Vanishing acts, p.13
Vanishing Acts, page 13
“That’s the least of it,” Pearlman said. “The real point is that the A303 offers an easy connection to the M3. Look to the north, at that cluster of newish villages west of Hurstbourne Priors. At present, their access roads all connect to the A343, which means that the local yuppies have to make their way over to the M4, with Newbury sprawling right across their path. The bypass was supposed to make that access easier, of course, but that was fifteen years ago. It’s Nightmare Junction now—but once the cart-track connecting Tenebrion to the A303 is a real road, the temptation to extend it northwards to give the villagers a new way out will become enormous. The new Tenebrionites won’t like it, of course—all they want is to be a nice coy cul-de-sac—but you can bet your pension that the developer always had it in mind. He understands the domino principle, if no one else does. Once he’s got the go-ahead to expand Tenebrion Village he’s going to send his bulldozers northwards to plant the spine of a whole bloody town. That’s why the battle’s worth fighting and why it’s worth fighting here and now, between the farm and the A-road. The strip either side of the road’s mostly hedgerow, but there’s a little patch of woodland here that must have been there from the very beginning, untouched by the hand of cultivation since the Norman invasion. The Domesday Book identifies it as Tenebrion Wood—my bet is that the farm was named after it.”
“It’s not entirely untouched,” Hazard said, raising the specimen-tube. “No matter how long Tenebrion Wood’s been there, this Tenebrio’s an invader, carried into the British Isles with European grains. These may have adapted to local produce, but they’re no more native to the wood than you are. I suppose you’ve considered the argument that setting up tree-houses, digging tunnels and getting set to fight a pitched battle against the developer’s security men will completely wreck the fragile ecology of your precious wood. Even if you did save it from the bulldozers—which you won’t—you’d destroy it in the process. Anyway, I already told you I’m not getting involved. I can’t afford the hassle.”
“That’s what they’ll put on the ecosphere’s tombstone,” Pearlman said, predictably. “We might have saved it, but we couldn’t afford the hassle. I just want you to take a look, Doc. I just want you to stroll around the site, and tell me whether there’s anything better than darkling beetles there—anything we can actually use in an all-out propaganda war. It’s an exceptional site in more ways than one, and the leaf-litter seems to be beetle heaven. I scooped that lot up in two minutes flat, in daylight. You don’t have to lead the charge—just give us the benefit of your expertise. One day, the front line will reach your backyard, and you’ll be screaming for my help.”
“My backyard is a cemetery,” Hazard pointed out.
“You think that makes a difference? You think that because you’re living in a redundant vicarage next to a derelict church you’re safe? Come on, Doc, even you aren’t that naive. It won’t be nearly so much fun living next to that folly once they’ve connected your little lane to the A303—and they’ll do it. Inch by inch, wood by wood, they’ll do it. Just take a look. That’s all I’m asking.”
“It’s pointless,” said Hazard.
“It’s better than marking first-year essays,” Pearlman retorted. “It’s coming on summertime, and I’ll bet you haven’t been out in the field since September last, even if you do live in the darkest heart of the green belt.”
Hazard could feel himself weakening. Summer was coming on, and he hadn’t been in the field since the start of the Autumn term. Even if there was nothing to see but darkling beetles, it would be a day out.
“Tomorrow’s Friday,” he said, finally. “I’m teaching till three, but I can wrap up after that. Probably reach you by five, traffic permitting.”
“Tonight would be a lot better,” the ecowarrior retorted, unable to suppress a wide grin of self-satisfaction. “The beetles mostly come out at night. That way, you could give me a lift.”
“Tomorrow,” Hazard said, flatly. He figured that he’d made enough compromises.
“I’ll leave you the map,” said Pearlman, who was prepared to be generous now that he’d got what he wanted. “Leave your car in the lay-by west of the turn-off—it’s a good three-quarters of a mile, but the walk’ll do you good. Bring your wellies.”
