The Hollowing (35 page)

The roof of the cathedral had long since fallen in. Broken window arches made a jagged line along the walls, high above. Carved pillars, once richly coloured, now grey, rose to crumbling and broken bosses, massive structures reminiscent of the majestic ruins of Greece. Crows flew noisily across the open sky. Stone cracked and fell, clattering on the heaped floor, the whole building rotting before Richard’s eyes.

He walked along the nave, between pillars, through the grey, petrified trunks of trees, thinking
a wood once grew here!
but though the gnarled boughs twisted up from the cracked floor, now they flowed into the stone of the cathedral itself, all life squeezed from them, pallid, fractile organic shapes in the architecture, roots spreading, branches flattening against the limestone, leaves like flakes of chalk, falling with every footstep.

There was no frost or ice, yet the place was deathly cold and his breath misted. From the altar he looked back into the body of the building, at the shreds of paint that showed where frescoes had once told stories, at the gargoyles in the high corners, some with faces intact, but broken bodies, others just stubs of proud stone. And at the statues: here, the robes of a woman, her face blank, her hands still precisely carved; and close by, eyes and mouth in a face, surmounting the body of a saint that seemed to melt through the white marble. And everywhere, the shadows of dead branches, breaking the sky. And everywhere, stone that crumbled like rotten wood.

Helen was a dark shape, watching from the door at the far end of the church, motionless but for the icy mist that formed a halo round her head.

Suddenly she stepped forward, between the statues of the martyrs, and called sharply, “Alexander?”

There was silence for a moment, and Richard called, “I thought he was dead.”

Helen advanced through the cold place, walking cautiously between the stone pillars, the stone trees. “He’s here all right. I saw him from my bower, watching us. Lytton! Don’t be shy, now.”

There was sudden movement in the fallen stone. Broken branches were dislodged from a heap of rubble, small shards of marble and rock rolled down, and a shapeless mass of rock and dust began to rise, to reveal itself as a grey man emerging from hiding, heavily dressed, holding a long staff. Through the lank hair that fell around his face, piercing eyes stared at Richard and a mouth twisted into a death-mask grin. Then the head dropped as the figure coughed violently, spots of blood falling on the dust-white chest before the man could block his mouth and stifle the sounds of pain.

When the fit was over, Lytton looked up and laughed, stepping more into the open.

“I’ve been here for four days,” he said hoarsely. “I’m damned if I know what to do next. Your son has had the second laugh on us, Richard. But he’ll come to the tree. He’ll have to. He’ll come to the tree. And when he does…”

Helen had been approaching quietly, and Lytton sensed her now. He turned quickly, his filthy cloaks swirling, his staff brought defensively down to the horizontal. As she hesitated, he backed away, turning again to Richard.

“You have the look of a man who’s seen a ghost. And maybe you have. And that’s a fine set of clothes…” Lytton laughed as he spoke, but again broke down into a violent, bloody coughing fit. Staring at Richard, he wiped the red spit from his beard and lips, then looked at it. “I’ve been too long in the wild. It’s slipping away. But Huxley will survive, mark my words. Huxley
will
survive. Damn it!” He looked up hard again, banged the staff on the broken floor. “You’ve
got
to get him out. One of us. Somehow. He’s running us like puppets on strings, Richard. Why didn’t you come
back
when we called for you?”

Richard was confused and cold, and his heart was racing. The last time he had seen Lytton, the man had shot and smashed his son, not realising the trick, and been consumed by the shapechanger. Then Haylock had said he’d been killed at Old Stone Hollow. So indeed his words were right. For Richard, there was the distinct sense of looking at a ghost.

“Was he here? Was Alex here?”

