Dale Bailey - In the Night Wood

So it began, their introduction to the fuel that love feeds upon: stories.

That night they shared their stories — the beginning of them, anyway, as they understood them then. They started at the surface as the best stories do. So they talked about their graduate studies (their gradual studies, he said, venturing a rare joke). They talked about their crummy apartments and their crummier cars. He talked about the pressure to publish. She talked about the Law Review.

And then, as the best stories do, they deepened.

They talked. She was an orphan, alone in the world. Her parents had died in a car accident three years ago. In a way, Charles was an orphan, too. Kit had hardly been a mother to him, and in his freshman year of college she’d moved to a commune in Nova Scotia. He hadn’t seen her since.

Dreams and aspirations, two cups of coffee, then three. They were both too wired to sleep, so they repaired to her apartment to talk some more. She checked his head to make sure he hadn’t injured himself when they’d collided, his lips brushed hers, and one thing led to another, as these things will.

Everything important that had ever happened to him had happened in libraries, Charles thought, drawing her down to him on the bed. Then he stopped thinking at all. They married six months later.

They lived happily ever after.

At midnight, by myriad ways and strange, through trees parted before her to direct her path, Laura crept down to look into the Mere of Souls, whence the Sylph had dispatched her. Of a time you could see things in the water, or so Laura had learned in the Sylph’s Tale, and she went to her knees, enamored of these mysteries. But no matter how she tilted her head or squinted her eyes, she could see nothing but clots of leaves rotting in the depths below.

Then the waters began to boil and the Genii of the Pool thrust his head above the surface. Weedy hair coiled around his face. His eyes were narrow and blue and cold. “What brings you to this place?” he said in tones thick with the thunder of distant waters.

Laura gathered up her courage and spoke, her voice quavering. “I was told in a Story once upon a time,” she said, “that you could see your Fate in the Pool if only you believed hard enough. And I believe very hard.”

“Some things are better left unseen,” the Genii rumbled, “and the Mere of Souls may lie.”

— CAEDMON HOLLOW, IN THE NIGHT WOOD

They hadn’t spoken for almost an hour — not since Harrogate, where he’d had some trouble with a roundabout and the solicitor’s car had vanished, eclipsed by traffic — when Charles Hayden caught his first glimpse of the Eorl Wood.

In the days prior to their departure from their home in Ransom, North Carolina, with its attendant griefs and sorrows, Charles had fooled himself into thinking that maybe, just maybe, things would be okay after all — that the quiet stranger who shared his home was the outward face of a new Erin, a sadder, wiser Erin, tempered, but no longer paralyzed, by knowledge of the myriad ways the world could betray you. He had fooled himself into believing that with enough time and effort, with enough patience, he might yet reach the core of warmth inside her. He had supposed that the core of warmth was still there.

Last night over dinner at the hotel, this pleasant illusion had crumbled around Charles. And over breakfast this morning with the solicitor — her name was Merrow, Ann Merrow — Erin had been pensive and morose. During the chaos at the roundabout, as Charles had whizzed around the circle in futility for the second time, Erin had roused herself long enough to point at one of the branching exits.

“I think it’s that one,” she’d said, and Charles had whipped the car across three lanes of traffic. He caught a flash of the sign mounted high above. Ripon and North Yorks , it read. Then a lorry blew by with an aggrieved blast of the horn, and he’d yanked his attention back to the road. There had been a time when a stunt like that would have elicited an impassioned orgy of outrage from Erin. Now, however, she barely blinked. Charles supposed she’d just as soon the truck had crushed the car like an aluminum can. If you got right down to it, he supposed he wouldn’t have much minded it himself.

Ahead, traffic cleared and the solicitor’s dusty blue Saab came into view. “Sorry,” Charles said, but Erin hadn’t replied. The last vestiges of Harrogate fell away in the rearview mirror and the alien Yorkshire terrain drew up around them, a rugged patchwork of hand-stacked stone walls, rolling pasturage, and narrow-windowed eighteenth-century farmhouses, the forbidding line of the moors looming always up behind them like the shoulders of sleeping giants, blanketed with earth.

It was a bleak prospect even on this clear April morning, and Charles found himself thinking of the Brontë children, tubercular and strange, more than halfway mired in fantasies wrested by sheer force of desperation from this unrelenting landscape, the remote Haworth parsonage and the churchyard before it, overcrowded with the dead. The present seemed to lie lightly on the land here, as though the narrow span of gray road, where the solicitor’s car hove momentarily into view at the crest of each new ridge, might simply melt away like a dusting of fresh snow, unveiling the bones of an older, sterner world.

That thought put him in mind of Caedmon Hollow and his own strange fantasy wrested from this same hostile terrain all those years ago — more than a century and a half now; Caedmon Hollow might almost have known the Brontës — and Charles felt a surge of excitement at the prospect of Hollow House awaiting them. In that moment of anticipation, he could almost forget Erin’s brooding silence, the trouble with Syrah Nagle, and — and the rest of it. He could almost forget it all.

Ahead, Merrow turned into a still more narrow road. It ran downhill between retaining walls of stacked stone for maybe half a mile. Then the road broadened, the walls drew away, and they were in civilization again, or what passed for it out here, anyway.

Suddenly they were in Yarrow. The village was old and steep, crowded into a rift between the hills. Merchants hugged the high street — a newsagent with a white cat drowsing in the front window; a pub, its lot crowded with the noon rush; a hardware store; and a florist (Petal Pushers, Charles noted with a humorless snort). At the far end of town before a crumbling stone house, Charles saw a sign reading Yarrow Historical Society. He made a mental note to come back and have a look at the place. They weren’t likely to have anything useful, but you could never say for sure.

He glanced at Erin, but if the change in scenery had made any impression on her, it didn’t show. Merrow made two quick turns, each road more narrow than the last. If they met an oncoming car, they would have to pull over to let it pass. Charles had the fleeting thought that in leaving Yarrow they had passed through the last outpost of the modern world.

The terrain here was sharper, more unwelcoming, the hills rising steeply on either side. The road wound through rugged outcroppings of stone and patches of wiry brush. Charles cracked the window and let the slipstream flow in, freighted with the scent of heather and flowers just coming into bloom, and cooler than it would have been back home.

Except this was home now, wasn’t it? Home and a fresh start. He glanced at Erin. She seemed to have dozed off. She’d tilted her head against the back of the seat and closed her eyes, and for a single heartbreaking moment, as the midmorning sunlight etched silver the line of her profile, she looked like the girl he had married nearly a decade ago. Then the car dipped into shadow, and the sorrow around her eyes and in the set of her lips sprang into relief.