Dark Screams, Volume 7 Read online

  We came to this turn in the road and then I saw Ashdown Forest for the first time. It was a majestic sight, a good deal larger than a hundred acres. A field of heather and brambleberries extended to a row of sessile oaks in the distance. The woodland dipped and curled with the lay of the land, waves of willows and elms extending to the horizon, and I saw a dark path that led inside.

  “Tiddely pom,” said Christopher Robin.

  The old man was suddenly misty about the eyes. “Do you remember?” I asked him.

  “Everything,” he said.

  “Shall I go on?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  We crossed Cackle Street and entered the section of Ashdown Forest called Broadstone Warren by the locals. We passed joggers and a man painting on a big easel, two boys playing Frisbee. Trevor had finished with the flowers and was looking out at the park with open wonder. That was my favorite part about being Trevor’s mother, the watching of all those moments when he saw something new.

  Eventually the trees surrounded us and the path narrowed and changed from macadam to packed dirt. I recall that this place had the most amazing smell: pine sap and earth and dew, so fresh. The way was tough going for a bit. I had to turn left to right and back again to avoid the knobby knees of tree roots sticking out of the ground. But eventually we came to a short bridge over a thin creek, and after we got to the other side, Christopher Robin said, “Here.”

  I parked the chair, bringing the locks down behind the wheels with my shoe, and slowly the old man stood and began to shuffle into the forest.

  “Mr. Milne,” I said. “That’s far enough. What if you fall?”

  But Christopher Robin ignored me. I took Trevor’s hand and walked after my ward.

  “Watch there,” I said, pointing to another tree root right before the old man stepped on it and almost keeled over. This far from the path, the wood was quite dark, and it was difficult to see very far. But he continued on, determined, and I didn’t worry all that much, because I’d seen this before. Old men who are coming to the end can show remarkable strength in the last few days. Stubbornness. Or anger at the death that’s coming. I saw a man once, who hadn’t walked in a year, get out of his bed and march outside to a bench behind the hospital so he could watch the sunset. He died two days later. Christopher Robin had something important he needed to see.

  We walked together, slowly, following the old man for twenty paces, and then he stopped and stared at an old oak tree and I saw the sign there still nailed to the trunk, though the bark had grown around its corners as if the tree were eating it up. SANDERS, it read. And it was then I felt the first pangs of apprehension. Smart men tell us we have only five senses, but we know that cannot be true. At a traffic light, you can feel it when the person in the car beside you turns to look at you, a gentle prickle down the back of your neck. There are ghost instincts, I believe, senses carried down in our genes from our ancestors who huddled in caves and hunted in open fields and had to know when a jagular was stalking them. This feeling, this apprehension, was like that because I suddenly felt we were being watched.

  “Did your father put that there, Mr. Milne?” I asked.

  “No,” he whispered. He turned to me then, and what he said next almost made me lose my steady composure. He said, “Stay close to your son.”

  Well, I took Trevor’s hand in mine straightaway. He bristled at my touch, the way he does, but I held him tight. And tighter still when I heard the thing coming through the underbrush, an animal moving our way through the bracken and brambles. It came from the deep woods, the darkness there. I saw the berry bushes sway and part before I saw the creature, itself, and in that last moment, Christopher Robin said something else.

  “Please don’t send the tiger,” he whispered.

  Then a thatch of blackberry bushes bent down, and out of the woods stepped a velveteen donkey without any tail. It was a child’s thing. I could see that. A stuffed little buddy of a donkey and very big. And very old. There were patches all over it and two or three places yet to be patched where yellowed cotton stuck out in wispy tufts. It moved of its own accord, though, and I could feel in my heart that it was alive. Aware. Intelligent. For a moment, my mind shut down, I think, because I was unable to form a coherent thought, and my memory of it all is muddled. It was the impossibleness of the moment overwhelming my senses. What brought me back was Christopher Robin’s voice.

  “Don’t run,” he whispered. “Don’t leave. If you try to go, that thing will kill you and your Trevor. I am sorry.”