Lytton struck at one of the marble columns, cracking the stone and watching as dust and fragments fell. The hollow sound reverberated in the space. “In the same way that a snake sheds its skin, so Alex has shed this building. Can you
imagine
that, Richard? Like the Jack-chapel that tried to swallow us, this was a
part
of your boy, living stone, living armour. Certainly he was here. But he’s long gone. This cathedral has been discarded, like a dying dream. Like the White Castle—do you remember? He’s moved to another place, the same place, but a
living
form of it. And it’s close. And it’s hidden from sight. Why he abandoned this particular nest, that I cannot tell you. Perhaps because of me. Perhaps because of fear of me—or something else that was closing in. It’s probably a part of his defences. He can create, discard, re-create. He can disguise himself in the world of the wood. So yes, Richard. Your son was here, a year ago, a thousand years ago, hard to tell. This place is as much a mythago as any of the Hooded Men, the Jacks, the Bone Carvers we might encounter. Once the life is taken from it, it will collapse back into itself, rot down like the dead thing it is. What
we
have to do, now, is look for a wrongness in the wood—a clue as to where he’s hiding.”

Helen came through the drifting dust, circling Lytton widely, alert to the huge and heavy staff he carried so tensely, so threateningly. A stream of pink saliva ran from his lower lip as he watched her.

“You need a doctor,” she said.

“No time for that.”

“At least let me help you.”

“To a poisoned dart, on behalf of Mr. Bradley, here? Thanks, but no. If I find Huxley, if I can bring him into this world, see him, talk to him, then what does it matter how ill I am? He can tell me the way to peace. He can show me the direction. I’m sure he knew it.”

Richard listened to the words, the obsession, only vaguely understanding what drove Lytton. The man’s breath rattled in his lungs. He had known of Helen’s poisoned darts—had he been watching events in the dell?

Helen, frowning at Lytton’s defensiveness, said, “I have no desire to hurt you. You should know that. Richard thinks you tried to kill Alex. Maybe you did. But if you help
us,
if you help us get to Alex, then you won’t need to kill him. We should work together.”

Lytton mocked, turned away from her, always cautious. He ran his tongue around the inside of his lips, emphasising his hollow face, the emerging skull. But his eyes gleamed as he approached Richard and said, “I knew it was the Jack. But I can’t deny my first impulse was to settle it there, to get rid of the cancer. That was years ago and things have changed, but the boy will still come to the tree. I’m sure of it.”

“The Mask Tree?”

“You saw it. They’re Alex’s faces, the faces of his private heroes, his magic friends. Did you see Arthur there? And the Green Knight? And Guiwenneth of the Green? And Jason?”

“I’ve seen a little too much of Jason recently,” Richard murmured, and Lytton hesitated, thinking, before going on: “Then you saw his pleasures. But there, also, is everything that is older, older, all the nightmares, all the elemental forms that haunted Alex as he lay kicking, terrified, in the womb. Did you see
them?
There are hundreds of them. And he’ll come to them. He
has
to.”

“The protogenomorph?” Richard said, glancing at Helen.

Lytton straightened, looking impressed. “Indeed. The protogenomorph. The guardian in Alex, the part of him that has waited for you, the part that has been fighting the battle…”

“What battle?”

“Against everything that was released from him when his dreams and his imagination were sucked through the mask.” Lytton frowned through his filthy, matted hair. “You’ve not been fully briefed, then.”

“He got my note,” Helen said, “but under difficult circumstances. We’ve only just met again … in the dell, as I’m sure you saw.”

Lytton’s look darkened, his lips pinched, though his gaze remained steadfastly upon Richard. “Are you going to kill me, Richard? If I turn my back will you club my brains out for trying to kill your son, as you believe?”

“Of course not. Not unless you attack him again.”

“Then I’m relieved. I can’t watch you both. I’m tired, I’m ill. And I need food, and rest. However…”

He dropped the staff, shrugged off his filthy cloak to reveal a second layer of stitched hides, with a grimy wool ruff. This he removed and tossed to Helen, who grimaced at its stink, but wrapped it gratefully around her shoulders. Below this second cloak, Lytton was wearing stained cotton shorts and a torn tennis shirt. He put his outer cloak on again and shrugged as if to say, Sorry, not enough rags to go round.

In his slow voice, breathing hard, he said, “There’s a tragic painting by Manet:
The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian
 … Have you ever seen it?”

Frowning, Richard said, “Yes. Of course.”

“Four attempts, Richard. Four attempts at depicting the moment of a man’s death, two feet from a firing squad. A year and a half of the artist’s life, of his mind, his sweat, his madness. All that time to get a single
moment.
A tragic moment. A violent moment.”

