Authors: Robert Holdstock
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Contemporary, #Fantasy, #Fantasy Fiction, #Great Britain, #Forests and Forestry
Mythago Wood - 1 (8 page)
During the rest of the long wet winter, following Christian's disappearance,
I increasingly frequented the dark, musty room at the back of the house: my
father's study. I found a strange solace among the books and specimens. I would
sit at his desk for hours, not reading, nor even thinking, merely staring into
the near distance, as if waiting. I could visualize my peculiar behaviour quite
clearly, snapping out of the mindless reverie almost irritably. There were
always letters to be done, mostly of a
financial nature,
since the money on which I was living was rapidly dwindling to a sum
insufficient to guarantee more than a few months' idle seclusion. But it was
hard to focus the mind upon such humdrum affairs when the weeks passed, and
Christian remained vanished, and the wind and rain blew, like living creatures,
against the smeared panes of the French windows, almost calling me to follow my
brother.
I was too terrified. Though I knew that the beast -having rejected me yet
again - would have followed Christian deeper into Ryhope Wood, I could not face
the thought of a repeat of that encounter. I had staggered home once, distraught
and anguished, and now all I could do was walk around the forest edge, calling
for Christian, hoping, always hoping, that he would suddenly appear again.
How long did I spend just standing, watching that part of the woodland which
could be seen from the French windows? Hours? Days? Perhaps it was weeks.
Children, villagers, the farm lads, all were occasionally to be seen, figures
scurrying across the fields, or skirting the trees, making for the right of way
across the estate. On each occasion that I sighted a human form my spirits
leapt, only to subside again in disappointment.
Oak Lodge was damp, and smelled so, but it was in no sorrier a state than its
restless occupant.
I searched the study, every inch of it. Soon I had accumulated a bizarre
collection of objects which - years before - had been of no interest to me.
Arrow and spear heads, both of stone and bronze, I found literally
crammed
into
a drawer, there were so many of them. Beads, shaped and polished stones, and
necklaces too, some made from large teeth. Two bone objects - long thin shafts,
much inscribed with patterning - I discovered to be spear throwers. The most
beautiful object was a small ivory horse, much stylized, its body strangely fat,
its legs
thin but exquisitely carved. A hole through its
neck showed that it was meant to be worn as a pendant. Scratched within the
contours of the horse was the unmistakable representation of two humans
in
copula.
This object made me check again a short reference in the journal:
The Horse Shrine is still deserted, I think now for good. The shaman has
returned to the heartlands, beyond the fire that he has talked about. Left me a
gift. The fire puzzles me. Why was he so afraid of it? What lies beyond?
I finally discovered the 'frontal bridge' equipment that my father had used.
Christian had destroyed it as much as he could, breaking the curious mask and
bending the various electric gadgetry out of shape. It was a strangely malicious
thing for my brother to have done, and yet I felt I understood why. Christian
was jealous of entry into the realm in which he sought Guiwenneth, and wanted no
further experimentation with mythago generation.
I closed the cupboard on the wreckage.
To cheer myself up, to break the self-obsession, I reestablished contact with
the Ryhopes, up at the manor house. They were pleased enough with my company -
all, that is, except the two teenage daughters, who were aloof and affected, and
found me distinctly below their class. But Captain Ryhope - whose family had
occupied this land for many generations - gave me chickens with which to
repopulate my own coops, butter from his own farm supplies, and best of all,
several bottles of wine.
I felt it was his way of expressing his sympathy for what must have seemed to
him to be a most tragic few years of my life.
Concerning the woodland he knew nothing, not even that it was, for the most
part, unmanaged. The southern extent was coppiced, to supply farm poles, and
firewood. But the latest reference he could find in his family's
accounts
to any sort of woodland management was 1722. It was a brief allusion:
The wood is not safe. That part which lies between Lower Grubbings and the
Pollards, as far as Dykely Field, is marsh-ridden and peopled by strange
common-folk, who are wise to woodland ways. To remove them would be too costly,
so I have issued orders to fence off this place and clear trees to the south and
southwest, and to coppice those woods. Traps have been set.
For over two hundred years the family had continued to ignore that immense
acreage of wild-grown wood. It was a fact I found hard to believe and to
understand, but even today, Captain Ryhope had hardly given a second thought to
the area between those strangely named fields.