  That brought me around quick. I knelt down and put my arm around my son to protect him from this impossible animal, this unbelievable thing that had come out of the wood. I had just about gathered my wits finally and was thinking I should try to pull my son back to the path and leave my ward to fend for himself against this monster when the donkey opened its mouth and spoke in a low, dull voice.

  “I suppose I know why you’re here,” it said.

  Christopher Robin’s lips trembled and a little spittle fell onto his pressed and starched button-up shirt. “Which one of you did it?”

  “The Backson, of course,” said the donkey. And let’s not pretend here. All right? Let’s not pretend we don’t know who this donkey was. I knew right away. “Who else could it be?” said Eeyore.

  “Yes, but who did it send to fetch the girl?”

  “The bear. It’s always the bear first.”

  “Christopher Robin,” I whispered, and it sounded like my voice was coming from very far away, down and around a long tunnel to reach my ears again. “Christopher Robin, what is happening?”

  But the old man ignored me for the moment. “Bring us to the Backson, donkey,” he said.

  “Follow me,” said Eeyore. “And if you spot my tail along the way, please do pick it up.”

  When I didn’t move, Christopher Robin turned to look at me. Then he looked down at Trevor. I looked at my son then, too, expecting him to be thoroughly frightened or at least sufficiently confused. But what I saw there was, I suspect now, what Christopher Robin expected to find—I saw wonder.

  “If you wish, when you remember today, you may believe you dreamt it all,” the old man said to us, confidently. “That what you see today is but a dark dream. That is how I got through it. As well as I could have. In fact, I was so sure it was a dream, part of me never believed we’d find the old house in the tree at all. But for now we need to act. I don’t want any more young persons to suffer. You need to help me along, Miss Rebecca. Not far. Not far. We have a little business to do and then we can return to the house. And to Dartmouth and our warm beds there.”

  “Mind the thistles,” said Eeyore as he disappeared into the bushes.

  Christopher Robin took my arm and looked at me, eyes full of pity. And God help me, I told myself it was a dream and we walked after that donkey.

  —

  Beyond the berry bushes we happened upon a footpath worn into the soil that led deeper into the wood. Eeyore ambled slowly along, allowing for Christopher Robin’s old-man steps, and it never once looked back but sometimes sang a song I couldn’t quite make out because its voice was so low. It sounded like a sad song. We walked that path for a kilometer or so. It took us down a hill and over a wooden bridge, and then we came to a clearing with a little light and I saw the rest of the brood resting in the ankle-deep switch grass.

  Before he died, when my father got to drinking—which was not often and only in the company of close friends—he would tell us about the foo fighter he saw over Dresden in the war. He was a gunner, my old man, and he sat in that fishbowl under the plane shooting bullets the size of goose eggs at kraut Messerschmitts over the Fatherland. One night during the end of the war, on a night where there was a New Moon, my father’s aircraft encountered a glowing ball of light that acted of its own accord. It followed them back to England and at times came so near to my father in his fishbowl cage that he felt the heat coming off it. “Like sitting too close to a campfire,” he’d
say. But what I remembered as we came into the clearing in Ashdown Forest was how my father had described to us countless times the feeling of “disjointment” he’d felt when looking at the object. “It was disjointment,” he’d say, scotch in hand. “Like staring at the thing made you forget all the rules of the universe. Like your very soul was disjointed from all logic and sense. In the face of such strangeness, our minds protest.”

  I understand now what he was trying to say.

  As we came into the clearing, I saw them. Pooh. Piglet. Rabbit. Tigger. Roo. Even Owl. Only Kanga was missing. A child’s menagerie. The stuffed animals sat in the grass as if they’d been waiting for our arrival. They looked so sad because they looked so old. Their plush coverings were coming undone. Moss was growing across Rabbit’s face like a birthmark. Tigger was missing an arm—a gnarly branch stuck out of its armhole as a poor substitute. I never did learn what happened to Kanga, but I’m guessing nothing good.

