Chapter 3
I consider taking the bus to town, but the thought of the downhill journey and those narrow twisting roads makes my already bilious stomach lurch.
I decide to walk instead, zipping my coat against the cold autumn air.
I wave to the neighbor across the street who is staring at me over the roof of his car, unsmiling.
He raises a hand solemnly in return. Mr. Jenner.
When me and Cathy were kids, he’d tell us off for riding our bikes up and down the road.
I gave him the finger once and he threatened to tell my parents.
It’s strange to be home. Idless is a small town, made to feel smaller by the trees seaming it into the valley on all sides.
Around here you get used to the constant fragrance of the pines; green and resinous and as bright as cut ginger.
I’ve never liked the view from the valley, looking up toward the sloping hills.
It always makes me feel as though the trees are slowly inching toward the town like a lumbering arboreal landslide.
As I cross the deserted town square toward the pharmacy, something catches my eye. There, just beneath an old wooden bench, something is growing. I bend down to squint at it.
“Hello, you,” I whisper. To the passersby, it probably looks like a wad of chewed gum, bright yellow and gelatinous, stuck beneath the slats of the bench. But I know better. Gently, I reach out a finger. The mass is firm, and it shivers slightly at my touch.
“Aren’t you beautiful?” I’m getting on my hands and knees to take a closer look, not minding the damp concrete, the grit and grime digging into my palms. Right now, my whole focus has shrunk to this tiny growth beneath the bench, this yellow brain fungus, so called because of the folds and crenellations that make up the fruiting body.
“Are you okay?” a voice asks me. I’m halfway under the bench right now, my head almost touching the wall behind it. “Do you need me to call someone for you?”
I slide myself awkwardly out. There is a man standing over me—looming would be a better expression, he’s at least six feet tall—looking at me with concern and just the slightest hint of distaste. I grin, but his expression doesn’t change. If anything, he looks more suspicious.
“I’m looking at a mushroom.”
“Is that right?” Hard to read his tone, but I can see he doesn’t believe me.
I point. “See? It’s called yellow brain. Also known as witch’s butter.”
“Why?”
“Because it was said that if it grew on your front door or gate, then you’d been cursed by a witch.”
“Huh. So you think a witch cursed this bench?”
He smiles. There is a gap between his front teeth wide enough to fit a coin through. I always wanted one of those. Like Madonna.
“Well, I suppose she might have done. If it was too uncomfortable.”
His grin widens and I take a better look at him.
He’s older than me—late forties or early fifties is my best guess—with a crooked nose that has been broken more than once.
His skin is sallow, with a broad forehead and heavy brows which frame eyes shining with good humor.
There’s a familiarity about him, but if you spend long enough in small places like Idless, you start thinking like that about everybody.
We’re all kin here one way or another, that’s what everyone says.
“Do all mushrooms have such weird names or is it just this one?”
“Depends what you mean by weird. There’s a powdery piggyback, a turquoise elfcup, destroying angel—”
“I don’t like the sound of that one.”
“It’s lethal. There’s a well-known aphorism among my forager friends: All mushrooms are edible, but some of them only once. The destroying angel is an ‘only once’ kind of mushroom.”
He laughs at that, unfolding his arms to reveal smears of dusky orange mud on his overalls, as if he has wiped his hands there.
Without thinking, I point to them. “You’ve been digging in clay soil.”
He looks down at himself in surprise. Raises his fingertips to his chest. “I have indeed. Planting hydrangeas. Are you a gardener, uh—?”
“Hazel. And no, I’m not. I’m not sure what I am. The correct term is a mycologist, but I’m an amateur, really. In this country, mushrooms are mostly seasonal, so this is a busy time of year for me. I’m going hunting today, in fact. All this mist and drizzle, it’s the perfect weather for it.”
“Is that right? What are you looking for?”
I sit carefully down on the bench and indicate for him to join me, which he does after a moment’s consideration. His face is lined and craggy, like a ravine. It reminds me of petrified wood.
“As it’s nearly Halloween, I’m hoping to find a fungus called devil’s fingers. I go looking for them every year, but I’ve never seen them. This year I’ve had a tip-off about a place where they’re known to grow, so I’m feeling pretty confident.”
“Why are they called devil’s fingers?”
“Because that’s what they look like, coming out of the ground.” I extend my fingers out of the end of my sleeve, wriggling them. “Red and pointy, like something out of a horror film. What’s worse is that they produce a smell like rotting flesh to attract insects.”
“Blerugh!” He mimes gagging. “Where can you find these horrors, then? I need to know where to avoid.”
I slide my bag from my shoulder. Inside it is an old book I’ve carried everywhere with me for the last five years.
It’s a field guide to mushroom identification written in the eighties.
It had been a birthday gift from Joe, bought from a secondhand bookshop on the corner of his road.
My fascination with mushrooms has always bemused Joe.
