What They Find in the Woods: Dark Minds Novella 2 Read online

  We talked over the dining table about our relative days, me referring to an interminable staff meeting before quickly glossing over the usual aspects of modern academia: student attendance monitoring, lecture preparation, project supervision. Then she discussed challenges she’d experienced in terms of plot development in the latest of a series of books involving the same character, one Mary Chesterton, who, in only my private opinion, was as detached from the messy real world as my meal was from a restaurant prepared one. But as a decent number of readers enjoyed her amorous adventures, who was I to judge? Demurely sexy Mary might not earn enough to free me from the shackles of fulltime employment – I’d hit forty-three last birthday, while Rose was five years younger – but I genuinely liked to see my wife content, all her creative urges fulfilled, and the traditional balance of the household maintained.

  Later, after retreating from our small dining room to the only slightly larger lounge, we watched some popular TV show, a duplication of, or rather a novel twist on, something showing on the other side, and the other side, and the other side. I calmly sipped my wine, and when Rose got close enough on the couch, she laid her upper body across my lap, encouraging me to stroke her hair as I often did. In the event, I used just one arm and then, after draining the last of the wine, set my glass quietly aside on the coffee table next to me, before slipping my mobile phone from one trouser pocket.

  I don’t want to give the impression that I was addicted to my work. That wasn’t true at all. But I simply had to check for email regularly because, without this routine task, I’d be confronted with over a hundred messages the morning after. Indeed, this was another part of the job that had grown intolerable over the last ten years. I went far enough back at the university to remember days when lecturers had carried out no more onerous administration tasks than essay marking, while enjoying protected time to pursue their academic interests, maybe heading up research projects or taking fieldtrips to certain global destinations. But after so many recent education policy shakeups and funding cutbacks, the role was now little more than that of a teacher of adults, and the once august institution at which I worked was just a factory for churning out graduates within a breakeven budget.

  Nevertheless, I knew there were far harder ways of making a living. After leaving school with just a handful of O-levels, I’d toiled for several years in a factory yard, picking up crap from around giant skips and learning with astonishing speed how easy it could be to have no kind of life at all. As a result of this experience, I had a keen sense of perspective and rarely let a day pass without considering my relative affluence these days. I’d earned it of course – returning to college to study A-levels and then getting an undergraduate place at Leeds University, where I’d taught ever since gaining a good degree – but even so, it was important, not to mention psychologically healthy, to remain aware that, however better things might be, they could be a hell of a lot worse, too.

  While accessing my email platform with a password I alone in the world knew, I stroked Rose’s hair more firmly, imagining her eyes closing as I did so, the way they’d often done since we’d developed this intimate habit after meeting eighteen years earlier. We’d both been studying at Leeds, but in different disciplines, me social sciences and her humanities. But neither of us had been so committed to the underlying principles of these rival approaches to experience – empirical science versus ineffable poetics – that we’d struggled to get along well. We were essentially middlebrow, mildly ambitious comfort-seekers, and as soon as the mortgage was paid off and we had enough saved up in our Trust Fund, we planned to settle back to a relatively modest, work-free lifestyle, away from all the noise and bustle of the world at large.

  At any rate, this had been true until recently, when my wife had got it into her head that she’d liked to have a child before it was all too late.

  By now, I’d accessed my inbox and could observe the usual junk I received on a daily basis. Here were newsletters and funding opportunities, School updates and enquiries from international scholars seeking collaborative opportunities in the UK. I believed that I could delete most without even opening them. But then, at the heart of this unruly stack, like some jewel embedded in garbage, was a message from [email protected]. The opening code referred to the psychology department, a student’s registration number, and – most crucially – the sender’s initials. In this case, “cl” would surely stand for Chloe Linton.

  I set aside my phone and glanced down at Rose lying on my lap, but only because I’d sensed her breathing heavily, as if she’d fallen asleep. That happened regularly, particularly after she’d spent a long day at the computer and then drunk alcohol in the early-evening. I nudged her gently, and then said, “Darling?”

  Without opening her eyes, she smiled and replied, “Oh, don’t stop doing that with your hands, Matt. It’s very relaxing.”

  After struggling through the rush-hour traffic earlier, I might have benefitted from a little of the same attention myself, but there was little to be gained thinking that way. Instead, I continued stroking her hair, before returning guiltlessly to my phone. Indeed, it wasn’t as if I was doing anything dishonourable here, was it? Responding to an email from an eager undergraduate? Oh yeah, force that man to wear a scarlet letter!

  Chuckling (but only quietly), I quickly opened the communication from my newest supervisee.

  Dear Dr. Cole,

  Thanks for meeting with me today and for agreeing to be my dissertation supervisor. I’m quite excited by my project and hope to get started immediately, as you suggested. As I said before leaving your office, I’ve already gathered some useful data – well, I guess you could call it an intriguing hint about the subject matter, that totally bad guy Donald Deere!

