They divided the likely spots the kids’ might have gone between them and split up. Worry growing like a terrible hunger in the pit of his stomach, Michael wandered a narrow path through shaggy ferns, shouting for Sam and Tink as he went. Only the agitated rustle of the trees and the reverberation of thunder drawing ever nearer answered his calls. He could hear Toby and Nat off to his left. At first, he thought that was good. He didn’t want to get lost. But as soon as he’d left them, his sense of familiarity bloomed. He knew these woods, the same as he’d known the back streets of Hernshore. They’d been out of mind, that was all. It was as though memory was a map written into the body by the world, and the cards which kept being dealt weren’t cards at all but cartographic fragments of his past.
This path, he knew, took a wide loop around the edge of the woods, coming close to the edge of the town if he didn’t deviate course, which he knew he would. When they were young, they avoided coming close to the town. The whole point of going to the woods was to get away from the watchful gaze of adults. How else could you get up to no good? Building dens and fires and when you were older smoking and drinking and, if you were lucky, kissing and fumbling with a girl.
Like Sally Fletcher.
That brought Michael to a dead halt and stifled Sam’s name in his mouth. Sally Fletcher! The butcher’s daughter. The fuck-it man’s daughter. There was a blast from the past. Petite, elfin, blonde and with a take-no-shit-from-boys attitude. The wind swirled around Michael, but he didn’t notice it. He and Sally had kissed in these woods. Hers was the first breast he had ever touched, fumbling with her bra as awkwardly as a fish in a net. The memory reached across time to him and brought with it an unbidden teenage erection, so hard it was painful. A straining little monster, trapped in his jeans.
They’d been a couple that last summer in the Hernshore. She held his hand at the funeral. Michael could feel it all these years later. Their fingers entwined. Was there anything more innocently erotic than the first time your fingers entwined with a childhood sweetheart? Then Michael left Hernshore, and he’d never thought about her again. Actually, that wasn’t true. His mother told him some years later, around the time he’d started seeing Tara, that Toby Tunstall and Sally Fletcher were to be married. Good for them, he had thought, and moved on as if it was nothing. But it wasn’t nothing . One of his childhood best friends was marrying the first girl he’d ever loved, and Michael let it go as if he’d heard one of his distant American relatives he’d met once was tying the knot with a nobody he’d never met.
What was wrong with him? How could he have forgotten Sally? How could he have forgotten it all? And what about what happened at the playground? There was nothing normal about that, and there was nothing normal about not only missing whole parts of your childhood, but also being unaware of the holes until forced to fall into them. Everyone else here: Ma, Nat, Toby, everyone in the town, they all seemed to understand. Aye, wyrmals, Mikey. You remember now? Nat had asked him. No, he didn’t fucking well remember, and he didn’t know why he seemed unable to focus on it, as though it was deliberately evading him by some sleight of hand.
He started to jog, calling the kids’ names.
‘Tink!’ he shouted, and the obvious slapped him like the wind gusting through the woods. Tink, she would be Sally’s. And Sally, where was she? Maybe she was at the farm or somewhere in the town and Michael hadn’t seen her. Finally, he had questions, and he was going to ask them, and fast before they slipped away.
He ran past the turning, put on the brakes, jogged back to it, and put on a burst of speed. He ducked branches and bound over the steppingstones across a steam called Little Brook. They’d spend hours fishing there, never catching a thing, making dams and rope swings, laying on the banks and smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol scrumped from their parents’ stores. Or heavy petting with girlfriends until best friends came crashing through the undergrowth, and hands were pulled away and t-shirts yanked down faster than a rabbit fleeing a fox. Nat’s eyes would be glittering and the jokes would come as subtle as thrown bricks.
Michael ran faster. The past galloped at his heels, picking up momentum, chasing him down. He burst into the clearing everyone called “the fairy circle”, on account of the eight eroded stones, each about the size of a football, at regular intervals around the circumference. The forest pressed thickly up to the circle but never encroached. Michael skidded to a halt. Toby was across the clearing, a hand held out to a pure white doe. She’d bent to Toby’s hand, but when Michael broke into the circle, her head twitched, and she was gone, springing away into the forest.
Toby’s shoulders sagged.
Michael was panting, hands on knees. ‘Tobes? Any sign of them?’
