The Martian in the Wood

V

Zena offered Walter the use of her parents’ bedroom, by far the most comfortable in the Lodge, but not yet cleared. Considerately he turned down the offer, and settled for a much smaller room, once a servant’s, but warm enough.

In the morning Pierce prepared an extensive breakfast of porridge, toast, eggs, bacon, cold meat, fruit juices, coffee. Walter tucked in with a vigour that surprised Zena. But only months before he had spent many days on the run from the Martians, and he would never forget the experience of raw hunger; he always filled his belly when he got the chance.

And they spoke of forests.

“Our fascination with the woods runs deep,” he said. “And our fear. Odd when you think that our most distant forebears may have emerged from the forests of Africa, and our closest extant cousins – according to Darwin, I mean the African apes – still live there. Gilgamesh, you know, faced the challenge of the Cedar Forest. The Caesars’ legions came to grief in the German forest, and always feared it. Julius claimed unicorns lived there! Perhaps he saw a hold-out of your elasmotheriums, do you think? And folk tales abound with forests; they are places of ogres and witches and transformations and a slipperiness about time and space.”

“But no Martians.”

He smiled. “Not until now. Perhaps we are witnessing the birth of a new mythos. Are you going to have any more of that ham?”

They prepared for the hike. Walter accepted Zena’s pressing to take heavy boots, a waterproof coat, hat and walking stick that had belonged to her father. Pierce made up light packs of food, water, bits of medicinal kit, and such practicalities as a torch and even an old flare gun.

Walter had no weapon. I don’t believe he ever used a gun in his life. When Zena took one of her father’s hunting rifles from the cupboard, and a packet of shells, Walter made no comment.

Thus they set off.

Compared to her previous hike, they made slow progress, even along the trail to Holmburgh Wood. From the beginning Walter, bearing his war injuries, leaned heavily on his stick, and soon grew short of breath. Zena was already mildly anxious about the shortness of the late winter day. But she told herself to be patient; perhaps, in the heart of the Wood, it wasn’t winter at all.

Walter remarked on the miserable condition of the vegetation, even given that it was midwinter: the dead grass, the spavined bushes, the absence of birds and other creatures. He speculated on nitrogen deficiency. “Harbinger of the Pasteur Institute has studied atmospheric changes associated with the Martians and their rampantly colonising red weed. Another mystery that will take years to resolve!”

The boundary of the Wood itself, the black-trunked trees thrusting out of the ground like the bars of a cage, seemed still more daunting, more excluding even than before. Walter poked at the trunks with his stick, and made no comment as Zena led him around the boundary to the place where she had entered before. Her paint splashes were still visible, though overgrown with moss and even flaps of new bark.

They pushed into the Wood. The daylight, for what it was worth, was shut out. Walter tripped on roots, and lost his footing when his boots sank into deep banks of moss and rot. But he used a battery torch to light his way, and learned to poke with his stick at uncertain ground before risking it. Their conversation, subdued, was limited to the practical, as they helped each other find a way through, and they made slow but steady progress.

At first, at least, nothing seemed to have changed. Zena saw no sign that her brother had been this way recently, or anybody else for that matter. But she found her markers of yellow paint, even if some of them had weathered more than she would have expected – almost as if the Wood were resisting her attempt to blaze a trail through it. She had brought the paint pot; she renewed the marks with defiant splashes of her brush.

Walter watched her. “I envy your determination, and clarity of thought. I myself feel – disoriented. It is as if the very light shifts around us, the shadows, turning me about. And the smells, of rot and blood, even of burning…”

“The Wood doesn’t want us here.”

“No, indeed! But it is going to have to put up with us. Lead on, Miss Gardner.”

At last they came to a place she thought she recognised. She held up her hand to halt Walter, and peered ahead, the shotgun heavy on her back. “Something is different.”

“How?”

“This is where I came upon snow, last time.”

Walter grunted, and pushed forward beside her, inspecting the ground. “You’re sure?”

