A hidden lane, a secret gate by Himring

A hidden lane, a secret gate

Schoolmaster Atkins had only three years to go before retirement, when Councillor Tompkins made a move and got him dismissed from his job. It seemed hard to Atkins that Tompkins could not have waited for three more years to be rid of him, but Tompkins was like that, petty, and age had not taught him more patience.

Almost the last task Atkins completed was to go through the books in the school library, which he also had had the running of, sign out a number of them, carefully marked as discards, and give them away to certain students whose parents or carers could not or would not afford them. Maybe he was being too pre-emptive, but he felt it in his bones that Tompkins’ favoured appointee would institute a purge. And if so, these books would be safe with readers who valued them.

At the end of the day, he handed in his keys and walked out of the school gates. He could have gone home, but his house, too, had begun feeling shadowy and impermanent. A reduction of the rent had been one of the perks that came with his job. Now the rent would go up and he would soon have to find somewhere smaller. But that was for another day, not for this evening—and so he turned the other way and walked out of town towards the outskirts of the woods.

Those woods had once, a long time ago, been the garden of a bishop’s palace. Bishop and palace were long gone and trees and weeds had grown up in place of the garden, until it almost looked like untouched wilderness. But some of the rare exotic plants that the bishop had collected and planted had survived against the odds, thriving without any tending or gardener. In other summers, Atkins had enjoyed taking his pupils on field trips to find them, nestling among the growth of other more common and expected plants that he also taught them to identify.

Now it was autumn and the wood seemed very quiet. He entered it on the familiar lane that at once began to sink a little into the ground, as if worn out with all the feet that had trodden it since the time of the bishop and his gardeners, and for quite some time he walked along, lost in thought, perhaps, or maybe not even thinking very much. There was a light scattering of leaves on the ground, beginning to turn into leaf mould. He spotted a brass key among the leaves, picked it up and put in his pocket. He might be able to return it to whoever had dropped it or he might not, but it was not going to do anybody any good lying on the ground in the middle of a wood.

Suddenly, he realized that although his feet had never left the well-known lane, his surroundings no longer seemed familiar. The banks on either side of the lane seemed higher and the trees taller than he remembered them. He ought perhaps to have been afraid, but he just went on and somehow, so imperceptibly that he quite missed the moment of the shift, the walls of the sunken lane turned into a pleached alley, such as the bishop might have once had.

It was a very long alley and the walls of densely interlaced branches and deep green leaves on either side seemed very high. Atkins was tiring and his legs were beginning to tell him that the school gates had been quite some way back and that house and bed would be even farther away.  But there was a light visible ahead of him at the end of the alley and, when he looked back the beginning of the alley seemed to be swallowed up in darkness, so he went on regardless. A slender gate loomed ahead of him that he had not noticed from farther off, in the gloom of the green dusk that surrounded him. It seemed to be made of interwoven strips of brass and after a moment’s hesitation he drew the brass key from his pocket and tried it in the lock. It fitted.

He became aware in that moment that, if he turned the key, it would be an irrevocable decision. But by then he wanted the light at the end of the alley very badly and the long way back seemed dark indeed. The key turned smoothly in the lock, and he was through, and the light was suddenly much closer than it had seemed a moment before.

The trees opened and he walked out and up a gentle grassy incline under a pale gleaming sky. He reached the top—and there was the Tree and the light shone gloriously upon it.

‘Oh’, he said. And: ‘I know you.’

He slowly walked up to the Tree, reached out and hugged it tightly, pressing his face into its bark and inhaling deeply—not a particular scent but just the tree-ness of it. He stood like that a while before he stepped back and looked up. Yes, it was all of it dear and known. There was the branch that had crumbled, except it was all there and whole, and the leaf that he had framed…

For a brief moment, then, he was worried, until he remembered that he had left the framed leaf to a museum and all the other careful, orderly provisions in his will.

‘That is all right then,’ he said and sat down among the roots of the tree, with his back to the trunk, to rest a bit.

Chapter End Notes

Originally written for three Hidden Paths prompts: a photo prompt showing a brass key amid fallen leaves, a quotation prompt from "Lud-in-the-Mist" by Hope Mirrlees that described a pleached alley, and the prompt "Into the Woods".