something more than fear kept her standing in the circle of sand. Stay, said the voice in her head that was her voice but not and Slipper crept closer still. The rough vest he wore had once been a deep blue; time and the elements had faded it to a futile grey. The remains of a gold braid clung to one shoulder. He wore nothing beneath; the shadowed lines of his ribs stood clear on his sides. His trousers had obviously come from a far larger man; they were tied around his waist with a length of twine and hung slack to mid-calf, where they had been jaggedly hacked shorter, perhaps with the same knife he was holding out towards her, straight-armed as though it were a spear. He grinned, and his teeth were a scatter of angles. The knife was a hand-span from her eyes. With one more step he too would be standing in the white sand circle and that blade, she knew, would be at her throat.
A shout.
The boy dropped his arm and stared behind her, to where the path opened out on the clearing.
The shout, again. Slipper whined and wrapped his arms around his stomach. His face softened, the slope of his shoulders changed and his projection of malice was swept away. He was no threat to her at all, just an emaciated and shivering boy, wrapped in the ill-fitting clothes of luckless and long-dead men.
‘Arrête!’
Rachel turned. A man stepped from the trees. He was tall and moved confidently. Like the boy, he was barefoot. But the man's clothes were not old and frayed. He wore dark trousers that shone like silk and a small bolero jacket, embossed with gold braid. He looked impeccable, as if a team of tailors dogged his every step.
The man shouted something else. He spoke French, or something close enough to it that Rachel could nearly make out the words. But they danced along the edge of her mind, meaning slipping away even as she grasped for it.
Slipper hissed some more words and spat at his feet. He waved the knife dismissively, in the direction she had come, the path to the house.
The man spoke again, a hint of steel in his voice. The words remained alien to her, but this time, she caught the meaning of a handful. She is a guest.
She could chart the course of the conversation from the change in the boy's posture. Had the man not spoken when he did Slipper would have slit her throat. The man reached out a hand, palm down.
Slipper shook his head vehemently and did not back away. Rachel stood between them, afraid to move in case she interrupted their delicate dance.
The man took a step closer, then another. Slipper remained where he was, the knife dangling from his fingers like a favourite doll. The man had covered half the distance to the centre of the clearing now, still speaking low and calm.
Slipper hissed and raised the knife again and Rachel could not suppress a whimper of her own.
The man shouted – something. He opened his mouth and sound came out, but the sounds were older than any language. The sound hit Slipper like a blow and he stumbled back a couple of steps. The man closed his mouth and the forest fell silent. But something buzzed in Rachel's mind, as if the power of the word was still draining away, dark and slow like black oil on the surface of the world.
Slipper quivered, struggling against a force Rachel could not see. His mouth stretched wide in agony and a sound like a sob escaped him. A tear ran down his cheek. The knife tumbled from his hand.
The man resumed his quiet approach. Slipper dropped to his knees and snatched up the knife. Then he turned and ran towards the trees. Rachel could still hear his loud sobbing long after he had disappeared from view.
She let out a long breath, unaware until then she had been holding it. Her legs quivered.
The man reached her and held out a steadying hand. ‘Are you hurt?’
It took Rachel a few moments to realise she had understood the words. ‘No. I'm—’ Another shuddering breath. ‘I'm fine.’
‘You should not be here. It is not safe for you.’ The man's eyes were a deep brown that gave no clues to his age or origin.
‘I'm sorry. I followed him. He wanted me to.’
The man gave a short laugh and looked towards the trees. ‘Yes. He did. He is a rough one. He is not used to—’ He paused, trying to find the words. ‘—gentle custom.’
She remembered Katherine's words upon finding the slaughtered possum. Little monkey.
The man smiled. My muse likes to be alone with me. He gets jealous if there are too many people about.
‘Go,’ he said, ‘before the little monkey comes back.’
Some large part of her wanted nothing more than to stay. To walk the paths under the trees, listening to the singing of the leaves until the Dancing Man returned. But Slipper was still out there. And it was not her place to be here. Not yet, anyway, she thought, with a sense of loss that felt like a dagger.
She turned and walked towards the path that led back to the farm. Just before she slipped beneath the boughs, the man called.
‘Not that way. Go the way you came.’
Rachel frowned. She was going the way she came. She—
She looked again. She was standing directly in front of the weirder way, the path that sloped upwards yet was not on a hill. She backed away. It seemed there were worse dangers than Slipper in the Forest Beneath.
She made her way around the clearing. When she reached the real path she turned and the man nodded. ‘Stay on the path,’ he said.
‘Thank you,’ Rachel said.
*
THE SUN WAS SO BRIGHT she had to blink away tears. Rachel took another step and stopped. She did not remember the journey from the clearing to here. A heartbeat ago she had been in the clearing, deep in the Forest Beneath. It was as if she had arrived here with a single step. She thought of how close she had been to inadvertently taking the weirder way, wondered where else she might have gone with a single wrong step, and shivered.
The mighty ur-oaks of the Forest Beneath were no longer visible. Only the original trees, the wind-bent macrocarpa scratching the sky.
Morning was burning the dew from the grass. She could hear the buzzing of bees. A line of cows was being led away from the milking shed.