“I’ve been following my paint marks. I remember ducking under this branch, I remember it being like an archway, and struggling with the sudden drifts.”

“No sign of snow now. Or slush, or any sign it was here recently.” With his stick, he probed at the ground. “But plenty of this stuff.” He lifted fronds of wilted vegetable matter, raised on the end of his stick. The fronds were blood dark and swollen with vesicles, like blisters. “Have you seen it before? The red weed, we called it. It was all over the countryside in Surrey and London, especially the water courses.”

“Where the Martians went.”

“That’s it. And died out as they did, presumably from earthly infections.”

“It’s not long since I was here. Even if the snow cleared, could it have spread so quickly, grown so thick?”

“It’s possible. It grew mighty fast in the few days it had last year, before the blight got it. But it’s also possible that what you saw before, the snow banks, was just as valid a perception as this, the red weed. Even if the two are entirely different phenomena.” He smiled, rueful. “In my attempts to chronicle the Martian incursion, in the fragments I have published so far – articles mostly for the American journals – I have been described as an ‘unreliable narrator’. Call me an honest one, at least, even if I have had difficulty in digesting my experiences. But in here, you see, I think it’s reality that may be unreliable. Not your memory.” He shook the fronds off his stick, and pointed ahead. “We should go on. I think I see light ahead. As if the forest is ending. Do you remember –”

“There was the clearing with the animals. The megafauna. And then, the Neanderthals’ hearth. It’s not as before.”

“Something different, then. Good! Come on.”

He led the way.

It was only a little further before they came upon the valley.

That, at least, was how Zena labelled it in her head, on first glance. She and Walter, as if by instinct, quickly dropped down behind the shelter of a low bluff, and out of sight.

The dense forest had given way, quite abruptly, to a wide landscape – as expansive as the clearing where she had spotted the elasmotheriums and the giant elks – but there were no megafauna here, she saw immediately. And the ground itself, the very geology, was changed too. She and Walter were at the top of a kind of cliff, perhaps fifty feet high, overlooking a broad, straight valley. The hard, rocky ground under her feet, and the outcrops by the edge, were rust red.

Walter picked at the rock with a fingernail. “No grains,” he murmured. “Not any kind of sandstone. It could be basalt, if heavily weathered. Rusted. Are there basaltic outcrops in Sussex?”

Zena had no idea. She stared at him, and the bit of rock he studied, and back at the wall of forest from which they emerged. It looked a hundred yards away, at least, though she thought they had come only a few paces to this bluff. She was cold, too, but it was a dry, sharp cold, oddly less uncomfortable than the damp murk of an English winter.

She looked up. The sky was clear, where it had been overcast, and the sun was low. Still the morning, then. But the sun looked pale, oddly shrunken. The sky was a deep, deep blue.

And before her was this valley, where no valley had existed before.

Cautiously she leaned forward, and peered out over the bluff. A valley, yes, wide and with a flat floor, and walled by this low cliff, and by a matching parallel line on the horizon. But where the cliffs were rust red, the valley floor was mostly green or grey, for it was covered with a greyish sort of vegetation. It was difficult to see the detail at this remove, but she thought she saw low trees, and grass, or perhaps moss.

And the valley was evidently inhabited.

The main features were a single great building – like a museum, was her first thought – and a canal. It could only be that, a waterway that was much narrower than the valley that enclosed it, that ran dead straight between the rocky cliffs. The land along its banks, perhaps irrigated, was thick with the grey-green vegetation. But the water itself, flowing only sluggishly, was stained blood red.

“Just as the astronomers see,” Walter murmured. “The red waters, red oceans, and grey-green land.”

Astronomers? She tucked that word away for now.

“It looks like blood,” she said. “The water in the canal. But –”

“The red weed,” Walter said. “Or some cladistic relative. Without a doubt.”