  Just to repeat, last week while waiting for a bus at the end of my street, I overheard a girl (about fourteen or fifteen), who lives directly across from me, talking to an older woman (her mum, I guessed). The girl was going on about someone she’d met recently in the woods near Pasturn, and kept calling him “Donald”. The older woman looked troubled, which was what got me interested, and said stuff like, “Yes, Shaz, I believe you,” as if she was talking to someone a lot younger than a teenager.

  Anyway, this bothered me all day, and later that night, with nothing much to do now that there’s just Mum and me in the house, I Googled “Shaz” as well as “Pasturn woods” and then “Donald”. And this is what turned up (see link below).

  I hope you think it’s as fascinating as I do. As I say, I’d be interested in exploring what this legend means to the community, why it seems so – what’s the word? – prevalent, do I mean? Or maybe resonant?

  Anyway, until our second meeting (next week, I hope; will email soon about that) –

  Chloe xxx

  It would have been foolish to assign any significance to the three Xs with which she’d ended her email; that was how young women often engaged in written communications, even though none of my female students (and there’d been quite a few down the years) ever had. No, what was more important was the content of Chloe’s message. There was indeed a link included at the foot of the page, leading to what appeared to be a blog site, and more specifically, to an entry called “the_passion_man”.

  After a few moment’s hesitation, I was about to activate the webpage in question but then Rose lived up to her name, nudging my hands as she lifted her head, a sudden act which almost certainly caused me to switch off my phone with one rapidly depressed thumb.

  “I’m tired,” she said, her eyes now all over me, as if I had something to hide or, much worse right then, she wanted a piece of it, too. “Shall we go to bed?”

  By this time, the lousy TV shows had switched to the late evening news, and there were various issues I needed to catch up with, if only to have something to discuss tomorrow over coffee with other academics. But I could see that my wife looked insistent, and after quickly pocketing one electronic device and then grabbing a second – the remote-con
trol – I immediately darkened the babbling screen, before standing just as she had.

  Fifteen minutes later, after washing and changing into night attire alone in the bathroom, I joined her in bed. She had the lamp on her side switched on, and the window overlooking miles of unlit countryside remained uncurtained as she’d always preferred it. She liked sunlight to stream in each morning, awakening her naturally without the need of any burdensome alarm clock. By then, I was long gone anyway, striving to beat the crush on the motorways towards Leeds, but even so the darkened pane at night bothered me a bit. With a light on in here and so much blackness outside, the glass acted like a vague mirror, capturing every act performed on our elevated king-size double. This was particularly problematic for me because Rose occupied the window side, and whenever I turned her way, I could see my face in the pane, with every response to comments she made laid bare for serious scrutiny.

  On this occasion, once I’d swung my legs beneath the sheets, she immediately leaned my way and, with all the understated insistence of her only-child upbringing, said, “Shall we try again, Matt?”

  I inhaled sharply, telling myself that this was to combat my sudden excitement rather than to avert a sigh. My wife was very attractive – red-haired, fair-skinned, witchy in her demeanour – and had never failed to arouse me. But I was tired after a long day, and the moderate amount of alcohol I’d consumed had hardly helped matters. I was also forty-three years old and had been led to believe that such problems tended to first manifest at this age.

  “I’m sorry, Rose,” I said, rubbing my eyes but certainly not just to conceal my treacherous face. “I’ve…I’ve been under a bit of pressure at work lately.”

  This was true; the start of a new academic term always involved a constant battle with paperwork, all those newly established procedures which had taken the zest out of university employment.

  “That’s okay,” my wife replied, one hand rested on my chest but without much pressure, which struck me as her attempt to simultaneously understand my difficulty and yet subtly rebuke me for it. Of course we both knew what all this might be about; Rose had stopped receiving her contraceptive injection a few months earlier, and any successful attempt at lovemaking might be the one that resulted in a child. “We can try again tomorrow, if you’re up to it.”

  “Yeah, I’ll lay off the coke and try to relax while…well, you know, while dealing with campus stuff.”

  “Are the students looking like a good lot this year?”

  I hesitated, but only to suppress a yawn. “One or two remain promising.”

  After turning over and facing away from me, Rose added, “Oh yeah, I sometimes forget that it’s not just incoming youngsters. There’s the other lot, too, isn’t there – those in their second and final years? I…I suspect you have your eye on a few decent candidates.”

  Had Rose hesitated only to combat a yawn of her own? I could only assume so, but now, glancing over one of her angular shoulders as she reached forwards to switch out the light, I could do nothing more than briefly observe myself in that vast window across the room.

  It looked like there was a sad, ageing man gazing back, wishing he could simply come inside from the cold.

  3

  SHAZ’S BLOG!!!

  August 13th, 2014

  MEETING UP WITH MR. PASSION!

  Nurse Susan (she’s not really a nurse, but I like to call her that, because it makes me feel safe) comes to my house almost every day and we go out walking together or on the bus into Leeds for shopping. I love all this and Mum says it gives her a break, too.

