Darkest Part of the Woods by Ramsey Campbell

shadows, and she caught herself wondering how that might appear to Lennox-as though a vast dark shape was flexing all its legs? Perhaps it was this sight that prompted Sylvia to ask "What do you think we'd find in there now?"

    "Whatever's usually there," Heather said.

    "And what's that, Heather?"

    "The sort of things woods generally have in them."

    "Are you saying that because you read my book?"

    "I'm saying it because it's just a wood."

    At the limit of her headlamp beams a lorry shuddered half out of the inside lane. "Have there been many accidents along here?" Sylvia said.

    "More than there used to be before they widened it," Sam told her. "The workmen had some with their equipment when they were. They kept saying someone in the woods was distracting them. Wouldn't you know they said it was us."

    Sylvia peered into the oncoming forest, and Heather resisted imagining how it might look to their father, as if the dark or something else as vast was stalking many-legged under cover of the trees. Her sister seemed entranced by whatever she was seeing, until she demanded
    "Is that him?"

    Heather gripped the wheel as the car threatened to veer. "Who? Where?"
    "Dad."

    Of course, the Arbour was in sight on the opposite side of the bypass. A man was standing in the gateway, back-lit by the floodlights of the hospital, and lowering from his mouth a trail of smoke. "He'll be a nurse," Heather said.

    "Where's dad's room?"

    "Upstairs at the front."

    Sylvia covered her face and made herself as small as she could without removing her seatbelt. The car had rounded the curve towards Goodmanswood, and the trees had put out the lights of the Arbour, before she lowered her hands and sat up. "Mom said I shouldn't disturb his sleep."

    As Heather turned onto the Goodmanswood road the woods and their mass of shadows continued to sidle alongside until the first crooked line of small ungainly cottages intervened.
    Once the houses had grown larger and newer the High Road sailed by, keeping, its shops and scattering of restaurants alight for almost nobody just now. A side street bulky with pairs of houses brought the Prices to Woodland Close, where several little girls with coats over pale blue ballet costumes were being escorted by parents into the community centre. "Did you ever go to that school, Sam?" Sylvia said.

    "It wasn't one by the time I started."

    "There was so much to see out of the windows I don't know how often the teachers had to tell me not to look."

    Presumably she had been looking at the woods. Heather parked on the flagstones outside the house and heard the dogged rhythm of a piano underlining the voice of a ballet teacher: "All be trees." Sam took charge of the bags of shopping while Sylvia hoisted her shoulder bag, and it was only then that Heather thought to ask "Where's your luggage?"

    "I left it in London till I knew I had a place to stay."

    "How could you think you wouldn't have?"

    "Maybe I thought you might feel I'd been away for so long I'd turned into a stranger."

    "You're no stranger than you used to be, Sylvie."

    "I'll take that as a compliment, shall I? I can't tell you how it feels to be home."

    Heather thought Sylvia's eyes must be unfocused by emotion, since she appeared to be gazing not so much at as through the house. Sam had barely opened the front door when Sylvia stepped over the threshold. As the keypad of the alarm ceased beeping under his fingertips she advanced to hang her shoulder bag over the end of the banister, then stretched her arms wide, embracing everything she saw.

    "That's where the trees came," she said, pointing to the corner where the staircase met the wall.

    "We still have one every Christmas," Heather said.

    "Here's where I used to lean my bike till mom got tired of the marks on the carpet,"
    Sylvia said, and pushed doors open. "Here's where we watched too much television if you believed mom, except she thought any was too much. What's this room now, just somewhere to