Of the Woodsman and the Work of His Ax

THE BRICKS AND MORTAR were gone. There was now rough bark beneath David’s fingers. He was inside the trunk of a tree, before him an arched hole, beyond which lay shadowy woods. Leaves fell, descending in slow spirals to the forest floor. Thorny bushes and stinging nettles provided low cover, but there were no flowers that David could see. It was a landscape composed of greens and browns. Everything appeared to be illuminated by a strange half-light, as though dawn was just approaching or the day was at last drawing to its close.

David stayed in the darkness of the trunk, unmoving. His mother’s voice was gone, and now there was only the barely heard sound of leaf glancing against leaf and the distant rushing of water over rocks. There was no sign of the German plane, no indication that it had ever even existed. He was tempted to turn back, to run to the house and wake his father in order to tell him of what he had seen. But what could he say, and why would his father believe him after all that had occurred that day? He needed proof, some token of this new world.

And so David emerged from the hollow of the tree trunk. The sky above was starless, the constellations hidden by heavy clouds. The air smelled fresh and clean to him at first, but as he breathed deeply he caught a hint of something else, something less pleasant. David could almost taste it upon his tongue: a metallic sensation composed of copper and decay. It reminded him of the day he and his father had found a dead cat by the side of the road, its fur torn and its insides exposed. The cat had smelled a lot like the night air in the new land. David shivered, and only partly from the cold.

Suddenly he was aware of a great roaring noise from behind him, and a sensation of heat at his back. He threw himself to the ground and rolled away as the trunk of the tree began to distend, the hollow widening until it resembled the entrance to a great, bark-lined cave. Flames flickered deep within it, and then, like a mouth expelling a tasteless piece of food, it spit forth part of the burning fuselage of the German bomber, the body of one of its crew still trapped in the wreckage of the gondola beneath, its machine gun pointing at David. The wreckage tore a blackened, burning path through the undergrowth before it came to rest in a clearing, still spewing smoke and fumes as the flames fed upon it.

David stood, brushing leaves and dirt from his clothing. He tried to approach the burning plane. It was a Ju 88; he could tell from the gondola. He could see the remains of the gunner, now almost entirely wreathed in flames. He wondered if any of the crew had survived. The body of the trapped aviator lay pressed against the cracked glass of the gondola, his mouth grinning white in his charred skull. David had never seen death up close before, not like this, not violent and smelly and turning to black. He could not help thinking of the German’s final moments, trapped in the searing heat, his skin burning. He experienced a wave of pity for the dead man, whose name he would never know.

Something whizzed past his ear like the warm passage of a night insect, followed almost immediately by a cracking noise. A second insect buzzed past, but by then David was already lying flat on the ground, crawling for cover as the ammunition for the .303 ignited. He found a depression in the earth and threw himself into it, covering his head with his hands and trying to keep himself as flat as he could until the hail of bullets had ceased. Only when he was certain that the ammunition was entirely spent did he dare to raise his head again. He stood warily and watched as flames and sparks shot into the skies above. For the first time, he got some sense of how huge were the trees in this forest, taller and wider than even the oldest of oaks in the woods back home. Their trunks were gray and entirely without branches until, at least one hundred feet above his head, they exploded into massive, mostly bare crowns.

A black, boxlike object had separated from the main body of the shattered plane and now lay, smoking slightly, not far from where David stood. It looked like an old camera, but with wheels on its side. He could make out the word “Blickwinkel” marked on one of the wheels. Beneath it was a label reading “Auf Farbglas Ein.”

It was a bombsight. David had seen pictures of them. This was what the German fliers had used to pick out their targets on the ground. Perhaps that had even been the task of the man who now lay burning in the wreckage, for the city would have passed beneath him as he lay prone in the gondola. Some of David’s pity for the dead man seeped away. The bombsight made what they had been doing seem more real, somehow, more awful. He thought of the families huddled in their Anderson shelters, the children crying and the adults hoping that whatever descended would strike far away from them, or the crowds gathered together in the Underground stations, listening to the explosions, dust and dirt falling on their heads as the bombs shook the ground above.

And they would be the lucky ones.