“It’s a powerful painting…”

Lytton nodded thoughtfully. “A year and a half of hell, for Manet. When he had completed the painting, he wondered, in a letter to a friend, if such a moment of violence, perhaps of evil, when subjected to such concentration, to such need to be expressed, might literally escape from time itself…”

Richard was perplexed by the earnestness and subject matter of Lytton’s conversation: why were they standing in the discarded stone-skin of one of his son’s mythagos, talking Art History?

Lytton chuckled hoarsely, wiping his mouth, his gaze on the etched and cracked face of a stone green man, whose piercing eyes watched through a mask of acanthus leaves. The sinister figure peered from below the marble legs of a horse, whose body and rider had long since broken away. He said, “Because unless my understanding is wildly wrong, such a moment is waiting for
us;
in some way it’s all around us; we’ve been inhabiting it for years. Alex has waited for you for several years of your time, but for just weeks of his. He exists
outside
of time. He’s frightened. He’s watching. You’ve felt it—McCarthy touched it on several occasions. He has constructed worlds around himself, through which you and I stumble, all of us, stumble. And at the heart of that world, there is a moment.
The
moment! He has guarded it jealously, or a part of him has. The moment of his death, or transition, as seen by the wood! When it occurs, we
must
be there. Because a primal part of Alex—which Huxley called the protogenomorph—will be looking for
us,
to lead us to the hiding place. The protogenomorph will be a shadow, and the shadow behind it is the danger. Follow the small shadow, the guardian, and you will find Alex. I’ll be following it too. It’s the greater shadow that we must be wary of.”

“And the greater shadow is what, exactly? Or don’t you know?”

“I’m certain it’s Trickster,” Lytton said simply, with a half-glance at Helen. “The trickster in Alex. The manipulative manifestation of our first consciousness, our first awareness of the potential for deceit. It exists in all of us, blocked by the small shadow to the best of the small shadow’s ability.”

“Conscience?”

“Yes—but more
control.
The part of us that always recognises the danger in trusting to our own needs, in believing that our lies might never be found out. It’s a primary quality, there are many legends and heroic figures associated with its existence. It’s a gatekeeper between states of mind, states of behaviour, and is very deeply buried. Like dark and light, Trickster and Control cannot exist separately. Unfortunately, these aspects of your son are free in the wood and fighting each other. The primitive Trickster has been released and doesn’t wish to return—but like all mythagos it is drawn to its maker, Alex. As Alex’s protector, you threaten it and it has attacked you, most notably in the form of Jack-the-Chapel.”

He had talked so much he had weakened his already damaged lungs, and he collapsed suddenly to his knees, leaning forward to retch bloodily and painfully into the stone dust. Helen crouched with him, arms round his broad back.

“You’re a dying man, Alexander. We
have
to get you help.”

“I’m an ill man, not a dying one. I’m closing in on Huxley. He and I are fated to meet, I’m convinced of it. Something in his journals. Once I find him, my health will turn for the better.”

“I’m going to take you back to the Station. There’s nothing here for us. Let’s go back for a while, behind the lines, and catch up on what’s been happening to us in this place. Get your strength back.”

Glamour

They retraced the steps of their lunatic dance to the dark glade formed below the branches of the towering Mask Tree. Richard stared at the jumble of forms, some so old that they were little more than shadows in his consciousness, others bright and new and recognisably Alex’s. He told Lytton of his experience with the tree, when bosky, of the feeling of Alex singing.

“You saw deeper than us,” Lytton surmised. “The masks are there, all of them. Alex is deeply in the tree, coming slowly to the surface. In time, all the masks will emerge. What then, I wonder?” He doubled up, coughing badly, and Helen tried to lead him away, but he shook her off, quite angrily. “We mustn’t leave this place,” he said forcefully, and for a while he stood in the overpowering rise of the bole, his hands against the dull colours that filled out the scratching and gouges in the bark. “This is where it all began,” he whispered, and beat against the faces as if by sheer brute force he could strip away the brighter colours and reveal the primal ochres, the oldest of the masks, the deepest of the journeys of the spirit that was reflected, recorded in the tree.