‘What does it look like it?’ Toby snapped.
Michael tried to straighten up. ‘No, but...’
The forest began to waltz. He turned with it, trying to keep up. The fairy circle, they’d come here that last summer. All of them. Nat, Toby, himself, and Sally. They often did, but this time Sally had mushrooms. Toby had a gallon of cider. Michael brought the smokes, and Nat brought his charming personality. They’d tripped, oh fuck how they’d tripped. The adult Michael dropped to a knee, his stomach summersaulting. The forest was a gypsy waltzer ride, twirling the woods into a nauseating blur.
###
All four of them stood in the middle of the fairy circle. The three boys held out their palms.
‘We should start with one,’ Sally said, handing them each a dried mushroom from a brown paper bag.
‘Nah, we shouldn’t be pussies. If we’re going to do it, we should do it,’ Nat said. He pulled on the cigarette he held between thumb and forefinger, the burning tip facing back into the cup of his hand. It was an affectation he’d been working on all year, to little success.
‘It looks gross.’ Toby was eyeing his shrivelled mushroom with disgust.
‘Stop talking about your knob,’ Nat said.
Toby countered with, ‘How do you know what my knob looks like?’
‘’Cos you’re gay and keep showing me it.’
‘You’re the one who brought it up.’
‘So, you admit it? Thinking about me brought it up.’ Ciggy in mouth, Nat flashed his eyes and put his elbow near his crotch. Raising his arm, fist clenched, he made a creaking sound.
‘At least you got the size right,’ Toby said.
Nat scoffed, ‘You wish.’
‘No, you wish,’ Toby said.
Sally rolled her eyes. ‘You ever wondered why neither of you have a girlfriend?’
Nat looked genuinely offended. ‘Bit harsh.’
Toby flushed red. ‘Yeah, we’re just pissing around.’ He stabbed the toe of his shoe into the dirt.
‘One mushroom is probably a good start. We’ve got the cider too,’ Michael said.
As if proof were needed, Toby held up the plastic gallon bottle of scrumpy homebrew he’d pilfered from the Tunstall’s stores.
‘Great, cider! Like we don’t drink that every bloody week.’ Nat flicked his cigarette butt and ground it under his heel. ‘Don’t be such a pussy, Mikey.’
‘Fuck off, Nat,’ Michael said. Not exactly his best comeback.
Nat cracked an invisible whip, replete with sound effect. ‘Pussy is as pussy does.’
Sally huffed in exasperation. ‘Why is being a pussy or gay such an insult? Being a massive dick seems more appropriate for you.’
‘Okay, let’s chillout. Probably not a good idea to trip angry,’ Michael said.
Nat made a chicken sound and flapped his arms.
Sally bristled. ‘Fine, think you’re so hard. Let’s do two.’
Nat snorted. ‘I was thinking three.’
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‘How about five,’ Sally said, hand on one hip, paper bag in the other offered up in challenge.
Michael thought he’d better cool this down. ‘Hang on a—’
‘Shut up,’ Sally and Nat snapped in chorus.
Nat was puffed up and not about to back down. ‘Okay, five, and we neck the cider four ways.’
Michael looked at Toby for support, who shrugged as if to say, what you going to do? He had a point. If either of them whussed out, they’d never hear the end of it from Nat. Plus, if Michael said no, Sally would be pissed at him for not backing her up. His heart transmuted into a throbbing engine in the middle of his chest. Five shrooms, he’d never even taken one. What if they went full schizoid or something? That would defeat the purpose.
The whole point of this was supposed to be a last fling before the dunes. He and his dad had been jogging early every morning through the forest and up the brutally steep hill to the castle ruins. Push ups and sit ups at the top. After that, he had chores at the Tunstall farm, working with Ma and Amos. Toby was his fellow chain gang member, helping build his strength by hauling bales and shovelling mature, all the while learning what he needed to know from the Tunstall elders.