As he spoke a shadow passed over them, crossing the sun; Zena looked up, blinking – her eyes were still adapted to the dark of the forest – but she saw nothing.

“I think we are observing generations of technology at play here, Zena. Spanning millennia – or millions of years, perhaps. The wider valley is surely too straight to be natural. I think these basaltic cliffs once contained a much wider waterway – perhaps it was more like a sea way, connecting vanished oceans. But as the great aridity tightened its hold, the way was largely abandoned – except for that canal, whose straightness, you see, follows the rectilinearity of its vanished forebear.”

She pointed to the building. “That looks like South Kensington.”

Walter laughed, surprised. “So it does.”

The single building, not far from the canal’s flow, was big, on a rectangular base, with a roof that glittered, metallic – Zena thought it might be aluminium, and if so fabulously expensive – and before its portico was a broad terrace of some pale pink stone. Masts stood on this terrace, topped with artefacts that glinted in the sun; they were like raindrops, but must be much bigger, she thought: lenses, perhaps.

This was the only building in sight.

“It is like a museum, yes,” Walter said. “Interesting perception. Previous generations would have thought of a church, or temple, or some grand classical building. Perhaps a taste for the grandiose spans the ages. Even spans the worlds.” He eyed her.

She smiled grimly. “That’s another pretty broad hint about where you think we are, Mr Jenkins.”

“Or where we seem to be, at least.”

She looked further, seeking more detail. Beyond the building’s broad terrace was a roadway, itself roughly following the line of the valley, floored by broken stone.

And on this roadway, she saw now, sat a man, alone, cross-legged.

Her heart thumped.

He sat still, apparently at peace. A small pile of belongings was heaped up next to him, and behind him was a kind of frame from which another figure dangled, inert. Zena could not make this out clearly. She later told Walter it reminded her of the articulated human skeletons hanging from a frame that you might see in a teaching hospital – but inverted, with the skull at the bottom, the feet at the top. Understandably, given what she had seen before, she felt unwilling to look more closely for now.

Again that shadow flickered across the sun. She looked up, shading her eyes.

She made out the occluding object now. At first she thought it was a monstrous bird. Around a central, spherical mass, bat-like wings spread wide, flapping and folding; where the sunlight caught them she could see the wings were translucent, and were supported by ribs, like huge, splayed fingers. No, it was too big to be a bird, she realised now, but surely smaller and more graceful than the flying machines in America and elsewhere of which she had read.

And as she watched this object seemed to be circling closer, and lower.

“Whether or not that flyer has seen us, I believe it is descending, towards him.” She pointed to the man sitting patiently on the ground.

Walter studied her. “You know where we are, don’t you?”

“I believe so. And I know who he must be. I think we should get down to him before the flyer reaches him.”

“Agreed.” Walter picked up his pack, handed Zena her shotgun, and looked around for an easy way down to the valley floor.

Where they found that the man, sitting alone, was of course Nathan Gardner.

Zena and Walter approached cautiously, Zena for one keeping an eye out for the flyer.

But she faced her brother.

Sitting cross-legged, his hands open and resting on his knees, he seemed serene, at ease. Yet he was in rags, his hair and beard unkempt, and he was gaunt, as if he hadn’t been eating. She could see the shape of his skull under the skin of his face, the eyes bright, his teeth stained from bleeding from the gums when he smiled.

The wretched creature beside him, dangling from its frame, was long dead: human or at least humanlike, male, naked, and inverted. A kind of cannula, like a tap, was fixed to its neck.

Walter, briefly and with reluctance, examined the corpse; he took care not to touch it. “This is the creature you saw in the cave of the Neanderthals.”

Zena confirmed it.

“Yes, that looks like the Heidelberg jaw, though the body would have to be dissected by a competent anatomist to be sure… Tall as he is, I think this fellow was young when he died. A boy.”

Nathan spoke for the first time. “He was an animal, without mind. He could not understand. His suffering was brief.” His voice was scratchy, hoarse.

