Cold Boy's Wood by Carol Birch (best books to read for students txt) 📕

a terrible old song. How many times has she appeared in the night? Where are you? I say. Are you here? Is it really you? Of course, she replies, smiling. Her teeth. Her eyes. I knew she was only in my mind. It’s different when the real thing happens. You just know. Lily never gets out of my head into the real world, to walk and talk and touch me. In a sense, neither does Harriet. I don’t know that woman. I know Harry in the garden with her tortoise, how we searched and searched for poor old Toby, how he still haunts these woods now, only he’s turned into a prehistoric monster. How many times did I wish and wish that if anyone would come to me out of the fog, it would be Lily, but it never was. Still, you could say, what’s the difference? The whole thing is just in your head, not just them old dreams, the lot.

I had a weird taste in my mouth. It’s one of those signs. Yes and there goes the shake and thrill of it up and down me. Teeth like castanets. Poor trees, poor blasted trees. They’ve been murmuring for a while now, I can no longer deny it. Could be dragons, elementals, the cold boy, mad King Goll – they will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old – What a game. At first I pretended it was just the sounds the world made, saying my name. But it’s not, it’s the old thing, like they’ve never been gone, murmuring voices rippling softly, a constant stream, heard behind a distance, from a distance inside. They’re always there, they just lie dormant, sometimes for years, like a volcano. Whispering, chuckling, the odd one rising now and then, the odd phrase emerging:

it was another time

she was on the bus and never

but if you did know

what would you do about it?

not you

now you know

They also laugh.

I hear voices that have been inaudible for ages. Still distant. Sometimes I thought they were there as I was going off to sleep, only they could have been the heating, or something outside, or stuff moving through a pipe. Just the world. They’re coming in over the waves in the air, from high in the sky, still quite far away, so many all murmuring together like the civilised hum of a great room full of polite people making conversation. My heart thudding got in the way of the voices, irritating me. I walked until I came to the ruin. It had changed. At first I thought it was a dark castle, blocking out the trees over a long area, but when I turned to look around at the woods folding over the path behind me and then looked back, there were lights on inside, and colours, as bright as if a strong light source lay behind them, running down in the windows like pouring water. I wondered if I walked towards it, would it all vanish, because it was too perfect to be real, and I didn’t want it to stop. It soared up and up, a thing of mythical proportions, away and above the trees, with those pouring waters rushing down behind the windows.

How lucky I am! There’s no approaching a sight like that, not if you don’t want to get burned. I sat with my back to the wood and my face towards where fog came from the heights, slipping down the long slopes like grey suds, thickening as it came. I haven’t got a home anywhere. I’d love to light a fire. I have matches in my pocket, and a tiny bottle of vodka. I drink my vodka. Anything goes. I can play and misremember because it’s all misremembered anyway, and the hours fly by. The stones and leaves dance, sweetly, sedately. Rivers run in the leaves’ black veins. The things out there, whispering, are real, that much is obvious. I know what they should be but I don’t think they are. They should be all those people I know who’ve gone, but they never are, or if they are, they’re still so far away that I can’t get them. They’re just people I don’t know, their endless meanderings wandering by. Still, every so often I feel as if they fill me with themselves, all of their weird and groping selves, sometimes I almost feel as if I am them. We are legion. Here in me they never stop their bickering. I remember one day laughing at it all, I said: What point? What point trying to unmix this ball of worms, let them writhe. Then was consumed with horror at what I was.

I looked down and saw on the stones in some ancient path that ran from where I sat to where the great doors had stood, a worm, a thin long thing trying to get somewhere. I hate worms, can hardly look at them. I watched in fascination as it slumped itself feebly a little way along. These too, I thought. Me and thee, worm. You make every fibre of my being curdle. And I thought about the body that came down, and felt sorry for it. Are you here still? All the time you were up there in that terrible lonely place did your clay meet them, the worms? The horrors, the horrors. Death by worms, the boats. What have I done? Oh God, what have I done, what have I done? Did you walk? Oh but you’re long gone now. It’s all long gone in the end.

*

I forget the stages, if stages there were, by which the ineffable again corralled me, but I wasn’t even in the woods any more. It felt as if considerable time had passed, or as if I’d just come to in a dream. A wild sea spread out beneath me, small grey sea horses dashing themselves to delightful death against the cliffs. I was on a lip of rock