Authors: Robert Holdstock
The longhouse itself had a fire in its centre. Richard stooped and entered the smoky interior. Light flooded the room from gaps in the turf roof, and from the slatted windows that had been shaped in the wattle and daub of the walls. There were tables here, and charts on crude frames. Chairs were scattered about, and there was a sectioned-off dark-room and a clutter of photographic equipment. This, then, was the research centre.
Richard was hailed and he stepped out of the lodge. Lacan appeared again from the undergrowth, tugging at his beard and shaking his head. He looked worried.
“McCarthy is here. I’m sure of it. I can see signs of him. I think he must be slipping away. He’ll need help.”
“Slipping away?” Richard asked, then realised he meant going “bosky.”
A thought occurred to Lacan. “The lake. Of course! He’ll be there. It’s the natural place to be.”
Richard dropped his pack and followed along the bank of the river, which eventually narrowed and deepened, flowing between sheer, mossy rocks and stunted trees. Holding on to each other, and grabbing at roots and rocky prominences, they waded into the freezing water and edged through the ravine.
The confinement suddenly ended and the river opened out into a wide, ice-blue lake. It was cool here, and across the shimmering water the woodland was in the bite of winter. Richard could see snow on the dark trees, a stone tower rising above the branches and the wrecks of ships piled in disorder against the length of the rocky shore. The middle of the lake was hazy, the forest beyond visible as if through frosted glass. Richard didn’t know it then but Helen told him later that this was “Wide Water Hollowing,” and was believed to connect ancient seas, meres, streams, and lakes, from Tuonela to the Aegean of Odysseus, from the magic waters of Manannan and the lake of Excalibur to the river gorges of the Lorelei. None of the teams at the Station, however, had yet risked a journey to the watery worlds of legend beyond, and most of their understanding was guesswork, based on the mythagos that had come through to their own world of Old Stone Hollow.
Just off the shore, where Richard and Lacan crouched, a small boat bobbed as the breeze sent waves against it. Two fishing lines stretched out from the lakeside, one of them flexing under tension, suggesting that its bait had been taken. Lacan strode to the glass-fibre rod and reeled in the catch, holding it up on the hook. He looked at the five inches of thrashing juvenile perch with silent disappointment before returning it to the water.
“I have no time for
morsels!
”
A few minutes later they found McCarthy. He was hunched up in the rocks, totally naked, his hair draped with green vegetation, his body streaked with blue and black dyes, which at first glance looked like bruises. He was staring blankly out across the water. He appeared to be shivering.
“Is that what you mean by ‘bosky’?” Richard whispered.
“First signs,” Lacan confirmed quietly as they watched, adding in a whisper, as he fiddled with the bear-tooth necklace around his broad chest, “It’s very sad, Richard. Very disturbing. He will become more and more primitive, wearing animal furs, and charms, becoming very
strong
in smell, very wild in his look. It is a most unpleasant change. We must resist it at all costs.”
Richard glanced at the big man, almost unable to believe what he was hearing, thinking Lacan must be making a joke. But the Frenchman was impassive, impossible to read. He said, “You see? He’s sitting there dreaming, listening to the wood. There’s nothing to hear. Not in
here,
at least,” he tapped his right ear. “But there is so much to hear more deeply. McCarthy is a talented
sciamach.
They often go first.”
“Sciamach?”
“Shadow dreamer. They use the wood, they probe the wood, it’s a sort of journey…”
Stepping into the open, Lacan shrugged off one of his heavy furs and flung it at the dreaming man.
“Get dressed.”
His words, abrupt and angry, seemed to shake McCarthy from his daze. He looked up through watery blue eyes and smiled.
“Arnauld! What’s happening?”
“Put the fur on. Quickly. You’ll die of cold.”
McCarthy stood awkwardly. Richard noticed the huge scar across the left side of his torso—he had been gored by a boar, Lacan whispered—and he looked like a wasted man, all ribs, pelvis, and prominent knees. When he tugged the dark fur round his shoulders he looked pathetic. He was still trembling. He reached a hand through the cloak to shake Richard’s. His face was deeply etched, very drawn, and in the way of dying men his teeth seemed too large for his mouth, his eyes loose in their sockets. But he seemed at ease, was content to be led and followed Lacan obediently back to the Station, not complaining as he waded through the cold river.
