Into the Midnight Wood

Chapter One

Meredith Schwarzwelder might have been a nightmare to live with, but at least he paid his share of the rent on time.

It had become something of a coping mechanism for David Carew to remind himself of this fact several times per day.

It was what he reminded himself now as he attempted to decipher the smudged ink of the hastily scrawled note on the kitchen table.

In fact, if David were to draw up a list of points for and against his housemate, the For column would have a single point in his favor:

The Against column—against what, precisely, David wasn’t sure; just against him generally—would have taken a lifetime to write out.

Meredith was a good, fine Welsh name, of course, if a bit out of style as a man’s name these days.

David had nothing against that. Schwarzwelder, too, was a perfectly acceptable surname, even if some clerical meddling of the distant past had led to the nonstandard phonetic spelling.

But to combine the two—that was pure absurdity.

One simply couldn’t go around mixing languages and nationalities in such haphazard fashion.

It was a frivolous name, befitting a frivolous person.

#2: He is a frivolous person, an irredeemable eccentric.

Every quirk of speech and manner that David had taken for affectation upon their first meeting five years ago, he now knew to be authentic. The simple truth was that Meredith was genuinely, incurably strange.

Exhibit A: The note.

Ran down to the shops. Bednarek stopped by early, and he says, can you clean up the garden because there’s people coming later. Also, don’t worry about the hallway ceiling. Says me, not Bednarek. Back soon.

Love, Meri

The i was dotted with a heart. A heart. A grown man, a sensible man, did not sign his name in such a fashion. And yet—

The note continued with the addendum:

P.S. Don’t worry about the linen cupboard either.

P.P.S. The bread is out.

David closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and ran a hand through his wavy dark hair.

He ought to go and investigate what, precisely, had happened to both the hallway ceiling and the linen cupboard, but he wouldn’t.

Not yet. He would deal with that and the garden and Mr. Bednarek, the landlord, after he finished his breakfast. He needed a moment to drink his tea and read the morning paper and go through the daily process of reconciling himself to the reality of living with the singularly most bizarre person he had ever met.

“I think Schwarzy’s having it off with Mrs. Jupiter,” said Brian.

David’s eyelid twitched. He made a noncommittal sound without glancing up from the finance pages.

“Schwarzy! And Mrs. Jupiter!” persisted Brian.

Brian was the third occupant of Midnight Cottage, so named for its location at the edge of the Midnight Wood.

Mrs. Jupiter was the witch who lived down the lane.

“I heard you the first time.” David wasn’t surprised.

He’d seen the way Meredith spoke to her, leaning over the garden gate and winking and saying things like Nice weather, isn’t it, Mrs. J?

and How’s the chickens, Mrs. J? and Want me to show you the spot where the sweet woodruff grows down by the sycamores, Mrs. J?

Sooner or later, she’d been bound to take him up on it.

Sooner or later, most people did.

#3: He flirts with everyone in his path, whether man, woman, or other.

“It’s hardly decent,” said Brian.

Privately, David agreed, but he merely sighed and folded his newspaper. “Mrs. Jupiter is a widow, Brian. She’s allowed to have it off with whomever she likes.”

True or not, it was hardly the scandalous news his housemate seemed to take it for.

David bit into his English muffin (the last from the half-forgotten package in the cupboard, its staleness not disguised by a thick layer of marmalade), took a sip of tea, dabbed at his moustache with a paper napkin, and was just turning his attention back to the newspaper when Brian spoke again.

“Yes, but he isn’t, is he?”

“What, widowed? Or allowed to have it off with—”

“Stop saying that,” demanded Brian. “It’s vulgar. But yes. The latter.”

David didn’t bother pointing out that Brian was the one who’d introduced the phrase to begin with, and once again took up the newspaper without comment.

#4: He is, apparently, having it off with Mrs. Jupiter.

“I saw them, you know,” Brian went on. “Yesterday. In the Midnight Wood.”

With a huff, David dropped the paper back to the table. “Yes, and?”

Brian scowled and picked up his plate, set it back down, and began to pick at his undercooked freezer waffle. “He was clinging to her.”

Unmoved, David took another drink of tea. “He clings to everybody. He clings to me if I let him. I wouldn’t worry.”

#5: He clings.

#6: And he stares.

