I know that I’ve been a little lax on the creative writing, and that this story has taken me a lot longer than I first thought it would to get to the end of it’s first draft. That said, I’m almost slightly content with it. This one’s for Rachel.
As usual feel free to leave comments, slander etc etc. You know the drill.
Season’s End
I woke to sunlight shining through thin tartan curtains. I was twelve, and the sunlight had that special summer holiday quality about it that promised a cloud free day. There’s something magical about holiday sunshine; something that can fill a day full of excitement; turning sticks into swords, trees into towers, and small boys into knights and wizards. As sleep drifted away I gradually became aware of a deep hum and incessant tapping, coming from behind the curtain. Carefully I pulled the fold of the curtain open, revealing a fat bumblebee throwing itself furiously against the glass. If it had been a wasp I would have killed it, crushing it against the window with the heel of a shoe. The summer before I had been stung by one, the memory of the throbbing red lump it had raised on my arm was still fresh. But I liked bumblebees, liked the fat laziness of their flight, and the hairy yellow and black stripes of their bellies. I lifted the latch and opened the window. I watched the bee buzz away, flying out over the waving green treetops.
After a rushed breakfast of thickly buttered warm toast that I barely stood still to eat, I ran out the backdoor into the garden. I should explain now that our house was surrounded by a large wood, and that the fence that had divided our small garden from the ancient trees of the wood had long since fallen to rust among ivy and briars. To me the wood was as much a part of my home as the house itself. I had spent many blissful days roaming through that wood, following narrow almost imaginary paths, scaling trees that could transform into mountains or towers. I imagined treasure and booty, gold and swords and armour, at the top of those towers. At that age I had no interest in damsels, distressed or otherwise. Today, I decided, I was a knight, tall, strong and noble. I would track and hunt the trolls, fairies, and goblins that lurked in the shadowed wood. I would know them by the whistling of the wind that was their cries, tracks left in the leaves, and the hollow trees that were their lairs. I was a wizard too, with nonsense magic words that banished the ghosts that I knew with childhood certainty haunted the dappled spaces under the trees. I took my favourite stick from where it was propped against the crumbling shed and walked through the neat garden, its carefully tamed flowerbeds and striped lawn full of the scent of the yellow and white honeysuckle blossoms that climbed the kitchen wall. As I left the lawn and entered into the shade of the tall trees talking in the wind my stick grew into a sword and I swiped the heads off nettles and brambles as I followed the path deeper into the woods.
After a while spent walking along cool paths deep into the wood, bent almost double searching for the heavy claw prints of trolls and the smaller footprints of goblins, I wandered into a glade I didn’t recognise. In the middle of the clearing was the rotten stump of a long dead tree, with a scatter of freshly dug earth around it. At the base of the stump was a large hole, its entrance marked with the light brown of freshly turned leaf mould. I knelt down, bending my head low to peer into the darkness of the hole. I couldn’t see far. I prodded and brushed the turned earth with my sword, wondering if it had been dug by a badger or a fox, it was too big for a rabbit, that I knew. As I swiped at the earth, I noticed something white amidst the dark dead leaves and brown of the earth. I dropped my stick and carefully brushed the earth away with a gentle hand. Lying there uncovered in the shifting dappled sunlight lay a small white shape, a bone. Rabbit’s bone, I said out loud to myself. I brushed and dug more, feeling earth pushed beneath my fingernails. More white, more bone showed, cool against my fingers. Excited I dug faster, brushing earth and leaf aside with quick scoops. After a minute I sat back on my haunches, hot from efforts, appreciating the cool woodland air on my clammy brow. The white scattering I had uncovered was no rabbit skeleton, but the slender, off-white bones of a hand. A human hand. I recognised the delicate nubs of finger bones from the hanging skeleton in Mr. Whitmore’s science room at school. I stood up, unable to look away, electrified, young body filled with energy that demanded release. Strange words came to me from cheap horror comics. I was a grave robber, a desecrator of bodies. I knew I should bury it again, that it was the right thing to do. Instead I ran. I ran back through the woods, ignoring the brambles whipping at my legs until panting and gasping I reached the ordered safety of the garden. There I collapsed on the back steps, drawing deep breaths sweet with the scent of honeysuckle down my aching throat.