McCarthy’s speciality was dreams, although from the brief summary of his area of study Richard gathered that he was no psychologist. As he drank tea, and almost literally came back to earth, he talked of “lucid dreaming,” “dream travel,” and “dream correspondence.”
“Ghosts,” he said, as his enthusiasm returned, “dreams and creation—Ryhope Wood resonates with all of these things, and condenses them. If I can find the key to mythago-genesis, I can unlock the Big Dream, the First Dream.”
“I wish you luck,” Richard said encouragingly, again not understanding a word.
Lacan laughed. “I can’t understand him either,” he said loudly, bringing the hint of a smile to McCarthy’s morose features. “He speaks in tongues. But I like him! He may not be able to unlock the Big Dream, but he unlocks a very good
cassoulet!
”
* * *
When the Station at Old Stone Hollow had been established, three years ago by the time-standard of the world outside of Ryhope Wood, there had been twenty assorted scientists and anthropologists, all gathered in by Alexander Lytton, all with a specialist field, all made privy to the secrets and oddities of the realm of the wildwood. They had been divided into ten teams of two, but only five of these duets remained extant. Three had disappeared more than two years ago and were presumed dead. Helen had lost her husband Dan, although under circumstances that were unclear. McCarthy had been unable to save his partner from a lance wound, inflicted when they had been exploring one of the medieval castles that could be found in the deeper wood. Alexander Lytton and Arnauld Lacan had proved to be so temperamentally unsuited to each other that they had willingly and gladly separated and were the only two members of the research establishment who went on solo missions.
Helen was currently beyond a zone named Hergest Ridge, but was with Elizabeth Haylock, a specialist in first millennium Europe, and Alan Wakeman, a palaeolinguist and expert in “glyphs.” Two Finlanders were due back within a matter of days.
Helen’s team were several hours overdue at the Hollow, but McCarthy, before his temporary lapse into the
bosk
(it was his first, it would not be his last) had sensed the three of them returning, quite close, quite safe. They were vibrant shadows in the wood, and McCarthy could communicate with those shadows, although in a way which was unclear to Richard at the moment.
* * *
Exhausted by walking, made tired by wine and McCarthy’s gamey and substantial stew, Richard slept in the mid-afternoon. He awoke to the sound of voices, hailing the camp from a distance, and went out into the Station in time to see Helen carefully crossing the rope bridge. Haylock and Wakeman were already entering the compound.
Helen looked wretched, her clothes matted with mud, her face a tracery of thorn scratches, nothing serious enough to worry about. She greeted Richard very wearily, but managed the echo of an amused smile as she said, “How’s the man who dances with cricket bats?”
He noticed that moss was growing on the blackened bark of her right hand. Aware of his helpless glance, she covered the blemish, rubbing at it self-consciously.
“I really have to wash and rest,” she murmured. “I’ve been two weeks in the wild—”
Richard was astonished.
Two weeks?
He’d only seen her the day before yesterday!
“—I’ll talk to you later. I’m really glad you’ve decided to come.”
“I’m glad to see you too,” Richard said. “I’ve got a lot to learn. A lot to talk about.”
“And a lot to see,” she added as she walked tiredly to one of the sleeping tents. “And a lot of travelling.”
Wakeman and Haylock had unpacked onto a trestle table, displaying their finds, some of them quite gruesome. Stripped of their over-clothing, stretching their limbs after shedding the weight of their equipment, they made a strange pair, naked but for the tight, green body-webs both were wearing. Elizabeth Haylock was a tall, robustly-built woman with an angular face and restless eyes. Her hair was in a long, black pigtail which draped over her right shoulder as she talked to Lacan. She seemed shy of Richard, or perhaps uncomfortable with simple social graces. When he was introduced, and asked about her speciality, she was sharp; when he admitted his lack of understanding she seemed impatient. Perhaps she was just tired. He understood that she was also an expert on the Late Pleistocene, a part of the Upper Palaeolithic characterised by wide-scale treks of the hunter-gatherer clans, and the laying down of two separate streams of mythology, of which later echoes could be seen in the richly painted Magdalenian caves of the Pyrenees.