It had been a gruelling summer, but also the best ever. He didn’t work all day. They were usually done by lunchtime. Ma would stuff him and Toby with cheese and pickle sandwiches, cut like doorstops, and freshly baked scones, drowned in jam and cream. That or a warm steak and kidney pie, pastry flaking, gravy oozing into buttery mashed potatoes. All of it came with a pot of tea, piping steam from its spout, as if it were a gingerbread house with the hearth ablaze. Bellies full, they’d hop on their bikes and freewheel down the hill to the beach house. Michael would shower, and then they were free. Free to wander without purpose. Free to smoke and talk about nothing but bullshit and bad jokes. Free to drink and free to snog his girlfriend. Free in a way only those who have respite from a duty can be. So, the whole point was to have some fun, to play with danger, because real danger would come for them all soon enough. And then all the games would be over.
Sally handed out the extra mushrooms, and before anyone could say anything she threw hers back. Not to be outdone, Nat was a second behind her. Sally glared at Michael. He looked at the withered strands of fungus in his palm, feeling like he was about to jump off a cliff.
Nat made another chicken noise, and Michael jumped. As ever, Toby was right behind him.
‘Herne’s nuts, these taste like shit.’ Michael held out his hand for the cider.
‘Where do you think they grow? I picked them off cowpats.’ Sally smirked as she chewed.
Each of the boy’s eyes widened. Michael couldn’t get the screw-top off fast enough. Nat and Toby crowded him, eager to wash the taste way as fast as they could. The cider filled Michael’s mouth, turning the half chewed shrooms into a not-so-subtle cocktail of alcoholic apples, mould, and cow’s arse. Much bigger, Toby hip-bumped scrawny Nat out of the way and took a huge chug, spilling amber rivulets down his face. He swallowed, wincing, and handed the bottle off to Nat, who drank from his knees.
Deadpan, Sally swallowed and opened wide to show she’d not cheated. Her tongue was peppered with dark specks, like flies on sticky paper. ‘Dickheads,’ she said, and held out her hand for the cider. No one argued with her assessment, least of all Nat, who handed over the cider with grudging admiration.
They sat back-to-back in the centre of the fairy circle, passing the cider around until the bottle ran dry. The effects of the booze hit first. Warm as sunshine, toasting them from the inside. Soporific fumes dulled their eyes and blushed their cheeks. Michael leaned back and gazed up. The sky was blue and framed by a circular filigree of leaves. He held Sally’s hand and wanted to be alone with her and naked in the forest. With the cider in their blood, he thought they might melt into each other, their bodies becoming one, their minds dissipating before the surge of pleasure.
Nat screamed, butt-scooting away, pointing at Michael’s crotch.
At first Michael thought his flies might be undone. Nat was pantomiming horror, so he checked. Oh Herne! He had a raging boner pitching a tepee in his jeans. His zip had half peeled down, and the head of his cock, cowled in the white of his briefs, was pushing through the hole. He immediately thought of that scene in Alien with John Hurt. They’d watched that movie a dozen times in the den at the beach house, his dad sometimes commenting on Ridley Scott’s choice of shots, or the set design, or how paired back but perfect the dialogue was. Michael had his own xenomorph trying to bust out of his crotch. Mortified, he blushed a deep crimson. But it wasn’t like Nat to miss an opportunity for an epic piss take.
Sally giggled and drew up to her knees, staring at Michael’s embarrassment. The next second, her focus changed. Her pupils were dilated, obliterating the green of her eyes. She frowned and looked around, blinking. She reached out a hand to something unseen in the air. Except, no, there was something. Her hand left red trails behind when it moved, rippling the air. And the air itself had creased, as if wrinkling into crinkled seams that shone silver.
Nat carried on screaming. ‘Mikey, it’s going to get you. Fuck, fuck! Sugnar’s tits, what is it? It’s going to get you.’ With a whimper, he spun around on his knees and crawled away in panic, whimpering.
Thankfully, all this was certainly a boner-killer. Michael felt the little monster wilting in his underpants.
‘Oh, bugger!’ Toby said. He wobbled onto his feet and ran to the edge of the fairy circle, where he bent double and puked on the head of a dreadlocked fern.
The trip cascaded. Wrinkles in perception multiplied, as if this world was being rumpled like a piece of clingfilm.
