Chapter Eight
Eight
He let himself lie in late the next day, dozed gradually awake with the increasingly insistent light through the blinds and the noises from the street below.
Niamh had not come back when her shift downstairs ended.
She’d doubtless gone home to sleep it off, and he was alone in the sheets.
He grabbed his Mappin smoky wind and a fistful of halfhearted rain in his face, and abruptly he realized he was enjoying himself.
“Good, eh?” Ferguson, grinning at him again. He had to pitch his voice above the scuffling wind along the roof.
“It’s not bad, aye,” Duncan shouted back.
“Could probably get you on, if you wanted. Put in a word. Service manager’s a retired captain, invalided out after Passchendaele. I was his runner. Cool under fire’s pretty much all he’s looking for in a man. You’d be ideal.”
“I’ll bear it in mind. Thanks.”
“No bother.”
They hit the outskirts of Erlsley, the thinning out of habitation, soon after saw the loom of the Forest ahead. Broad, natural cleft in the trees, where the iron rails ran. The same path carved through the slain piles of deadwood from the failed Re-clearance. They rattled into a curve on approach.
“Always makes me twitchy, this bit,” Ferguson yelled. “Once we’re in, I’m fine. But this—”
He gestured, wordless, as the tree line rushed them.
At Messines, he’d apparently stormed a German machine gun post single-handed when the rest of his squad got pinned down.
And, according to Crammond, he’d proven pretty handy in a couple of tussles over supply with Erlsley’s east end gangs as well.
But now, as the train rushed in under the first of the nodding canopies and the path ahead became a gloomed fairy-tale tunnel, roofed in with overarching branches, Duncan saw how the fear rose in Ferguson’s eyes, how he grew taut at his post and patted the Lewis gun now and then, as if reassuring a favorite dog.
Duncan leaned on the turret rim at his side, watched the tree wall go by a scant five yards from his nose. He tried to be companionable.
“They been burning this back?” he shouted.
“Yeah. Flamethrower units on a short train couple of months back. Doing the same thing everywhere, they tell me. Part of the Railways Act directives; it’s one of the reasons we’re amalgamating with LNWR and the others. Lot of extra costs now.”
Another kind of war. With new enemies and rules we have yet to learn.
Just as the Forest had seemed to find natural boundaries well back from any large human settlements—and had also spared a surprising amount of fenced farmland in the south and east—so the trees had stayed back from the railway lines wherever they ran.
No one knew why. Duncan had always assumed it was the iron that did it.
He’d certainly worked off the assumption enough times.
But such premises, he knew, were rooted in very shallow soil.
What had held true for the last five years might all change, literally overnight.
Because it already had once before.
He could almost summon sympathy for Martin Hardy, beleaguered officer on the poop deck of a floundering once-proud ship of the line, whose timbered certainties were now coming apart under storm and cannonade.
A long century of imperious Victorian mastery and the inheritance it left—dazzling conquests on the borders of science and engineering, proven dominance over the natural world, progress and prowess and pride in both, piled up like the loot of some daring imperial campaign in theoretical realms…
And now it was gone, tumbled to makeshift barricades, and the old terrors of night and the unknown returned.
The train barreled hastily through a couple of abandoned stations, serving small villages the Forest had swallowed—eerie places where the tree growth had punched through walls and roofs like the coils of some gargantuan squid.
Some form of low undergrowth was already sprouting on the fallen mulch of leaves across platforms and what little they could see of the spaces beyond.
Once, Duncan thought he spotted furtive movement behind a window in one of the station buildings, but they passed too rapidly for him to be sure.
The train made no whistle to mark transit in these places—perhaps the crew was afraid of what they might wake.
But eventually the whistle did blow and they began to slow as the first of their express stops at Huddersfield came in sight ahead.
They coasted in at the platform and the train came to a slow, screeching halt. Ferguson’s relief was palpable.
“Don’t like to think what happened to the people in those villages,” he muttered.
Duncan said nothing. He’d come across enough examples to have some idea, and Ferguson didn’t deserve the nightmares.
—
They pulled out of Huddersfield on time, made Manchester Piccadilly a couple of minutes ahead of schedule.
Duncan thanked Ferguson, begged off going for a jar with the crew, and got his bags from the carriage below.
Hefting them felt awkward—his hands as much as his face were chilled almost numb from the journey in the turret.
He checked for his connection to Macclesfield, ran and missed it, had to sit and wait an hour for the next service.
Garner met him at the other end with the horse and buggy.
“Still not joining us here in the twentieth century, then?” Duncan ribbed him as he swung his bags aboard.