The Memory of Trees by F. G. Cottam Page B

mist with, he felt suddenly vulnerable.
    He progressed. And the world he knew retreated at his back. The fog seemed to thicken, slyly increasing in density. And the silence became more profound, deadening his tread over the earth and the noise of his breathing.
    It seemed an eternity before he saw the tree. His sense of direction had always been excellent and the fog had thrown him off only a few degrees so that he came first upon the dim green cluster of pebbles that was the cairn, before looking to his left and seeing the green cone of the tree, anaemic and still in its solitary spot on the cliff top.
    The cairn made no sound. The stillness of the fog had silenced it, he thought, grateful to be spared its shrill and gleeful crooning. He tried to make out the sea, but there was nothing in the space where the land ceased but greyness. Fog filled the void with its dumb emptiness. The sight and the thought made him feel momentarily lonely. Then he went back to feeling the trepidation that had grown with every step taken towards his destination since he’d climbed off the bike.
    It had got worse, hadn’t it? He recalled the feeling he’d had after clambering down the cliff face to the beach. Such a climb would likely be fatal in these conditions, but he felt it again, didn’t he? He felt scrutinized, watched. And he did not think the study friendly or even neutral. The watcher felt to him wholly like a powerful physical threat.
    He eased through the pale blur of the yew’s branches and felt the solidity of its trunk. He ran fingers over the wrinkles in the bark. The tree was substantial and secure, something real and solid in a world reduced by the fog to speculation and whatever menace it hid. He felt it in the raised hair and chill on his skin.
    The cairn emitted a sound, then. It was sudden and short and sounded to Curtis’ ears like a chuckle of laughter. He shivered, his hand recoiled from the rough surface of the tree he stood next to and he tried and failed to rationalize what his ears had just registered. He hadn’t imagined it, had he? No, he hadn’t. The spirit evoked by the cairn, the capering phantom it stood in stone tribute to had judged him and found him absurdly wanting. It had laughed at him; at his blindness and at the terror gripping him.
    Something splashed below him on the shore, at the edge of the sea. It sounded large, whatever was doing the splashing. He heard a sort of sucking noise as something that sounded bulky and soft blindly gained the shore and clambered closer over the shingle.
    Curtis sank to all fours and crawled the six feet to the brink of the cliff. He could see nothing below him when he reached it. There was that weird sucking sound and a rising smell of something so foul it made him retch and stung his nostrils. Then there was a scream and the scream was altogether inhuman, a wet wail too deep and savage to emanate from any human throat; too prolonged in the mournful outrage of its fury and pain.
    The world went silent again. Curtis rolled on his back in frustration. He turned his head to his left and thought he saw the outline of the cairn, silent and innocent now, more clearly than he had before. The fog was lifting. When he turned back to the view from the cliff edge – where the view ought to be – he could make out white foam on anaemic pebbles where the waves broke below him. But as the view gained detail, there was no beast to see crawling, reeking from the sea.
    The fog disappeared. The world clarified.
    Freemantle did four sets of twenty bicep curls to end his workout in the gym. The gym was one of three rooms occupying the basement of the property the new guy hadn’t been shown. It was the biggest of the three. The others were the comms room and the armoury.
    He dropped his dumbbells to the rubber floor with a thud and decided on a couple of rounds on the heavy bag. It was an addition to his usual routine but he felt like throwing some leather. He pulled on a pair of