The Hollowing (16 page)

“Three days, five weeks—I’ve been in
deep.
I’ve had longer to think about you than you have about me. You’re a hard man to shake off, Richard Bradley. You feature in my dreams. I like that. And I think Dan will like you too. And it’s OK, before you start getting edgy. He’s not the macho, possessive type.”

“Not a Jack Daniels and Marlboro man, then?”

She laughed. “No way. The occasional Southern Comfort and lemonade, maybe. Marijuana, of course, but then who doesn’t? But how about you? I know Alice left you. You still on your own?”

“A regular bachelor boy. Cliff sang about me and no
body
but me.”

“Cliff Richard? He’s too pretty. Mick Jagger, now…”

“The Stones? With you all the way. The only music I’ll dance to, these days. But I still have a fondness for The Shadows…”

Helen laughed loudly. “Then, Mr. Bradley, have
you
come to the right place!”

*   *   *

A horn blast brought everyone running to the river’s edge, through the gates of the compound, and a great cheer went up as two bulky figures appeared among the trees at the top of the slope. They came down through the bone yard, and again the man raised the bone horn to his lips and emitted the deep, sonorous call, laughing as Lacan shouted to him to be silent.

They came over the bridge and flung their packs to other members of the team, then stripped down to sweat-stained skin suits. They were Finnish mythologists and had been coming home for some weeks, vaguely tracked by McCarthy. Their arrival was sudden and unexpected and a special delight for Lacan, whose
Lièvre à la Royale
was sumptuously ready to eat. The woman of the new team, Pirkko Sinisalo, had an arrow nick in her right wrist and Elizabeth Haylock led her to the medical tent.

A few minutes later they came over to meet Richard, Pirkko reeking of antiseptic, her partner, Ilmari Heikonen, holding a half-finished bottle of
snapsi,
ice-cold and fragrant, which Richard happily tasted. They had been searching for Tuonela and the hero Vainamoinen, but had ended up on the tundra of an early Siberian myth-cycle, fighting for their lives against mammoth hunters.

As dusk drew close, music started up on an old gramophone, a loud country song, up-tempo and jaunty, made unusual with the voices of Lacan and Helen adding their own accompaniment.

The hare was served, so tender that it melted from the bones, so tasty that everyone forgave Lacan for his temper and his tantrums, and the jobs he had given them.

After the hare, and the compliments, and Lacan’s voluminous and voluble acceptance of his culinary genius, there was dancing to Breton jigs and waltzes, supplied by Lacan on a set of ancient bone bagpipes, which he played with immense vigour and much foot-stomping, and Ilmari on a violin. Richard was quietly pleased that Helen danced with him early on, taking him through the steps of the country dances that, familiar in tune, he had only ever seen, never tried. The coals from the fire, plus dry wood, had been used to create a bonfire in the middle of the clearing, and the occupants of Old Stone Hollow wheeled and skipped around the flames, voices adding hysterically to the singing and guitars from the scratchy records.

“What, no cricket bat?” Helen called, as she waltzed with Lytton, who kept roaring out words of song in such a broad Scots accent that it sounded like a battle-cry. Haylock’s black hair flowed around her like a veil as she and Wakeman pirouetted, the man holding himself rigidly upright, like a robot, his movements sudden and jerky. Richard and Pirkko, dressed only in the body webs against the heat of the fire, performed a sort of sedate Regency to the slower Breton rhythms. Pirkko sweated, kept saying things to Richard which he couldn’t hear, pressed close to him and laughed familiarly. He concentrated on Lacan and McCarthy, tussling with each other as they danced awkwardly, the small Irishman trying to control the monstrous Frenchman as they twirled together, at arm’s length, scowling and insulting, stumbling and laughing.

The dancing stopped abruptly, almost shockingly. Ilmari Heikonen was screaming at them to be quiet. He was by the gates through the palisade, pale and frightened, illuminated by the fire.

“Turn the music off!” he shouted, and the strains of the Celtic dance ended suddenly, leaving an eerie silence broken only by the crackle of burning wood and Heikonen’s words. “There’s something coming towards us. Out by the Sanctuary. It’s coming fast, through the roots…”

Richard had never seen such activity. Within moments everyone was jacketed up, swinging cameras and monitors onto their backs and running to the river. Helen flung Richard’s heavy jacket to him, and he struggled into it, following, confused, behind the others, over the bridge and up the dark incline towards the Sanctuary, stumbling as he went, aware of the torchlight ahead.