Colours became more vivid and less solid, existing in some impossible state at the margin between liquid and gas. Sally’s corn silk hair shone and waved languidly like seaweed. Michael could have sworn he could see every pore on her face. The red aura came off her as an undulating smudge; she turned her hand palm up for the butterflies to float down on. No, that wasn’t right either. Michael tried to focus and stay connected to his body. The world was coming apart, and his mind was separating. Those weren’t butterflies. Because butterflies didn’t have human legs and arms and heads. Although maybe they did when you were tripping your balls off.
Fairies in the fairy circle, his mind conjured. Herne’s balls! That wasn’t good.
Nat was covered in fairies too, and he was screaming, trying to swipe them off.
Bees, Michael thought. The memory and all its associated feelings of the time he, Nat, and Toby had taken a leak on a beehive for a joke. The punchline was not funny at all. These tiny, winged people hovering around in equally little balls of light. They were a deconstructed rainbow of spheres, bothering his friend, swooping and circling. But what terrified Nat delighted Sally. She turned to Michael, teeth a brilliant vision, dazzling white.
‘Look, aren’t they amazing?’ she said, wafting her fingers, conducting a silent orchestra of colours. The fairies—were they really fairies? —were the melody personified.
Sally’s eyes divided, first once, so that she looked with wonder through four eyes. Before they divided over and over, until she had a pair of compound eyes, like a fly. Only these were made of dozens of white balls, with a green disk and black circle at their centres. And dozens of fleshy lids, trimmed with her long lashes, all of which blinked at the same time.
Michael scooted back.
‘What is it, Mikey? They won’t hurt you,’ Sally, the human-shaped fly, said. She had more arms too. A second pair sprouting from her hips, with an extra joint. ‘We can see them now. Just like in Rundleskink the Weaver.’
Nat wouldn’t stop screaming, flailing wildly at the orbs of light. Dark haired, with six scrawny limbs and bug eyes. Oh Herne, no! Michael checked on Toby, who was wiping his mouth with his ham hock-sized insect hand. Veined and translucent wings folded to his back.
‘I think we took too much,’ Toby crocked and retched. Another gush of puke splattered the bedraggled fern. Did the fern just frown?
They were all human-shaped flies, even Michael. Each gave off vaporous colours, except Michael. Toby was green, Nat bluish purple, and Sally was the burnt red of a summer sunset. But Michael was nothing. Empty.
The silver creases proliferated, crinkling the woods and warping reality. Michael had a terrifying sense they were being watched by everything. Animals in the woods, the trees and plants, even the stones around the circle. And other things too, like but not like the fairies – if that’s what they were. It was hard to focus on because the silver wrinkles were now everywhere. Within the warped perception of the trip, Michael realised they weren’t wrinkles at all. They were threads of a web made of silver hung upon the moon and stars above and tied to the world below. He hadn’t been able to see them before, and they connected everything, ensnared everything, including him and his friends.
They were cocooned in a thick blanket of gossamer, shackled to each other and the web by thicker rope-like strands.
And along came the spider.
Just as he and his friends were human-fly chimeras, so was the spider-thing. The crawling arachnid patrolling his web was also a little man, with fat, grey lips and skin black as the night sky, and a blackbird’s eyes and pointed ears. He tended his threads, pulling them and listening to the tinkle they made. If a note was off, he’d tighten the thread or slacken it with deft movements of his... hands?... forelegs? The spider was coming for Michael’s friends, picking its way along the shimmering tightropes, stopping to test their tone every few scurrying steps.
A prisoner in a shimmering straitjacket, Michael struggled to get free. The forest floor fell away, falling hundreds, no thousands of feet below while the canopy of the trees remained above, framing a sky of turning constellations and a swollen moon, which had somehow risen in the middle of the day.
