In the Night Wood
A FOREST. A BOOK. A MISSING GIRL.Charles Hayden has been fascinated by a strange Victorian fairy tale, In the Night Wood, since he was a child. When his wife, Erin – a descendant of the author – inherits her ancestor’s house, the couple decide to make it their home. Still mourning the recent death of their daughter, they leave America behind, seeking a new beginning in the English countryside.But Hollow House, filled with secrets and surrounded by an ancient oak forest, is a place where the past seems very much alive. Isolated among the trees, Charles and Erin begin to feel themselves haunted – by echoes of the stories in the house’s library, by sightings of their daughter, and by something else, as old and dark as the forest around them.A compelling and atmospheric gothic thriller, In the Night Wood reveals the chilling power of myth and memory.
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Dale Bailey 2018
Cover design by Andrew Davis © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover images © Shutterstock.com
Frontispiece illustration © Andrew Davidson
Dale Bailey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008329167
Ebook Edition © September 2018 ISBN: 9780008329174
Version: 2018-11-23
For Pam and Sally
The specific mode of existence of man implies the need of his learning what happens, and above all what can happen, in the world around him and in his own interior world. That it is a matter of the structure of the human condition is shown, inter alia, by the existential necessity of listening to stories and fairy tales, even in the most tragic of circumstances.
— MIRCEA ELIADE, THE FORBIDDEN FOREST
Gretel began to cry and said,
“How are we to get out of the forest now?”
— THE BROTHERS GRIMM, “HANSEL AND GRETEL”
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
By the time the Moon arose and let down her golden skirts, Laura was sore afraid. In the pale light she stumbled through a ring of sinister yews into a glade where stood a single bearded oak, hoary and not unkind.
“I met you once in a dream,” she said.
“And I you in my long, arboreal sleep,” replied Grandfather Oak (for that was his name).
“Isn’t that odd?” Laura said to the tree.
“Not at all,” said Grandfather Oak, nodding sagely. “The Story is rich in coincidence.”
“What kind of Story is it?” asked Laura.
And just then the North Wind swept through the trees, and Grandfather Oak shivered all his branches and dropped down a curtain of golden leaves. “It is not a happy Story,” he said. “But so few Stories are.”
— CAEDMON HOLLOW, IN THE NIGHT WOOD
Hollow House came to them as such events befall orphans in tales, unexpectedly, and in the hour of their greatest need: salvation in the form of a long blue envelope shoved in among the day’s haul of pizza-delivery flyers, catalogs, and credit card solicitations. That’s how Charles would pitch it to Erin, anyway, sitting across from her in the night kitchen, with the envelope and its faintly exotic Royal Mail stamp lying on the table between them. Yet it felt to Charles Hayden like the culminating moment in some obscure chain of events that had been building, link by link, through all the thirty-six years of his life — through centuries even, though he could not have imagined that at the time.
Where do tales begin, after all?
Once upon a time.
In the months that followed, those words — and the stories they conjured up for him — would echo in Charles’s mind. Little Red Cap and Briar Rose and Hansel and Gretel, abandoned among the dark trees by their henpecked father and his wicked second wife. Charles would think of them most of all, footsore and afraid when at last they chanced upon a cottage made of gingerbread and spun sugar and stopped to feast upon it, little suspecting the witch who lurked within, ravenous with hungers of her own.
Once upon a time.
So tales begin, each alike in some desperate season. Yet how many other crises — starting points for altogether different tales — wait to unfold themselves in the rich loam of every story, like seeds germinating among the roots of a full-grown tree? How came that father to be so faithless? What made his wife so cruel? What brought that witch to those woods and imparted to her appetites so unsavory?