He kicked out hard at the bombsight, connecting with a perfect right foot shot, and felt a surge of satisfaction as he heard the sound of broken glass from within and knew the delicate lenses had shattered.

Now that the excitement was over, David put his hands in the pockets of his dressing gown and tried to take in a little more of his surroundings. Some four or five steps beyond where he was, four bright purple flowers stood tall above the grass. They were the first signs of real color he had seen so far. Their leaves were yellow and orange, and the hearts of the flowers themselves looked to David like the faces of sleeping children. Even in the murk of the forest, he thought he could discern their closed eyelids, the slightly opened mouths, the twin holes of their nostrils. They were unlike any flower that he had ever seen before. If he could take one and give it to his father, then he might be able to convince him that this place truly existed.

David approached the flowers, dead leaves crunching beneath his feet. He was almost upon them when the eyelids of one of the flowers opened, revealing small yellow eyes. Then its lips parted and it emitted a shriek. Instantly, the other flowers awoke, and then, almost as one, they closed their leaves around themselves, revealing hard, barbed undersides that glistened faintly with a sticky residue. Something told David that it would be a bad idea to touch those barbs. He thought of nettles, and poison ivy. They were bad enough, but who knew what poisons the plants here might use to defend themselves?

David’s nose wrinkled. The wind was blowing the stink of the burning aircraft away from him, and its stench had now been replaced by another. The metallic smell that he had detected earlier was stronger here. He took a few steps deeper into the forest and saw an uneven formation under the fallen leaves, spots of blue and red suggesting something lay barely concealed beneath. It was roughly the shape of a man. David drew closer and saw clothing, and fur beneath it. His brow furrowed. It was an animal, an animal wearing clothes. It had clawed fingers and legs like those of a dog. David tried to glimpse its face, but there was none. Its head had been cleanly severed from the body, and recently too, for a long spray of arterial blood still lay upon the forest floor.

David covered his mouth so that he would not be sick. The sight of two corpses in as many minutes was making his stomach churn. He stepped away from the body and turned back toward his tree. As he did so, the great hole in the trunk disappeared, the tree shrinking to its previous size and the bark seeming to grow over the gap while he watched, entirely covering the passage back to his own world. It became just one more tree in a forest of great trees, each hardly different from the next. David touched his fingers to the wood, pressing and knocking, hoping to find some way of reopening the portal back to his old life, but nothing happened. He almost cried, but he knew that if he began crying, all would be lost. He would be just a small boy, powerless and afraid, far from home. Instead, he looked around him and found the tip of a large, flat rock erupting from the dirt. He dug it free and, using its sharpest edge, he chipped at the trunk of the tree: once, then again, over and over until the bark fragmented and fell to the ground. David thought that he felt the tree shudder, the way a person might if he had suddenly experienced a severe shock. The whiteness of the inner pulp turned to red, and what looked very much like blood began to seep from the wound, flowing down the channels and crevasses of the bark and dripping onto the ground beneath.

A voice said: “Don’t do that. The trees don’t like it.”

David turned. There was a man standing in the shadows a short distance from him. He was big and tall, with broad shoulders and short, dark hair. He wore brown boots of leather that came almost to his knees and a short coat made from skins and hides. His eyes were very green, so that he seemed almost like a part of the forest itself given human form. Over his right shoulder, he carried an ax.

David dropped the stone. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

The man regarded him silently. “No,” he said at last. “I don’t suppose you did.”

He advanced toward David, and the boy instinctively took a couple of steps back until he felt his hands graze the tree. Once again, it seemed to shiver beneath his touch, but the feeling was less pronounced than before, as though it were gradually recovering from the injury it had received and was certain now, in the presence of the approaching stranger, that no such hurt would be visited on it again. David was not so reassured by the man’s approach: he had an ax, the kind of ax that looked as if it could sever a head from a body.

Now that the man had emerged from the shadows, David was able to examine his face more closely. He thought that the man looked stern, but there was kindness there too, and the boy felt that here was someone who could be trusted. He began to relax a little, although he kept a wary eye on the big ax.

“Who are you?” said David.

“I might ask you the same question,” said the man. “These woods are in my care, and I have never seen you in them before. Still, in answer to you, I am the Woodsman. I have no other name, or none that matters.”

