Stephen Baxter: The Martian in the Wood

Nathan, it seemed, had always been rather duller in personality. A year younger than Zena, he had followed his parents to London where he had made brief forays into the world of high finance – clearly the parents had hoped he would follow in their footsteps – but he had soon returned home. He had always been an outdoors type, even as a boy. Now he tried out modern agricultural methods on the estate, to the bemusement of tenant farmers twice his age. Yet he was a romantic too, with his head turned by accounts of the great British explorers of decades past. As a boy, Zena would recall, he had played at being James Cook or Robert Falcon Scott, bravely penetrating darkest Holmburgh Wood. But he had never gone deep in there – not then.

The house itself had been shut up since the War. The family had engaged two servants, a butler and a maid. When the Martians landed in Surrey the maid had decanted to her own family in Cornwall, and Zena could not blame her for that. The man, Pierce, had volunteered for military service in the few desperate days of the War, when the meagre British Army had taken such a battering in Surrey and London, and in the provinces there had been a hasty recruitment drive. “But the war was over afore I was fitted out in the khaki, Miss,” he told her. “And so I come ’ome.” He was a burly, fatherly local man who had been with the family many years; Zena was glad to see him, and waved away his apologies for the few weeks of neglect the house had suffered.

Of her brother, Nathan, there was little trace.

He was evidently in residence, in theory if not in practice. When she ventured into the room that had been his since boyhood, she found a few clothes scattered on the bed and on the floor – rough working clothes, his city suits hung disregarded in the wardrobe – and a few enigmatic scribbles, maps and notes she could barely read. Pierce said Nathan had been away “in that Wood” for a couple of days and nights, and it wasn’t the first such expedition he had made, the man reported with unstated disapproval.

So Zena moved back into her home. She helped Pierce with getting the house in order again, and visited the tenant farmers, and made trips to the village to collect post and newspapers – those services had recovered quickly after the War, as everybody knows. She worked only slowly through correspondence relating to her parents, and the formalities regarding their deaths and legacy. There was, as Pierce reassured her in her darker moments, “no rush about them things”.

On the fourth day, Nathan showed up.

He came on foot, out of the Wood, along the trail to the house.

This was about four in the afternoon. But in what seemed to be a well-rehearsed ritual, when he saw Nathan approach, Pierce put out a kind of lunch, of cold meat, bread, fruit, red wine and chilled water, on a picnic table.

Zena ran out to meet Nathan. This was, after all, the first family member she had seen since before the War. They embraced – she was tearful, she would tell Walter – and they spoke briefly of their parents.

But Nathan was dry-eyed, and seemed distracted, even in such a moment. His clothes, a rough jacket and shirt and workman’s trousers, were grimy, scuffed. He was unshaven and smelled of damp and mould; he had been out in the Wood for some days. She thought there was dried blood on his clothes, his hands, even streaked on his face. Around his mouth. He seemed gaunt, pale – not from simple hunger, it seemed to her, more as if he was in the early stages of some wasting illness. And even as they spoke of their parents he kept glancing back at the Wood, as if he longed to return.

But he sat down. “God,” he said, tearing off handfuls of cold ham. “Hunting for your grub is harder work than you think. I’m dying for a bit of meat.”

For Zena a kind of deep relief to have him home warred with irritation. “You wouldn’t be cramming your face like that if Mother and Father were still here.”

“Perhaps not,” he said. “Sorry. But if the Martians were still here we’d all be eating like this. Stuffing ourselves when we got the chance. Feeding off scraps, or what we could hunt. Those of us who survived.”

“But the Martians aren’t still here,” Zena said.

He didn’t reply to that.

“What are you up to in that Wood, Nathan? Playing at Speke seeking the source of the Nile, as when we were children?”

He snorted. “ You never played. But I am searching for – something.”

“Searching?” A sibling’s natural scepticism cut in. “The Wood is only, what, three miles across? This is Sussex, not Poland. How long do you need to search such a scrap?”

“A scrap? If you say so.”

“What something do you seek, then?”

He eyed her, and Pierce. “Neither of you were here to see it. You’ll have to take my word.”

“Your word about what?”

As he spoke, he continued to eat and drink. “You know I was here, on the estate, when the Martians landed in Surrey. On my own, after Pierce and Mary left. I thought I should stay to support the tenants, and in case you, or Mum and Dad, came home. Of course, nobody knew what was going on, once the telegraph wires were cut and the newspapers stopped. A very scary few days, that was. But I stuck it out. A few times I thought I heard guns, saw the flashes of weapons. But it’s been a stormy summer.”

“That’s true enough.”

“And then …”

With his usual forensic care, Walter would date what Nathan next described to the day of the Martian opposition itself: July 6. That was presumably a coincidence – but it was probably no coincidence that this was the day after Walter himself discovered the Martians in London slain by infection.

And Walter immediately knew that Nathan’s account had some plausibility. Ten Martian cylinders fell on Surrey and London in the First War, each bearing five Martians and five fighting-machines. After the War, of this deadly cargo, forty-seven Martians were accounted for (plus one infant, apparently budded on Earth, dead as the rest), and only forty-eight of their great tripods.

What, then, of the rest?

“There was a storm,” Nathan said. “Another one. In the late afternoon it got black as night, I’ll swear. I was alone in the house, watching the lightning dance over the land. Dance – yes, that’s the word. And in that uncertain illumination, I was upstairs looking out of the master bedroom over the Wood, and I thought I saw …”

“Yes?”

“Movement. Something standing over the Wood. Like a towering skeleton, I thought, all bones and joints. Death, come to Holmburgh.

“Lightning struck it – or maybe it summoned the lightning from the sky. And it fell, crumpled, toppled.

“There was a kind of explosion. It seemed to blast straight up, and I saw what looked like branches and trunks, wheeling in the air. You’d think the whole Wood would catch fire, but no, it died away quick.”

Pierce put in, “I’m told a powerful enough bomb can be like that, Miss. It sort of blows out its own fire.”

“But then the lightning came again, smashing down on – well, whatever it was that had fallen in the Wood. Again and again.”

“And that’s what you have been searching for.”

“Wouldn’t you? Actually, no, you probably wouldn’t.”

She ignored that. “But again, Nathan – why haven’t you found it yet? The Wood is, what, six, seven square miles? And if this object is as big as you describe, and there were multiple lightning strikes –”

“It’s not as simple as that,” he said. He glanced at the descending sun. “Too late.”

“For what?”

“To go back out again today.”