It was just 'the wood', and people skirted it, or used the tracks round the
edge, but never thought about its interior. It was 'the wood'. It had always
been there. It was a fact of life. Life went on around it.
He did show me a written entry in the manor's accounts for 1536, or 37, it
was not clear which. This was before his family's time, and he showed me the
entry more out of pride at its allusion to King Henry the Eighth than for the
reference to Ryhope Wood's strange qualities:
The King was pleased to hunt the woodlands, with four of his entourage and
two ladies. Four hawks were taken, and a canter across the wild fields. The King
expressed admiration for the dangerous hunt, riding without due care through the
underwood. Returned at dusk to the Manor. A stag had been killed by the King
himself. The King talked of ghosts, and was entertaining on the manner of being
haunted in the deeper glades by the figure of Robin Hood, which apparently
loosed an arrow at him. He has promised to hunt upon the estates in another
season.
Shortly after Christmas, whilst I cooked in the kitchen, I detected movement
beside me. It was a shock to my system, a moment of fright that made me twist
around, adrenalin making my heart race.
The kitchen was empty. The movement remained, a hesitant flickering at the
edge of vision. I raced through the house to the study, and sat behind the desk,
my hands on the polished wooden surface, my breathing laboured.
The movement disappeared.
But it was a growing presence that had to be faced. My own mind was now
interacting with the aura of the woodland, and at the edge of vision the first
pre-mythagos were forming, restless, ill-defined shapes that seemed to vie for
my attention.
My father had needed the 'frontal bridge', the strange machine, paraphernalia
out of Frankenstein, to enable his own ageing mind to generate these 'stored'
mythic presences from his racial unconscious. His journal - the log of his
experiments with Wynne-Jones - and Chris, too, had hinted that a younger mind
might interact with the wildwoods more simply, and very much faster than my
father had ever imagined possible.
In the study there was a brief escape from these clamouring, frightening
forms. The woodland had reached its dark, psychic tendrils only to the nearer
rooms of the house - the kitchen and dining-room - and to pass beyond that zone,
through the stuffy lounge, along the passage to my father's studio, was somehow
to shake off those insistent movements.
In time, in a matter of weeks, I became less afraid of the images from my
unconscious that were slowly materializing. They became an intrusive, but rather
un-threatening part of my life. I kept clear of the woods, imagining that by so
doing I was not causing the generation of mythagos which might later emerge to
haunt me. I spent a great deal of time in the local village, and journeyed to
London, to friends, on as many occasions as I could manage. I avoided making
contact with the family of my father's friend, Edward Wynne-Jones, despite my
growing awareness of the necessity of finding the man and speaking to him about
his research.
In all these ways I suppose I was cowardly; and yet, in retrospect, it was
more a result of my unease, my distraction at the incomplete nature of events
with Christian. He ought to come back at any time. Without knowing for sure
whether he was dead, or just totally lost, there was a great tendency to move
neither forward nor back.
Stasis, then: the flow of time through the house, the endless routine of
feeding, washing, reading, but without direction, without goal.
The gifts from my brother - the hares, the initials -provoked something akin
to a panic reaction in me. In early spring I ventured for the first time close
to the encroaching woodlands, calling Christian's name.
And it was shortly after this break in routine, perhaps in the middle of
March, that occurred the first of two visitations from the woodland which were
to have a profound effect upon me in later months. Of the two emergences it is
the second that was most immediately important; but the first would become of
increasing significance to me later, even though, on that windy, cold dusk in
March, it was an enigmatic haunting that passed through my life like a cold
breath, a fleeting encounter.
I had been to Gloucester for the day, visiting the bank where my father's
affairs were still managed. It had been a frustrating few hours; everything was
in Christian's name, and there was no evidence that my brother had agreed to
pass the handling of affairs across to me. My pleas that Christian was lost in
distant woodlands were listened to with sympathy, but precious little
understanding. Certain standing orders were being paid, certainly, but my
financial predicament was growing acute, and without some access to my father's
account I would be forced back upon my education. Honest employment was
something I had
once looked forward to. Now, distracted
and obsessed with the past, I wanted nothing more than to be allowed to govern
my own life.
The bus was late, and the journey home through the Herefordshire countryside
was slow and continually held up by cattle being moved along the roadways. It
was late afternoon before I cycled the final miles from the bus station to Oak
Lodge.
