As his cramped legs stagger him down from the truck, he pauses, and becomes absorbed in the residual silence of the massing of men who have never seen terrain like this before, have never travelled this far before, and who have lost their gung-ho boisterousness in a single evaporating instant.
He shoulders his way through them - each one of them younger than he by half a generation - to the side of the track and stares at the edge of the forest.
The sun is just about poking through, watery and frozen.
Lichened branches formed an intricate dome of spars and cross-members that look like the decalcifying rib-cage of some giant animal that is rotting back to vegetation, bones and all.
He takes a step closer. He can almost hear it groan. The wind gets up, then dies down. The mass of trees seem to undulate in front of him - an illusion of movement both seductive and repellent.
A single bird cracks out of the topmost branches big as a pterodactyl and flies over their heads, its legs sticking out behind, seemingly bandaged together, as straight and level as a single aimed rifle; its wings whiplashflap once with a broken-branch retort before its glide takes it out of sight.
He crouches down, and stares deep, deep inside through the jagged entrance from his distance and feels like he is staring through the ripped curtains of a proscenium arch in any one of a half-dozen run-down theatres in any one of a half-dozen neglected parts of town after any one of the half-dozen minor earth-tremors he could remember. Everything was a'kilter, awry, defiantly so, as if the forest is saying "WHAT'S IT TO YOU? WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE ANYWAY?"
A glue-like smell wafts out, evoking melted-down horses and clapped-out furniture repaired too many times.
MEMORY: the furniture piled high outside the house on the street that led to the docks awaiting the clip and clop of the old nag to pull the cart to the next house in the downward slope of decreasing size and increasing poverty in the few years it had left before it gave up its ghost and was melted to glue.
He stands up and takes several steps towards it. Nobody follows him. No officer bars his way with an order.
Each one of his fatigue-booted steps sinks into the ooze. Each sucking recovery of his foot releases a smell at once so acrid and so chemical that it seems both artificial and - obscenely - biological. Each composty reek fades behind him as the next footstep digs in and sucks out and unearths its own miniature cesspit of rotting leaves. Other leaves - pristine, clear-outlined - come in carried on the wind and stick to their moribund predecessors plastered up his legs. Briefly unspoilt, they look like spilt opaque gems. He feels as if he is gradually being encrusted in a veneer of cheap paste jewellery. He feels as if the earth is slowly attempting to recover its own, sliming upwards, gluing around him with a mudpack of decomposition. He tries to close his nose, breathe through his mouth and stagger on, the gamy flavour pressing on his palate, gagging through his throat.
Looking for a patch of drier ground, he paddles out sideways, and accidentally kicks over a large mushroom, neatly severing it at the base. Crudely inverted in this way, the white plasticity of its underbelly shines out against the dullness of the soil upon which it rests.
He picks it up.
There are minute faded blue blotches within the white. He sniffs at it, dislodging granules of peat, which drip onto his newly-grown beard. Tiny insects flick around the spokes of the cap, which seem to be curling magnetically away from his fingers. It looks like it is putrefying already. It looks like it would rather die than be touched by him. It feels like the first casualty. He doesn't recognise it, and hence doesn't know if it is edible or poisonous, friend or foe.
He glances behind. Still no one moves. Still no officer calls him back with an order.
He lets the mushroom drop, and stamps down hard on it, smearing the whole thing, ribs, cap, insects and all into the rutted slime and walks on further, the as-yet-unloaded rifle bumping against the small of his back.
Fronds of clacking-dry creeper hang down like a giant grass skirt, imparting a sense of desiccation that contrasts with the oozing suck of the undergrowth.
He glances back again. They are still milling around, waiting for nothing.
And he presses on further into the forest, the right angle of his broken rifle nudging against his knee.
And he reaches a clearing, and a broken-down cottage with a fence in need of repair.
And a sound extrudes from inside and something in him is agape. And he finds that his mind can draw images from the escaping sounds and this is what he imagines:
VISION: a fat farmer arse-fucking his wife for the avoidance of more children in a dawnlit bedroom of damaged wood and chicken feathers, pumping his friction through an added slime of goose-grease, ruffling up her brown night-petticoats, side-on-behind, gentle for a big man, his clawed hand at her front-below, dipping in more sludge, tipped towards her tip, grunting as the day unfolds.
And her pleasure-screams forming the prelude to letting him in further, relaxing around him as the light penetrates as well and the mushy continental plates of ice at the windows cracking to a floating thaw.
And her smiling lips slightly berry-tipsy from the tot of liqueur to numb against the pain.
And all of this he sees in his bent mind as he stays hidden in his trees, and a short while later he sees a fat man emerge, tucking his night smock into his trousers, sees him yawn and scratch and amble round the corner by the barn to piss against the stump of an ash tree seemingly put there in that form for that purpose, wincing as he does so.
He reaches down to the brand-new ammunition belt, sluggishly inserts two cartridges, mends the broken rifle to a straight line, points it and waits.
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