His bees are the purring, drowsy creatures of summer days and elegant wildflowers, the sweet amber of honey.
He didn’t understand the dirt and decay, the coatings of sap and slime.
It was a mystery to him. I was a mystery to him.
“Here. I’ll show you.” I’ve folded the corner of the page down, and I find it quickly, turning the book toward him.
On the page is an illustration of devil’s fingers: otherworldly and alien looking, erupting bright red tentacles from a gelatinous egg sac.
On the facing page, a few paragraphs of type and then my notes handwritten in the margins.
The book is full of them, scribbled in corners and crammed between paragraphs.
I’ve got footnotes on footnotes in there, annotations and maps.
Joe used to tell me it was like trying to untangle a cipher.
The man frowns at it, rubbing it with his thumbnail as if that will make the handwriting more legible.
“What’s that say? Drey Town?”
“Bray Farm. It’s up in the woods. Do you know it?”
His face sets, becoming almost serious. He hands the book back to me. “I know it. Don’t you need the owner’s permission to go up there?”
“Huh.” I hadn’t thought of that. I’ve just been powering through my hangover, too infused with the concept of my new start to consider whether I would be trespassing. I shrug. “Yeah, I guess. I don’t think anyone owns it, though. I mean, who’d want to after what happened?”
Even though he is staring intently at me, his gaze has no weight. It is a feather turning in the wind. His eyes are pale brown, almost golden. He looks at me a beat too long, and that’s when the penny drops.
“Oh shit. You’re the owner?”
“That’s right. I bought it thirteen years ago and been renovating ever since. It’s an old building, and that makes it a long process.”
“It doesn’t bother you?”
“The history?” He laughs. “Hazel, all the stuff that happened in that house was over a hundred and fifty years ago. I don’t even think about it anymore.”
The morning mist has dragged itself along the treetops and across the precinct, bringing with it the heady, fertile scent of the forest. I feel a tickle run up the back of my neck.
I love being among trees. I love the damp, drizzly days of autumn spent digging through loamy soil and layers of rotting wood.
But I’ve never liked these woods. For a start, everyone knows they’re haunted.
As kids we all heard the story about Joseph Bray, the farmer who went mad one winter and took an axe to his family out in the barn.
There are rumors that some parts of it are so thick and dark that if you get lost, you never come out.
Sometimes soft lights can be seen flickering and floating among the branches at dusk.
“Hazel?” He nudges me a little. “You’ve gone very quiet. I was just saying that if you want my permission to look around the farm, then you have it. Just don’t go into the house itself—it’s still a bit of a wreck, and I can’t vouch for its safety. You got a pen?”
I nod, pulling it out of the front pocket of my rucksack.
I’m getting thirsty. It’s all this talking.
I’m thinking about getting a cold can of lemonade or maybe a cup of tea at the kiosk round the corner when I see what he is doing.
He is writing his name on the flyleaf of my book. I frown as he hands it back to me.
“That’s me. Andrew Garrison. In case you want to look up on the land registry who the farm belongs to. I don’t want you thinking I’m some creep.”
“Oh, I don’t think that.”
I do think that. I have an innate wariness of men offering me anything. This man probably wants to kill me has run through my head more times than I’d care to admit. He unfolds himself with a groan that speaks of aching joints and old bones. I know how he feels.
“You know the Bray Farm has legs, don’t you?
” Now it’s my turn to stare at him blankly.
He throws his head back and laughs. “Ah. You’re not as old as me.
That’s what the old-timers used to say about the Bray Farm back when I was a kid, because you could never find the place, even with a map.
It was like it was running round the forest, hiding from you. ”
I laugh, but the image of a house with legs gives me the creeps a little bit. It makes me think of Baba Yaga and her house of the dead marching on long chicken legs.
Andrew looks up toward the forested hills before adding, “Seriously, though, Hazel—between here and there is about fifty miles of wild, arcadian forest. You sure you know where you’re going?”
“Half the fun is in the finding,” I tell him, and it’s the truth—me and my forager buddies say it to each other all the time, even when we’re wading ankle deep through boggy leaf litter or wet, clingy grass.
Even in the rain, even in the hail. Half the fun is in the finding.
One afternoon Terri had turned up in a homemade T-shirt that read HALF THE FUNGI IS IN THE FINDING!
and we’d all laughed. Thinking about my old friends makes me feel sad.
A slump in my mood is setting in, my headache announcing a comeback bigger than Vegas Elvis.
I get up, extending my hand to Andrew, who gives me another of those broad grins as he shakes it.
His hand is big and rough and calloused.
“It’s been a real pleasure, Hazel. I hope you find your horrible fungi.”
“Thanks, Andrew. Who knows, I might see you up at the farm later.”
He smiles, but it’s polite. Perfunctory. He doesn’t think he’ll be seeing me again, at the farm or anywhere else. I think of a house scurrying through a dimly lit forest and feel that prickle on the back of my neck a second time. Like a warning.