Dale Bailey - In the Night Wood

Harper Voyager

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2019

Copyright © Dale Bailey 2018

Cover design by Andrew Davis © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2019

Cover images © Shutterstock.com

Frontispiece illustration © Andrew Davidson

Dale Bailey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008329167

Ebook Edition © September 2018 ISBN: 9780008329174

Version: 2019-08-30

For Pam and Sally

The specific mode of existence of man implies the need of his learning what happens, and above all what can happen, in the world around him and in his own interior world. That it is a matter of the structure of the human condition is shown, inter alia , by the existential necessity of listening to stories and fairy tales, even in the most tragic of circumstances.

— MIRCEA ELIADE, THE FORBIDDEN FOREST

Gretel began to cry and said,

“How are we to get out of the forest now?”

— THE BROTHERS GRIMM, “HANSEL AND GRETEL”

Contents

Cover

Frontispiece

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Once Upon a Time …

Prelude

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

I: Hollow House

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

II: Yarrow

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

III: In the Night Wood

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

About the Publisher

By the time the Moon arose and let down her golden skirts, Laura was sore afraid. In the pale light she stumbled through a ring of sinister yews into a glade where stood a single bearded oak, hoary and not unkind.

“I met you once in a dream,” she said.

“And I you in my long, arboreal sleep,” replied Grandfather Oak (for that was his name).

“Isn’t that odd?” Laura said to the tree.

“Not at all,” said Grandfather Oak, nodding sagely. “The Story is rich in coincidence.”

“What kind of Story is it?” asked Laura.

And just then the North Wind swept through the trees, and Grandfather Oak shivered all his branches and dropped down a curtain of golden leaves. “It is not a happy Story,” he said. “But so few Stories are.”

— CAEDMON HOLLOW, IN THE NIGHT WOOD

Hollow House came to them as such events befall orphans in tales, unexpectedly, and in the hour of their greatest need: salvation in the form of a long blue envelope shoved in among the day’s haul of pizza-delivery flyers, catalogs, and credit card solicitations. That’s how Charles would pitch it to Erin, anyway, sitting across from her in the night kitchen, with the envelope and its faintly exotic Royal Mail stamp lying on the table between them. Yet it felt to Charles Hayden like the culminating moment in some obscure chain of events that had been building, link by link, through all the thirty-six years of his life — through centuries even, though he could not have imagined that at the time.

Where do tales begin, after all?

Once upon a time.

In the months that followed, those words — and the stories they conjured up for him — would echo in Charles’s mind. Little Red Cap and Briar Rose and Hansel and Gretel, abandoned among the dark trees by their henpecked father and his wicked second wife. Charles would think of them most of all, footsore and afraid when at last they chanced upon a cottage made of gingerbread and spun sugar and stopped to feast upon it, little suspecting the witch who lurked within, ravenous with hungers of her own.

Once upon a time.

So tales begin, each alike in some desperate season. Yet how many other crises — starting points for altogether different tales — wait to unfold themselves in the rich loam of every story, like seeds germinating among the roots of a full-grown tree? How came that father to be so faithless? What made his wife so cruel? What brought that witch to those woods and imparted to her appetites so unsavory?

So many links in the chain of circumstance. So many stories inside stories, waiting to be told.

Once upon a time.

Once upon a time, at the wake for a grandfather he had never known in life, a boy named Charles Hayden, his mother’s only child, scrawny and bespectacled and always a little bit afraid, sought refuge in the library of the sprawling house his mother had grown up in. “The ancestral manse,” Kit (she was that kind of mother) had called it when she told him they’d be going there, and even at age eight he could detect the bitter edge in her voice. Charles had never seen anything like it — not just the house, but the library itself, a single room two or three times the size of the whole apartment he shared with Kit, furnished in dark, glossy wood and soft leather, and lined with books on every wall. His sneakers were silent on the plush rugs, and as he looked around, slack-jawed in wonder, the boisterous cries of his cousins on the lawn wafted dimly through the sun-shot Palladian windows.