Because it was Friday the traffic was dire, so Hazard didn’t get to the relevant stretch of the A303 until five-thirty. What Pearlman had described as a “lay-by” was just a gap in the hawthorn hedge which already had one car parked in it: a red Citroen Saxo. Having received no attention for at least two years, the hedge was so overgrown that it was difficult to maneuver his Daewoo in beside the Saxo, but Hazard managed. He pulled his Wellington boots out of the front seat and put them on. He threw his loafers on the seat and put his mobile phone out of sight in the glove compartment before locking the vehicle and setting forth.
Although the gate guarding the “cart-track” had been tied open—presumably by the new residents of Tenebrion Farm—it still bore a notice saying PRIVATE ROAD: NO RIGHT OF WAY. It hadn’t occurred to Hazard until he saw it that Pearlman’s Last-Ditchers would be trespassing, thus requiring him to break the law even to look at the site, but he had come too far to turn around. Cursing himself for allowing himself to be sucked in, he began to walk up the narrow lane.
The unkempt hedges were seething with small birds and the fields beyond hadn’t been ploughed or planted for as long as the hedges hadn’t been trimmed. Spring had been warm and wet, as spring usually was nowadays, and grasses had run riot in the fallow fields. To the uneducated eye, it might have seemed that the land to either side was already halfway returned to wilderness, but Hazard’s eye was not uneducated. He knew that the patchwork of hedges and square fields which even country folk tended to think of as “natural” was entirely the product of technical artifice. If Tenebrion Farm really had been a thriving operation when the Domesday Book took account of its productivity, the artifice in question might go back a thousand years—but it was no more “natural” for that.
For the first half-mile, during which the track curved gently to the left, there was little or no change in the surroundings. Then Hazard came to the border of what Pearlman had called Tenebrion Wood—although his earlier description of it as “a little patch of woodland” seemed far more accurate. The hedges dissolved into a chaotic mess of thin-boled trees and thick-leaved undergrowth, which crowded more closely upon the track than the hedges. The foliage loomed over the pathway with dismal effect, although the arching branches hadn’t quite contrived to form a tunnel roof.
Hazard observed, wryly, that this really could pass for “natural” woodland. It was crammed with sickly and diseased specimens, having nothing of the airy spaciousness of a well-managed and carefully coppiced wood. It was certainly plausible that the site of Tenebrion Wood had never been brought under cultivation since the Norman invasion—although, as he’d pointed out to his former student, that was a far cry from being “untouched.” If Steve Pearlman could scoop up Tenebrio beetles by the dozen, even by day, Hazard was prepared to bet his last sixpence that other invaders would be equally at home here: grey squirrels, brown rats, black-and-white magpies as well as hundreds of invertebrate species. Supermarket supply-chains, cross-channel trains, and global warming were combining forces to import alien species into southeast England on a massive scale. Whatever Pearlman’s Last-Ditch Brigade was striving to defend, it wasn’t the native ecosystems of ancient Britain; those were currently in the process of being shot to hell for the fourth or fifth time since the Celts allegedly imported agriculture to this not-very-green and not-very-pleasant land during the last-little-Ice-Age-but-one.
It wasn’t difficult for Hazard to find Steve and his half-dozen friends, although they were discreet enough not to reveal the extent and nature of their operation to passing cars until they had established a defendable coign of vantage. The wood was so dense that there weren’t many places within spitting distance of the road where any sane person would try to pitch a camp. As he approached the Last-Ditchers’ base, Hazard could see that the canopy squad were having some difficulty getting their tree-houses and rope bridges into shape, and the diggers had only managed to sink a single shaft. By the time he came into the camp the sentry had whistled a warning, and a mud-caked head had bobbed up out of the shaft.
“Oh, hi, John!” said the muddy head. “Steve said you were expected.” He raised his voice to shout “Okay, boys, he’s on our side!” before lowering it again to say: “You remember me, don’t you?”
Hazard would never have recognized the face of the boy beneath the mask of mud, but the voice finally clicked. “Um … Adrian,” he said. Hazard knew perfectly well that because he was a digger named Adrian his compatriots inevitably called the boy Moley, but that would have seemed an intimacy too far, in spite of the fact that Moley had used his first name. “Where is Steve?” he asked.
