Stephen Baxter: The Martian in the Wood

She walked the perimeter – nine miles or thereabouts, it took her most of a short October day. The only sound she heard was the cry of the crows overhead, wheeling against that habitually dark sky – that and her own breathing, her uncertain footsteps. She saw no living animal, and no sign of the tenants’ lost sheep.

But, as she walked, she saw the dead.

Small animals: a fox was the largest, squirrels and stoats, even a badger. They were hung up from the low branches, suspended by bits of tendon ripped from their hind legs, so it appeared. Each of them with a crudely gashed throat; each of them apparently bled out. She did not touch these gruesome relics. When she looked deeper into the Wood, she thought she could see branches in the dense interior similarly adorned, as if with hideous fruit.

And, as she approached the end of her circuit, she thought she saw movement. A human figure. Just a shadow, deep in the Wood, somehow running despite the density of the growth.

Without thinking she pushed into the Wood herself, pressing between the crowding trees, or trying to. She soon ran into a veritable wall of tangled branches and densely growing trunks, and clinging debris under her feet. It felt, she would tell Walter, as if the Wood was deliberately excluding her. Pushing back.

She called: “Nathan! Nathan, it’s me, Zena. Zee-zee! What are you doing in there, Nathan? Come home… Pierce has your meal ready whenever you come back. Cold meat, as you like it…”

Perhaps it was that word “meat” that hooked him. She thought the running figure hesitated, just as it was on the verge of disappearing in the shadows. And it, he, looked back. A human face, pale, like a lantern in the wooded dark. Was it Nathan’s? The eyes seemed bright, restless. But then he – if it was Nathan, if anything was there at all, and not just a trick of the light or her own imagination – turned away, and ran on, and was lost.

In November the weather stayed dry, with little rain and certainly no snow, but was oppressively cold. Pierce and Zena took to huddling by the big fire in the old family room, partitioned off long ago by Zena’s father to give his wife and children somewhere cosy, in a house centuries old that could “leak like a sieve” in the wind.

Nathan came back just once that month.

He stayed only a few hours, at the end of an afternoon that was already darkling. He ate in the kitchen, almost wordless, and Pierce and Zena had to bring him his customary requirements: a change of clothes to replace jacket and shirt and trousers that were all but worn out, packs of food and medicines. He would not let Zena cut his hair this time, or his beard; the hair had grown out rough, shaggy, thick black. Again she found disturbing streaks of blood on his discarded clothes. Nathan himself seemed still more drawn, thin, pale, his eyes vivid and bloodshot in a face that was white under the dirt and the animal blood.

He was gone before the night closed in.

At the beginning of December there was a new crisis in the unhappy little community of Holmburgh, when Mervyn Chapman went missing.

Mervyn, nineteen years old, tall, gangly, not very strong, was the eldest son of one of the tenant farmers. Rab Chapman, the father, was still, silent, grave, as the police were called and the area was searched, the buildings and the fields. Not a trace was found.

The police penetrated the Wood itself. Zena watched them go in with dogs and truncheons and lanterns and torches, vivid sparks in a dull noon, swallowed by the trees. They were in there for hours, and repeated the exercise the next day. The constables emerged looking baffled if not fearful.

Once Zena overheard a detective inspector growl with frustration at the contradictory tangles that emerged when his men tried to map the routes they had taken in the Wood. She glimpsed these maps herself, and made discreet copies from memory. (Later she would show these sketches to Walter – and later than that he would compare them to mysterious sigils seen by the astronomers on Mars, and in the clouds of Venus. But that is another story.)

Two days of searching yielded nothing, not a sign of Mervyn or indeed of Nathan. The police offered possible explanations. Perhaps Mervyn had simply run away, as farmers’ children will often do. Perhaps he was in Brighton or London, looking for work or love or just excitement. If he was lying rotting in Holmburgh Wood, he wasn’t to be found.

The police presence wound down.

The farmers organised themselves into patrols; they would go out two at a time, armed with shotguns, and march around the perimeter of the wood. Children were kept indoors. Animals were carefully watched.

A few days before Christmas, Nathan came back to the Lodge.

This time he would not enter at all, though Zena tried to coax him with food.

On a December afternoon, then, already darkling at four, Nathan sat cross-legged in the driveway before the main entrance, and ripped apart cold meat with fingers like claws, stuffing it steadily in his mouth. His movements were rapid, furtive, and his eyes were watchful, apparently unblinking. He was so pale.

Pierce kept a discreet watch, intending to deflect any of the farmers who might come this way. Still it remained unspoken, but many on the estate clearly blamed “the loon out of the Lodge” for what had become of Mervyn, and the stolen animals.

“Let me look after you,” Zena said at last. “Me and Pierce. Just like before. You know it’s what they would want.”

He stared at her. “Who?”

“Mum and Dad, of course. Come home. For them, if not for me.” Under the strain of yet another confrontation, her concern easily mutated to irritation. “Or is that why you’re running away? Is this your way of dealing with the fact that they died? How easy is it for me, do you think, stuck here?”

Still he didn’t reply, though his head jerked this way and that, as if he was scouting for predators.

“Night after night you must sleep in the rough. What do you do, heap up leaves? I remember when we were small, and you used to sneak out at night… But it’s December, Nathan. It’s so cold.”

He laughed, around a mouthful of torn meat. “Not so cold as in there. Not so cold as it is for them . And they don’t mind.”

She was baffled. “Who’s them , Nathan? Are there others? Are you meeting somebody?”

He laughed again, but would not reply.

“It’s nearly Christmas. Why not come in just for the season? Maybe until after the New Year. We could make the tree. Get the decorations down from the loft –”

He dumped his food, stood up with one lithe movement, grabbed his goods, and was gone, just like that.

But this time Zena was prepared.

She and Pierce had the routine ready. She was already wearing outdoor clothes, a heavy sweater and trousers. Now she grabbed her hooded leather coat, and forced her feet into her stoutest boots. Meanwhile Pierce brought out the pack she had been checking every day, with battery torch, whistle, small medical pack, and food and water bottles replaced daily – and a small pot of bright yellow paint. She was ready to go in a couple of minutes.

As she loaded the pack on her back, Nathan was still in sight, hurrying along the track towards the Wood.

“I ’ope nobody takes a pot-shot at ’im,” Pierce murmured.

“I hope so too, Pierce. And indeed, I hope nobody lines me up either.”

Pierce faced her, grave, more like an uncle than a butler, she thought. “You sure about this, Miss?”

“What else can we do, Pierce? The Chapman boy was the final straw. We have to know .”

“It’s gettin’ dark.”