Stephen Baxter: The Martian in the Wood

She pondered this hypothesis. “And the Neanderthals and the unicorns, the Ice Age images?”

Walter shrugged. “It dreams of its own cold world. Perhaps that is stirring deep old memories of our own. Of the ice, of the lost beasts alongside which we ourselves evolved: these dreams are your brother’s, and yours, not the Martian’s. Or perhaps there are greater minds at play. Consider the Wood itself: the ancient trees never cut nor coppiced, their raddled trunks caked with moss and parasitic plants, and with that gnarling and twisting that comes only with great age. The whole somehow integrated, as if the trees were nerve cells in some hideous brain of wood and moss and vegetation. A mind , restless, oppressive, resentful! Or perhaps the truth is stranger still.

“Look – I believe that our analysis of the Martians is sometimes distracted by the obvious, by technology we can recognise if not resist. The Martians are not of this world, you know. They come from a place where things are not as they are here . And perhaps their consciousness, muddled with ours, is having effects that are stranger, and stronger, than we think.”

“Well, if it is so, what must we do?”

He smiled, a distorted expression on that heat-damaged face. “Good question, and to the point. There are times when life reduces to its essentials. I spent much of the Martian War trying to find my wife – or that’s what I thought I was doing. I got rather muddled on the way…”

Zena thought that over. “We must go back to the Wood and save my brother.”

“Exactly! I suggest we start first thing in the morning.”

Zena offered Walter the use of her parents’ bedroom, by far the most comfortable in the Lodge, but not yet cleared. Considerately he turned down the offer, and settled for a much smaller room, once a servant’s, but warm enough.

In the morning Pierce prepared an extensive breakfast of porridge, toast, eggs, bacon, cold meat, fruit juices, coffee. Walter tucked in with a vigour that surprised Zena. But only months before he had spent many days on the run from the Martians, and he would never forget the experience of raw hunger; he always filled his belly when he got the chance.

And they spoke of forests.

“Our fascination with the woods runs deep,” he said. “And our fear. Odd when you think that our most distant forebears may have emerged from the forests of Africa, and our closest extant cousins – according to Darwin, I mean the African apes – still live there. Gilgamesh, you know, faced the challenge of the Cedar Forest. The Caesars’ legions came to grief in the German forest, and always feared it. Julius claimed unicorns lived there! Perhaps he saw a hold-out of your elasmotheriums, do you think? And folk tales abound with forests; they are places of ogres and witches and transformations and a slipperiness about time and space.”

“But no Martians.”

He smiled. “Not until now. Perhaps we are witnessing the birth of a new mythos. Are you going to have any more of that ham?”

They prepared for the hike. Walter accepted Zena’s pressing to take heavy boots, a waterproof coat, hat and walking stick that had belonged to her father. Pierce made up light packs of food, water, bits of medicinal kit, and such practicalities as a torch and even an old flare gun.

Walter had no weapon. I don’t believe he ever used a gun in his life. When Zena took one of her father’s hunting rifles from the cupboard, and a packet of shells, Walter made no comment.

Thus they set off.

Compared to her previous hike, they made slow progress, even along the trail to Holmburgh Wood. From the beginning Walter, bearing his war injuries, leaned heavily on his stick, and soon grew short of breath. Zena was already mildly anxious about the shortness of the late winter day. But she told herself to be patient; perhaps, in the heart of the Wood, it wasn’t winter at all.

Walter remarked on the miserable condition of the vegetation, even given that it was midwinter: the dead grass, the spavined bushes, the absence of birds and other creatures. He speculated on nitrogen deficiency. “Harbinger of the Pasteur Institute has studied atmospheric changes associated with the Martians and their rampantly colonising red weed. Another mystery that will take years to resolve!”

The boundary of the Wood itself, the black-trunked trees thrusting out of the ground like the bars of a cage, seemed still more daunting, more excluding even than before. Walter poked at the trunks with his stick, and made no comment as Zena led him around the boundary to the place where she had entered before. Her paint splashes were still visible, though overgrown with moss and even flaps of new bark.

They pushed into the Wood. The daylight, for what it was worth, was shut out. Walter tripped on roots, and lost his footing when his boots sank into deep banks of moss and rot. But he used a battery torch to light his way, and learned to poke with his stick at uncertain ground before risking it. Their conversation, subdued, was limited to the practical, as they helped each other find a way through, and they made slow but steady progress.

At first, at least, nothing seemed to have changed. Zena saw no sign that her brother had been this way recently, or anybody else for that matter. But she found her markers of yellow paint, even if some of them had weathered more than she would have expected – almost as if the Wood were resisting her attempt to blaze a trail through it. She had brought the paint pot; she renewed the marks with defiant splashes of her brush.

Walter watched her. “I envy your determination, and clarity of thought. I myself feel – disoriented. It is as if the very light shifts around us, the shadows, turning me about. And the smells, of rot and blood, even of burning…”

“The Wood doesn’t want us here.”

“No, indeed! But it is going to have to put up with us. Lead on, Miss Gardner.”

At last they came to a place she thought she recognised. She held up her hand to halt Walter, and peered ahead, the shotgun heavy on her back. “Something is different.”

“How?”

“This is where I came upon snow, last time.”

Walter grunted, and pushed forward beside her, inspecting the ground. “You’re sure?”

“I’ve been following my paint marks. I remember ducking under this branch, I remember it being like an archway, and struggling with the sudden drifts.”

“No sign of snow now. Or slush, or any sign it was here recently.” With his stick, he probed at the ground. “But plenty of this stuff.” He lifted fronds of wilted vegetable matter, raised on the end of his stick. The fronds were blood dark and swollen with vesicles, like blisters. “Have you seen it before? The red weed, we called it. It was all over the countryside in Surrey and London, especially the water courses.”

“Where the Martians went.”

“That’s it. And died out as they did, presumably from earthly infections.”

“It’s not long since I was here. Even if the snow cleared, could it have spread so quickly, grown so thick?”

“It’s possible. It grew mighty fast in the few days it had last year, before the blight got it. But it’s also possible that what you saw before, the snow banks, was just as valid a perception as this, the red weed. Even if the two are entirely different phenomena.” He smiled, rueful. “In my attempts to chronicle the Martian incursion, in the fragments I have published so far – articles mostly for the American journals – I have been described as an ‘unreliable narrator’. Call me an honest one, at least, even if I have had difficulty in digesting my experiences. But in here , you see, I think it’s reality that may be unreliable. Not your memory.” He shook the fronds off his stick, and pointed ahead. “We should go on. I think I see light ahead. As if the forest is ending. Do you remember –”