Authors: Robert Holdstock
But he had
gone
—just
vanished
from the Little Dream. He had been running. There was the tall traveller. And his father’s shadow had disappeared from the wood, just yards from where Alex was sheltering behind his defensive wall.
He had been so close …
The hollyjack whistled from below. Alex went back to her and cried in her arms. She was very weak. She clattered and chirruped.
Winter is coming. There will be danger. We must draw deeper, to protect ourselves.
Alex closed his eyes. The wood in the chapel shivered, then seemed to freeze. Light caught the broken coloured glass above the doors, a last glimpse of the knight and the monster, before the shadows closed in on him. The window had grown—the glass had filled out, the colours deepened. He could see so much of the scene of battle.
Something was not right. The knight—Gawain—not right.
The hollyjack trembled.
They slept for a long while.
PART THREE
Long Gone, Long to Come
Spirit Rock
(Two months later …)
There’s a fire up by Hunter’s Brook—they’re dancing by the fire—
“Daddy—wake up—there’s a fire—
“They’re dancing—”
“Daddy!”
Richard woke with shock, yelling out into the pale dawn light. The room was cold and damp, dew-encrusted. The window was wide open and he could see rolling clouds, threatening rain. It was four in the morning. The crows were flapping and cawing in their roosts and Richard’s head was pounding as the image of Alex, reaching out to shake him awake, began to fade.
He was fully clothed, having slept sprawled on two blankets on the floor. The bedroom was a mess. Downstairs, from sitting room to kitchen, the chaos was far worse. In the month since he had resigned from his job in London and returned permanently to Shadoxhurst he had become a slob through distraction. He walked the perimeter of Ryhope Wood every day, and filled his evenings in the local pub, writing an account of his experience at Old Stone Hollow and points beyond, and getting very drunk.
The more he wrote, and the longer he stayed out of the wood, the more dreamlike the events became. It began to seem as if he had been the audience at a film. The characters were vivid, but they were all actors. Arnauld Lacan, McCarthy, Alexander Lytton—a fine cast, certainly, but they were now playing other roles in other films. Ryhope Wood was a small, dangerous, marshy woodland, far bigger than it seemed, but surely just a wood, tricky, deceptive, but as tame, in its way, as everything in England. His son was not hiding there. His son was dead. His bones were in the earth. Even Helen had become an artificial memory of beginning love. She filled his waking dreams and occupied his thoughts obsessively: they had grown so close, in those few days in the wood, but now she too was dissembling into image, voice, laughter, becoming detached from him.
But the dream—it had been so real—it had been his first real dream since coming back here.
Standing stiffly, rubbing the small of his back where it ached from the hard floor, he staggered to the window and greeted the misty dawn. He saw, at once, the column of smoke that rose steeply from Hunter’s Brook before being whipped by the cross-winds. Was that a figure standing on the grey skyline? He squinted, trying to make out the detail, and a moment later the shape had vanished.
“Christ! Oh Christ—Helen!”
He tugged on his shoes and windcheater, walked groggily down the stairs and splashed cold water over his face. He was unkempt and unshaven, but gave no more thought to this than to the ants that crawled over the sink where his dirty crockery was heaped, ready for cleaning. Outside, he relieved himself against the elm at the bottom of the garden, then walked briskly along the bridleway. Soon he saw the orange lick of flame below the shifting smoke, and as he came over the low rise towards the brook and the trees, he saw the crouched, black-caped and hooded figures, one in front of the small fire, two below the trees, mostly in shadow. The moustached face of the nearest man was very bronzed. Slightly oriental eyes watched Richard from below the hood. Somewhere in the trees there was movement in the mist and Richard was distracted. When he looked back at the crackling fire, the hooded man was standing and holding out a wooden object. Richard approached cautiously.
It was a cricket bat, six inches long. Richard was astonished. He accepted the gift, and was at once aware that the other man was pleased. His companions stood and drew back among the alders at the edge of the stream, pulling their capes about their slender frames. The hooded man beckoned to Richard, who followed him to the brook and along its dry bank.
A human shape, covered in leaves, lay on its side on a crude litter of poles and cross-woven twine. The body didn’t move. One of the caped figures brushed leaves from the face to expose greying-black hair over deathly white skin. A further brushing aside of leaves revealed an arm in splints and the curve of hips, unmistakably female.
