The Memory of Trees by F. G. Cottam

told.’
    ‘He’ll find out,’ Abercrombie said, ‘in the fullness of time, if there’s anything to tell, if any of it turns out to be anything other than weird Celtic bullshit. You’re not really sold on it, so what exactly would you tell him anyway?’
    ‘I think this place affects people in strange ways. You hear and see things here that aren’t real.’
    Her father laughed. ‘Hallucinations?’
    ‘It’s to do with scale and remoteness. It’s a wilderness. All that space and isolation plays on the senses.’
    ‘You’re talking about creative people, wild imaginations, tuned to atmosphere in a way most people aren’t. He won’t be sensitive to the same vibes you are. You’re a painter. He’s a guy who plants trees. It’s a practical skill. Artist versus artisan, honey.’
    ‘Curtis thought he saw something down on the shore this morning. He thought he saw a man who looked like his twin, staring at him.’
    ‘He seemed pretty chilled this afternoon.’
    ‘The stare was hostile. He felt threatened.’
    Her father shrugged.
    ‘Who would you say it was?’
    He didn’t say anything for a long time. He put his fingers to his throat and stroked the place housing the tumour that would end his life when it erupted and he drowned in his own haemorrhaging blood. That was Francesca’s thought and she could see her father read her mind, seeing it there.
    ‘I’d say it was a ghost, baby,’ he said. ‘But you don’t believe in those. Yet you’d still like me to share a bunch of myths about this place with Tom Curtis that risk freaking him out and scaring him away when he’s planted only a single tree. Women are such contradictory creatures.’
    ‘I don’t actually think anything would scare him away,’ Francesca said. ‘Folklore certainly wouldn’t do it.’
    ‘Because he’s brave?’
    ‘Because he’s desperate. He needs the money too badly. You know he does. It was one of the reasons you gave him the job.’
    ‘He got the gig for a whole stack of reasons. But I do think it sort of cool that he’s so broke. It makes him keen. God loves a trier and so do I.’
    There was a knock at the door and Freemantle entered the room. He did so on silent feet. Francesca thought you didn’t need to see or hear him to know who it was. You could smell his aftershave and sense his bulk and eagerness.
    Without turning, Abercrombie said, ‘What you got, Sam?’
    ‘Cold spots are still registering low temps. Raven Dip’s about five degrees below ambient, Loxley’s Cross the same.’
    ‘Puller’s Reach?’
    ‘Just the fog bank. It came in low and it’s dense.’
    ‘Well,’ Abercrombie said, ‘you want the sea, you gotta take the weather. Mother Nature’s sometimes a bitch.’ He stood, signalling that the meal and conversation were both over. ‘That’s the deal, people,’ he said.
    Francesca got up and walked past where Freemantle stood without a word or a look and went to her studio. Night was descending. She would work on the painting she was close to having completed for an hour and then have an early night. An early night still seemed a paradoxical thing in her father’s company, a kind of contradiction in terms. He had lived all the way up, as the saying had it. But he was dying now, his strength depleted, and the nights were ending earlier all the time for him.
    She could see the contradiction in the position she had taken over dinner with her father. She knew from her own experience that the place they were in evoked sensations in people that were unfamiliar and unnerving. At least, they did in her. She thought they did too in her father and in Freemantle, whom she suspected was thoroughly spooked by the whole domain.
    She refused to accept the myths as the cause of these sensations. The stories were scary. But they were monstrous and outlandish and only an ignorant medieval mind convinced of a vindictive God and dark magic and a flat earth with an edge to fall off if you ventured too far could