No Telephones

Cumberly Park was crammed with alders and hawthorns and English oaks, but it was tiny, to the point that, despite its density, it would’ve been difficult to mistake for true woodland. Crowding us in from all sides were the revs of car engines, the yelling of kids coming home from school, and smoke and smog rising above the leaf-barren canopy—wispy white and ashy dark bulging against each other, conspiring to turn blue skies grey.

It should’ve been impossible for anyone to disappear here. A child’s body would’ve been dredged up within hours by teens popping in for a vape.

“She’d have been sixteen roundabout now.” Auntie Tilly paused by a fallen log, and crouched to study it, black puffer jacket ruffling. “Same as you.”

I stopped beside her, and attempted to arrange my face to appear understanding, which was odd to have to put effort into. Like trying to share in grief that you actually did feel; you didn’t want to cry, so you suppressed it, but now you were having to put up another facade to show you still cared.

“She was how old when she, erm–” I said, because it filled the quiet.

On the log was some fungus, spores arranged like shelves. Tilly ran her fingers near them. “I’m sure your GCSEs taught you more than basic subtraction.”

My breath hitched in my throat. “Thir- Thirteen.”

She threw back a smile. “I’m only joking. You’re acting like she was my kid.” Tilly had been the lead detective. It was the last job she’d been assigned to, before she’d switched to a career in rubbish collection.

Yet she insisted it’d had no effect on her.

“Turkeytail,” she said.

“What?”

“That’s what this is. So-called because it’s shape is similar to turkey feathers, or so they claim. Common to…well, everywhere.”

“Toxic?”

“Death still hangs heavy on this place in the minds of the youth.” She tutted. “No. It’s often used in herbalism practices. The only thing it poisons is modernity, which is one thing that needs a good poisoning.”

She rose and continued off the trail. I followed. My breath misted in front of my face, my nose threatening to snap off in the cold, though my scalp remained hot in the beanie my mother had knitted for my last birthday. I clung to that warmth as branches cracked underfoot; I kept checking to make sure they weren’t bones. I was still hopeful about finding something.

Maybe hopeful was the wrong word.

Tilly gestured to a smattering of holly berries. “These, on the other hand, are bad news. They cause diarrhoea, vomiting, all sorts of nasties. Unlikely you wouldn’t scramble to some help before it got so far as killing you, though.” Neither would berries have hidden a body, she didn’t have to say.

Ellie Thompson had last been seen sprinting into Cumberly Park alone, this testimony given by the very boys who’d herded her in, hollering about her braces or her blonde curtains or some such nonsense. Accounts said this hadn’t been the first time she’d fled here for similar reasons.

CCTV surrounded the park, due to the commonality of petty crimes that took place within. None of them had caught Ellie leaving.

The only belongings of hers the police had found were her phone, laptop, and earphones left in the hollow of a dead oak. The data on the former two had been corrupted beyond recovery. Hers was the only DNA found on any of them.

I eyed my aunt as I followed her. Were these the facts that darted around and around in her mind as she went on these walks?

Why me? I’d said to my dad.

She’d take no offence to you coming, he’d said. Your mum just wants to know she’s okay when she goes in there, not, you know…

Suicidal?

He’d nodded, staring into his tea. Do it for your mum.

I’d glanced in on my mother, sitting in her bed, a blood-stained tissue clenched in her bluish fingers. She'd looked vacant.

I adjusted my beanie. For mum.

Another, more welcome sound joined the car engines: the tinkling of water.

Tilly and I arrived at the river. It glided through the middle of the park, connecting Ellie Thompson’s school on one end of town to mine on the other.

It was funny that we’d never run into each other in these woods—or, at least, I didn’t remember us doing so. We’d shared the habit of fleeing here, when I’d been smaller and the trees had therefore stretched towering. If I didn’t look up, it was like they went on forever. Plugging my ears eradicated the noises of civilization. I could breathe. I could forget that each day it seemed my mother’s health only worsened.

It was never enough, though. Dog walkers and tired parents would bumble in whining to each other about how digestives were now a whole 50 pence more expensive, and the illusion shattered. Sometimes I’d squeeze my eyes shut and wish for the woods to expand onward into a forever forest—a wish with the kind of force of will behind it that I’d used to think could shift mountains and stars, but really only resulted in a headache.

I shook myself out of my recollection; Tilly was thirty yards along the river’s shore. I stumbled after her.

She stopped, held a staying hand out. I halted, trying not to pant as much as I needed.

She was glaring down. A vape was half-buried in the earth, purple, a nozzle like sickly lips. She waited. Then she lifted her foot over it, and slammed.

She kicked it over and over while bearing a blank, almost clinical expression. I stood back, fingers curled around my own vape in my coat pocket. I hadn’t intended to use it, only forgotten it was there, cold and weighty, before I’d left the house.

Tilly stopped, half-turned back. “Why are you lurking?”

“Sorry?”