Her rambling words, her apparent hostility, blunted Richard’s relationship both with the woman and with her conversation. She walked off after a while, and emerged from one of the tents wearing a towel and carrying soap and a scrubbing brush. She joined Helen in the river, which earlier Lacan had called dangerous, and floated lazily in the turbulent flow, seemingly quite unbothered by the prospect of Wild Riders passing.
Wakeman too was distracted and exhausted. He was in his fifties, tanned, wore his grey hair in a ponytail, and was intricately tattooed with Celtic symbols on each of his muscular arms. A powerfully-built man, he reminded Richard of the sort of wrestler who appeared on television on Saturday afternoons. Wakeman was triumphant over a find relating to his own speciality: the Urnfield and Wessex cultures of the Bronze Age (a term he hated). The bronze mask was very tarnished, and quite battered, but the face it depicted was imbued with a terrible evil, and was unquestionably, he thought, related to a particular magician of the third millennium
BC
, a terrifying spectre who used the riverways of Europe to trade in the then current form of spells. His name, Wakeman believed, had been
Mabathagus.
Possession of this mask then, was dangerous, and Lacan was not happy that it had been brought into the Station. He pumped up the generator power and made a circuit of Old Stone Hollow, checking the wires, ribbons, and talismans of the defences.
(iii) Spirit Ghyll
An hour later, Lacan led Richard between the highly-coloured warning poles at the back of the Station. The path wound tightly through a scrub of knotty hazel and elder in full, white flower, into the deep shadow cast by the high, overhanging rock wall. It felt suddenly cold below this great cliff, and the smells of earth, damp, and vegetation were concentrated powerfully. Richard could hear the distant sound of rushing water, but the scrub was heavily silent, eerily deserted. Their movements became loud.
Lacan indicated markings on the rock and as Richard’s eyes became accustomed to the shade, so he saw the painted patterns for the first time. The activity of his edge-vision intensified, a swirl of colour, the sensation of two figures running towards him, a ghostly movement that set his hair prickling and caused him to glance round.
Lacan watched him curiously. “Have you seen such designs before?”
Lines painted in parallel, complex spirals, rows of brilliant blue circles, cross-figures and stylised human forms and faces. The under-hang was a tapestry of primal patterns and surrealism. Everything seemed to flow towards the earth, gathering towards the place, behind dense bushes, where the sound of water was a constant, distant murmur.
“Some of them are like rock carvings,” Richard said. “Those old tombs, the megalithic ones…”
Lacan nodded, satisfied. “Some of them are very like that indeed. Where I come from, in Brittany, the tradition is even older than in this country. But there are patterns here that are like those of the Bushmen. In the Kalahari there are caves and rock faces with the same sort of configurations. It’s like two cultures fused together. Have you ever been to the Kalahari?”
Richard hadn’t, although he was familiar with the rock paintings from school studies. Lacan beckoned him on, pushing through the brush until the low cave itself opened before them. “This is only the beginning,” he said. “There’s much more inside. Be careful.”
The open cave lowered and narrowed as they edged through. It became a cramped passage, curving and dropping in alarming fashion into the earth. They crouched, then crawled below the oppressive weight of rock. Richard could hear the sound of rushing water, far away, deep down. The damp, depressing smell of wet stone and stale air, familiar to him from potholing days in the Yorkshire Dales, was at once comforting and threatening.
“This leads the way to a most dangerous hollowing,” Lacan said. “We’ve lost three good people through it, right at the beginning of the expedition. And more mythagos emerge from it to our world than from anywhere else. Look there…”
Lacan had suddenly pointed the torch at three hollowsticks wedged into a crevice in the rock. The passage had widened slightly, and two narrow tunnels led away into the darkness, one above the other. One of the wooden figures was clearly female: the carver had shaped crude breasts on the thick twig that formed the body. All three had winding-sheets of green cloth tied around their middles, pouches to contain the relic that gave power to these spirit guides.
“We’re coming to the main chamber. It’s very slippery.”
A moment later the crushing rock lifted and Richard was able to straighten into the echoing, cathedral space of Old Stone Hollow. Lacan switched on the lamp that was placed here, and a pale yellow light set sudden illumination and deep shadow to the cascade of shape on the rock walls and the formations of thin stalactites on the ceiling. Water gushed from a narrow crevice to the right, tumbling through a fine mist of spray into a wide ghyll. The floor was strewn with fallen chunks of the roof. The mouths of smaller tunnels opened everywhere.