Nicola Barker - Darkmans

He’d been especially moved (he remembered) by the plight of the Wood Anemones, which — like the plainer, smarter sister in a Brontë novel — had been gradually shoved (by their more popular sibling) into the wood’s inhospitable outer margins, where they clung on, tenaciously, seeming to positively thrive in the poor soil and dappled shade there. They were such fragile plants, so plain and sweet and tender…He smiled, fondly. But that was spring — his smile rapidly dissipated — and this was winter.

Once he’d left Elen–

Elen—

No…

Stop.

— he’d driven — his breath still irregular — along the A268, took a left at Two Hoven’s Farm and pulled on to Bixley Lane. It was ludicrously dark here and so unimaginably wet that he felt like he was ploughing though a vicious jar of black Quink.

He changed down a gear as he headed past the old saw mill and a couple of small cottages, then put his lights on bright as he drew beyond. The woods crowded ever closer, glowering down at him, encroaching.

He didn’t want to stop, but he took an old Landrover in a small layby–

Abandoned?

Dumped

— as a signpost (a pointer) and parked up close to it, in the hope of shading his bike (in its lee) from the worst of the weather.

He was quite wet already (tiny rivulets of water trickling down his back). His scarf was damp. He wore a woolly hat (which he’d hurriedly yanked from his rucksack after removing his helmet) and his thick, leather biking gloves. He had a compass — hung on a black cord around his neck — which he quickly inspected. He tried to pull out the map, but it was tipping down and the wind howled, so he thought better of it.

He was wearing solid boots (biking boots) but this didn’t equip him for the voluminous puddles and the sticky expanses of mud on the initial track. It was a wide track. A good track, really, all things considered. He had a torch. Without a torch any kind of progress would’ve been totally unfeasible.

He trudged into the darkness, calling out, woodenly, at ten-second intervals.

‘Dory?’

He felt strange— surreal —as if this wasn’t actually a real search, just a pretend search, a search in a film, perhaps, which had already been carefully scripted to fail.

‘ Dory? ’ he called. ‘Isidore?’

Two minutes in and he was drenched. He felt hopeless.

‘Dory?’

After five minutes, he entered the pine forest. The weather wasn’t nearly so extreme here and the ground was softer underfoot. The soles of his boots were cushioned by rotting ferns, old moss and pine needles which stuck to the mud he’d already accumulated until soon his feet were like two, huge, weighted blocks.

He stopped for a moment, out of breath, closed his eyes and tried to inhale the forest. He sniffed (as if desperate to reactivate his storm-battered senses, his curiously fragile sense of self), but the only thing to enter his nostrils was water. Water from the perpetual drip on the tip of his nose. He coughed.

He moved doggedly onward. Soon the wide track fractured into a dozen much smaller paths. He inspected the compass, shivering, then took a bold step forward and almost fell. A tendril of Bramble had hooked on to the sleeve of his coat. He pulled it off, cursing, but as he pulled he noticed something — a piece of cloth. He reached out for it, unhooked it and drew it closer to his face. He grimaced–

Boxer shorts…

He wrung them out and shoved them (grimacing, fastidiously) into his pocket.

‘Dory?’

He felt overwrought. He felt too old to be heroic. Too old to be brave and dependable. Too old .

He tried to look around him, to focus, but his glasses were streaming. ‘Dory? Are you there?’

Then, quite out of the blue — with almost no warning — his hackles rose. It was entirely unconscious — unwitting— automatic .

‘ Dory? ’ he pivoted on his heel. ‘Is that you?’

He lifted his torch from ground-level, into the rain-soaked black, then gasped, stepping back, almost tripping.

Behind him–7 feet away, at best — stood a stag. A giant stag. ‘Holy Mary,’ he said.

The stag gazed at him, blankly. It seemed dazed. It was an old one. Its horns were broken. Its pelt was thick in certain places (the shoulders, the rump), but intensely threadbare in others.

‘Holy Mary,’ he repeated, panicked, feeling the beat of his heart, almost entering his own heartbeat (through a funnel, a dark funnel, through his…his head ? Where? His ear ?) and then suddenly — an entirely different sensation (and yet the same , somehow) — he felt the beat of the stag’s heart, he felt himself crushed up against it, against this bold and extraordinary counter -beat — he felt the stag’s ears pricking up, turning towards him, he felt himself sucked in — the two beats merging and becoming one, pumping in tandem — charging on, careering on, in a riotous, shuddering gallop, twice as strong, twice as powerful — the same beat, the same breath, the same…

He took a second, blind step back, then a third, his boot hitting a tree trunk. He tried to push himself up against the tree, to become the tree (as he’d become the stag) but his rucksack blocked his body.

The stag glanced over its shoulder, away from him, distractedly. He felt the individual bones rippling in its neck.

He could still feel its heart, but softer now. The flare of its nostril…‘Heart,’ he thought, then, ‘hart. Hart …’

He scowled–

No.

‘ Dory! ’ he yelled, swinging the torch around.

‘Dory?!’

He returned the blaze of the torch to the deer, but the deer was disappearing into the darkness, sinking into the darkness, being engulfed by the squall…Its beat gradually grew softer.

‘ Dory! ’ he yelled again, and as he yelled something hit him, square on the head.

He froze for a second, blinking, terrified, then he laughed — a cone, a pine cone! He took a small step forward, still laughing, searching for the cone with his torch, and as he searched — still chuckling, oddly engrossed, childishly engrossed in the search — a large, heavy branch came crashing down on to his back.

‘I had three visions,’ he told her, a little later on that evening (as she swallowed her pre-lights-out medication).

‘Yeah,’ she murmured, boredly. ‘You already said …’

‘In the first,’ he continued (refusing to be put off), ‘a man is standing next to a house. Everything seems fine. And then the house simply collapses. Totally collapses. But it’s like in that old Buster Keaton gag — that black and white short — where the house falls around him but the man remains standing, apparently unhurt, in the middle of all this mess and chaos…’

‘Hmmn. Fascinatin’ ,’ she said, picking up her phone and sending a quick text.

Nite MumXX

‘In the second vision I saw a sheep leading its lambs to slaughter. Or if it wasn’t a sheep it was a duck, or…or some generic creature…Animals aren’t really my bag …But the kind of animal it was doesn’t really matter — it was a symbolic image, a metaphor …’

‘’Course it was.’

‘And in the third I saw a boy awaken from a long, deep sleep. He sits up. He looks around. He speaks. He says two words, very clearly…’

‘Oh yeah? An’ what’s he say , Rev?’ she asked, idly.

‘I’m not sure. I don’t remember.’

‘Great.’