Suddenly the wood was very silent. Lights flashed in the dark, spread in a wide arc. Helen was breathing hard, leaning against a tree. Suddenly she shouted, “He’s here!”

At once two figures slammed themselves against trees, hands outstretched, scraping against the bark. Richard noticed Helen rubbing the blackened, coarse skin on the back of her own hand. He smelled blood.

“It’s rising. Concentrating,” came McCarthy’s voice.

Then Helen’s, “It’s the boy. He’s hesitating. He knows we’re here…”

“It’s your son,” she whispered a moment later. “He’s aware of you. He’s probing for you. Quickly … we might get a chance to see him.” She dragged Richard forward.

Lacan bellowed: “He’s shifted through the web … to the right, forty degrees … He’s in the Sanctuary!”

Helen changed direction, running between grey stones and carved columns, following the flash and flicker of torches ahead. Bulky shapes crossed in the light, or loomed up and scrambled away, each trying to find a position, to feel the flow of whatever energy Alex was projecting. Their voices merged and mingled.

“Here!”

And then a flight of birds and a wild crashing through crisp undergrowth.

“He’s rising again!”

“But where? Where?”

“He’s close! Who’s got his shadow? McCarthy?”

“I’m with him. He’s stretched thin—he’s searching very hard. I can see his trail—he’s frightened.”

All around him Richard could hear movement among the trees and the ruins, but suddenly he felt cold, isolated, standing with his back to an oak, facing the sombre shadows of a wood whose outline was broken, high above, by a fragmentary moonlight.

And then someone called him “daddy.”

The voice had seemed to come from the edge of the world, but had shocked him. It was a boy’s voice, a whisper only, not recognisable, yet powerful. A single word, a dream word, and he felt weak and leaned heavily back, staring at darkness.

It started to rain, warm and sticky. The tree against which he was leaning began to ooze and he pulled away, shocked by the unpleasant sensation. The whole glade rustled and trembled as the sap squeezed from the leaves. The atmosphere became heady, heavy, quite stifling, and the air pressure built until his eardrums began to hurt.

From the corner of his eye he saw a camera flashbulb triggered, a brief glare. The air was sucked slowly from his lungs so that he gasped.

An immense and ghostly face rose suddenly from the dark ground, a grey luminosity in the night, a half-glimpsed image of eyes and nose, a flop of hair, a mouth that worked silently, the gigantic visage of a boy thrusting up into the glade. As it rose, so it dispersed, fragmenting at the edge, but re-forming and leaning towards Richard, who backed again into the weeping tree. The spectre’s eyes were wide, and in the glowing grey shape he could see what looked like tears. The face rose further and shoulders and arms appeared. A hand swept through him, tenuous fingers seeking to touch him. The figure began to enlarge then, spreading thinly through the trees, expanding unnaturally, then silently bursting, like a flock of white birds scattering in sudden alarm.

The pressure in the glade changed and the sap-scented air freshened. Helen came up to Richard and took his arm. “What did you see?”

“I saw Alex. His ghost. His face.”

“Are you
sure
it was Alex?”

“He called to me,” Richard said. “I think he recognised me. And he
did
sound frightened.”

Before he could say more, before he could allow the sudden sadness to arise and express itself, Lytton called out in a low voice, “Let’s get out of here. He’ll have seeded the glade, and this is a primary genesis zone. Did anyone see where he came through?”

Lacan said, “The arch. It must be a hollowing.”

“Good! Then we’ve got him!”

Helen tugged at Richard, an urgent gesture. “Don’t wait around.”

“A seed?” he asked as he followed.

“Genesis,” she murmured stiffly. “Alex has come to have a look at you, but he’s generating mythagos and we don’t like what he generates. It’s how we’ll follow him, though … McCarthy will have seen shadows of the land between us and the cathedral. We should be able to follow Alex home…”

The team moved back through the darkness. Richard listened to the glade behind them, but heard nothing.

In the night, though, the silence was broken by an almost human cry of pain and frustration, coming from a distance, lasting moments only.

