Fitz hesitated to raise his eyes to the expanse of trunks before him; whereas normally he would have passed without a second thought by the wood, or stalked eagerly into it, today his nerves recoiled from it like an alien thing. Maybe it was the strange light of the coming storm. Behind every tree something unknown and invisible today, newly, stood concealed. Within every shadow sheltered some inscrutable and inarticulable fear. Fitz felt a dead weight rise along the top of his spine and creep up his neck. His arms dangled.
Don’t be stupid. Don’t be a baby.
He started to cross the little stretch of wood that lay between Mr Ahmadi’s garden and his own, between the friary’s sunken, ancient grounds and the patch of scrabble and vegetables that stretched behind his own cottage. It was at once the long way round and a shortcut, at once familiar and the border of something strange and menacing.
He hadn’t taken ten steps when it struck him, more forcefully than before, that something was wrong. The voice of the wind still roaring in the garden seemed, in the wood, instead muted and green. At this time of the year, in this weather, no birds sang. He expected the deep quiet and, at a distance, the lean and moan of the taller trees. What he didn’t expect – he couldn’t put his finger on it for a moment –
Whispering.
Ahead, just past the gate to his own garden, a drystone wall ran round a little churchyard attached to a ruined chapel. Once, the chapel had served the family in the Old Friary where Mr Ahmadi now lived, and the toppled headstones that crowded the yard recorded what Fitz had always assumed were their names. Illegible now and crusted with lichens, anonymous and neglected, the stones were the closest thing Fitz had to old friends. Tottering between them was one of his earliest memories, and there were few days, save in the worst of winter, when he didn’t stand for a minute or two among them, or watch them from his window, among the yew trees that now dwarfed and overgrew the derelict building. Tonight he ought to have stopped at his own gate and gone inside. He should have shut it behind him and gone right into the house. Instead he found himself in the churchyard, his hands on a cold plinth of stone, the collapsing weight of the wall standing between him and the whispering woods beyond.
The evening’s strangeness scared him, and yet he couldn’t quite give it up.
The blood strained tight in Fitz’s skin like a fist in a glove. He almost expected to see faces peering from behind, or within, the wood’s shadowy trunks. He couldn’t tear his own stare from them. Of course there was nothing – just the familiar moss-crusted texture of the trees, the bark here grey, there brown, coated in the shadow of high leaves, as far as the eye could see. He drew a deep breath, lifting his lungs till they ached against his ribs. With the cool stone under his hand, he thought perhaps he had imagined the noise, that it was just some unusual effect of the storm blowing overhead.
But there it was again.
Whispering syllables, dusk-words, a soft sibilance between shifting leaves.
For the second time that evening, terror raced over the little hairs that velveted his taut skin. There were too many trees before him, too many places where those voices might be hiding. He suspected one, then all of them. His eyes leaped erratically across the scene like a drop of water crazing on a hot pan. His heart, his whole chest, cramped, squeezing the wind out of him. The whispers crawled on his neck. They worked towards his ears.
‘Boy.’
Fitz had been watching the woods, his back to the cottage. Now he spun round, pressing his legs flat against the tombstone, and almost throwing his free hand before his face – throwing it down against his side, instead.
The man before him was a little taller than he was, a little heavier but not much, grizzled. His short hair and neat corduroy jacket gave him an air too dapper for the woods. His left hand rested on the silver head of an ebony cane.
‘Where is your mother, boy?’
‘Inside,’ Fitz answered. His eyes darted at the cottage, at its windows. ‘Inside the house.’ The words stole from him and were gone before he could stop them.
The man peered at him, as if in disbelief. ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ he asked. His voice was insistent, near a sneer.
The wind that gusted along the hedge and through the churchyard swept also through Fitz. He opened his mouth to answer, but had nothing to say. The backs of his legs, stiff against the headstone, wanted to run, but he had almost trapped himself between the chapel and the stone wall, and when he glanced towards the trees the man’s cane shot out, warding him back.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘what’s this you are holding so tight?’
With his cane he prodded at Fitz’s leg, forcing him to move towards the corner of the chapel wall.
Fitz saw that he had been gripping the headstone hard enough that his fingers, cold in the wind, ached as he released them. It was the only new stone in the yard. He had never looked at it.
The man scanned the inscription. ‘Another relation of yours, I suppose.’ He lurched forward and grabbed Fitz by the arm.
Paralysed but for a shaking in the back of his skull, Fitz watched the man’s chin as the words hissed out of him.
‘I’m a friend,’ he said. ‘I expect we’ll meet again later.’
The pain in Fitz’s arm had still not subsided as he watched the man – who certainly did not seem like a friend – disappear round the hedge the same way, five minutes earlier, he himself had come.
All the tension in his body abruptly recoiled
