As the cover banged shut like a coffin lid, the tilting of the book rearranged the twigs into a different pattern - into words he was able to read. He fumbled the door open and raised the volume in both hands. By the glare of the security light he saw the title wasn't Tapioca but Tapiola. What difference did one letter make? 'Come and get it,' he roared, hurling the book from him.
It struck the grass with a thud which seemed to crush his shout. The cover raised itself an inch and fell shut, and then the book was as still as the trees and their shadows. Beyond the unlit road, and around his property, the forest stretched for miles. The words he'd glimpsed were growing clearer, embedding themselves in his mind. YOU TURNED AWAY ONE MESSENGER. The night sky seemed to lean towards the patch of light which contained him and the book, as though the sky was the forehead of the blackness behind the mass of trees, in which he heard a sudden gust of wind. Its chill found him while he waited to see the trees move,' and he was continuing to wait when it subsided. It might have been a huge icy breath.
'Not likely,' he said in a voice which the darkness shrank almost to nothing. He backed away and closed the door. The breath of the night had smelled of decaying vegetation, and now the room did. He thought he saw a trace of his own breath in the air. Hugging himself and rubbing his upper arms, he went to his desk for a mouthful of Scotch. As the ice cubes clashed against his teeth, he almost bit through the glass. Beyond the window the lawn was bare. The book had gone, and there wasn't so much as a hint of a footmark on the grass.
'I bet you think that's clever. Let me introduce you to someone who's cleverer.' He was speaking aloud so that his voice would keep him company, he realized, but he wouldn't have to feel alone for long. Without glancing away from the window he groped for the phone on his desk, detached the receiver from its housing and jabbed the talk button. He was already keying the number for the police as he brought the receiver to his face.
A sound came to find him. Though the earpiece was emitting it, it wasn't the dialling tone. It could have been a gale passing through a forest, but it seemed close to articulate. He clawed at the button to clear the line and listened to the welcome silence; then he poked the talk button again, and again. The phone was dead.
And there was movement among the trees. High on the trunks, branches sprang up and waved at him, a series of them rapidly approaching the house. A branch of a tree at the edge of the grass drooped before gesturing triumphantly at him, and then a severed length of the telephone cable which they had all been supporting plummeted on to the grass.
'Having fun, are you?' Thirsk demanded, though his throat was so constricted he barely heard himself. 'Time I joined in.' He dropped the useless receiver on top of a pile of typescripts and dashed kitchenwards, switching on lights as he went. His bedroom lit up, the bathroom and toilet next to it, the large room in which he dined and watched television and listened to music, and finally the kitchen, where he lifted the largest and sharpest knife from the rack on the wall. Outside the window he saw an image of himself almost erased by the forest - an image which grew fainter, then was wiped out entirely as his breath appeared in front of him and condensed on the window.
He saw himself being engulfed by fog in the reflection of a room which had been invaded by trees. The glint of the knife looked feeble as a lantern lost in a forest. 'I'm still here,' he snarled. Driven by a defiance which he felt more than understood, he stormed back into his office.
He was still there, and for a while, since he couldn't call a taxi. He laid the knife within reach on the desk and drafted a letter to his printer. . . . looking forward to the Christmas consignment. . . any way you keep costs down is fine . . . His words seemed insufficiently defiant until he scribbled It's only paper, only pulp. Of course he would never send such a letter, and he was about to tear off the page and bin it when he realized how like taking back a challenge that would seem. He drove the knife through the pad, pinning the letter to the desk like a declaration nailed to a door.
At first there was no apparent response. The only visible movement in the room was of his breath. It took him some minutes to be certain that the smell of decaying vegetation had intensified - that the source was in the room with him. Did the colours on the jackets of the new books resemble stains more than they should? His chair trundled backwards and collided with the wall as he reached the shelves, where he dug a finger into the top of the spine of the nearest book.
It came off the shelf at once - the spine did. The cheap glue had failed, exposing bunches of pages which looked aged or worse. His hand swung wildly, hooking another spine at random. That fell away, bearing a patch of its rotten jacket, and his finger poked deep into the pages, which were a solid lump of pulp. He dragged his finger out of it, dislodging both adjacent spines. Their undersides were crawling with insects. He staggered backwards just as sounds began in the warehouse: a ponderous creaking followed by a crash that shook the office.
'Leave my property alone,' Thirsk screamed. He ripped the knife out of the pad and, pounding across the office, hauled open the door to the warehouse. The bookcases that weren't attached to the walls had fallen together, forming an arched passage, in the darkness of which piles of books were strewn like jagged chunks of chopped timber. Not only books were in that darkness, and his hand clutched at the light-switch before he knew he didn't want to see.
As soon as his hand found the switch, the block came away like a rotten fungus from the wall. The surviving fluorescents lit for an instant before failing in unison with a loud sharp glassy ping, and he glimpsed a shape stalking up the passage of the bookcases towards him. It resembled a totem, carved or rather shaped out of a tree, walking stiffly as a puppet, though it was considerably taller than any puppet had a right to be. It grew as it advanced on him, as if whatever feet it had were picking up or absorbing the books on which they trod. Its disproportionately large head was featureless and unstable as a mass of foliage, and its arms, which were reaching for him, were at least half the length of the warehouse. So much he distinguished before he threw the door in its face. Twisting the key, he wrenched it out of the lock and shied it across the room.
There was silence then, a silence like the quiet at the secret heart of a forest. He heard his pulse and his harsh unsteady breaths. Gripping the knife two-handed, he glared about. Half a dozen spines sagged away from books, spilling grubs, as the telephone let out a hollow exhalation and began to speak in the voice of the wind.
Thirsk shouted louder, drowning out its words. 'In here too, are you? Not for long. This is my house, and one of us is leaving.' But he wasn't sure why he was rushing to the front door - to eject an intruder, or to confront the source of all the intrusions?
The trees were out there, and the darkness behind them. Neither appeared to have moved. 'I know it's you,' he yelled. 'I know you're out there.' He saw his shadow jerking towards the trees before he was aware of heading for them. As he reached the nearest, he slashed at the trunk, slicing off bark. 'You're my property and I can do what I like with you,' he ranted. 'If you don't like it try and stop me, you and your big friend.'
He felt his feet leave the gravel for the plushy floor of fallen leaves and pine needles. He was well into the woods, hacking at every tree within reach, when all the lights of the house were extinguished. He whirled around, then discovered he was able to see by the faint glow of the sky, which no longer felt like a presence looming over him. 'Is that the best you can do?' he cried, reeling deeper into the woods, no longer knowing or caring where he was. 'That's for you, and so's that.' When the trees around him began to creak he chopped more savagely at them, daring them to move towards him; when the mounded earth seemed to quiver underfoot he trampled on it, ignoring how the forest had begun to smell as if the earth was being dug up. He might have been miles into the lightless forest when the hand whose enormous fingers he'd just slashed raised itself with an explosive creak, soil and undergrowth and decaying vegetation spilling from its palm, and closed around him.