The house was cold. I pulled on a thick, Shetland jumper and busied myself at
the fire-grate, cleaning the ashes of the wood fire from the previous day. My
breath frosted and I shivered violently, and at that moment I realized there was
something unnatural in that intense chill. The room was deserted; through the
lace-covered windows, the front gardens were a blur of brown and green, a fading
vision in the gathering gloom of dusk. I put the light on, wrapped my arms
around my shoulders and walked quickly through the house.
There could be no doubt. This cold was not right. Ice was already forming on
the insides of the windows, on both sides of the house. I scraped at it with a
fingernail, peered through the lesions so made, out across the back yard.
Towards the woodland.
There was a movement there, a vague stirring, as tenuous, as intangible as
the flickering motions of the pre-mythagos which, though they occupied my
peripheral vision, had ceased to concern me. I watched that distant stir in the
forest as it rippled through the trees and undergrowth, and seemed to cast a
moving shadow across the thistle-covered field that separated treeline from the
edge of the garden.
There was something there, something invisible. It was watching me, and
slowly approaching the house.
Not knowing what else to do, terrified that perhaps the Urscumug had returned
to the woodland edge in search of
me, I picked up the
heavy-hafted, flint-bladed spear that I had made during the December weeks. It
was a coarse and primitive means of defence, but was satisfyingly secure in a
way that no gun could have been. What else, it had occurred to me, should one
use in offence against the primitive but a primitive tool?
Passing down the stairs, I felt a breath of warm air on my frozen cheeks, a
touch like the quick exhalation of breath of someone close by. A shadow seemed
to hover about me, but it disappeared quickly.
In my father's study the haunting aura vanished, perhaps unable to compete
against the powerful residuum of intellect that was my father's own ghost. I
peered through the French windows at that woodland which could be seen from
here, rubbing at the frosted glass, watching as my father had once watched,
frightened, curious, drawn to the enigmatic happenings beyond the human limit of
the house and grounds.
Shapes darted about the fence. They seemed to pour from the woodland edge,
spiralling and leaping, grey, shadowy forms that vanished as quickly as they
came, like the tongues of grey smoke from a gorse fire. From the trees, and back
to the trees, something reaching, feeling, prowling about the grounds.
One of the tendrils passed over the fence and extended to the French windows
themselves, and I drew back, startled, as a face stared at me from the outside,
then vanished. The shock had made my heart race and I dropped the spear.
Reaching down for the heavy weapon, I listened as the French windows were
rattled and banged. The woodshed door was struck a violent blow, and a sudden
fury swept among the startled hens.
But all I could think of was that face. So strange: human, yet with qualities
that I can only describe as elfin; the eyes had been slanted, the inside of the
grinning mouth a glowing red; the face had possessed no nose, nor
ears,
but a wild, spiky growth of fur or hair had sprouted from cranium and cheeks.
At once mischievous, malevolent, funny, frightening.
Abruptly the light drained from the sky, and the land outside became grey and
foggy; the trees had become shrouded in a preternatural mist, through which an
eerie light shone from a direction towards the sticklebrook.
My curiosity at last outweighed my apprehension. I opened the windows and
stepped into the garden, walking slowly through the darkness towards the gate.
To the west, in the direction of Grimley the horizon was bright. I could clearly
see the shapes of farmhouses, copses and the roll of hills. To the east, towards
the manor house, the evening was similarly clear. It was only above the woods,
and Oak Lodge itself, that this storm-dark pall of gloom hovered.
The elementals came in force, then, emerging from the very ground itself,
rising about me, hovering, probing, and making strange sounds very like
laughter. I twisted and twirled, trying to glimpse some rational form to the
gusting creatures, occasionally glimpsing a face, a hand, a long, curved finger,
the nail a polished claw that jabbed towards me, but curled away before contact
could be made. I glimpsed female shapes, lithe and sensuous. But mostly I saw
the grimacing faces of something more elfin than human; hair flowed, eyes
sparkled, broad mouths parted in silent cries. Were they mythagos? I hardly had
time to question it. My hair was touched, my skin stroked. Invisible fingers
prodded my back, tickled me below the ears. The silence of the grey dusk was
interrupted by abrupt and brief bursts of wind-shrouded laughter, or the eerie
cries of night birds that hovered above me, broad-winged, human-faced.
