Darkest Part of the Woods Read Online Free Page A

Darkest Part of the Woods
Book: Darkest Part of the Woods Read Online Free
Author: Ramsey Campbell
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do over the counter. Most of my dad's collection has gone."

    Sam had discovered that local jobs of any worth and permanence were hard for even English literature graduates to find, but he said "Say if you can't afford me any more."

    "I need you both. Imagine me sitting in here all day with nobody to talk to about books."

    "That's what the customers want with their coffee." Sam heard himself making Dinah redundant too, and changed the subject hastily. "You were saying last night I could go early to visit my grandfather."

    "I hadn't forgotten. The hash hasn't screwed up my memory yet. Go ahead."

    Sam fetched his ankle-length Oxfam overcoat from the less than horizontal row of hooks outside the dauntingly basic toilet, and was limping streetward when Dinah turned from arranging magazines in the window. "I haven't had a chance to say sorry, Sam."

    "I didn't think you needed to."

    "I was wrong last night. You couldn't have done any more to stop them cutting down the trees when you were hurt. It's not as if I did anything at all. I expect I would have if I'd known you then."

    Until last night Sam had assumed she and Andy were living together. Though she lived in the same faded Victorian house, Andy was sharing his bed with a man.

    Sam had been the only one to decline Andy's Moroccan hashish pipe, which had provoked Dinah to suggest that his having abandoned the protest had been another failure of nerve. He'd already gathered that arguing was her way of getting close to people, but he hadn't said much in his own defence, because he felt that in some way he'd broken faith with the woods. "Wish you had," he told Dinah awkwardly, and made his escape from the shop.

    His green Volkswagen was parked on rubbly ground behind Worlds Unlimited and a takeaway whose rear emitted fumes and an outburst of Cantonese chatter. Having indulged in a fit of coughing, the car found its way out between two Victorian family houses that seemed to be competing over how many students they could accommodate. In less than a minute he was passing the university, where the students crossing the lawns already looked young to him. He remembered feeling unengaged last year by anything he read or wrote, however much his work pleased his tutors, as if some unidentified aspect of him had yet to be enlivened. His vigil at the edge of the woods had seemed potentially far-more fulfilling-still did, so that he had to remind himself that he was on his way to visit his grandfather, not the woods.

    Ten minutes took him out of Brichester and along the motorway to the bypass, beyond which the woods appeared to bristle with stillness beneath a stretch of low white clouds that resembled an elaborate skeleton the length of the horizon.

    The trees extended shadows to finger the car as he sped through the gap in the safety barrier and across the bypass to the Arbour. A shiver overtook him, though the afternoon was hot enough for several patients and two male nurses to be sitting in the grounds. One patient was lying on a recliner midway between the hospital and the gates. As Sam cruised past he saw it was his grandfather.

    Sam parked between a Bentley and a minibus and hobbled across the grass. He wasn't sure if Lennox was asleep; his eyes might be shut or only nearly. His right arm was propped on its elbow, while the hand seemed to be mimicking the shape of a tree across the road. Sam tiptoed lopsidedly to gaze down at the long slack wrinkled face, and was disconcerted to imagine that he was seeing himself in his seventies. At that moment Lennox squeezed his lips together at the pain of flexing his upheld hand, and his eyes flickered open. Though he seemed to be peering past Sam, he murmured, "It's Sam, isn't it? You look uncomfortable."

    Sam hoped that referred to his injury. "Just my ankle," he said.

    "Here's a place." Lennox sat abruptly up and patted the recliner. "So you won't have been getting about too much with that."

    "I should have been coming to see you
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