The Cold Quiet — Stories

The Bramble Wall

Book Four — The Cold Quiet

It was the shortest Saturday of the whole year — the sun barely bothered climbing before it started thinking about coming down again — and Felix stood at the back door in his big coat, breath going white in front of his face.

"The forest will be all wrong," he said, delighted. "Alex. It'll be all wrong and I want to see it."

Alex was at the shelf, radio in hand, the little light on top glowing steady green. He didn't need telling twice. He'd been thinking about the den since breakfast — not saying so, just thinking about it, the way he did.

"Charged," he said.

Felix clicked his own on. Green light, first try. He looked almost offended not to have a story about it.

"Mine's charged too," he said. "It's been charged for days."

"I know," said Alex. "I watched you do it."

Daddy was by the door already, laced into his big boots, a coil of rope over one shoulder and a small saw in his hand. "Storm brought half a tree down over the lower path," he said. "Mum and I are going to clear it before someone rides into it in the dark. We'll be along the footpath, not far — you'll hear the saw."

"We always go together," said Felix.

"We always have someone on the radio," said Alex.

"Good lads. And take the torches seriously today — it gets dark stupidly early now, earlier than you think, so don't push it." He looked at the sky, low and white and already thinking about dimming, even though it was barely past lunch. "Straight there, straight back. Go on."

Out the gate, up the footpath — and the trees closed over, and the sound went quiet-and-big, the way it always did, except today it was quieter, and bigger, in a way that made both boys stop talking for a second without deciding to.

The forest wasn't the forest. Or it was, but wearing something else.

The low ground, which all summer had been bare brown earth good for finding things in, had vanished. In its place lay flat grey water, so still it looked solid, holding the white sky upside down in it like a second sky underfoot. Where the ground rose — the little humps and ridges Felix had never once looked at twice — it stood up out of the flood like islands, tufted with frosted grass, becoming, all of a sudden, the only way anywhere.

"It's not the forest," Felix breathed. "It's a hundred little forests with water in between."

Alex didn't say anything. He was looking at where the path used to go, and where it went now instead, and doing the sum in his head. He knew this flood, though — knew it came up to about welly-height in the deepest bits and no more, cold and slow rather than fast, the kind you could wade if you truly had to. But islands were better than wading. Islands kept you dry.

Somewhere off behind them, small and ordinary and comforting, came the far bite of a saw.

They picked their way from island to island — the raised roots, the little humps, the higher ground along the old hollow way — reading it the way they'd always read the forest, except today reading it wrong was a wet welly, not just a wrong guess.

"There," said Alex, pointing without needing to explain, and Felix followed his finger to a ridge that ran, dry, all the way to the big oaks.

The cold had its own smell, Felix noticed — not the green smell of summer, but something flatter and cleaner, like the inside of the fridge, with a thread of woodsmoke in it from somewhere behind them. Their breath came out in clouds and vanished. Every so often a last brown leaf let go of a branch above the flood and spiralled down to land, without a sound, flat on the still grey water, and sat there, and didn't sink.

"Look," said Felix, stopping to watch one land. "It floats. Everything floats today."

"Not everything," said Alex, and stepped carefully round a soft patch that wasn't quite island and wasn't quite water, testing it first with the toe of his welly the way Daddy had shown him — press, wait, trust it, or don't.

Somewhere under the grey glass, gone completely, lay the track Alex had cleared with his own hands back in the autumn — the one they'd been so proud of, wide enough to wheel a bike through. Now there was no sign it had ever existed at all. Where the bike-stand had stood, only the two tallest branches showed above the water now, like a little gate to nowhere.

"It's under there," Alex said, quietly. He didn't sound sad about it. Just certain. "It's just having a rest."

"Everything's having a rest," said Felix, looking round at the whole hushed, flooded, waiting forest. "The whole place is asleep with its eyes open."

The bramble wall, when they reached it, looked nothing like itself — bare black branches instead of green, the gap at the bottom rimmed with frost, but the gap was still there, same as always, and they crawled through it the same as always, Felix's hood catching on the same thorn it always caught on.