Moley pulled himself out of the hole, revealing a body that was every bit as filthy as his head. “He’s showing the skirt round. He’ll have heard the signal—won’t be long.” Hazard knew that the digger’s use of the word “skirt” wasn’t a symptom of thoughtless sexism. In road-protest parlance “skirt” referred specifically to a female outsider—female ecowarriors never wore skirts.
“I take it that the developer doesn’t know you’re here yet,” Hazard observed.
“I think the residents might have caught on,” Moley told him. “We’re not expecting the opening salvo of blustery threats any time soon, though. You’re a scientist, right? You know about soil structure. We’re having a hell of a job digging this tunnel—stuff’s like black treacle, keeps seeping between the boards no matter how tightly we place ’em. Need more wood underground than up top at this rate. Appreciate it if you could take a look and give us an expert opinion.”
“I’m a beetle man,” Hazard said, unable to think of anything more foolhardy than taking a look at a tunnel whose walls had communicated so much filth to the young man’s body. “I sift leaf-litter when I have to, but everything below the surface is out of my jurisdiction. Sorry.”
“Well, there’s plenty of dead leaves,” Moley replied, unresentfully. “Never seen so many creepy-crawlies before either. I figured out that all woods aren’t the same when we were at Egypt Mill, but this baby is seriously yukky.”
“That’s how things go when they’re left to themselves,” Hazard said, patronizingly. “If the woodcutters don’t keep coming in to clear out the old growth and thin out the saplings, none of the acorns ever grow into mighty oaks. Mother Nature’s a real slut when it comes to housekeeping. As for the creepy-crawlies, every frostless winter we have sets off a new population explosion—just one damn plague after another. Tenebrio came to raid our granaries, but it’s as versatile as any other vermin. Rats, people, even cockroaches—you name it and Tenebrio will give it a run for its money.”
Steve Pearlman had now become visible between the densely-packed and crooked tree trunks now, so Moley must have figured that he had done his bit for the cause of courtesy. With a casual wave of a black hand he disappeared back into his shaft.
The woman with Steve was indeed wearing a skirt, but she’d had the sense to bring Wellingtons. Her hair was cut short, but not as severely as the general run of Steve’s female friends. She was older, too—more Hazard’s age.
“Hi, Doc,” said Steve. “Glad you made it.” To his companion he added: “This is the entomologist I mentioned—taught me at Uni, or tried. John Hazard. John, this is Claire Croly.”
Claire Croly was clean enough for Hazard not to mind taking the hand she extended. His slight hesitation was caused by the thought that she might be a reporter. “What pretext did he use to drag you out here?” was the politest way he could think of to ask.
“He says the place gets lively after dark,” the woman said.
“I’ll bet it does,” Hazard countered. “But it’s not the kind of party you wear your best clothes to—and the gatecrashers sometimes get ugly.”
“We’re not expecting the opposition yet,” Steve Pearlman said, sharply. “And we won’t be doing any partying. We’re undermanned and way behind schedule. Claire’s here for the same reason you are: to see how weird the site is.”
“You’re a biologist?” Hazard said, looking quizzically into the woman’s clear brown eyes.
“Not exactly,” she said, wryly. “I’m on the staff of the Fortean Times.”
Hazard felt as if his face had been slapped. The worst suspicion he’d so far entertained was that she might be from the local rag; this was far worse. He rounded angrily on Steve Pearlman, who was wearing the same infuriating grin that had possessed his face when he’d initially closed the trap on his old tutor. “You little shit!” he said. “I can’t believe you’d set me up for this! Jesus, it’s bad enough being fucked over by the Sun. Plastering my name all over the Fortean Times will just about kill my career.”
“I told you yesterday would be better,” Pearlman replied, unrepentantly. “You insisted on double-booking yourself.”
“I can assure you that I’ve no intention of plastering your name anywhere, Dr. Hazard,” Claire Croly was quick to add. “Your presence here is of no relevance to me. Even if something were to happen—and I see no reason, as yet, to think that it will—I’m perfectly prepared to leave your name out of any report I might make, if that’s your wish.”
