Down to the Lake (early draft)

Virgo opened her eyes. She hadn't meant to fall asleep, only to rest for a few minutes in the deep shade of a beech tree. But then the forks in the branches had become divisions in her thoughts, places where her mind left one track to follow another, and another, and another after that. Her eyes had risen to the twigs at the top, with their canopy of sunfilled leaves; and her mind had entered a consummate region, with lines too fine to resolve and ramifications too dense to keep apart. Soon her consciousness had collapsed altogether, leaving only the fresh clean smell of the woods, the veins showing through the leaves, the shades of deeper green printed on them by the leaves above. Just before she fell asleep she felt a flash of confusion, with the fractal structure of the branches somehow recast as a pyramid of human faces, some huge and leering, others tiny and cowed; then the whole thing dissolved in the hard blue sky.

She was lying on a red wooden bench. Her neck was stiff and a line of drool was plastered to her cheek. She sat up and rubbed her eyes.

The bench faced a ridge that linked the mountain she was on to a chain of ascending peaks. Beyond that the land swooped into a valley. Although most of the panorama was blocked by the spine of trees along the ridge, there was a clear space a few metres wide in front of the bench. The branches that dangled into it from either side — tongues exploring a missing tooth — had been sheared off about a metre and a half from the ground. The effect was a kind of leafy, cinematic frame for the lake and valley below.

She stood and stretched, wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. Her groggy eyes alighted on the town sprawled across the valley. But they were not comfortable there; the scintillations of glass and steel were like little pinpricks that stabbed her pupils into a shivering dance. She lifted her gaze to the softer reflections of the lake. A moment later she had cause to wonder if she were awake at all, for she saw the lake drain out of the valley. The furred green slopes of the mountains plunging into the empty basin. The town and the lakeside villages rimed around the edge of nothing like the dirt of an ancient bath. The subterranean heat of the bottom, overgrown with jungle and populated by animals not seen since prehistoric times.

She shook her head, batting away the unwanted pictures. Whatever else was missing from her life, the lake would always be there.

She set off down the path that zigzagged through the woods below the ridge. It was easy to follow: the red and white trail markings stood out bright and clear against the muted palette of the forest. Not that Virgo needed them. She could have found her way down with her eyes closed, palming around the trees, knowing them by the different textures of their bark. Beech, oak, elm, birch: all good friends of hers.

She had been walking for about a quarter of an hour when she heard something move. It dashed off, crashing through the undergrowth. Deer, she decided, from the quick loping stride, the two sudden pauses and equally sudden returns to movement. Something else bolted and its dry, thrashing course seemed to cross the line of the first. She held herself very still until the disturbance died away. It was as if she feared a chain reaction, a bifurcating wave of panic that would send every bird and beast of the forest scuttling from her; as if her human presence were capable of exceeding some critical mass, triggering an awful bomb of self-awareness that would drive the trees flat and strip the moss and grass and earth from the mountain, leaving her exposed on a vast face of rock.

She continued walking, easing her heartbeat into the steady rhythm of her stride. She refused to be frightened here. These woods were her cradle, they had rocked her all her life. The dry air, the web of roots with the mulch packed over it, the blanket of shrivelled leaves. The same temperate scenes her ancestors had foraged in.

Her ancestors: those big white brutes who survived the ice age to forge Europe's steel heart.

She glanced up to the treetops. The sky was so bright that the flecks of it between the leaves seemed like foreground instead of background, scraps of blue foil scissored and glued onto dull green paper. She knew how hot it would be out of the forest. It was a day for napping in the shade, dangling her feet in a pond, doing anything to keep out of the valley.

But she had to go down to the lake.

When she returned her gaze to the path she noticed a very pale, almost white butterfly bobbing up and down above a patch of nettles. As she watched, it abandoned whatever inscrutable ritual it had been engaged in and began to flute along the path. Its wingbacks brightened as it passed through feathered patches of light. For some reason she feared the butterfly's allure. Like an employee who breaks the spell of their boss by picturing him unclothed, she imagined the insect in enormous close-up, crawling over a half rotted chunk of bark. She saw the haired and segmented darkness of its body, the fur coating its wings, the alien probing of its legs.

A few seconds later she caught up with the butterfly. For a while it kept erratic pace with her, dropping back to inspect the small white flowers on the weeds by the path, fluttering ahead again. Then it veered off into the woods. She followed it without knowing why.

Now she was fighting through branches and shrubs, dodging roots strung like tripwires beneath the brown leaves. Her feet danced across the uneven terrain, assuming odd, clownlike poses. She stumbled several times, grazed her shin against a rock. The butterfly disappeared behind trees, reappeared beside others. Every time it entered her vision a kind of vibration touched her eyes, an altered visual pitch like the buzz from an old TV when the scene shifts from night to day. Finally it vanished for so long that she gave it up for lost and began to finger the ragged stripes on her leg. She wondered how she would get back to the path. Then the butterfly burst from the mass of roots at the foot of a fallen trunk and cut a singing diagonal through the air. Then it was gone altogether.