Chapter Six #2
“No, I do not.” David was only getting warmed up.
“You leave me to clean up all your messes while you won’t lift a finger the one time I ask for your help.
You’re refusing a perfectly reasonable request with no justification whatsoever, you’ve got no ambitions, and your taste in music is rubbish.
You don’t pick up after yourself, you keep leaving all your eyeliner pencils in my bathroom, and your sideburns look stupid! ”
That succeeded in knocking that sneering smirk off his face. “I—”
David was not to be stopped now. “Do you know what? I understand exactly why you don’t want to see your family. Any time you run into trouble, you haven’t any recourse that isn’t putting on that empty-headed act and charming or fucking your way out of it—”
“Oh!”
“—but you can’t do that with them, and you can’t do that with me. And by the way, houndstooth doesn’t go with argyle!”
There was a rustle overhead, and a fallen pine cone thumped into the loam at David’s feet. Then, all at once, rain pelted down, startlingly loud against the canopy of leaves above, though it did shield them from much of the downpour.
“Oh, yeah? Well—well—” Meredith was near furious tears now. “Well, I don’t like your moustache!” Turning on his heel, he flounced off in the opposite direction, crashing through the underbrush, Bianca bounding along after him.
Very well. If Meredith wanted to be difficult and go storming off alone through the Midnight Wood because he was unwilling to face the truth, so be it. Good riddance. David had plenty of better things to do.
He started back in the direction from which they’d come.
For an uneasy moment, he questioned his route in the darkness and rain, but no, there was the patch of imitation wintergreen they’d found—Meredith had hung on to the plant, but David still had a handful of berries in his coat pocket—and here was the creek.
Its surface rippled with the odd raindrop, though the initial intensity of the downpour had already abated.
Idly, David bent and took up a small flat piece of shale from the creek bed, turning it over in his hand as he walked along. He didn’t need Meredith’s help. Not to find his way in the Midnight Wood, and not with Maitland Cartier.
His frustration threatened to bubble up again, and he pushed any thought of Meredith firmly from his mind, replacing it instead with a visualization of his goals: One day, perhaps a month from now, waking up in his own house, alone, and drinking his tea uninterrupted—free of tangerines and unsuitable pattern combinations and Meredith.
A few weeks further on, somehow meeting Cartier at his daughter’s wedding.
Gracefully turning casual conversation into an offer of the VP position at Cartier’s head office.
Perhaps he’d even have a handsome son of marriageable age whom he’d be eager to introduce him to.
No—Cartier had no son, David knew. A nephew, then. A big, muscular, outdoorsy type who played football and went kayaking and had warm dark eyes—
It occurred to David that he ought to have reached the edge of the Wood by now. Somehow the path he’d been following had quite vanished.
No matter. He’d been heading in the right direction; he was sure of it. He picked up his pace—not because he was by any means uneasy, but because he had important and pressing things to do, regardless of the passage of time here.
Was that a rustle in the nearby trees? A crack of a branch? No, surely his mind playing tricks on him.
“Meredith?” he called.
There was no reply.
David attempted to console himself once more with thoughts of Maitland Cartier and his possibly imaginary nephew, to no avail.
Branches whipped at him. Briars caught at his clothing.
Tree roots tripped him up in the dark. All the while, rain continued to fall.
Realizing he was still holding on to the bit of shale from the creek, David tossed it away.
Instead of the expected rustle of its landing among dry leaves, he was met with a soft thwack as though it had just struck the flesh of a living being.
“Meredith?”
Silence.
David looked around wildly, broke into a run, dodged around the broad trunk of an ancient oak, and nearly crashed into a dark figure half hidden in shadow that was very definitely not Meredith.
Even if it had been a long time since he’d set foot on a rugby field, David could move fast and turn on a dime when he had to.
It served him well now as he took off in the opposite direction.
The figure pursued, crashing through the underbrush with a high, cackling laugh that filled David’s heart with an icy dread.
David darted between trees, leapt over a fallen log, splashed through a pool of stagnant water.
He hoped he was gaining distance, but didn’t dare look back, didn’t dare stop to think.
A tiny flash of white crossed his path, and then, too late, David discovered that the rock beneath his feet was no gradual incline, as he’d thought, but terminated in a sharp drop-off where the opposite end jutted out of the earth.
This time he was not able to stop so quickly.
In spite of his best efforts, his boots slid over the mossy surface, and he was falling, grasping in vain at the rock face, at the nearby branches that tore at him as he plunged through them.
He landed hard, and something cracked as pain exploded through his arm and shoulder.
The sounds of his pursuer slowed, then seemed to recede into the distance. David groaned and tried to sit up, without success. His head swam, and for a time, he could only lie among the crushed plants and broken branches in a daze.
Then approaching footsteps sounded anew, and his heart sank. He was sure something was broken, and he was in no condition to flee, let alone face whatever was coming for him.
“David?” called Meredith.
He groaned again, this time for an entirely different reason.