  I like to buy makeup (and don’t chew it anymore–I’m older now) and CDs by my favourite boy bands. Sometimes when I walk by in my new skirt and blouse (I have boobies now, and nurse Susan keeps telling me to cover them up), I see boys watching from the corners of their eyes or not always that secretively. That makes me happy. I’ve never been very popular before– even my dad left when I was just a little girl. So I’ll keep wearing that blouse and skirt, thanks very much.

  But thisisn’t really what I wanted to talk about in today’s blog post. No, I have a mysterious event to mention, but one only I might end up believing. The doctors used to tell me that much of what I think happens to me is just “fantasy”, but as I say, I’m older now, nearly fifteen. So it’s different.

  Sometimes, even when nurse Susan isn’t here, I go out walking in Pasturn. My mum, often drinking alone in the lounge and watching old films that make her cry, doesn’t always realise (just as I don’t think either her or Susan know about this blog). Anyway, I get bored some nights just staring out of my bedroom window, thinking about all the good things other girls my age (who don’t have my stupid problem) must be getting up to elsewhere.

  I used to imagineclimbing out of the window and then down some ivy (which we don’t have) to reach the street below, like an exotic princess in a story, going to seek her prince. But then I thought, why bother making this hard for yourself, girl? Just step out of your boring bedroom, down the boring stairs, and out of the boring house. And so then I did. That was how it all happened.

  Pasturn is a dull place. As I said, if you want good things to happen, you have to travel on the bus to Leedsand meet up with cool people, some who even look like they’re out of girl and boy bands (but otherswho don’t, much like me, perhaps). In the village, though, there’s just a lot of old folk like my mum has become lately and nurse Susan has always been. I once saw a pretty, young woman, who lives in a house across from mine, standing at the bus stop, but I think she’s too old to be my friend and, looking like a princess, probably has a prince already.

  I kept walking that night (I can’t believe this happened only last week!), which was cold and dark and had no stars or moon. After a while, I looked around and saw no houses anywhere near me, which sometimes happens when I fall into one of my trances, asthoughts take over and I forget where I am. This time, I was wondering whether I’d remembered to take my pills earlier – it was a day when nurse Susan didn’t visit– but I was sure I must have, unless mum had been so drunk she’d forgotten to remind me.

  But then I saw him, just standing in the road up ahead.

  I was now near the Pasturn woods, quite close to the last buildings in the village but too far to see from any of their windows. The woods are big and dark, and lots of people say they’re supposed to be haunted, but nurse Susan and me sometimes walk in them and we’ve never seen anything weird there. Until now, I mean, when Susan wasn’t even here to help me, which is what she’s supposed to do.

  The man looked all shadowy under so many crisscrossing, leafless branches, and it must have been the way I kept staring at him which made all the wood down there, all the bark and knots and weepy sap, somehow merge with his skin, as if he was a puppet brought to life by some invisible master. I looked around, stupidly expecting to see someone else nearby, maybe up in a tree and dangling the man on giant strings, but there was nobody about. Just me. And the man.

  I thought for a moment that this was my dad come back after years of absence, but then told myself not to be silly. Mum said we were well shut of him anyway, explaining that as soon as he’d realised what my problem was, he’d run off with another woman and refused to have anything to do with either of us. So balls to him (forgive me swearing– this just makes me mad sometimes).

  Then the man started beckoning me. I think that’s the right word. I’ve been looking up new ones daily in my dictionary, because I want to make this blog as good as I can. And yes, he kept stroking one arm slowly my way, and it must have been an autumn wind in the trees, bending their old boughs, which made his elbow seem to creak, as if it was made of wood.

  Still suffering a bit from my trance earlier, I soon found myself moving forwards, as if under hypnosis. A doctor once tried that out on me, but my brain’s too giddy for it to work. But it worked this time, sure enough, because only minutes later, I was right up close to the man.

  His face looked less like part of a tre
e than it had at a distance. There were no gnarly lumps on it, or seepages leaking down his cheeks. Even so, it did look a bit like wood, the skin smooth but also with a lined texture, like the grain on a new kitchen table from the shops. But it was his eyes I was most interested in. Despite the lack of light just here, they looked green and seemed to swirl like sink plugholes when you pour something poisoninside– chemicals like cleaning liquid, I mean, like the stuff mum uses to get rid of stains.

  Then the man, in a voice I could hardly hear because that was when another wind must have got up and made all the trees around us creak again, said,“Come with me. Come and play with my children. Come and dance with them all. They like to dance.”

  Well, I like to dance, too, and one thing I’d love to do more than any other isgo to a disco in Leeds, where other young people my age have fun and drinks and dance all night. I’ve seen them on the Internet and it looks brilliant!

  And so now I started thinking. The man, moving away into that dark-packed wood which was creaking more than ever and sending this sound my way so that it seemed to be coming from directly in front of me, looked about the same age as my mum: forty or fifty–I couldn’t decide which. Anyway, definitely old enough to have children my own age, maybe other young girls–and boys– who, while living in the woods, might have as little experience as I did of events outside this tiny village.