“You still have the spritely legs of youth. Ahead of me. Go on.”

I hesitated, nodded, and moved past her as she bent down.

I glanced back halfway, my eyes straining in my sockets to glimpse what she was up to without being caught.

I didn’t see what happened, exactly, only that her throat bulged for a moment, and the vape was nowhere in sight.

I dared not believe it. I preoccupied myself by thinking about the one in my pocket. I needed to be rid of it, but littering it somehow seemed a poor idea, so for now it would have to hide.

“Oh!” She caught up to me, and pointed at a hare on the other side of the river, its jaw sliding back and forth to break down the grass in its mouth. “What a baby.”

The grey mammal bulged to the size of my torso, spherical eyes taking me in like a predator’s. Only, its instinct seemed less motivated by hunger, more by a desire to dissect. I wasn't sure what it was about hares that scared me. Bunnies were smaller, fluffier, softer. Hares knew that blood and pennies tasted the same.

“Yeah.” I tried for a smile. “A baby.”

“The fastest mammal in the UK,” said Tilly.

“How fast?”

“Forty miles an hour. The average human strains to reach half that.”

I was glad it was on the other side of the river. Making use of my ‘spritely legs’, I continued along the bank, and Tilly followed. I had the impression she could somehow sense my vape, that her eyes bored into my pockets, but whenever I looked back—pretending to glance across the river—she was only smiling fondly.

It seemed that she came into this park for the same reasons I’d used to. Escapism. Interruptions to this, like litter, sparked fury. Perhaps there was some mental instability there, but nothing fatal. I was happy to have gleaned this much to report back; I nevertheless wasn’t keen to repeat the experience.

We arrived at one of the trails that wound through the park, and a bridge, made of stones eroded smooth with age, curled over the river. I cocked an eyebrow up at Tilly. She nodded. We crossed.

A weeping willow stood on the other end. She approached it, fondness persisting. I hung back, reluctant to follow. Its leaves had abandoned it, and without snow or frost to make it graceful again, it had become a decrepit, haggard thing, spilling upward and wilting in every direction like a spluttering fountain. Yet Tilly put both hands on it in a light embrace, and inhaled as though everything else until this point had stank of the bins she collected so regularly.

I had the absurd urge to run. I forced myself closer, only by two steps.

“Bless you,” she told the willow. I couldn’t see her face. Her voice sounded squeezed and a touch raspy. “Did you know all—or nearly all—weeping willows here are female? Brought over from China in the eighteenth century.”

“Do they self-pollinate?” I said.

“That’s the barbaric part. We lop off cuttings and put them just where we want them, like fussy children. Keep them lonely, keep them unintrusive.”

“The legacy of the Empire,” I said.

“Exactly.”

She took another deep breath, and this time I drank it with her. The park became quieter than it’d been a moment before. As though the car engines were behind double-insulated glass, and the sounds of school kids vanished entirely. I closed my eyes, and allowed myself to believe again that the trees stretched upward forever, that the willow was surrounded by friends, that there would be no interruptions to this slice of peace.

My phone buzzed. I extracted it from my pocket, looked down. Mother. I answered.

“Hello, darling.” Her voice came tinny, broken up. Must’ve been a poor connection. I made out: “How’s the walk going?”

“It’s nice!” I said. “Auntie Tilly is full of facts about the fungus and wildlife here.”

“As though it could be called wildlife.” Tilly turned from the willow and strode my way. “Everything’s so squeezed it can’t be allowed to thrive.” Her lips had puffed out a little, like the beginnings of an allergic reaction.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Absolutely.” She arrived beside me, slipped the phone from my hand, and chucked it into the river. My mother started to warble something before she was cut off with a splash.

I stared at my aunt.

She looked out at the woods, unperturbed.

I remained quiet several seconds longer. Eventually, I managed, “Shall we head back?”

“Which way is that, then?” she asked. The hand that had handled my phone was burning red, most severe at the fingertips. She tucked it in her jacket pocket.

“Any which way,” I said, keeping my voice light. “We can just follow the trail. It’ll lead out soon enough.”

“After you, Spritely.” She’d taken a liking to my new nickname.

I walked ahead of her. I tried not to seem too rushed. In this, I failed.

Something had changed around us other than the noises. The trees had grown further apart, not as crammed, so there wasn’t such a warring of branches in the canopy. The trunks were larger, too, hawthorns swelling to oak size, oaks turning monstrous.

“Is there something diff–” I said.

“Is there what?” Tilly cooed.

I looked up. I could see no smoke. The revving of engines was gone entirely. There was only the chirpings of robins and sparrows, but when I searched, I could see no birds of any variety.

“Is there what?” Tilly repeated. Her footsteps quickened.

I stomped ahead faster as well, wrangling to keep by breath steady. “Ignore me, I think I’m just tired.”

“We’ve lost the trail.”

My heart throbbed. I looked down. Indeed we were on unmarked earth, ours the only bootprints in sight.

I summoned the courage to turn around.