And the clearing on the other side —

It held. It was an island now, properly, water lapping cold and still at the low lip of ground on two sides, but the clearing itself stood up dry above it, the three old oaks black and huge against the white sky, the fallen oak lying exactly where it always lay, its moss gone dark and stiff with the cold instead of soft and green.

Alex went straight to the den.

It stood.

The lean-to they'd built against the fallen oak, the door Elfine had woven, the cleared approach they'd finished together — all of it stood, and more than that: tucked into the corner nearest the big trunk, a low wall of packed turf and leaning branches kept a whole dry patch of ground behind it, out of the wind, out of the wet.

"We built that before the flood came," Alex said, crouching to touch it. "In case."

"Does it work, though," said Felix. "Properly. Not just looks like it works."

Alex ducked inside, into the dry corner, and sat. The wind, which had been finding every gap in Felix's coat outside, simply stopped.

"It works," said Alex, and something in his voice, quiet as it was, sounded like the proudest thing he'd said all year.

Felix wasn't satisfied with just being told. Felix pressed a hand flat against the packed-turf wall, then against the old fern-thatch roof above it, checking each bit the way you'd check a den you'd trust your life to. He put his cheek right up against the windbreak and felt for a draught. Nothing. He looked down at the floor of the dry corner — leaf-litter, bone dry, not a dark patch on it anywhere, when everywhere else in the clearing the ground had gone dark and heavy with wet.

"It's actually dry," he said, sounding faintly amazed at his own brother's handiwork. "Not a bit dry. All-the-way dry."

"That's the idea," said Alex.

Felix crawled in properly then, out of the wind, and sat shoulder to shoulder with Alex in the small held space, and for a minute neither of them said anything at all — just sat there, breath clouding gently in the cold air outside the dry corner but not inside it, in the small held-in warmth of a thing they'd built with their own hands, months before they'd known they'd need it.

"We didn't know it would be for today," Felix said eventually. "When we built it."

"Didn't matter," said Alex. "Built it anyway."

They didn't notice the light going until it had mostly gone.

That was the trouble with the shortest day. It didn't dim the way summer evenings dimmed — slow and gold and warning you. It just quietly ran out. The white sky greyed, then blued, then thinned to almost nothing, while two boys sat happy and distracted in a dry corner, not paying any attention to it at all.

Felix looked up first. "Alex."

Alex looked up too. Outside the den's mouth, the clearing had gone the flat, colourless blue of proper dusk, far earlier than either of them had expected, and the black glass of the floodwater beyond the bramble wall had turned the same colour as the sky, so you couldn't easily tell anymore where the ground ended and the water began.

"That got dark fast," said Felix, and for the first time all day his voice had a small, careful edge in it.

Alex was already moving — not panicked, just quick — unclipping the radio from his coat and thumbing the little switch on its side. A cone of white light snapped on, steady and real, and swept across the clearing floor, picking the islands back out of the dark one by one.

"Daddy said take the torches seriously," Alex said. "So we do."

They went back the way they'd come, Alex's light finding the ridge, then the next hump, each patch of dry ground appearing exactly where they knew it would be, because they knew this forest, properly, the way you know a thing you've walked a hundred times — even now, even changed, even in the dark. Felix kept close, his own torch adding a second circle of light to Alex's.

At the second hump, though, Alex stopped.

Two ridges ran off from where they stood, both dark humps in the torchlight, both looking, for one long moment, exactly like the way home.

"Which one," said Felix, and for the first time all day sounded properly unsure.

Alex didn't guess. He swung his torch slowly along both ridges instead, the way Daddy had shown them — not at the ground right in front of his boots, but further out, hunting for something he'd recognise. And there it was: away to the left, a broken branch hanging at a particular crooked angle off a particular old holly, a landmark he'd noticed without noticing on the way out, the sort of thing you only find again because some quiet part of you filed it away the first time.

"That one," he said, pointing his beam at the crooked holly. "I remember that tree. This way."

Felix followed, and didn't ask how Alex knew, because Alex always knew, and because a moment later the path opened out exactly where Alex had said it would, and between the two torch-beams there was always, always, enough to see by.

