The God of the Hive - Laurie R. King [28]
It began to rain lightly, more a background susurration than actual drips through the leaves. We travelled through the green nowhere, never seeing more than a few feet to either side, following the rhythm of firm footsteps. The journey was timeless, the landscape featureless, my companions noisy ghosts.
Then the noise ceased. In moments, I stepped into a clearing, and glanced involuntarily upwards to check the sky: yes, still cloudy, which meant it was the real England. And despite the heavy grey, I thought no more than an hour had passed since the crash.
Goodman’s home confirmed the sensation that Hansel and Gretel could not be far away—or perhaps Titania and Oberon. The structure—hard to think of it as a house—stood off-centre in a lush meadow encircled by forest and punctuated by one magnificent oak tree. Once upon a time, the dwelling may have been a woodman’s hut, but was now a gallimaufry of elements: A yellow-brick shed leant against a lichen-blotched stone hut butting up against a red-brick shack that was in turn held upright by a wooden lean-to that might have been built yesterday, the whole variously roofed with old moss-covered tile and slick new black slate and two sheets of rusted corrugated iron. The water tank perched on top looked like a joke, or a nesting-place for herons. The huge oak rose up thirty feet from the door, and might have been the home of fairies. At a slight remove stood another shed, this one wooden and apparently windowless, with a wired chicken-coop leaning to its side.
The faint aroma of wood-smoke in the air was the most real thing about it.
He had left the front door open, and I looked through into an unexpectedly light room of colour and wood. As I stepped in, I caught sight of Javitz’s legs, stretched out on a neatly made bed through an inner doorway. The Green Man—no, he had a name: Goodman—was in the act of spreading a thick duvet on the floor beside it. I followed him, going down on one knee to ease my sleeping burden onto the down pad; she made a faint protest in the back of her throat, then curled onto her side and was still. I left the fur around her and stood, kneading my upper arms and wondering why mothers didn’t resemble stevedores.
From the outside, the building had suggested an uncomfortable series of cramped spaces, but on the inside there were only two rooms. The bedroom was scarcely twice the size of the narrow bed it held, but the main room was spacious—or would be for a single inhabitant. It had a fireplace faced by two highly civilised soft chairs, a window with a long, padded window-seat at its base, a simple but sturdy wooden table, and a small kitchen consisting of a sink with a tap, a tiled work-surface, and a small wood-burning cook-stove.
As a whole, it resembled a windowed cave furnished by a jackdaw—or a child. One wall, floor to ceiling, was a collage of bright paper and small shiny objects, many of which looked as if they had been dug up in the woods: blue medicine bottles, bright labels from food tins, cut-out colour illustrations from ladies’ magazines, coins so old the features were worn away, bits of broken mirror glass, two mismatched hair-combs. In the centre was a spray of half a dozen feathers; around the wall, a wide arc of horseshoes from pony to draught-horse traced a path through the jumble. The rest of the room was similar: a Japanese tea-pot without a spout held a handful of wildflowers; none of the curtains matched; the original upholstery of the chairs was hidden beneath a length of brilliant orange-flowered curtain and a blue and green Paisley, respectively. Still, it was surprisingly clean and smelt sweet, as if the floor had been strewn with rushes until an instant before we walked in.
Our host had tossed sticks onto the fire and set a kettle over the heat, and was now divesting himself of his outer garments. When hat and coat were on their hooks—a randomly arranged nest of sawed-off antlers—he finally turned to me, a short, slim man showing no effects of having carried over thirteen stone of man through the woods for three quarters