Chapter Eighteen #2
They passed the last of the carriages, left the train behind.
The rails curved on beyond, into the Forest gloom.
Duncan crossed them over the first set of rails, took station in the center.
Two thin lines of steel on either side, not much of an advantage, but it would have to do.
Grass and weeds grew up everywhere from the hardcore between the rails, between the sleepers, reaching close to his knees and to Mimi’s waist. Faint bitter green fragrance, rising as they pressed on through.
The girl’s nose wiggled with it. Overarching trees, long uncut, made the path ahead a tunnel, endless, bending away to some emergence they could not see.
“Right, then,” Duncan said.
Miller’s Frith station shrank behind them, was eventually lost to view round the curve.
Duncan checked once or twice, just to see they weren’t being shadowed.
The girl didn’t look round at all. She clung close at his side, lips moving in silent recitation of something, some nursery rhyme or prayer or other fragment.
The trees crowded in, leaned over, snagged the moon and held it there.
The hushed Forest became their entire world, only the dull glint of the rails on either side to suggest the human race had ever existed at all.
For all that, they made surprisingly good time, once Mimi discovered that jumping from sleeper to sleeper could be a fun game.
She would bound ahead of him like an untrained puppy, had to be called back a couple of times, but soon worked out how long the elastic was that he’d allow her.
From then on, she turned back with unerring timing, just as an admonishment rose to his lips.
He stowed the words, gave her a smile instead, and after a while she began to smile back.
What fears she’d had back at the station seemed to evaporate with the game.
He picked up his own pace a little to match her enthusiasm.
He checked the Mappin it might have comforted her.
“No,” he said. “We’re just walking through. Got a little farther to go before we’re home. This is just a…a place we have to pass.”
“What place?” she quavered.
From memory and the regional maps he kept in his pack, Duncan thought it might be Lower Gortham, Hortham, something like that.
But there was no quick and easy way to tell.
No platform signs; they’d long ago rotted and tumbled, or been torn down, and almost all trace of the village they’d named was long gone, too.
Whatever human homes had stood here once, the Forest had swallowed them whole.
Only the cracked wooden facade and window frames of a modest station building peered out amid thickets of brush and young trees, like a prisoner at the bars of a cell.
Impossible to see if anything of the structure behind remained, or if the facade only stood courtesy of the jostling trees and bushes that held it up.
“It’s called Lower Hortham,” Duncan said breezily. “Little village, like the one we’ve just come from.”
“But it’s gone,” she said aghast. “What happened to the houses?”
“Well, uh, the people left.” Approximation yawing increasingly away from any accurate truth. “And then the Forest came, and it grew over the houses.”
“Why?”
Good question. As ever, there seemed no rhyme nor reason to it.
Some places, the Forest ate entire, others, like Miller’s Frith, went slowly, stealthily colonized with growth.
Still others somehow survived untouched, even when the inhabitants were gone.
There were theories, Duncan knew, among the woodsmen and witches, in smoke-filled rooms of thinkers in Whitehall and Oxford and Cambridge alike.
Maybe it was churches, consecrated places, that kept the Forest at bay—in view of what lived in the bell tower back at Miller’s Frith, Duncan had to doubt that one—or maybe it was something geographical, geological even, some resonance of subterranean crystal or rock.
Maybe even something to do with blood spilled in the ground, either mortal over the slaughterhouse centuries of human history, or Fae at some prehistoric juncture recorded history did not recall…
Truth was, no one had any answers. And nor did he.
“It’s just what happens when people leave,” he said. “You have to look after places if you want the Forest to stay out.”
She looked up at him in silence. He saw tear sheen in her eyes, saw how very tired she was. He cupped her face with one hand.
“Come on. Not far now. We’re nearly home, I promise. Stay at my side.”
He dialed back his more obvious wariness, but strained his ears and kept the McCulloch up until they’d cleared the far end of the platforms and left the station behind.
After that, he encouraged Mimi to skip from sleeper to sleeper again, as she had been.
She went with the suggestion, as gamely as she could, but you could see her heart wasn’t in it anymore.
The twinned jut of the platforms fell behind, like paired reefs at low tide, in the wake of a ship steering well clear.
Presently, the whole place faded into the gloom.
They trudged on.
—
Midnight came and went. The land around them began to tilt, rising to the right, increasingly steep, like an incoming wave, falling away more mildly to the left, so the roots of the trees and the ground itself on that side were hidden from view.
L&YR’s engineers had put in a modest sandstone embankment to support the looming slope on the right-hand side, blocks now heavily mossed, cracked, and crumbling in places.
A similar wall below on the left shored up the line, made a terrace of it above the sloping lie of the land.
A little farther along, Duncan caught the first, faint sounds he’d been waiting for—the rinse and chatter of a stream coming down fast through the trees on their right.
He spotted it soon after, the glinting, broken rush of water over rocks as it tumbled to meet them, reached the line, and then disappeared under a small purpose-built gap in the embankment’s stonework.
You could hear the stream gurgle underneath, then emerge from the far side and carry on in cheery splash and hurry down the hill, though thickets of undergrowth and then the trees themselves hid it from view.
Farther down, he knew, this stream would find and empty into the River Ashop as it flowed southeast into ever deepening valleyed stretches to join the Derwent.
But before that, the Ashop passed the bustling village and ferry station of Maltby, which, for reasons still unexplained, had not been engulfed by the Forests when they came.
And where—he checked the Mappin & Webb—ex-of-the-Guards Colonel Martin Hardy should by now be installed and waiting with his men.
They were all but home and dry.
The curve on the rails tightened left, as the line bent northward, seeking Maltby and the station it had once served there. He’d probably—
Fast motion, corner of his eye, up in the trees to their right.
It was all the warning he got.