It took half an hour to pluck up the courage to go back. Walking back through the wood, I started at every noise, every squeak of branches rubbing together in the breeze, every stick falling noisily into the leaves. It was no longer the same place I had entered that morning. That morning I had been hunting creatures that I had never found, that were real in that self conscious, childish half-imagined way; monsters that I could banish with a thought. Now I knew, really knew, that there was a dead body in my woods. And somewhere was the thing that had killed it. As I walked I tried to decide if it had been bandits, or robbers, or a maniac, or a wild man, that had murdered someone and buried the body. Caught up in my thoughts, I didn’t even realise that I was nearing the glade again. What finally made me look up from the path beneath my feet was a noise, faint at first, a deep humming barely audible that got louder as I walked on. As I entered the clearing I stopped dead, not understand what I saw. On the ground near the stump, where I had found the finger bones, was a deep carpet of yellow and black, shifting and writhing. The humming was stronger now, a deep vibration that I could actually feel in my stomach and chest. Filling the air were streams of bees, fat, hairy, bumble bees, each as big as the top of my thumb. They wound and wove, coming from the trunks around the glade, through the treetops, coming to settle on the growing mass obscuring on the ground. At first I gawked in amazement, just watching the lines of bees drunkenly flying around the clearing before dropping into the buzzing mound next to the stump. As the shock wore off I realised that they were swarming over where the body was buried, digging with thousands of needle-like legs into the soft leaf mulch to reach what was below. I suddenly couldn’t stop myself thinking of rotting flesh, sweet with decay. The bees were there to feed. Thousands of tiny mouths eager to lick with minute tongues, to ingest, to carry away a portion of someone’s body on thrumming wings. A wave of acrid bile flooded up my throat and I knew that if I stayed I would be violently sick. With a hand to my mouth I once again left the clearing, my roiling belly reducing me to a hobbling run.
At dinner I could hardly eat, pushing my food around my plate until my mother told me to stop. All I could think about was the heaving mass of bees in the glade, I imagined I could taste the sweet nectar of decay on my tongue. Concerned that her normally voracious child had no appetite she asked me if I was feeling ill. I muttered something vague and didn’t meet her eyes, she had that maternal talent for always being able to tell when I was lying. After a few seconds she went back to watching one of her soaps on TV and paid me no more attention.
The last of the sunshine shone down in sparse golden rays through the trees, intermittently piercing the glooming gloom as I finally made my way back to the glade. It was nearly dusk and darkness was beginning to seep into the space between the trunks, to swallow up the undergrowth in pools of darkness. A gentle evening breeze rustled the leaves in the treetops above. I was tense with fear, walking softly but jumping at every snapped twig. The growing shadows could hide anything, whatever had killed and buried the body could be creeping up on me and I’d wouldn’t know until it was too late. Despite the fear I kept going, forcing myself to place one foot in front of another. I somehow knew that if I didn’t go to the glade now, then tomorrow it would rain, and the day’s magic would be washed away, there would be nothing left in the clearing but damp leaves and disturbed earth, and I would be left always wondering what had happened. As I walked the darkness gathered in closer, tightening around me, the dying light penetrating through the treetops less often. As I walked, the humming of hundreds of buzzing wings came to me softly through the wood. I followed it as if it were a path through the trees, leading me onwards to an unknown end. When I eventually reached the edge of the clearing I hung back, unsure of what I would see. After a moment I found my courage and stepped forward into the clearing. The humming was faint now, soft and fading as the last bumblebees flew in lazy streams back into the trees, each following a path known only to it. Next to the tree stump there was no longer a carpet of yellow and black bodies tumbling over each other, no longer the slithers of bone I had unearthed. All that remained was a hollow of freshly dug earth longer than I was tall and about two foot deep where the body had lain, the shallow ditch of an empty woodland grave. Of the body itself, there was no sign. As I watched, the last of the bees circled once more around the glade and slowly flew away into the trees, a tiny fuzzy shape as much heard as seen. I turned to follow it’s flight, and as I did so caught a glimpse of a pale figure flitting between the shadows of the trees. For just a second I saw a slender young woman with golden yellow hair and milky white skin that seemed to glow in the growing gloom as she danced between the pools of shadows and the tree trunks. I saw her for just one second, and then she was gone, gone into the wood. All that was left was the sweet scent of honeysuckle blowing through the wood on the gentle evening breeze.
I remember that the day after that it did indeed rain. A few days after that I was sent back to school, and in the years after that I grew up, and the sunlit summer holiday days no longer seemed magical to me. All this happened to me almost a life time ago, and as I sit here in my favourite chair writing it down I am an old man; an old, sick, man. The years are not kind, they rub away at you, seeking to smooth you down to nothing. I know that I will never see another summer after this. As I sit here I look out the window and see the soft evening of a dying summer’s day, the breeze brushing leaves touched by the sinking sun. In a minute I will put down my pen, stand up, and go out into the wood. I will go to a clearing, to lie down in a shallow hollow also softened by the years, and there I will watch the light fade from the sky, and wait for the scent of honeysuckle.
