‘The trees,’ he said, circling his finger. ‘They are all younger here. This land was cleared, farmed, and then abandoned.’
‘Do you want to take a look?’ asked Dalip.
His fleeting expression told her that no, he didn’t. Really didn’t. But he looked away, then back, and he wore a different face. ‘Yes.’
The three of them converged on the house from different angles. It wasn’t big, but big enough for a few people who really didn’t mind seeing each other every waking moment. The roof had collapsed completely, and a single sapling poked out above the tottering walls.
The rude wooden door was still in place, but only for as long as it took Dalip to rest his hand on it. It fell, neatly and cleanly, backwards to join the ferns and fungi that were growing out of the scattered shingles and beams.
The walls were rough timber, overlapping split logs on a frame with the bark facing outwards. For all that, it was carefully and skilfully made, and it would have been dry inside.
‘I wonder what happened?’ said Mary. She ducked under Dalip’s arm and stood on the fallen door. There wasn’t any evidence of furniture, or anything on the walls.
‘The wolfman said—’ started Dalip, but Stanislav interrupted.
‘We know what the wolfman said. It is very convenient that he told us about the possibility of empty houses before we found any. As he knew we would, because he also told us the direction to go to find this geomancer.’
Mary walked in further, and began kicking through the debris with the toe of her boot. ‘You think he’s lying?’
‘I think it is convenient, that is all. If we accept his explanation, all we think when we see these falling-down walls is that the people who lived there have moved somewhere else.’ He looked up at the sky, at the trees reaching out over the ruin. ‘There are other reasons for houses to be abandoned, not all of them good.’
‘You’re very suspicious,’ said Dalip. ‘Sometimes an abandoned house is just an abandoned house. We see them all the time on London streets: you know, with those steel shutters over the doors and windows.’
‘How often were the occupants forced to leave?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose that happens sometimes.’
‘It happens a lot,’ said Mary. She’d made a hole in debris, and had dug as far as a layer of thick bark sheets. ‘In squats, or you can’t pay your rent. Bailiffs come round and give you the evils, throw your stuff out on to the street, and it’s fuck you very much.’
Dalip conceded the point with a shrug. ‘Okay. But it’s not like anyone owns this bit of the forest, do they?’
‘So you believe,’ said Stanislav. ‘What if they do?’
‘I don’t know. We can’t go back, because we’ve nowhere back to go to. We can go in a different direction, but then we’re more lost than we are already, which would be saying something. At least we have a destination at the moment.’
‘Which the wolfman gave us.’
Mary bent down and pulled at the bark tiles: the original floor, like the walls, was made of split logs, but these were flat side up. As she exposed more, she started to find things that had been protected from the elements. A wooden platter, with rounded chisel marks across it. What looked like a broken stool, a sawn piece of trunk and three stout legs splayed around it.
She passed them back for the others to examine.
‘If the people who lived here had moved of their own accord,’ said Stanislav, ‘they would have taken their plates, if not their chairs.’
Dalip turned the platter in his hands. ‘We don’t know that. For all we know, the farmer was old, out working alone in his fields, had an accident or just died, and everything just fell apart with no one to keep it up.’
Mary stood up and wiped her hands. ‘If this was a farm—’
‘Twenty years ago.’
‘Then is there still going to be food here? I don’t know how these things work. Are we going to find chickens and things like that running around? Or potatoes. They grow in the ground, right?’
‘We don’t even know if they have potatoes here,’ said Dalip, but Stanislav nodded in agreement.
‘It might be food we do not have to work for, which is always worth collecting.’ He checked the position of the sun and pronounced it midday. ‘We need to rest for a while anyway. Here is as good a place as any.’
‘You realise I don’t know what I’m looking for. Veg comes out of packets.’
‘Then,’ he said, ‘do you know what a chicken looks like?’
She thought about it. Probably. It wasn’t going to arrive in breadcrumbs, but yes, she’d seen one before. ‘Sure.’
‘Then we are all agreed. If there is any sign of Grace, or if she has been here, tell me immediately.’ Stanislav stepped back out of the doorway and walked off to catch the others as they arrived.
‘Your mate’s a bit weird,’ said Mary.
‘Weird? In what way?’ asked Dalip, and added, ‘And he’s not my mate.’
‘He’s closer to being your mate than anyone else here. And weird in a serial killer sort of way. Paranoid.’ She went to the other corner of the room, picking her way between the leafy ferns. ‘No one’s tried to kill us yet, unless you count your sea serpent. So why’s he got the fear?’
‘Fear? I wouldn’t say that.’
‘I would. It’s like he’s seen all this before. Where did you say he was from?’ She bent down again, and started pulling up plants. They came away easily, and she threw them to one side, creating a shower of soil that made Dalip step back.
‘I didn’t say he was from anywhere, and I don’t know. Eastern Europe somewhere, I suppose.’ He shook the dirt from the uppers of his boots. ‘What if he’s right? What if we’re trespassing on someone else’s land?’
‘We’ve walked for half a day and we’ve seen no one. We’ve been here two days and there’s only been the wolfman. There’s no one here. This place is empty.’ In London, everywhere was someone’s; the council’s, developers, some rich Russian bloke, it didn’t really matter◦– there were rules wherever she went, even in places that seemed to have fallen down the cracks of the city. Here? No.
She uncovered a few more pieces of detritus. Shards of a small stone bottle. A wooden handle, worn smooth with use, but no clue as to what it was attached to. Something that may have been once string, but fell apart on being picked up.
There was nothing to indicate one way or the other whether the farmer had simply upped and left for pastures new, or been forced out by some crooked landlord.
By the time the rest of the group arrived, Mary was already out in the forest. She could see, now that it had been pointed out to her, where the former fields had been: thinner trees this side of the line, fat trees, the other. In places, she could even see the remains of a fence, now only a series of rotten posts in the ground.
She couldn’t see any chickens, or pigs, or cows, or sheep. That exhausted her knowledge of nursery rhyme animals, but there didn’t seem to be anything moving except the occasional flash of orange boilersuit on the ground, and glossy feathers in the air.
She followed the old fence around. It wasn’t far, enough to encompass the land that someone could reasonably work and live off. It went in a strip from the river to beyond the house, roughly square. And as she walked the boundary, she saw another structure in the distance, between the straight trunks and slanting branches of the trees.
Looking around, Mama was closest to her, but she didn’t say anything. It wasn’t like it was important. She stepped over the fence line and through the mature wood until she came to it. The house was also a ruin, roof gone, walls sagging, but there was no evidence of fields around it. Instead, there were jumbled piles of logs, slowly returning to the soil.