When Richard looked more closely he could make out the dead body of Elizabeth Haylock.
Across the brook two further dark figures appeared among the trees, then ran quickly towards Ryhope Wood. The moustached man clapped his hands and said sharp words. Both language and gesture were clearly designed to communicate “She’s all yours now.”
Then he followed his friends, away from the stream and onto the grassy rise, where more hooded shapes rose from cover and joined the easy trot back to the wood. There were nine in all. Before he vanished from sight the leader turned, a silhouette against the brightening day. He raised both hands vertically, watching Richard and uttering a shrill, broken cry.
What had happened?
Richard pocketed the tiny cricket bat and leaned down over the woman’s corpse, nervous about touching it. The leaves on the litter by her face shifted, as if blown. A moment later she groaned and her eyes opened slightly, focusing painfully on the brook. Richard cleared the hair from her face and she turned to look at him. When she saw him she allowed herself a thin and pallid smile.
“Richard—am I out?” she whispered.
“Of the wood? Yes.”
“Thank God. Oh thank God…” She grimaced with pain. “I’m in a bad way. What happened to the Pathanan?”
Richard glanced at Ryhope Wood, thinking of the small figures. “Gone. Can you walk if I helped you?”
“Sorry—sprains in both ankles.
Christ,
I’m cold. Please get me warm. Please…”
She drifted into unconsciousness again, and mercifully remained so as Richard dragged the litter along the bridleway—he hadn’t wanted to leave her alone while he went for help—taking nearly an hour before he was able to unroll the damaged woman onto a blanket and haul her into the relative comfort of his sitting room. He called the doctor and made tea. Elizabeth revived again and allowed herself to be stripped and examined. Her ankles were bandaged and her arm placed in a better splint. She would go to the hospital for a proper cast the next day. Given painkillers, antibiotics, and strong tea, she began to feel human again.
The doctor, although curious about her clothing and general condition, did not question Richard too closely. And as soon as he had gone, Elizabeth appeared to relax. Richard helped her to the bath, where she soaked for an hour, unbothered by his presence as he sat on the toilet seat, helped wash her back, and waited for her to talk.
She was very thin—Richard remembered her as being quite robust—and her face was lined, her breasts badly bruised. She had shallow but extensive cuts on her legs, and Richard replaced the iodine that had now washed off. To compound her physical deterioration, she seemed mentally exhausted, distant and depressed, speaking in a slow, quite breathless whisper.
“What happened to you?” Richard asked after a while.
“The wrong sort of hero,” was all she would say. “It doesn’t matter. Don’t push me on it. The Pathanan found me and helped me, thank the Lord. I was just trying to get out—just trying to get away. I’ve had enough.” She lay back in the water, one hand gently touching the deepest bruising on her chest, her eyes closed.
“They were camped in Oak Lodge, coming right to the edge.” Hesitantly, she added, “I think they were looking for you. They were carrying a little cricket bat. It was a gift, either came from Helen or Alex—”
“They gave me the bat. Nothing else. Just the bat—and you. No message, no hint of anything else.”
Elizabeth sighed again. “Someone wants you back in the wood. But there’s nothing there now, nothing to go back to.”
Again Richard asked what had happened, and wearily the woman said, “It all went wrong. We lost too many, too much. Maybe if you’d come when we asked it wouldn’t have risen again. It overwhelmed us.” She opened her eyes slightly, frowning. “That wasn’t meant to sound like an accusation. Sorry. I
can
understand why you didn’t want to go back. The way I feel now—” She rubbed her face with her hands. “If this is how you felt, then it’s not surprising you hid from us.”
Confused, Richard leaned forward, his gaze on Elizabeth’s face as she breathed softly and soaked her aches away. Her words were coming out in a jumble—he didn’t understand “risen again,” or being “asked again.” Was she delirious?
“When was I asked back? I left the wood two months ago. I went back to London, couldn’t face the job I was in and came back to live here. I’ve not heard from any of you, from the Station, for two months.”
Elizabeth Haylock frowned from behind half-closed eyes. “Didn’t you get Helen’s note?”
