The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

Above me, Gibbet Wood clung to the top of Gibbet Hill like a green skullcap. As I approached, and then entered beneath the branches of this ancient forest, it was like stepping into a painting by Arthur Rackham. Here, in the dim green gloom, the air was sharp with the smell of decay: of funguses and leaf mold, of black humus, of slithering muck, and of bark gnawed away to dust by beetles. Bright cobwebs hung suspended like little portcullises of light between the rotted tree stumps. Beneath the ancient oaks and lichen-coated hornbeams, bluebells peeped out from the deep shadows among the ferns, and there on the far side of the glade I spotted the serrated leaves of the poisonous dog's mercury that, when steeped in water, produced a gorgeous indigo poison that I had once transformed into the bright red color of arterial blood simply by adding a two-percent solution of hydrochloric acid.

I thought with pleasure of how the ammonia and amides given off by the deep compost on the forest floor provided a perfect feast for omnivorous molds that converted it to nitrogen, which they then stored in their protoplasm, where it would be fed upon by bacteria. It seemed to me a perfect world: a world in which cooperation was a fact of life.

I drew in a deep breath, sucking the sour tang into my lungs and savoring the chemical smell of decay.

But this was no time for pleasant reflections. The day was hurrying on, and I had still to find my way to the heart of Gibbet Wood.

The farther I went in among the trees, the more silent it became. Now, even the birds had become eerily still. This wood, Daffy had told me, was once a royal forest in which, many centuries ago, kings of England had hunted the wild boar. Later, the Black Death had taken most of the inhabitants of the little village that had grown up beneath its skirts.

I shivered a bit as, high in the branches above me, the leaves stirred fitfully, though whether it was from the swift passage of the ghostly royal hunters or the restless spirits of the plague victims--surely they were buried somewhere nearby?--I could not tell.

I tripped on a hummock and threw out my arms to save myself. A rotted stump of moss-covered wood was all that stood between the muck and me, and I grabbed at it instinctively.

As I regained my balance, I saw that the wood had once been square, not round. This was no branch or tree trunk, but a cut timber that had weathered and been eaten away to something that looked like gray coral. Or petrified brain matter.

My mind recognized it before I did: Only slowly did I realize that I was hanging on for dear life to the rotted remains of the old gallows.

This was the place where Robin Ingleby had died.

The backs of my upper arms bristled, as if they were being stroked with icicles.

I released my grip on the thing and took a step backwards.

Except for its frame and a shattered set of stairs, there was little left of the structure. Time and weather had crumbled all but one or two of its floorboards, reducing the platform to a few skeletal remains that stuck up out of the brambles like the bones of a dead giant's ribcage.

It was then that I heard the voices.

I have, as I have said before, an acute sense of hearing, and as I stood there under the ruined gallows, I became aware that someone was talking, although the sound was coming from some distance away.

By rotating slowly on the spot and cupping my hands behind my ears as makeshift reflectors, I quickly determined that the voices were coming from somewhere on my left, and with careful steps, I crept towards them, slipping quietly from tree to tree.

Suddenly the wood began to thin, and I had to take great care to keep out of sight. Peering round the trunk of an ash, I found myself at the edge of a large clearing that lay at the very heart of Gibbet Wood.

Here, a garden had been cultivated, and a man with a battered hat and working clothes, was hoeing away industriously among the rows of widely spaced plants.

"Well, they're all over the bloody place," he was saying to someone I could not yet see.

"... Behind every fence post ... hiding under every bloody hayrick."

As he removed his hat to mop his face and the top of his head with a colored handkerchief, I saw that the speaker was Gordon Ingleby.

His lips, set in a weathered face, were the startling crimson hue of what Father called "the sanguine temperament," and as I watched, he wiped away the spittle that had come with his angry words.

"Ah! 'The heavens set spies upon us,'" said the other person in a dramatic voice: a voice I recognized at once as Rupert's.

He was lounging in the shade beneath a bush, smoking a cigarette.

My heart nearly stopped in my chest! Had he spotted me?