Deep in the woods
Back when I was a student, I lived for a long year deep in the woods of the High Weald, in an otherwise single-sex community of young scientists working at a government research station. Our little terrace of houses were ex-nurses quarters, in the grounds of an old Victorian insane asylum: a rambling and decaying building, complete with marble-fitted mortuary, that loomed over our accommodation on the other side of a nevertheless sizable lawn. Perhaps surprisingly this situation didn't bother us, until one winter's night when we decided to take advantage of the full moon to walk through the woods and across the silvered sandstone scrub to our favourite rural pub.
The hills were familiar to us from mist-shrouded autumn mornings mushroom foraging1, and familiar to I especially, for only the day before at twilight I had chased a barely-believing young stag across them on foot in a moment of Bacchic frenzy. And yet, this evening, despite the companionable feeling of warm beer in our bellies, there was something peculiar about the night upon our return journey. Perhaps it was the cool air, or the ensharpening moonlight, or the eerie barking of foxes, but it seemed to us we had slipped sideways into some other space in which we were disadvantaged strangers in a land, to all intents identical to our own, and yet not our own; a pellucid sleepscape that was a stalking ground for the out-of-time, the unearthly, and the fey.
We had found our way back through the woods and crags to the path that ran alongside the lawns, when the full moon behind the asylum caught our eyes. Looking across at the building, we were transfixed in fear, for there, on the very roof, stood a scattering of dark figures, silhouetted in the moonlight, staring across at us; silent, unmoving, focussed. We stared at the figures, and the figures stared at us, and for all the world all we could consider, despite their distance, was the inevitable proximity of our deaths in some terrible and irrational fashion. It was only after some long seconds that we realised the figures were the tall chimneys of the building, cast against the bright night sky, and yet, nevertheless, it was almost impossible to see them as such, for every effort to switch the illusion in our minds proved inadequate, as if the slipping hallucination was of chimneys, not the calmly waiting predators, and the everyday world was their world, not ours. Unable to shake this vision, there was little to be done but huddle up tighter and make our way along the path home, locking our doors tightly and hoping to wake on the morrow2.
14 Dec 1991
Notes:
1 I once saw a deer, badger, and fox all looking at a set of inkcap mushrooms on our front lawn. The site was a long way from anywhere but waited patiently for a writer of sentimental fiction.
2 The research institute later built a specimen storehouse on the site, containing rack upon rack of ancient biological samples in formaldehyde jars. It was not a place to be on resurrection day.