The Hollowing (3 page)

“Nonsense,” Alice said, but she frowned when she saw the look on her husband’s face. “Jim Keeton and Tallis disappeared over a year ago. You know that, Alex. He hasn’t come back, now. If it was Jim, then it’s his ghost.”

Richard was trying to remember something from those distressing days, when the countryside had been searched and no sign of the two Keetons found. “When Jim vanished … wasn’t it in the morning? He’d run out of the house in his dressing gown. Don’t you remember what Margaret told the inquest?”

Alice shrugged. “I remember. But they’ve been gone for over a year. You’re not telling me that a year later he’s still wearing his dressing gown…”

Richard looked round in the darkness. On the small back seat of the car his Red Knight son was hunched, knees drawn up, eyes wide as he stared at his father. He was crying silently.

*   *   *

Five hours later, James Keeton came to their cottage. The rain had eased, but he made a miserable and bedraggled figure, standing at the bottom of the garden, staring at the dark window where Alexander watched, the mask held against his chest. He opened the gate and ran quickly to the back door, tapping on the glass. Alex struggled to see the man from his bedroom, but Keeton had moved through the rain to stand outside the dining room. Like a bird, tapping with its beak, Keeton kept tapping with his fingers, pressing his face against the glass, hand raised, tap-tap-tapping as he peered into the darkness of the cottage.

Alex stood on the landing, shivering. His pyjama trousers came undone and he struggled to tie them more securely. He listened to the noise of the beak on the glass downstairs, and remembered his friend Tallis’s tales of birds, and bird creatures, and nights filled with wings. He slowly descended the stairs, and in the dining room approached the half-moon face of the man outside, coming closer until he could see the beard and the curve of pale flesh above, stepping right up to the window where the half-naked man tap-tap-tapped in slow desperation. Alex gently tap-tap-tapped back. Keeton’s nose was squashed against the glass. A trickle of rain ran down between eyes and windowpane. He held the odd piece of rotting wood in one hand, and Alex saw the crude face, the moon-like curves, the cuts for eyes. He recognised it as one of Tallis’s masks. It was Moondream. He pressed his hand against the glass where the mask watched, remembering his lost friend.

The water on the pane, outside, mingled with the tears that Mr. Keeton shed.

“Don’t run away,” Alex called, and the man closed his eyes. He seemed to slump against the glass and continued to tap with the mask, as if he were a weary Punch and Judy man, using the cold-eyed wood to entice the children’s fancy. Moondream tapped the window and Keeton sank down into a huddle; mask-face and man-face disappeared from view.

Alex went outside with the Persian rug from the hallway and wrapped the heavy fabric around the freezing man. Mr. Keeton was silent, now, hugging the mask and watching the dark, damp night through eyes that were unpleasantly blank and watery. Alex tried to help him stand, but he wouldn’t move.

“Don’t run away again. Promise? Stay here.”

The man made a strange sound, then curled more tightly into his saturated dressing gown and the thick, dry rug, pulling the knotted ends around his neck.

Alex went upstairs and woke his father.

“Mr. Keeton’s come home. But he’s very sad. I think Tallis must be dead.”

Moondreaming

There was something very curious about James Keeton’s condition. When he had been bathed, shaved, and his hair brushed, only a desperate, haunted look in his eyes suggested any difference to the robust and over-nourished man who had disappeared, presumably to live rough and wild, one year and fifteen days ago. His wife Margaret was very distressed, hardly touching her husband, but staring at him as he was examined by a local doctor, and talked to and tested, but without responding in any way.

Keeton’s skin was scratched in places, and his two big toes very bruised. The growth of beard, now removed, had been that of four or five days. His dressing gown, though the pockets were torn, once dry was as good as new—not the raggy robe that might have been expected from a year in the wild.

Oddest of all, the elastoplast on his index finger covered an almost healed cut. The day before he had disappeared, Keeton had cut himself carving a shoulder of lamb for the family lunch.

Had he been looked after somewhere during his absence, only to be returned to his original appearance (minus pyjamas!) a few days before, to run blindly along the country lanes around Shadoxhurst? Only James Keeton could answer that question, and Keeton was saying nothing. He rocked slightly in the armchair, and seemed, at times, to be looking into the far distance. He cried silently, and his lips moved, but no sound emerged.