When he strained to look to Nat, he noticed another thread. It came from his chest as if tied around his beating heart and plaid out into the stars in a taut line. At the end of it was a beautiful woman with a dirty laugh that made him fall in love with her. Tara in a bar with two girlfriends and a bloke in a ruby shirt trying to chat her up. The way she rolled her eyes when she saw him watching, as if to say ‘save me from this wanker.’ So he did, coming over as if he knew her. And then he and Tara naked in a single bed, movie posters everywhere, Portishead’s Dummy tripping out on the CD player, with a kind of pained yearning that only their lovemaking could requite. And thinking she was the most inexplicably wonderful thing, watching her take photographs of people in the park while they sat on a bench and ate deli sandwiches Michael had insisted, she let him buy her. And a thousand other threads connecting their lives into a glittering nebula of moments, including ones he’d rather not remember. Dark stars, like her interest in his father. The questions a curious graduate of film school couldn’t help but ask. His finding a copy of her draft Master dissertation on Jonathan Lorimer’s cult war movie. A knot of uncharitable suspicion. Separately, a conversation about children that somehow led to her defence of his father and his cowardice and the argument that followed. Anger, so much anger, not at her, but at the man who’d abandoned him. Only that man wasn’t there to take it, and his mother then floated through life on a cloud of gin and Valium, never mentioning the death or Hernshore. Which left Tara to take all Michael’s pent-up rage, which seemed to come from nowhere. But there was a thread at his back, pulling him away. Tugging him away from her and her neighbourhood. He moved without telling her and disappeared into another part of London and avoided all the places they went together.
The silver thread knotted and turned from them and left Tara’s chest, on to events in her life after Michael. A positive pregnancy test in a quivering hand. A bump in her belly that suited her. The sweat and pain and blood and defecation of childbirth. And the baby boy, Sam, screaming and held to her breast for the first time. Sam crawling and learning to walk and growing tall and lanky like Michael. The cleft in his chin like Michael’s. Mother and son watching movies together. Her teasing his hair between her fingers, as he lay his head on her lap. Hard times and sacrifice for Tara. Definitely no movie career. No career at all. Two jobs, sometimes three to make ends meet. No bitterness either, but so much love. And then sickness and panic and internet searches. And writing a will and a letter to Michael at the kitchen table, trying to catch her breath in withered lungs. No, this was too much. Michael couldn’t look, couldn’t take how time and space were overwhelming him.
Teenage Michael’s stomach lurched vertiginously. His mind reeled away, unable to comprehend. The web jangled sleigh bells as he wrestled with his bindings. The little ink-black man, who was also a spider, scuttled toward Toby. The spider checked Toby’s bindings, tugging and adding more threads as needed. Toby was oblivious, chucking his guts up over the undergrowth.
‘Get away from him!’ Michael shouted. It helped to focus on what was around him instead of in the terrible expanse of stars, but no one listened to his warning.
In a blink, the spider was over at Sally, working with nimble fingers at the end of his spindly legs.
‘No!’ Michael grunted and thrashed. Somehow, his right arm broke free. He pawed at his bindings, gasping as they cut his fingers. He didn’t care and in a blind panic clawed at the web around him. His blood sizzled on the thread. It broke and he fell towards Sally and knocked the spider from his web.
The little man threw a silver line to a star and caught his fall and began to climb back. Michael had dislodged Sally. She was half out of her cocoon. He started pulling at the threads, which cut his palms, making them slick with blood.
Then the wryms came.
They were as thin and white as pus from a teenager’s acne, with round mouths full of teeth chewing at the threads, crawling out of every pore in Sally’s skin. The spider swung to the farthest edges of his skeins and spun more threads, gathering them from the light of the stars and the moon, but he was losing the battle, and the web was coming loose. Below, Hernshore tilted on its axis, and hung by a single thread in the hallucination.
Michael’s blood was providing lubrication to free Sally. She was crimson with it, crimson but with countless white worms writhing and snapping their jaws in the blood. He couldn’t see how he could save her and all his friends.
A darkness fell across the web. Michael looked up and terror blanked his mind. A stag that seemed as big as the world towered over them. Then terror became a deranged variety of hilarity. The stag urinated on them. It fell in a stinking monsoon. The smell was a dark musk and a cloying ammonia that burned the back of his throat and seared his eyes. The worms shrivelled up and fell away from Sally, and the trip dissolved.
###
Nat was there at Michael’s side, a hand steadying his shoulder. ‘Take it easy, mate. You, okay?’
Michael’s head swam. The fairy circle and the surrounding woods came back into focus. Toby, all grown up and still angry, stood at the edge of the clearing, wringing that red bandana of his as though it was Michael’s neck. There had been a pure white doe sniffing at Toby’s hand when Michael had broken into the circle, and...
Nat helped him to his feet. ‘Easy now,’ Nat said. ‘Remember last time we were here?’
‘Yes,’ Michael said, ‘I remember. I remember all of it.’