  And Pooh.

  When the bear rose up on its haunches, it stood as tall as Trevor, and as it drew close, waddling back and forth much like a penguin, I could smell the dankness of its matted fur. Like rotting fruit in a wet cellar. As it walked, it kept its front paws behind its back.

  “Hello, Christopher Robin,” said the bear. Its voice was tired, the voice of an obese geriatric patient, lethargic and weak. “I’m afraid I’ve done something rather rash.” It brought out its fat little paw hands and the light brown fur was stained red with blood. “Sometimes the bad things take up the most room in your heart. Don’t they?”

  The little pig came then, scurrying through the grass on its hind legs. “You mustn’t blame P-P-P-Pooh. It was the Backson. W-When he calls, you know we c-can’t say no.”

  “I need to see him,” said Christopher Robin in a very measured voice. “Please take me to see the Backson, Pooh.”

  “Perhaps, instead, we should have a honey hunt,” suggested Pooh. “Yes. A honey hunt and then the Backson. Or a honey hunt and a nap and then the Backson. Or maybe the Backson tomorrow after breakfast. Yes, that’s best.”

  “No time for honey, Pooh. That girl is dead.”

  I guess it was then that I realized this was all about Sarah Baker, the young girl found murdered in Ashdown Forest. This thing, this demon pretending to be a boy’s stuffed bear…somehow it had killed her. The horrid truth infected my being like a fever, it throbbed in my ears like a sickness and churned my stomach with disgust. The implications of such a thing.

  “They are not real,” said Christopher Robin, to me. He must have noticed that I had gone pale and was near fainting. “They are not real, Miss Rebecca. Not really real. It’s like a parent playing pretend, except…except you can’t see the hands sticking out from under the sock puppets because that’s what Pooh and Piglet and the others are, though it took me a long time to figure that much out. They’re puppets. And the thing that’s moving them about is the Backson. It’s got its invisible arms in them, moving them around with its cosmic mind. We must find it. And soon.”

  “Please,” I said. “Please, Mr. Milne. Let’s go back to Sussex. Let’s go back to the street.”

  “We can’t,” he said. “It’s far too late. The only way back is forward now, I’m afraid. Help us along. And dear God, keep hold of that child.”

  And then Christopher Robin turned back to the bear and sort of squatted a bit so he could stare into the bear’s shiny black eyes.

  “Please take us to the Backson, Pooh Bear,” he said.

  Pooh sighed and dropped his head. “What I like doing best is nothing.”

  “We can’t stay in your corner of the forest, waiting for him to come to us.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” said Pooh. “But then again, I wouldn’t know if you were wrong.”

  And so the bear turned and trudged deeper into the wood and, one by one, his friends followed, Roo hopping along at the back. I helped Christopher Robin move along, being sure to hold my Trevor dear and close at the same time.

  —

  Later, Christopher Robin stopped us all at a large boulder half out of the ground beside the trail so that he could rest on it and catch his breath. This was more than he’d walked in years, and it was taking a considerable toll. He looked ragged to me, husked out, as if he’d aged ten more years since we left the house that morning. He motioned for me to sit with him. I pulled Trevor in close and my son watched the animals wander about in an open field, picking the tops off flowers and rubbing the pollen in one another’s faces. Once or twice he tried to bolt away, to frolic with the creatures, to run and roll and bark with them, but I never slackened my hold, not for one second. I was aware that we were in a moment where anything could happen, and if it did, it would be bad.

  “It came to me in the war, piece by piece,” said Christopher Robin, rubbing his forehead with the back of one hand. “I had done a good job of convincing myself that this was all only my imagination, stories I had told my father and he had written down. But my memories didn’t feel like daydreams. They were solid in my mind. And the more distance I got from the days I spent here in the Hundred Acre Wood, the more I began to understand what it had all been about.”

  “Tell me,” I said, because it seemed it was something I should know straightaway before we went any farther. I got the sense we were close. “What is a Backson?”

