Mythago Wood - 1 (9 page)

Swiftly, then, the activity died away, and the light from the sticklebrook
grew more intense. The stillness was frightening, chilling. The cold was
numbing, and my body was racked with cramp. I watched the light as it emerged
from mist and woodland both, and was astonished when I saw its source.

A boat came sailing from the trees, moving steadily along a stream far too
small to contain its width. The boat was painted with bright colours, but the
glowing light came from the figure which stood upon its prow, peering intently
towards me. Boat and man, both were among the strangest things I have ever seen.
The boat was high-prowed and high-sterned, with a single sail set at an angle;
no wind took the grey canvas or the black rigging; symbols and shapes had been
carved upon the wood of the hull; bizarre figurines surmounted both prow and
stern, and each of those carved gargoyles seemed to twist to watch me.

The man glowed with a golden aura. He stared from beneath a bronze-bright
helmet, its crown elaborately crested, half-hidden between the twisting cheek
guards. A flowing beard, chalk-white with streaks of red, reached to his broad
chest. He leaned upon the railings of the ship, his patterned cloak wrapped
about his body, the light that surrounded him glinting on the metal of his
armour.

About him played the ghouls and ghosts of the forest edge, and they seemed to
be pushing and tugging at the ship, accounting for its movement forward on the
shallow waters of the stream.

This mutual regard across a distance of no more than a hundred yards lasted
for a full minute. Then a strange wind began to blow, filling out the broad sail
of the eerie vessel; the black rigging tugged and twanged, the boat rocked and
the glowing man glanced up to the sky.

Around him, the dark forces of his night-time entourage gathered, clustering
about the boat, whining and crying with the voices of nature.

The man tossed something towards me, then raised his right hand in that
universal symbol of acknowledgement. I stepped towards him, but was blinded by a
sudden dust-laden wind. Elementals swirled around me. I saw the golden glow
disappear slowly back towards the wood, the stern now the prow, the sail filled
with a healthy breeze. Try as I might I could not step forward through the
barrier of protective forces that accompanied the mysterious stranger.

When at last I was free to move, the ship had gone, the dark pall of mist
above the land was suddenly sucked away, like smoke swirling towards a fan. It
was a bright evening; I felt warm. I walked to the object the man had thrown and
picked it up.

It was an oak leaf the size of my palm, fashioned out of silver, a masterful
piece of craftmanship. As I stared down at it, I saw the shallowly inscribed
letter C within the outline of a boar's head. The leaf was pierced, a long thin
tear, as if a knife had been thrust through the metal. I shivered, although why
the sight of this talisman should fill me with such dread I was not, at that
time, able to understand.

I went back to the house, to think about these most bizarre mythago forms yet
to have emerged from the edgewoods.

Rain swept across the land, a drenching shower that seemed to come from a sky
too bright to have carried the downpour. The fields became slick and treacherous
as I raced back towards Oak Lodge. The rain penetrated my thick pullover and
flannels, and was cold and irritating on my skin. I had been caught unawares,
strolling down from the manor house after a few hours gardening, undertaken in
exchange for a cut of mutton from their supplies of salted meat.

I ran across the garden and flung the heavy piece of meat into the kitchen,
then stripped off my saturated juniper, still standing in the rain. The air was
heavy with the smell of earth and woodland, and as I stood there, shedding my
wet clothes, so the storm passed, and the sky brightened slightly.

Sun broke through cloud, and for a few seconds a wave of warmth encouraged me
in my thinking that as late April was about to give way to early May, the first
signs of summer were at hand.

Then I saw the fragmentary carnage near to the chicken coop, and a chill of
apprehension made me dart to the side of the kitchen door . . .

Before I left I had closed the door, I was certain of that. But it had been
open as I had scampered out of the wet weather.

Wringing out my jumper I walked cautiously to the chicken coop. Two chicken
heads lay there, their necks still bloody where they had been struck from the
bodies with a knife. In the rain-softened soil round about were the marks of a
small-footed human being.

Entering the house I could see at once that I had entertained a visitor in my
absence. The drawers to the kitchen table were open, cupboards were open, and
tins and jars of preserved foods had been scattered, some jars opened and
sampled. I walked through the house and observed the muddy prints of feet as
they toured through the sitting-room, into the study, up the stairs and through
the various bedrooms.

In my own bedroom the prints, a vague outline of toes and heels, stopped by
the window. The pictures of myself, Christian and my father, that were placed on
my bureau, had been moved. By holding the framed photographs to the light I
could see the smudges of fingerprints on the glass.

The prints of both fingers and feet were smallish, but not like a child's. I
suppose, even at that moment, I knew who my mystery visitor had been, and felt
not so much apprehensive as intensely curious.