Hazard gulped air as he fought to control his outburst of temper. He didn’t want to make a worse fool of himself by blustering. His gaze flickered back and forth between Pearlman and the woman. “So I’m an afterthought, am I?” he said, trying to speak lightly. “I’m your last hope, if the Fortean Society can’t give you any ammunition to fight with.”
“If you’d come when I asked,” Pearlman pointed out, again, “you’d have been in and out before Claire arrived. Short notice, I admit, but still—for you, I took the trouble to collect the beetles. All I offered Claire was a cupful of unease—and the name, of course.”
“What name?” Hazard asked, although he knew as soon as he said it that he’d been cleverly wrong-footed.
“Tenebrion Wood. You didn’t think it was named after the beetles, did you?”
“Of course not,” Hazard said, knowing that it wouldn’t sound convincing in spite of the fact that it was the truth.
“According to my admittedly brief research,” Pearlman said, “the beetle genus was probably named after the same thing as the farm.”
“Tenebra is Latin for darkness,” Hazard said, trying to regain the intellectual high ground. “Hence darkling beetles.”
“Yes,” said Pearlman, “but Tenebrion, with an n, is Old French for goblin, and there’s even an obsolete English word tenebrio, referring to a kind of night-spirit.”
“Are you telling me that you brought me out to hunt for ghosts and fairies?” Hazard said, coldly.
“No,” said Pearlman, patiently, “I brought you out here to look at insects. I brought Claire out here to hunt for ghosts and fairies. It’s called not putting all your eggs in one basket. We are the Last-Ditch Brigade, remember? Even the Friends aren’t wholly behind us on this one. Do you know how the circulation of the Forte an Times compares with that of The British Journal of Entomology—or New Scientist, come to that?”
Hazard did know; he had always thought it a sad comment on the times in which he was living. “I should never have come,” he said.
“Yeah,” said Steve Pearlman, “well, you knew that yesterday, and you came anyway. Now you’re here, you might as well take a look around, mightn’t you? Then you can go back to your ivory-tower and your graveyard, protect your reputation as a scrupulous bore, and pray that urban blight won’t come marching over your own personal horizon for a few years yet.”
Hazard clenched his jaw, but decided against striking back. He knew that the young man had a point. He’d over-reacted. On the other hand, he did have to hope that this reporter’s promise was worth more than the average. He could really do without a mention in the Fortean Times—a mention which one of his students was, alas, guaranteed to spot. “Okay,” he said, eventually. “Show me what you’ve got.”
What Pearlman had, it transpired, was little more than Hazard had already guessed from his first sight of the little wood. The ecowarrior had elected to defend a little corner of nature that had already been more than half-choked by nature’s own fecundity. The wood had been unhealthy for centuries. Far from bringing it back from the brink, the recent string of mild winters and benign springtimes had given a tremendous boost to its parasites. More than three in every five of the standing trees were dying, and the leaf-litter that had accumulated with undue rapidity had begun to rot down with almost-tropical alacrity.
Pearlman had called the wood “beetle heaven” but that had just been a come-on. Moley had been spot-on when he’d described it as “seriously yukky.” All kinds of insects were having a high old time here, including the mealworms that were the larvae of darkling beetles, but the only message implicit in their unusual activity was that this thousand-year-old stand of trees was doomed, regardless of whether or not bulldozers were allowed to pulverize it in the interests of transforming a farmer’s access-track into two lanes of neatly laid tarmac.
Hazard did, however, play his part. He let Steve Pearlman show him a couple of muddy hollows six or seven feet in diameter, which would allegedly become seething pools of insectile flesh when darkness fell. They were not exactly “clearings,” because the emaciated tree-branches clustered just as densely above them as they did everywhere else, but they were the only patches of almost-bare ground to be seen except where Moley and his fellow excavators were at work.
“Odd, no?” said Pearlman, as Hazard tested the second concavity with his fingertips.
“Maybe,” said Hazard, cursing the sticky mud which clung to his fingertips. He borrowed a few leaves from a nearby tree to wipe it off. The leaves seemed dry and peculiarly autumnal, considering that the saps of spring ought to be rising lustily.