“David!” With a distraught cry, Meredith ran to him, Bianca trotting close behind, and David forced himself to his feet. “Oh, you’re hurt. I never meant—”
“It’s nothing.” David steadied himself against a nearby tree with his good arm and found an awkward posture in which the pain in his shoulder was just bearable.
“I’m all right.” He was not all right, but he could walk on his own, and admitting it here when there was nothing to be done was unlikely to help matters.
Meredith reached out and brushed a stray lock of hair from David’s eyes. “You’re bleeding,” he said, and made it sound like a reproach. “One of the Mice found me and said you were in trouble.”
#50: He talks to mice, or imagines he does.
David leaned back out of Meredith’s reach. “Just took a bit of a spill, that’s all. Come on, let’s get out of here.” He started off through the trees in what he hoped was the right direction; it appeared to be since Meredith followed without correcting him.
“She said something was after you,” he persisted.
“Of course there wasn’t.” David didn’t want to linger on the figure he’d seen, or, more likely, imagined he’d seen.
And imagination it must have been, even if he did feel quite foolish now—the Midnight Wood was known to play tricks on one’s mind.
“I suppose,” he admitted grudgingly, “I just got a bit worked up, being alone in the dark.”
“The Wood can do that to you,” said Meredith with sympathy. “You sure you’re all right?”
“Fine,” said David. The concern was surprising, and his anger at their earlier row began to dissolve.
Until Meredith next spoke.
“Give us your coat, then. I’m freezing.”
“Schwarzy?” said David thoughtfully.
“Yeah?”
“Get fucked.”
Meredith gasped. “Oh! You’re so mean to me.”
“I’m not giving you a thing after the way you’ve behaved,” said David, “and anyway, my arm’s broken.”
“You just said you were fine!”
“A necessary falsehood, to boost morale.”
“My morale does not feel very boosted.”
“Yes, clearly, as you shattered the delicate illusion. Come on.”
“We’ll get Mrs. J to fix you up,” said Meredith. “She’ll know just what to do. Does it hurt very much?”
“Yes. Stop talking.”
Thankfully, he did. Soon the daylight—such as it was—filtered through the trees at the edge of the Wood, and presently they emerged a short distance from Mrs. Jupiter’s cottage. Though the sky remained overcast, the rain had faded to a half-hearted drizzle.
Of course there hadn’t really been anything after him in the Wood, David told himself firmly.
He’d simply been spending far too much time with Meredith, whose wild imagination appeared to be contagious.
David had been preoccupied with Pressing Concerns about his future, at the expense of paying proper attention to his surroundings, and had let his nerves get the better of him, that was all.
Just coming down the path beneath identical dark umbrellas were Mr. Bednarek—a pudgy, bald-headed man in a black overcoat, with a face rather like that of a dissolute cherub—and a small, elegant, silver-haired man whom David recognized from his photograph as none other than the Maitland Cartier.
What he was doing by the Wood, David couldn’t guess—perhaps taking the scenic route after visiting the cottage?
David had missed his chance there, and there was no one to blame for it except Meredith, for dragging him on this ridiculous outing to begin with.
There was no way he could meet Cartier in this state—coat torn, trousers filthy, bits of dead leaves sticking in his hair, one cheek scratched and bleeding, not to mention the current unnatural position of his shoulder making him look like a shuffling monster out of a horror film.
Perhaps if he hung back in the shadow of the Wood, the two would pass without taking notice of him.
“Aren’t you coming?” asked Meredith.
“Wait.” David made a grab for him with his good arm, but Meredith eluded him, already starting down the path. “That’s him!”
“Who? Oh, him,” said Meredith, face lighting up in realization. He waved and called out, “Bednarek!”
“What do you think you’re doing?” David hissed.
“Helping you meet Cartier like you wanted, what do you think?” asked Meredith, unperturbed.
The landlord turned. “Ah, boys, glad to see you.”
As they met on the path, Meredith leaned in to embrace and air-kiss Bednarek and then, to David’s horror, Cartier, who looked momentarily taken aback, but allowed it without comment.
#51: He just air-kissed Maitland Cartier without a second thought.
“This is Mr. Cartier,” explained Bednarek. “He is dear friend and business associate. I give him the tour. This,” he said to Cartier, “is Mr. David—”
“David Carew, sir,” he said, ignoring Meredith pulling a face at him and extending a hand weakly despite the tremendous pain. “Delighted to meet you. I admire your work very much.”
Cartier smiled and gave him a firm handshake that nearly drove David to his knees. “A pleasure.”
“And this,” said Bednarek with an expansive gesture, “is our Schwarzy.”
“Yeah. Hi.”
In the back of his mind, David wondered what it would take to make Meredith introduce himself properly, but this wasn’t the time to experiment.
“We shall just be on our way,” Bednarek said. “So glad we could all meet, yes.”
“Wonderful to meet you in person at last, Mr. Cartier.” David ought to say something profound and impressive, but between the pain and meeting his idol, his mind had gone quite blank.
“Nice meeting you, too, Daniel.” Maitland Cartier reached over and clapped him on the injured shoulder, and David fainted.