Darkest Part of the Woods Read Online Free

of yourself She resented his condescension, which she couldn't even grasp, and yet he sounded so like the father she hardly remembered having that she was unable to speak- She saw Margo sharing her feelings, and it was Dr Lowe who intervened.

    "It's been coming for a while, hasn't it, Lennox?"

    "You could say that. Why," Lennox said in what might have been genuine surprise and delight, "you did."

    "I'm saying you've been growing restless for some time."

    Lennox's enthusiasm faded. "More like ever since I was shut in here."

    "It's been more apparent these last few months."

    "Is that how long? Means more to you than me."

    "Can you say what's been disturbing you?"

    "Try looking in the trees."

    "I know," Margo said, sounding determined as much as inspired. "You mean the people who lived in them to try to stop the bypass. Sam was one."

    "When did you see them, dad? They were half a mile away up the road."

    "They were on the radio, weren't they," Margo said, "and in the papers."

    Lennox met Heather's reflected gaze, and his eyes seemed to glint from the dark of the woods. "Maybe you're the one who'll get it, Heather."

    "They've been trying to build the bypass all year," she was prompted to say. "Was it just that they were taking some of your view?"

    "Last night did you want to see they hadn't done too much damage?" Margo suggested.

    Lennox crouched towards the window. Heather saw the woods brighten and grow insect-legged with shadows that merged with the depths steeped in fog and darkness as two pairs of headlamp, beams were dipped. "You've tired me enough now," he said. "Maybe I'll even sleep."

    "We'll come and see you again soon," Margo said as Dr Lowe opened the door.

    "And I expect Sam will," said Heather.

    Lennox's reflection was swallowed by a blur composed of his breath and the woods. He spoke so low she had to strain to hear him. "Wait till it's all of us."

    3

    A Meeting in the Forest

    The rotund crewcut boy halfway through his teens wore a T-shirt over a shirt over a sweater.
    The T-shirt made it dear what he would ask before he did. First he wandered through the shop, using a finger and thumb to pluck from the shelves a very few paperbacks, at whose covers he gazed before turning them over as if that might transform them into something more attractive.
    Having returned a last disappointment to its place and his hands to the pockets of his faded piebald jeans, he confronted Sam across the counter. "Got any Star Wars videos?"

    "We don't sell videos, sorry."

    "How about model kits?"

    "Not those either."
    "Comics?"

    Sam was beginning to feel like one confronted with an unsympathetic audience.

    "We're for books."

    The angry rash at the corners of the boy's mouth appeared to drag them down.

    "What's Worlds Unlimited supposed to mean, then? I don't see any Star Wars books."

    "That's because you can buy those anywhere," Andy was anxious he should know.
    "Can't be a sci-fi shop without them."

    "We're more science fiction," Dinah told him as Andy winced at the abbreviation.

    "And fantasy and even horror."

    The boy was almost out of the shop when he delivered his verdict, "Old people's stuff."

    Andy sat down at the coffee table between the counter and the shelves, so hard that the middle-aged armchair was audibly distressed, "Twenty-three," he said, sweeping a lock of blonde hair back from his lightly ruled high forehead and trapping all his tresses in a rubber band at the nape of his neck, "and ready for recycling."

    "Gives me and Sam another year," said Dinah, pensively pinching the chin of her small oval face. "Seriously, maybe he just meant a lot of the writers are dead."

    "Their books weren't last time I read them."

    Sam was about to concur when Andy, as he often had when the) were at university and indeed at school, switched positions. "Anyway there goes someone else who didn't buy a book."

    "Quite a few have today," Sam pointed out.

    "Less than half. We're selling more on the net than we