Rachel took a deep breath. The air was humid and smelled of grass, diesel, shit. As she breathed, she felt the memory of better air. As if she had been somewhere recently, some other, more real world.
‘There you are!’
Katherine St. John was striding towards her in a pair of old, dirt-encrusted jeans, a flannel shirt and a hat that looked like it had been snatched from a cricket umpire's head. There was nothing of the ethereal musician about her; she looked as if she'd spent her whole life on this farm, walking this dry grass under the scorching southern sun.
‘Wondered if you'd gone out for a walk. I love it first thing in the morning, when everything's new and the rest of the world hasn't woken up yet.’
‘I – yes,’ Rachel said, ‘thought I'd take a stroll.’ But the words felt wrong in her mouth. She remembered sunrise striking the wall of the bedroom. She had dressed and decided to see the farm. She remembered, but there was something else, as if the memory stood in front of something else, blocking it from view. She turned and looked again at the pitiful stand of trees she had thought of as the forest for some reason. There couldn't have been more than ten of them and they looked so dry that they'd crumble in a strong wind. Hadn't there been something else, something—
‘I've got the kettle on,’ Katherine said. ‘Let's go back to the house.’
*
‘HAVE YOU GOT EVERYTHING you need?’ Katherine called from the kitchen.
Rachel blinked, lost in a waking dream. There had been a path, and an orange moon. ‘Sorry?’
‘Don't you head back to Auckland today? Or have I got the day wrong.’
Rachel pulled her phone from her pocket and checked the date. Friday. She'd spent a week on St. John's farm, although it didn't seem more than a couple of days. ‘No, you're right.’
Katherine placed her royal wedding commemorative tea set on the table.
The voicemail icon was flashing on her phone. Rachel couldn't imagine who had been trying to call her, or why she hadn't heard it.
Katherine finally finished fussing in the kitchen and sat down. ‘The garage called. Car's all ready to go. Tony will drop it over this morning. Was there anything else you wanted to discuss?’
Rachel struggled to remember what they'd spoken about the past few days. She remembered recording a few conversations. But had she captured anything really new? Did she have enough to put together a story? If not, it was too late to do anything about it now.
‘I think I've got everything, thanks.’
*
SHE WAS PACKED BY THE time Tony from the garage parked her rental in front of the house and refused any form of payment. ‘Don't worry,’ Katherine said, ‘It's all taken care of. Least I can do for the last remaining female rock reporter.’
Rachel had no answer.
When she'd loaded everything into the car, Katherine hugged her, an embrace that didn't seem to end. ‘It's been fun,’ Katherine said, when she finally let Rachel go. ‘It's been good to have someone else to talk to.’
Rachel didn't know how to respond. ‘Just doing my job.’
‘Well.’ Katherine looked like she was going to say something else, but didn't. The silence stretched.
Katherine waved in her rear-view mirror until the driveway curved around a stand of trees.
She smelled something when she stopped the car and got out to unhook the gate. She followed her nose. A dead possum was sitting on a fencepost, surrounded by flies. Rachel kicked the post and the possum tumbled off into the grass.
‘Little monkey,’ she said to herself as she climbed back into the car, then wondered why she'd said it.
She didn't remember the voicemail until she was checked in and waiting in the departure lounge. The most impatient passengers were already forming a line. Rachel accessed her inbox and joined them.
One message, two days ago, from Simon.
‘Don't know what you're doing out there, if this is the kind of research you're after. But short answer, no. The oldest oak trees in New Zealand are maybe a hundred years, tops. I don't know what you're seeing but they're definitely not oaks. Must be some kind of native, although I can't imagine which one. Get back here with my story and stop messing around with trees.’
The line was moving now, people shuffling forward on to the plane. She had no recollection of calling Simon at all. There was a fuzziness around the corner of her vision. Jetlagged for the whole trip. Some kind of record.
Rachel checked her bag again. The laptop was in there, and the KD-2, buried under a pile of cassette tapes. She'd work on the story during the flight, listening to her recordings in the darkened cabin while the rest of the passengers slept. She'd have a story for Simon by the time she reached Heathrow. He probably wouldn't be happy with it. Then again, he never was.
Rachel looked down at the land as the plane rose. The roads and buildings dwindled, until there was nothing but the green of the hills and the grey blue of the sea. She looked down until the plane hit the clouds and there was nothing to see but the falling night.
When she finally turned away from the window she was surprised to find tears on her cheeks.
*
ST. JOHN PRODUCED THE album herself from her New Zealand farm, teaching herself new instruments and how to drive the mixing desk in the process. ‘It was very important, I think, to do it all myself. These songs are close to me and I feel that I have a responsibility to present them as purely as I can. There's a journey I take when I'm putting them together. It's like ... It's like I'm walking in an ancient wood. And I can hear the songs there, almost as if the trees themselves are singing, I—’
She stops, smiles, shakes her head. ‘I'm being terribly indulgent.’ She sips her tea. ‘But I had to do it alone. Just me and my muse. He gets jealous when there are other people about.’
—From The Miracle Child Returns, again, an interview with Katherine St. John, Sounding, April 2014