Zena knelt before him. “And what about yourself? What about your suffering, Nathan? You look scarcely better than he does.”

He shook his head, his smile ghastly. “I have all I need.”

Zena looked around, at the single building, the empty valley. The solitary figure of the flyer, still slowly descending – cautious in the thin air, perhaps. “What is it you have? There is nothing here.”

“Nothing material. But they live like this, or underground. Many of them live alone, physically – there are few of them, scattered over this world – though they like to congregate. For the benefit of their young, especially.”

“They,” Walter said analytically. “You mean the Martians.”

Nathan only smiled.

“Well, it makes a certain sense.”

And Zena, apparently stranded on a slab of Mars – Mars! – stuck in the middle of the family estate, had to suppress a laugh that would have come out sounding deranged, she was sure. “Sense, Mr Jenkins? How can any of this make sense?”

Now the flying thing grounded, with surprising grace. Zena saw how the central mass, evidently a passenger, shrugged off the frame of wings, as a walker might shrug off an overcoat. The wings neatly folded themselves up, to a compact packet.

And the thing moved forward.

Zena had never seen a Martian close up, during their time on the Earth in ’07 (and nor had I). Few photographic records were made of them while alive; artists’ impressions were, according to eye witnesses, notoriously unreliable, giving no real sense of, for example, the graceful motion of their machines. Even the nearly intact specimen which would one day be pickled and put on display in the Natural History Museum had not yet been released from academic scrutiny. And besides, all the time the Martians had been on the Earth they had been oppressed by our planet’s heavy gravity, which distorted their very bodily form.

So, now, Zena had few preconceptions. She and Walter held their places as the thing scuttled closer.

It was big. Massive. The bulk of a Martian has been compared to a bear, and Zena could see that now. But it looked swollen, it was all but spherical and nearly featureless, with little of the articulation and detail of terrestrial animals. Its hairless hide was like glistening leather. It moved with surprising speed and grace, raised up on its limbs, which, sprouting from beneath the body, were more like extended hands, she thought: two clusters of long, powerful fingers, on which it scuttled like a crab. It had a mouth with a V-shaped upper lip, and large, apparently lidless eyes, almost luminous. There was no distinct face; it was as if these features were painted on a balloon. Zena – as I would, when I too came face to face with such creatures – had an odd, disorienting sense of infancy: this was like a baby’s face, hugely swollen and those lidless eyes wide with surprise.

And Zena saw now that it had a kind of plug in the side of its body, another cannula. This was its only equipment – save, Zena saw now, for a glassy object, egg-shaped, that it carried in two of its long fingers. It came to rest alongside the dangling corpse, and with a graceful flick, took the tube which hung from the body, and fixed it to its own cannula. When this arrangement was in place it gave a soft hoot, like a steam whistle, almost of satisfaction, Zena thought.

Nathan laughed.

It was an unexpected, jarring sound in a world that was still and silent. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that I’m so happy. Happy to be here. Happy you’ve joined me at last, Zee-zee. It’s all so perfect. Can’t you see?”

Walter stood close to Zena. “How’s your shooting?”

“My father took me hunting. I didn’t like it, but –”

“Remember I told you what they found when they cleared out one of the cylinders? A crystalline artefact…” He pointed to the crystal egg that nestled under the Martian.

She saw it quickly. “That is how they communicate. That is how they project their dreams.”

“Perhaps.”

“And if it is destroyed, this ends. I know what to do.” She brought her gun around from its strap, cocked it, aimed.

“No!”

She jerked back, shocked. She lifted the gun away. “Mr Jenkins? What is it? This was surely what you were suggesting…”

“Of course, of course.” He ran a gloved hand through hair that had greyed during the summer of the Martians. “But it’s just that it’s such an – amputation. Think of it! The Martians seem materially poor to us; they have no art, no luxury – none that they brought to the Earth, at least. But what need of art or sticks of furniture when you live your life in the realm of the joined mind? And imagine that deep, intimate contact suddenly curtailed. You yourself so recently lost your parents, Miss Gardner. How can we inflict such a severing?” He sighed, almost wretchedly. “I once dreamed of the perfectibility of species. But even the Martians remain an incomplete form with this terrible flaw, the ghastly business of the blood. And yet, and yet! The magnificence of the vision!”