The Green Chapel: 4

The hollyjack was in pain. She was certainly close to death. She had returned to her nest and lay there, emitting sounds that made Alex sad. He kept whispering, “Don’t die. Not yet. Don’t die…”

It was dark, the sky laden with storm clouds, a cold wind blowing through the roofless sanctuary, this huge cathedral. Alex moved restlessly below the trees, waiting for the rain. He watched the dark maw of the nest, calling to his friend, but she was beyond his help now. He didn’t fully understand.

She had told him that what was happening to her was merely part of her life and death, even though she had escaped from her own troop, and had not been with a male for several seasons. He knew only that there would soon be carrion birds. They would not harm him, they would simply fly to occupy the high nests of the wildwood. But the hollyjack was so weak she feared for her sapwood. She was already dry to the point of cracking.

Alex was so confused. He had left the Little Dream abruptly, dramatically affected by the sight of his father, who had looked so old, so different to the man of his recent dreams. He had surfaced in a place where there were traps—he had felt a pulse of hostility, like a raw wound, a savage threat to him from among the men around him. The anger had not come from his father. From his father there had just been desperation and longing, and the man had called to him, and Alex had answered, calling that he wanted to go home, that he longed to go back to the house with its shadows and its warm smells of food and the pictures and models on the walls and shelves.

He could see the house as if at the edge of his vision, not quite clearly yet, but it was welcoming, an old friend struggling to be remembered. He belonged there. Something terrible had happened to him, though. His father had seen it, and on one of his journeys to the Little Dream, Alex had glimpsed the terror through his father’s eyes, a boy blown across a room, a dead boy, a vacant boy, a boy buried in the rain. Something bad had happened, and that something was out in the wood, waiting for him. The giggler had struck once and it could strike again, if it could just break through the defences of the sanctuary.

The giggler had followed him through the wood just now. It had flowed behind him as he’d surfaced to see his father, and had run amok, dispersing the men and women who had set the traps. It had laughed and screamed, then skulked back through the rootweb to the cathedral again, to hover in the leaf shadow, waiting its chance. Or perhaps just waiting …

The hollyjack was silent. Alex walked up to the nest, conscious of the powerful smell of rot and decomposition that flowed from the round entrance. The hollyjack stirred in the darkness. Alex could hear the distant sound of cawing crows, muffled, painful. The hollyjack gasped, and her tusks clattered. Above the nest, stray light from the storm sky struck the shattered knight …

“Gawain…”

The name came to him just as thunder rolled and a sudden, freezing wind gusted through the cathedral. The light shifted on the coloured glass. The green legs of the monster shone briefly. Behind the headless figures, the green chapel beckoned, its dark doorway in the fresh green mound like a gate to peace. Alex smiled. “Green Knight,” he said. “I remember…”

The glass shook as a second peal of thunder rolled across the sky, followed by a strike of lightning and a further crash of sound.

The hollyjack screeched. Birds erupted from the nest, a hundred of them, flowing like a black cloud from the bower. White-billed and black-winged, they struggled to the entrance and filled the air, brushing Alex back as they streamed into the thunder, swirling, crying, circling above him as they found birth and freedom.

When the nest was silent, Alex crawled into the soft interior, reaching to feel for his friend. She was still alive. Thorn-tipped fingers brushed his skin and she rustled. Alex wanted to fetch her something, anything that would help her recover. “Water? Shall I get water?”

She emitted a feeble chatter, and he left the sanctuary, racing through the storm to the well. Lightning broke the dark cover and he watched the wood anxiously as he raised the bucket, then carried a scoop of cold liquid in a leaf pouch back to the nest. When he got there, the hollyjack had crawled out onto the marble floor, and was partially entwined with an oak root. She looked like a small bush, but raised her head and opened her arms to embrace the boy, who curled into her empty belly-space, aware of the gnarled backbone and the black feathers that were scattered between her browning leaves.

She sipped the water messily. She was very weak. When he dreamed the Big Dream with her, it was faint, a hazy view of the greenjacks as they made their way through the wide woodland, and the shifting seasons.

The shaman led them, his summer growth now browning with an encroaching winter, the flowers and grasses that decorated his body withering and losing colour. He stood in a rain-swept dell, watching the watcher, while around him Oak and Ash, Hazel and Willow, moved through the thickets, making slow progress towards the cathedral. They were agitated. Soon they would start to shed their leaves, grow monstrous and transform. Winter Wolves.