Darkest Part of the Woods Read Online Free PDF Page B

multitude of insects that swooped and darted in patterns so intricate he was robbed of thought and breath.

    He didn't move until they veered towards him. As he stumbled backwards, part of his mind urged him to stand his ground, to see them clearly. Then the trees across the clearing swayed together, covering much of the sun, and the swarm soared back over the mound and into the depths of the woods. As he lost sight of them he thought they were shining brighter yet with colours he'd never seen, even in dreams. The withdrawal of so much light had left him virtually blind, and he shut his eyes and covered them with his hands.

    He was watching whiteness linger on the insides of his eyelids when a twig snapped close to him.

    It needn't be a footstep-the wind was fierce enough to break more than a twig-but it had sounded closer to the mound than the trees were. His eyes sprang open, to see little except blankness. The treetops had revealed the sun again, and he thought he smelled the mound, warm earth and something sweeter. Then his eyes began to work, and he saw a figure advancing through the dazzle past the mound. For the moment he couldn't see its face. Its hands were outstretched to him as though to draw him forward, and above either hand an insect brighter than the sun was hovering.

    4

    The Author of the Book

    "NEARLY time to go," Heather called, and thought she should have left off the first word.
    When Sam didn't respond she went up past her mother's lithograph of an impossible tree whose branches were only as real as the spaces between them.

    He was no longer in the bathroom, where the mirror was recovering from blindness while the shower prepared its next drip. She twisted the tap shut and straightened his towel on the rail, then as a second thought dropped the towel in the washing basket on her way to knocking on his bedroom door. "Ready for the road?"

    Surely he hadn't gone back to bed. She knocked again and eased the door open. He was at the window, and might have been ignoring the mess his room continued to be: the dwarfish hi-fi piled with naked compact discs on which headphones were resting, the bed not so much made as more or less draped with its quilt, the computer desk scattered with floppies, its chair wearing yesterday's clothes over some from the day before that. She could see nothing beyond the window for him to watch, just the woods a quarter of a mile away across the common. "If you're coming into town with me I'm about to head off," she said. "No point in using two cars when we don't need to."

    Sam wiped his breath off the pane as though waving to the trees, and Heather saw a wind make them return the gesture as he backed away from the window. "No point," he apparently agreed.

    "Who rang last night when I was in bed?"

    "Dad, to see if I'm all right for Sunday. "A faint smile like a shrug of his squeezed-together lips followed that, and a raising of eyebrows that rediscovered furrows in his high forehead. "I'll go out with him if it makes him happy," Sam said.

    She wondered if the prospect of herself and Terry being almost as polite as strangers to each other in the house they all used to share was causing Sam to seem more withdrawn than usual. "I'm sure it will," she said, and left him to lock the house while she roused the car.

    The Civic was keeping his Volkswagen company on the flagstones Terry had insisted on having laid in front of the large semi-detached house Margo had made their wedding present, herself moving into an apartment across Goodmanswood.
    Though Woodland Close contained no trees, a few gnarled brownish leaves were scuttling along the pavement. Cars chirped as drivers put their alarms to sleep while an early-risen vacuum cleaner bumbled like a fly unable to find an exit from the community centre, formerly a school. A third house on her side of the street was for sale. As soon as Sam was strapped in she drove onto the road.

    Two minutes' driving brought her abreast of the High