  “It’s just a made-up name. Something Pooh called it. A thing in the woods they would take me to sometimes. It lived in the crook of a rotted-out tree and looked like something I cannot really describe. But sometimes they would bring me to it and I would feel very faint for days after. Drained. Weak. Eventually, though, I would get better and return to play in the woods with Pooh and Piglet. Only later, in the war, I realized this thing they took me to that they called the Backson, it was feeding off me somehow. And all these animals and all the play were just…precursory. The motive was to feed. Always. It’s all the Backson, whatever it is. And all my friends, they were the tentacles it used to draw me in whenever it got hungry, the way that ugly fish that lives in the deepest reaches of the ocean uses a light to lure in tiny minnows.”

  Christopher Robin looked up as Tigger tried a bounce and landed on Roo’s tail. “When I left for good, when I grew up, I imagine the Backson searched for other children. And maybe sometimes those children would find ol’ Pooh and they would play and play until the bear suggested they walk deeper into the wood. And then the Backson fed again. But the world as it’s become…so insular. So scared. And for good reason. Parents don’t let children wander the wood anymore, and I bet it has fed less and less over the years. It has grown desperate with hunger. I think if it needed to, it could use these monsters to take a child by force. Poor Sarah Baker must not have wanted to go with them.”

  “Christopher Robin, we should not tarry any longer,” said Owl, who had perched above us on the boulder. How long had it been there, listening? How much had it heard?

  “Quite right,” said the old man.

  I helped him up and we walked on.

  —

  Round about noonday we came to a depression in the woods, a great round slumped-in bit of ground, and in the middle of it was a great big tree, what I learned later is called a pedunculate oak, a gnarled, twisty thing that must have been four hundred years old.

  “B-B-B-Backson,” Piglet whispered, and he would go no farther.

  Pooh kept walking, though, in a resigned way, toward the tree in the center of the circle, and we followed. Even Trevor was apprehensive now, his look of wonder wiped away by the dark of the place. He grunted and pulled a bit, so I carried him in my arms.

  As we came nearer to the trunk of the tree we saw that there was a great cancerous abscess in it, a rotted hole about a meter up from the mossy floor of the forest. Inside that hole was what I might describe as a worm, only larger than any earthly worm ever was. It was pink, the color of baby skin, mottled, piebald. It was about as round and long as a large pig, only without any limbs. It had sections li
ke a worm, and the topmost section was a darker tinge of pink than the rest, and in the center of that section was a wide mouth ringed with razor-sharp teeth.

  A little sound came out of me then, a moan of displeasure and repulsion, which I couldn’t really control. I watched the thing in the oak tree squirm as it sensed us draw near, like a cockroach might try to slink under an oven after a light came on. I set Trevor down carefully but kept hold of his hand.

  “What is that thing, Mr. Milne?” I asked. “What is it, really?”

  “I’m not entirely certain,” said Christopher Robin, “though if I were to guess I’d say it’s probably a dryad, if such things exist.”

  “A dryad?”

  “A wood nymph. A faerie. Something old and forgotten about.”

  From his cardigan the old man pulled a carving knife—stolen from the estate’s kitchen, no doubt.

  “I’m much too weak to do it fast,” he said. “And it should be quick. It deserves that much. You must do this.”

  “No!” I said, horrified. I backed away a couple steps, stumbling over a thin root and nearly falling with Trevor into the lichen around the base of the oak tree. Suddenly I felt the motley crew of stuffed, sentient animals move closer to us. It was almost as if they were automatically responding to an external trigger in the way a Venus flytrap plant will snap shut when a fly’s leg brushes against the thin hairs around its open maw.

  “You must,” said Christopher Robin. “They will not let us leave the wood.”

  And then I heard its voice. The voice of the worm in the abscess, the voice of the Backson. I heard it in my mind, awakening inside my head like a new thought of my own. And I knew this was the way it communicated, that in a way this was how it controlled Pooh and Tigger and Roo and the rest—telepathy or something like it. One of the old senses we’d forgotten about.