The doctor made a tentative diagnosis of shock, inducing a temporary catatonic state. He might emerge from it at any moment, or he might become dangerous, to himself if not to others. He should be taken to hospital for further and more expert examination, he advised.

Throughout all of this, from two in the morning to the new day, Keeton held firmly onto the crude mask, his grip tightening like a child’s when Richard tentatively tried to take it.

“Tallis was always making those things,” Margaret murmured from across the room. She was pale, exhausted with confusion. “Which one is it?”

Alexander said, “It’s Moondream. She told me more about it, but I’ve forgotten.”

At the sound of the boy’s voice, or perhaps at the mention of the mask’s name, Keeton’s unfocused gaze hardened and he sat up straighter, his lips smacking together for a moment. When Alex put his arm around the man’s shoulder, Keeton curled into the embrace, apparently relaxed.

*   *   *

At his own request, Alex drove with the Keetons to the infirmary, fifteen miles away, near a secluded village on the county border. Richard and others from Shadoxhurst spent the next three days searching the countryside for any sign of Tallis, but for a second time they found nothing. The owners of the Ryhope Estate scoured the edges of Ryhope Wood and the area adjacent to the mill-pond, but reported that they, too, had found no traces. Twice, Richard went across the fields to the wired-off road, and stood where the old road entered the gloom, to the ruins of Oak Lodge where his son, and other children, had once played. High, barbed-wire fencing and notices of the prosecution of trespassers were unfriendly reminders of the detached and hostile attitude to the local community that now resided in the Manor House: the two children (now in their thirties) had inherited the property after the death of their father.

Alex was a regular visitor to James Keeton over the next four weeks, and Richard and Alice both became concerned at what appeared to be the boy’s insatiable curiosity about the silent man. Keeton sat immobile and silent, staring into space, the Moondream mask either clutched to his chest or propped up on the mantelpiece of his small, private room, overlooking the woods. But although Richard talked to his son, tried to discourage him from the obsessive visiting, Alex would not be persuaded. He could cycle the fifteen miles to the hospital in just over two hours. His homework suffered. He was always glad if Richard drove him to the secluded place, and seemed unbothered by his father being in the room.

What Alex did was to whisper stories to the frozen man. As he spoke, he stroked Keeton’s hands. Sometimes he held the mask up for him, and invariably Keeton leaned forward to peer through its eyes. It was the only voluntary movement he made. Everything that Alex did sounded reassuring. He told jokes, wild adventures, he talked of Tallis.

“Come back, Mr. Keeton. Come back home,” Richard heard him saying once. “I know you’re still wandering. You can come back now. Everything is safe.”

In the car, driving back to Shadoxhurst, Richard asked his son what he had meant by those words.

“It’s just a feeling,” the boy said. “His body’s here, but I think his spirit is still wandering, still searching for Tallis.”

“This sounds like a fairy story.”

Alex shrugged. “Sometimes he whispers things that make me think he can see other lands.”

“Like the land of the Green Knight, eh?” Richard said, and then the implication of what Alex had said struck him. “He
whispers
things. He talks to you?”

“Not to me,” the boy said, shifting in the car seat and staring out at the darkening landscape. “But he talks … Not very much, and always in whispers. It doesn’t make much sense, but I think he’s wandering somewhere, searching hard.”

A month to the day after his committal to the infirmary, Keeton recovered consciousness dramatically. By the time Richard and Alex arrived at the hospital he was in a state of high excitement. He didn’t appear to recognise Richard, but began to talk almost incoherently to the boy, even as he peered through the face of the mask on the mantel-ledge.

“I can see her, Alex. I’ve caught up at last! She’s on the other side of the mask. I’m not sure if she knows it’s me, and she can’t hear me, but she’s there, among big trees, with several riders. She seems well. But she’s so grown up.”

Richard watched and listened as the older man poured out his vision to the thirteen-year-old.

