“What do you remember about the commune?”
He sniffed and nodded, leaning back in his chair. “A lot of noise, they made a lot of noise, and they got up to some strange things in the woods. Some of it would have turned my father’s hair white, but then we live in a different age now, don’t we? Quite different.” He looked toward the window, sunlight shining off of his scalp. “I don’t pretend I understood much of it, but I would help them where I could. Brought them groceries, sometimes, taught them which mushrooms were safe to eat.” He smiled. “Although some of them were interested in the less-than-safe varieties, if you get what I mean.”
He put the tea cup down, and for the first time Heather noticed that there were dark reddish-brown rings under his finger nails, as if he’d been digging in the dirt. Without really knowing why, she looked back toward the dog, and wasn’t surprised to see that it was staring at her, brown eyes luminous in a shaft of sunlight.
“Did you get to know them well?” asked Heather. “The young people, I mean? My mum knows a lady called Pamela who said she stayed out here for a time—did you know her at all?” Outside, the sun passed behind some clouds, and the sunny living room grew dimmer. Something about that made her feel uneasy. The lawn through the window looked suddenly dreary, and the woods at the bottom seemed to promise horrors.
“Lots of young people came here, looking to get away from their parents and live more interesting, freer lives. They wanted to know the country, to live closer to the wild, but most of them found they didn’t like it much when the winter came, and it got cold. They started to miss their parents’ central heating.” Bert smiled again, and it pinched his eyes into networks of wrinkles. “Some were committed though. A few really loved this land. Gave themselves to it. Can’t remember individual names though, I’m afraid.” He tapped the side of his head. “Not as sprightly up here as I was, more’s the pity.”
“It sounds like you spent quite a lot of time there,” said Nikki.
“I just helped them, is all. Can’t pretend I understood it, what they were up to,” said Bert, all the decisiveness leaking from his voice. Suddenly Heather felt guilty, seeing Bert as he was: a very elderly man, living alone in an isolated house.
“Anything else you can tell us about the area?”
He brightened at that. “Oh yes, there’s lots of history around here.” He stood up, almost looming over them, and Heather realized that before his back started to bend him in two he had been very tall. He shuffled over to a nearby cabinet and picked up some papers, which he brought back over to the coffee table. Unlike the slick pamphlets from the spa, these were printed in black and white, and on cheap paper.
“A civil war battle, a mile or so down the road.” Bert picked up one of the leaflets and passed it to Heather. There was a drawing of a Roundhead soldier on the front, clearly photocopied from some history book. “An especially bloody one, apparently. There’s nothing to see there now, of course, but you could always have a look there, soak up the atmosphere. Course, local legend says its haunted.”
“Haunted?” asked Nikki.
Bert smiled, as if amused at the ludicrousness of it all. “Go there on a moonless night and you’ll hear the sounds of battle. There’s lots of stuff like that up here, you’ll find. The lady in white who haunts the back roads, and the barghest that stalks the fields and the lanes, all the lonely places.”
“Barghest?” Heather took a sip of her tea. It had an unpleasantly grassy flavor. “What’s that?”
“It’s a word for a phantom dog,” said Bert. “You get versions of the legend all over the country. Black Shuck, Gyrtrash, Padfoot. Demonic hounds. Very popular bit of British folklore, that. Blazing eyes and slathering jaws.” He chuckled warmly.
Heather felt another tingle of unease, thinking of her mother’s suicide note: monsters in the wood. The old man was poking through the leaflets again, apparently intent on finding something. Despite the tea, she felt cold, and she realized that she didn’t like Bert. She didn’t like him at all, yet she couldn’t have said why. He nodded as he found what he was after, and passed Nikki a photograph. It showed a dense wood in spring, full of golden early morning light and dusted with bluebells.
“It’s beautiful,” said Nikki. Bert nodded seriously.
“These woods—the Fiddler’s Woods, which you would have walked through a small section of to get to my house—are ancient woods. Did you know that?”
“Aren’t all woods pretty old?” said Heather.
“Oh no,” Bert leaned back in his chair, his hands on the tops of his legs and his elbows pointing out, as though he were about to give them a painful estimate on an MOT. He sucked air in through his yellow teeth and shook his head. “Oh no. Trees were planted, you see, forests have been planned. But ancient woodland has been here a very long time. Longer than many of us have been here.” He shot a quick look at Nikki, and Heather stiffened, but he didn’t elaborate. “Ancient woodlands are forests that existed before 1600. If they were around before 1600, then it’s likely no one planted them—that they grew here, naturally. That they have always been a part of the landscape.” He leaned forward and tapped the photo with a slightly overlong