“Helen’s note? No.”
“Damn. She said she left the note for you here. You were out.”
Even as she spoke, a memory of 1959 screamed at him, memory of a previous encounter with Helen on a rainy day, the woman running from the house, leaving behind a scrawled note, now lost.
“When
was
this?” Richard asked.
“About a year ago. Station time, that is. This will probably come as a shock, but you’ve been gone from Old Stone Hollow for nearly three years…”
He felt more alarmed than shocked. Three years to his two months—so much had happened, then, while he had been suffocating in isolation.
The note—could it have been the same one? He asked if Elizabeth knew what message Helen had brought him, and his mind raced as she said, “It was something Lytton had worked out—how to find the protogenomorph. Alex’s, of course. It’s most likely to react to you, so it would have been good to have you in the wood. Also—forgive me for gossiping—but Helen was missing you. You made quite a hit.” She became aware that Richard was very pale, very shocked, and sat up in the bath, using her good arm to draw a towel around her shoulders and over her breasts, perhaps self-conscious for the first time.
“Are you OK?” she asked.
“Yes.
No!
I don’t know what to say. Is Lytton alive? I saw him killed by a Jack.”
“I heard about that. It spat him out. He did some good work. Helen came to tell you about it…”
Confused, almost dizzy, Richard held his head in his hands and said, “I think I
did
get the note. It sounds like the same one. Only I got it eight years ago!
My
time. 1959, to be precise. Helen had short hair, right?”
“In 1959? No idea.”
“I meant when she brought the note, a year ago…”
“That’s right. She’d cropped it back after getting a tick infestation.”
Too much, too fast …
Lytton alive! An odd fury crept into Richard’s heart. He had spent weeks trying to forget the moment, the wonderful moment when he had seen what he believed to be his son. And the same painful memory was linked to the sight of Lytton’s murderous rage—the man had started to kill Alex
before
he’d realised the trick. He had wanted Alex out of the wood with such a passion that it had never been his intention to rescue the boy.
But when he said this to Elizabeth she simply shrugged. “Helen told it differently. He was killing the Jack, not Alex.”
Helen had made her own slow way back to the Station, and McCarthy and Lytton had turned up later. Although they had been tricked by the Jack, they
had
been close to where Alex was hiding, and it was when McCarthy had been submerged in the shadow world of the wood, unconscious and half-eaten by the wood, drifting in the flow of stored memory, quite bosky, that he had seen the inner shadow of Alex, the primal shadow that Lytton called the “protogenomorph”—“The first form of the dreaming mind of the boy, or something. A reference to first consciousness. McCarthy saw it playing near a Mask Tree, which Lytton thinks is a focus for it. He thinks it leaves Alex to explore, and returns to him. It’s quite literally the boy’s ‘free spirit,’ so if you can find it, and follow it, you’ll find Alex.
“Help me up, please.”
Richard lent an arm and Elizabeth eased herself out of the bath. As he wrapped his towelling robe around her battered body, she said, “Eight years! Christ! She
said
she felt something was wrong. She must have gone through one hell of a hollowing—but then how the hell … how did she transit back? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Everything about that evening was strange, that much I remember. Strange all round. An odd note from a cropped-haired woman. An odd play at school. And it was the night James Keeton came back from the dead.”
“I’ve had enough,” Elizabeth Haylock said, her voice almost forlorn. “I need to sleep. I need to repair. Then I need to go. There’s nothing left in the wood for me, now. Everything I once loved I saw killed…” She glanced at Richard. “It’s not the same for you, though. Maybe you should go back.”
“I’ve made up a bed for you.”
Richard supported her as she walked painfully to the sitting room and sat heavily on the couch. He was burning with curiosity. “Where’s Helen now? What happened at the Station?”
“I don’t know where Helen is. She vanished. Wakeman’s dead, McCarthy too. Lytton was taken, probably dead. Nobody has seen Lacan since he left through the cave, the time you were with us. Heikonen drowned, we think, trying to retrieve a Finnish talisman from the lake, and Sinisalo went crazy and went deep. It all fell apart. Something came through out of Old Stone Hollow. It affected everyone, and it all just fell apart. I think I’m the only one who got out.”