If you have read his memoir you’ll know this was typical of Walter Jenkins. Such hesitation, such contradiction, at a moment of existential crisis – the anguish of doubt!

But Zena was made of sterner stuff. “Magnificent?” She gestured at the dangling corpse. “This? May I finish it, Mr Jenkins?”

“Do it –”

She raised the gun and fired, in a single movement, before he could object again. She saw the egg shatter.

And the world shattered in turn.

Holmburgh Wood closed around her like a clenching fist, darker than ever and still more threatening, as if in sullen reaction to her act of vandalism.

They were in a clearing in the Wood, but it was only a few yards across – not miles. The canal was gone, the valley, the great house. And Zena could see the evidence of burning: huge tree trunks lay around like tremendous matchsticks, evidently smashed by a preliminary explosion then charred by a flash fire.

The only structure here was a kind of shack, as Zena thought at first, a rough cylinder perhaps five yards across and not much taller, made of plates of some silvery, battered metal.

“It’s like a broch,” she said, wondering. “Like the monuments in Scotland.”

Walter grunted. “A broch of aluminium, it seems. Evidently laboriously constructed by the Martian, from the wreck of its fighting-machine, after the lightning strike that had smashed it…”

And the Martian itself was still here. Its flying wing was vanished. Compared to what she had seen before, the Martian looked to Zena as if it had been deflated, squashed, and its leathery hide was scarred and blistered from burns; it breathed heavily, making that hooting sound with its beaked mouth. It was bleeding itself, from small wounds inflicted by shards of the smashed egg. Yet still those babyish eyes were wide as if in perpetual surprise.

Similarly, the Heidelberg-jaw boy suspended from the frame was not as he had been earlier. Hanging now from a branch, not a stand, this was just a boy, lanky, clothed in rough farm gear, drained, inverted, his face looking bruised by the blood flow. Zena knew who this was: the wretched Mervyn Chapman, gone missing weeks before. She hoped that his suffering had been brief.

But she saw – a ghastly detail – that he was suspended from the tree by bootlaces, knotted around his ankles. She remembered noticing that Nathan had lost his own laces.

“None of it was real, was it? The animals. The Neanderthals.”

“None of it. Only the Martian –”

“And the blood.” She turned at last to Nathan.

He no longer sat cross-legged and in repose. He was sprawled on the cold ground, filthy, gaunt. And a cannula in his arm steadily transferred his blood through a transparent tube to the wheezing Martian. “It’s perfect, Zee-zee,” he whispered. “Perfect and eternal. Bliss, for ever. Can you not see it?”

She still had her shotgun. She cocked it and raised it at the Martian.

With a speed that belied its bulk and apparent distress, it scuttled away, diving inside its broch. The feed line snapped, and Nathan’s blood dribbled out onto the ground.

Zena would have gone after it, but Walter grabbed her arm. “No. The fighting-machine is wrecked, but see how it has welded the panels of its shelter… It still has the resources to harm us, and Nathan. Come. You must take your brother out of here.”

“Yes.” She focussed on Nathan, who still smiled as if in a dream. She tied off the dripping feed from his vein, swathed his arm in a bandage to protect the cannula until it could be properly removed, and tried to get him to his feet.

Walter called, “I can help if you wish. But –”

“You should bring Mervyn, if you can. The Chapmans need their son back.”

She had Nathan now, his arm draped over her shoulder. He smiled still, as he had at the side of his Martian canal. She looked around for the paint trail she had made.

Then, one step at a time, calm, determined, purposeful, she brought them all out of Holmburgh Wood.