At David, at his own reflection, at the sky, in the direction of anything with the slightest hint of sparkle, and, at times, at nothing at all.

On the verge of taking another sip of tea, David paused with his cup in midair. The gears in his mind had begun to turn; suspicion crept in. “Why are you worried?”

Brian didn’t reply. David’s suspicion grew stronger.

“You’ve been here, what, three weeks now?” David asked.

That question elicited a tight-lipped nod of affirmation.

David Carew did not consider himself a cruel man, but it was better for all concerned, he told himself, to confirm what he suspected, to rip the Band-Aid off and get it over with.

“All right,” he said. “Suppose they are.”

Perhaps he was being cruel, but he pressed on anyway.

“Suppose they are,” he repeated. “Schwarzy and Mrs. Jupiter, screwing each other senseless in the back garden right this minute.” (He could have said making love, he reflected, but that implied a certain delicacy of feeling, and in any case, Brian needed a reality check.

Judging by the way he flinched at the phrase, he needed it badly.) “What difference does it make to you?”

Brian’s cheeks had gone pink, and his nervous fingers had made considerable headway in the task of shredding his waffle into a heap of crumbs on his plate.

So that was it, then. David should have known from the outset. “You slept with him, didn’t you?”

Brian opened his mouth in what was probably meant to be righteous indignation and closed it again. He raised an index finger, frowned, and subsequently lowered it.

#7: He slept with Brian.

“I told you not to,” said David severely. “I did tell you, the first day you moved in.”

“I didn’t mean to!” said Brian in despair.

David raised his eyebrows and set down his cup. Very seriously, he asked, “Do you mean to say it wasn’t consensual?”

“N-no, it was.” Brian took on a dreamy, faraway look. “It was very consensual.”

David forestalled any further reminiscences with a raised hand.

“That’s quite more than I need to know.” Something else occurred to him.

“I thought you were straight.” He’d thought—hoped—that fact would prevent any complications of this nature, but he was neither naive nor ignorant of Meredith’s effect on people.

“So did I! I mean, I am!” insisted Brian. “I was. Oh, I don’t know!” He threw down the last bit of waffle and lowered his face to his hands, from behind which he said indistinctly, “Schwarzy’s got me all confused.”

“Yes,” said David, “I can see he has.” If his tone was rather dry, Brian was too distraught to pick up on it.

“It isn’t my fault,” said Brian. “He gave me the eye. He does that, you know. To everybody.” He raised his face and repeated, in an accusatory tone, “You know.”

“I don’t know,” said David flatly. “He’s never given me, as you call it, the eye. Not so that I’ve noticed.” Or perhaps David was immune to Meredith’s supposed charm. In any case, he was the only person in the shared rental house who’d ever lasted more than three months.

#8: He’s driven away every other occupant of Midnight Cottage without exception.

With a few, it had been this exact scenario.

With others, it had been the inability to withstand the psychic distress of living with a person who was chaos distilled—of the distinct possibility of coming home at any given time to find the drawer pulls off the kitchen cabinets or the wineglasses stacked precariously in the bay window or a trail of Chihuahua-sized pawprints in India ink leading down the back hallway.

True, the proximity of the reality-distorting Midnight Wood might have played no small part.

The interior of the forest disregarded the laws of time and space, and was home to innumerable strange plants and dangerous creatures.

At times, faint strains of music seemed to drift out on the wind at night but vanished the moment one tried to listen more closely.

Paths appeared to shift the moment one turned one’s back, trees and hills and valleys never quite staying in the same spot one had last left them.

It was a most unsettling place, and David never set foot inside the Wood if he could help it.

Meredith regularly went for nighttime walks there.

It was said that prolonged exposure to the Midnight Wood, even at a distance, could drive one mad.

That, David knew, was nonsense. He himself had lived there for five years and was perfectly sane.

So was Mrs. Jupiter, and she had lived there longer still.

For that matter, so had Meredith, and while sane was perhaps not the first word that came to mind to describe him, certainly he was no more mad than he had been upon their first meeting.

Brian was speaking, David realized, and had been for some time.

“—and I won’t take that lying down, I can tell you.”

“Sorry?” said David. “Won’t take what lying down?”

Brian slammed his teacup down onto the table. “There you go again,” he hissed, “making everything vulgar.”