Behind my aunt, hares were emerging from behind trunks. They hopped towards us. We were faster than they bothered to be for now, but more came, more than Cumberly Park’s meagre size should’ve been able to support.

It became impossible to ignore the question. “What’s happening?”

“I know what happened to Ellie Thompson,” Tilly said.

“Is she alive?”

“She’s the best kind of alive.”

I could no longer resist. I broke into a sprint.

I glanced back. Tilly kept marching forward at a moderate pace.

The hares caught up with her and surrounded her like a fleet. I made it maybe a dozen yards before a few cocked their head to the side, calculating. Then they bounded forward without sound. When I faced ahead to avoid slamming into anything, I had no concept of how close they were.

This I knew: I could not outrun them.

I hurtled past an oak with turkeytail shelves bulging all up its side, with the same exaggerated scale as everything else.

I skidded to a halt, ran back, and leapt at the tree. I climbed.

My fingers burned with icy friction. The platforms held steady. I glanced down. The hares hopped from shelf to shelf, pausing between each to contemplate. Still they came faster than my frantic ascent. Those who did not fit swarmed the ground around the oak, waiting their turn.

The closest leapt, teeth bared for my Achilles’ tendon.

I snatched my foot up. Its head smashed into the bark. It fell limply. Others on the ground shifted out of the way, and it snapped on impact. An arm spasmed. The swarm moved back in to smother it, unbothered.

I jabbed a foot down at one of the shelves lower than me, and it broke off, bouncing off others to the ground. I kicked some more as I continued my ascent. This slowed the hares a little, giving me a fighting chance.

I looked up. There was no more mushroom, and the lowest branch hung out of reach. I didn't have time to hesitate. I crouched as best as I could without losing balance, and jumped.

I grabbed the branch, fingers burning, threatening to release it as they were too cold to work properly. Before they could fail I swung my weight up, and sat on the branch. I climbed up another, and another, until I’d reached the top.

It was only now that I realised the hares had stopped chasing me at the highest turkeytail shelf. They eyed me, quizzical.

I panted, looking out at the world.

The view was devoid of buildings, of concrete or windows. Trees stretched to the horizon, evergreens dotting a brown landscape. There was no variation in the height, only flat ground, like our pocket of the world and been repeated out ad infinitum.

A red hand slapped the branch beside me, and I jumped.

“It’s only your aunt.” Tilly hauled herself up and sat beside me. She smelled of mown grass and sweat. How hadn’t I heard her come? I was out of options; the trees were too far apart to jump between, and she could grab me if she wished, hurl me to the ground to be at the hares’ mercy.

I remained distressingly unmoving.

She cupped my cheek. “What’s the matter?”

“My parents will be wondering where I am,” was all I could think to say.

“Why do you still care?”

“They’re-”

“Look. Really look, now.” She gestured outward. “Tell me why we should worry about anything else?”

I obeyed, more to sate her than to actually pay any attention, but this time when I turned, I became breathless. My shoulders relaxed. Muscle tension I hadn’t known I had melted off me. The skies shone blue, the sun caressed us, and I smiled.

“See what I mean?” Tilly said.

It wasn’t perfect, though. Something gnawed. It was hard to say what, at first. A heat…a warmth on my scalp. The beanie keeping my head snug, fibres knitted into pattern by determined fingers that were usually too flimsy to eat. And yet mum had managed it. For me.

I clutched the vape in my pocket, gathering my nerve. The way Tilly’s lips had puffed up, the way her hand was red…

I slipped it out, and pressed it to her face.

Her scream rattled my skull, mouth gaping as though her jaw had slid off its hinges. I gave her a nudge. She fell to a lower branch, and panted, flailing but unable to coordinate properly. I climbed down the other way.

The hares waited on the turkeytail shelves.

It was a mad idea, but worth a try. I put the vape to my lips, sucked in the taste of candied apple, and blew.

The hares fled from the smoke.

I descended, continuing to breathe more vapour downward, until my boots were back on solid earth.

I sprinted forever, too afraid to glance behind. My legs threatened to give. I’d seen the view from the canopy. I knew there was no end. Yet on I continued, ripping off my beanie and clutching it tight.

It happened unceremoniously when it did. I stumbled out into the street. A car hurtled towards me. I backpedalled, and it screamed past, honking. I could only laugh, tears spilling free.

I looked back into the park. Once again it stood cramped and lifeless.

My aunt never emerged—no CCTV ever glimpsed her. For a while I was investigated under suspicion of her murder, but they couldn’t make it stick, and eventually it was chalked up to whatever mysterious circumstances had taken Ellie. As though it happening twice was more reassuring than just the once.

When I got home my mother squeezed me in her arms, apologising over and over for sending me.

One year later, she gave me the last hug she ever would.

Now when I look back at my walk that day, one thought circles in on me, insistent, hungry, perhaps only due to the way memory distorted with time.

Maybe I should’ve stayed with my aunt.