It was on the second island, the flat black water lying dead still on both sides, that Alex went still himself.

His radio was clipped to his coat, switched on, and it was making no sound at all — no hiss, no static, no sea-in-a-shell. In this cold, this still, even the radio had gone completely silent. There was only the huge, complete quiet of a flooded winter forest at dusk, so total it had a weight to it, pressing in from every side.

And into that quiet, from nowhere, from everywhere, came a sound.

Tock.

Not through the radio. Through the air — or so it seemed, so still and close did the whole forest suddenly feel, the old trees leaning nearer in the dark, the black water holding its breath along with them.

A pause.

Tock.

Alex stood with his torch beam frozen on the water, not moving, listening with his whole body, the way he had once before, a long time ago, in a summer storm.

"You heard that too," he said. Not a question.

Felix had gone very still beside him. "Alex. What is that."

Alex had held this alone since the first summer storm, meaning to tell Felix one day, just not yet. Tonight, in the huge quiet dark with his brother's shoulder against his own, not yet finally turned into now.

"It's old," Alex said, quietly. "It happened once, in the summer, in the rain — a slow knocking sound, far off, in the quiet. I heard it back then too. I didn't tell you. I was keeping it, a bit, just for me. I don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is. But it's not scary. It's just — old. Like the forest remembering something."

Tock.

Then nothing. Just the huge cold quiet, and the black water, and two boys standing close together on a little dry island in the middle of it.

Felix didn't ask again what it was. He looked out at the still black water, at the old bent shapes of the oaks against the last blue light, and he didn't shiver, and he didn't reach for Alex's hand, though it was right there.

"It's like the forest is a book," he said slowly, "and we only ever read the summer pages before."

Alex almost smiled. "Come on," he said. "Torches on the ground. We know the way."

They came off the last island onto the solid footpath just as full dark properly closed in, two small torch-beams bobbing along a track they both knew with their feet as much as their eyes, and ahead of them, through the black trunks, came the small ordinary miracle of a real light — Daddy's headtorch, and beside it Mummy's, working still at the fallen branch across the lower path, the rasp of the saw carrying clear through the cold still air.

"There you are," said Daddy, straightening up, sawdust pale on his sleeve. "Good timing. We're just finishing."

"We used our torches," said Felix, with enormous dignity. "Because it got dark stupidly early. Like you said."

"Good lads," said Daddy, and didn't ask anything more than that, because there wasn't anything more that needed asking.

Mummy looked at them both a moment longer than usual, and seemed satisfied by whatever she saw, and went back to holding the branch steady while Daddy finished the last cut.

Home was warm and yellow after all that blue-black quiet, and they peeled off boots and coats stiff with cold, and flopped by the fire instead of the pool, which stood folded and put away for the winter, waiting for summer to come back round.

At the shelf, Alex set down what he'd picked up on the last island, without either of them quite remembering when — a small bird's skull, clean and white and impossibly light, no bigger than a bottlecap, that he'd found tucked in a fold of frosted grass.

"For the shelf," he said, and set it beside the black stones, the feather, the curl of old iron. Five things now, in a row, in the light.

"Tell it," said Felix, when they were sofa-flopped and thawing, "the flood bit. And the den bit. And the—" he glanced at Alex.

"You can tell that bit," said Alex. "If you want."

So Felix told it — the hundred little forests with water in between, the den standing dry on its own island, the dark coming down like a light switching off, the torches finding the way home step by step. And when he got to the quiet, still part, the tock part, he told that too, carefully, in his own big-Felix way, and Alex let him, and didn't take it back, because some things are better held by two.

The radios went on the charger, four little lights, glowing red in a row, filling for next time.

"It was different," said Felix, into the fire-warm quiet, "but it was still ours."

"Yeah," said Alex.

Outside, the flooded forest lay black and still and completely quiet under the winter stars, holding a den on an island, and a bramble wall rimmed with frost, and somewhere under all that cold glass water, a track, resting, waiting for the water to go down again — the way it always did, the way it always would.

The End.