She had been here within the last few minutes. There was no blood in the
house, which I felt there should have been had she carried the spoils of her
raid about with her, but I heard no disturbance as I had come across the fields.
Five minutes before, then, no more, no less. She had come to the house under the
cover of the rain, had toured the establishment, poking and prying with
admirable thoroughness, and had then raced back to the woods, stopping in her
passage to strike the heads swiftly from two of my precious hens. Even now, I
thought, she was probably observing me from the woodland edge.

In a fresh shirt, my trousers changed, I walked out into the garden and
waved, scanning the dense undergrowth, the shadowy recesses that were the
several pathways into the forest. I could see nothing.

I resolved, then, that I would have to learn to go back into the woodland.

And winter months too!

I tugged at one of the saplings and it was deeply rooted; I skinned my hand,
and tore the tender bark, before the plant at last relinquished its fervent grip
upon the earth.

She did not return that day, nor the next, but thereafter I became
increasingly aware that I was entertaining a visitor during the dark hours of
night. Food would vanish from the pantry; implements, ordinary items of
kitchen-ware, would be misplaced, or replaced. Also on some mornings there was a
strange smell in the house, neither earthy, nor female, but - if you can imagine
this bizarre combination - something that was a little of both. I noticed it
most powerfully in the hallway, and would stand for long minutes, just letting
the peculiarly erotic aroma seep into my system. Dirt and leaf litter were
always to be found on the ground floor and stairs of the house. My visitor was
becoming bolder. I imagined that, whilst I slept, she stood in the doorway and
watched me. Strangely, I felt no apprehension at the idea.

And yet I was glad, on that occasion, to have set the alarm so early, for
though my imagined woodland nymph was not in evidence, I
was
being
visited. The sound of chickens being disturbed came to me as I climbed back into
bed. Immediately I raced down the stairs to the back door, and held the oil lamp
high. I had time to glimpse two tall, thickly built man-shapes before the glass
of the •lamp shattered and the flame was extinguished. Thinking back on that
incident I can remember the
whoosh
of air as a stone was slung, a shot
more accurate than is rationally believable.

In darkness I watched the two shambling figures. They stared back at me; one
had its face daubed with white, and appeared to be naked. The other wore wide
pantaloons and a short cloak; his hair was long and richly curled, but that
detail may have been wrongly imagined. Each held a living chicken by the neck,
stifling the animal's cries. As I watched, each wrenched the head from its
animal, then turned and walked stiffly to the fence, lost in the gloom of night.
The one in the baggy pantaloons turned, just as he entered obscurity, and bowed
to me.

I remained awake until dawn, seated in the kitchen, picking idly at bread and
making two pots of tea that I really didn't want. As soon as it was light I
dressed fully and investigated the chicken coops. I was now down to two animals,
and they walked irritably about the grain-scattered arena, almost resentfully
clucking.

'I'll do my best,' I told them. 'But I have a feeling you're destined to go
the same way.'

The hens walked stiffly from me, perhaps requiring to enjoy their last meal
in peace.

Saplings were springing up all over the part of the garden next to the study,
and the thistle-field which connected that area with the woodland itself. There
were more than a hundred saplings - each less than six inches tall - in
scattered band across the small lawn that led from the study's French windows to
the gate. I went through the gate and noticed how the field, sparsely grazed for
several years and quite wild, was now richly dotted with seedlings. Towards the
woodland edge they were taller, some almost at my own height. I plotted the
width and extent of that band of growth, and realized with a chill that it
formed a sort of tendril of woodland, forty or fifty feet wide, reaching to the
house by way of the musty library.

The vision, then, was of a pseudopod of woodland trying to drag the house
itself into the aura of the main body. I didn't know whether to leave the
saplings, or crush them. But as I reached to tug one of them from the ground, so
the pre-mythago activity in my peripheral vision became agitated, almost angry.
I decided to leave this bizarre growth. It reached to the very edge of the house
itself, but when the saplings grew too large they could easily be destroyed,
even if they grew at an abnormal pace.

Or perhaps it was simply this: I wanted her.
Her.
The girl from the
wildwood who had obsessed my brother, and whom I knew to have visited Oak Lodge
again, in her new life. Perhaps much of what would follow was caused by this
desperate need in me for love, to find the same degree of commitment to the
female creation of the woodland that Christian had found. I was in my early
twenties, and save for a brief, physically exciting, but intellectually empty
liaison with a girl from the village in France where I had been after the war, I
was inexperienced in love, in the communion of mind and body that people
call
love. Christian had found it. Christian had lost it. Isolated at Oak Lodge,
miles from anywhere, it is not surprising that the thought of the return of
Guiwenneth began to obsess me.

And eventually she came back as more than a transient aroma, or watery
footprint on the floor. She came back in full body, no longer afraid of me, as
curious of me, I like to think, as I was of her.