“Her face is scarred. She’s become so tall. I think she must be a hunter of some sort. They’re in a deep wood, near a river, among stone ruins. An old man is with her, and he keeps crying. There’s something very strange in the trees—like a creature…”

“May I look?” Alex asked.

Keeton passed the boy the mask and Alex held it to his face, peering in through the eyes, turning slightly as if adjusting his view. From his expression it was clear that he had seen nothing but the room. Keeton took the mask back and placed it on the mantelpiece, touching the smeared moon-shapes, the crudely gouged eyes. His white shirt was saturated with sweat, his grey flannels creased and drooping. His hair had turned completely white in the last month, a startling change that occurred overnight, as if a ghost had touched him and he had been unable to respond.

He sat down now and sighed deeply. “Alex?”

“Yes?”

“It was her. It was my little girl all grown up. Wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Alex whispered.

“Oh dear,” the man said, then slumped a little. “Oh dear…”

And then he was silent. Within moments he had slipped away again.

He came back two weeks later, raving and angry, screaming as he stared inwards through the eyes of the mask. He had to be sedated. Thereafter, every three or four days he would emerge from his catatonic state and address an aspect of the reality he could experience through his daughter’s childish creation.

As often as possible, Richard took Alex to see him, aware that the two of them shared a rapport that was quite exclusive. Keeton described wild visions, of journeys across marshlands, of great snows, of thudding and frightening skirmishes, fought out in bloodstained mud, of fires on hills and mad dancing at fire-lit dusk. And as he described these visions he seemed at peace, as if he knew that his daughter would return to him.

The periods of lucidity were short-lived, however, the longest being only five hours. And the longer the lucid phase, the longer the time in silence, empty of dreams, empty of life. Quite often, at weekends, Alex would beg to visit the hospital, only to be frustrated and saddened by a day of sitting with a dead man. Not even the touching of the precious mask could draw a flicker of response from James Keeton.

Alex must have heard the rows between his parents, but said nothing, just became more withdrawn himself. Alice had become increasingly angry and concerned at the time Alex was spending at the hospital. She wanted to end the relationship. Richard argued that there was a special trust between the two, and that Alex might be the channel through which the man would return to full sanity.

“What the hell is the attraction? They hardly know each other—”

“I know. I don’t know what the attraction is. Perhaps it’s Tallis, a link with her. All I know is, Alex seems to comfort the man, and he’s happiest when they’re talking, sharing visions.”

“Visions!” Alice’s frustration made her face contort, anguish and anger ageing her. “We’ve got to put a stop to it, Richard. He’s not himself any more. I don’t recognise him.”

“Give him time, Alice. If he
can
help Jim…”

Alice, exasperated, closed her mind to the argument. “You’re a fool.”

Alex, certainly, heard it all, and sometimes he would try to reassure both parents, but only by touch, never with words.

*   *   *

One night, in the early spring, he crawled on all fours into his parents’ bedroom, reached up, and tugged his father awake. Richard peered over the side of the bed and groaned. Alex silenced him with a finger to lips and beckoned him to come downstairs. Blearily, Richard followed, as Alice slept restlessly and full of her own unexpressed—perhaps inexpressible—pain.

At the back door Alex pointed into the March night. “There’s a fire by the wood, people dancing. They’ve got drums. It’s very weird.”

Now that he looked carefully, Richard could see the faint, flickering glow of light from near Hunter’s Brook, at the edge of Ryhope Wood. When he investigated his tall son with his fingers he could tell that Alex was wet with rain, and cold with night air. He was also dressed in jeans and windcheater.

“Have you been
out?
”

“Come and see! Bring a stick. They’re all dancing with sticks around the fire.”

“Have you been
out?
” he whispered again. “At three in the morning?”

From the far distance the sound of drums swelled on the night breeze. It was an odd rhythm, faintly audible, a fluctuating murmur in the cold night.

“Come and dance!
Please,
Daddy. Get a stick. Do it for Tallis.”

Richard stared at the pale features of his son. “For Tallis? What do you mean by that?”

“I was dreaming of her. And the fire. Then I woke up. It might help Mr. Keeton to find her again.”

Confused, very cold, aware that he was operating in a game that he didn’t understand, Richard nodded. “What sort of stick?”