The Woodsman approached the burning airplane. The flames were dying down now, leaving the framework exposed. It looked like the skeleton of some great beast, abandoned to the fire after the roasted meat had been stripped from its bones. The gunner could no longer be seen clearly. He had become just another dark shape in a tangle of metal and machine parts. The Woodsman shook his head in wonder, then walked away from the wreckage and returned to David. He reached past the boy and laid his hand upon the trunk of the wounded tree. He looked closely at the damage David had inflicted upon it, then patted the tree as one might pat a horse or a dog. Kneeling down, he removed some moss from the nearby stones, which he packed into the hole.

“It’s all right, old fellow,” he said to the tree. “It will heal soon enough.”

Far above David’s head, the branches moved for a moment, even though all of the other trees remained still.

The Woodsman returned his attention to David. “And now,” he said, “it’s your turn. What is your name, and what are you doing here? This is no place for a boy to be wandering alone. Did you come in this…thing?”

He gestured toward the airplane.

“No, that followed after me. My name is David. I came through the tree trunk. There was a hole, but it disappeared. That was why I was chipping at the bark. I was hoping to cut my way back in, or at least to mark the tree so I would be able to find it again.”

“You came through the tree?” he asked. “From where did you come?”

“A garden,” said David. “There was a little gap in a corner, and I found a way through from there to here. I thought I heard my mother’s voice, and I followed it. Now the way back is gone.”

The Woodsman pointed again at the wreckage. “And how did you come to bring that with you?”

“There was fighting. It fell from the sky.”

If the Woodsman was surprised by this information, he didn’t show it.

“There is the body of a man inside,” said the Woodsman. “Did you know him?”

“He was the gunner, one of the crew. I’d never seen him before. He was a German.”

“He is dead now.”

The Woodsman touched his fingers to the tree once again, lightly tracing its surface as though hoping to find the telltale cracks of a doorway beneath his skin. “As you say, there is no longer a door here. You were right to try to mark this tree, though, even if your methods were clumsy.”

He reached into the folds of his jacket and removed a small ball of rough twine. He unraveled it until he was satisfied that he had the correct length, then tied it around the trunk of the tree. From a small leather bag he produced a gray, sticky substance that he smeared on the twine. It didn’t smell at all nice.

“It will keep the animals and birds from gnawing upon the rope,” explained the Woodsman. He picked up his ax. “You’d better come with me,” he said. “We’ll decide what to do with you tomorrow, but for now we need to get you to safety.”

David didn’t move. He could still smell blood and decay on the air, and now that he had seen the ax at close quarters, he thought he spotted drops of red along its length. There were red marks too on the man’s clothing.

“Excuse me,” he said, as innocently as he could, “but if you care for the woods, why do you need an ax?”

The Woodsman looked at David with what might almost have been amusement, as though he saw through the boy’s efforts to conceal his concerns yet was impressed by his guile nonetheless.

“The ax isn’t for the woods,” said the Woodsman. “It’s for the things that live in the woods.”

He raised his head and sniffed the air. He pointed the ax in the direction of the headless corpse. “You smelled it,” he said.

David nodded. “I saw it too. Did you do it?”

“I did.”

“It looked like a man, but it wasn’t.”

“No,” said the Woodsman. “Not a man. We can talk about it later. You have nothing to fear from me, but there are other creatures that we both have reason to fear. Come now. Their time is near, and the heat and the smell of burning flesh will draw them to this place.”

David, realizing that he had no other choice, followed the Woodsman. He was cold, and his slippers were damp, so the Woodsman gave him his jacket to wear and raised David up onto his back. It had been a long time since someone had carried David upon his back. He was too heavy for his father now, but the Woodsman did not appear troubled by the burden. They passed through the forest, the trees seeming to stretch endlessly before them. David tried to take in the new sights, but the Woodsman moved quickly and it was all David could do to hang on. Above their heads, the clouds briefly parted, and the moon was revealed. It was very red, like a great hole in the skin of the night. The Woodsman picked up the pace, his long steps eating up the forest floor.

“We must hurry,” he said. “They’ll be coming soon.”

And as he spoke, a great howling arose from the north, and the Woodsman began to run.

VIII

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 667