The Hollowing (37 page)

Then he saw Sarin. For a second he froze completely. Richard began to introduce the woman properly, aware that Sarin’s face had registered an expression of startlement. He was startled himself when Lacan mumbled, “Excuse me. Nature calls.”

The Frenchman reached for his cloak, almost angrily, and left the house abruptly, leaving Richard puzzled and Sarin disturbed. She stared after the big man for a long time, not responding to Richard’s words. She was in a dreamy state, a daze, concerned and anxious, her face, usually so thin and pretty, now furrowed. Richard touched her shoulder and she jumped, then shook her head and crawled across the floor, to curl up on her furs and think.

When, after an hour or more, Lacan had not returned, Richard went out and called for him, but without success. After dark, with the fire dead, Helen curled up against him, below the fleeces from the
Argo,
and while Lytton groaned in his nightmare sleep and Sarin chattered like a bird, twitching and shifting below her covers, they made love side by side, very gently and with almost no sound.

“I’m beginning to like you, Mr. Bradley.”

“Then why do you keep calling me Next-Buffalo-Dinner?”

At some time during the long night Richard was disturbed by the sigh of the bagpipes. Helen was sleeping against his chest, her hands holding him intimately. He detached himself without waking the woman and followed the dark shape of Lacan out into the tall grass. The night shadow of the big man was fleet as it passed through the moonlight to the open gates of the Station.

“Arnauld!” Richard called softly. “Arnauld! Where are you going? What’s the matter with you?”

“Leave me alone!” the Frenchman whispered furiously, his eyes gleaming in the moonlight. And with those brutal words he was gone again.

Richard couldn’t sleep, and imagined that he had stayed awake all night, staring into the darkness of the longhouse, breathing the fading scents of woodsmoke from the fire. And yet at first light, when he stirred from the fleeces again, he saw that Sarin was not in her corner. He went out into the dewy morning. There was a slight breeze and the air was chill on his skin. The brightening sky was cloudless, still purple over the eastern forest. The gates to the compound were open, but it was to the overhang above the cave system that Richard went, aware that he had heard furtive movement high above him, where the rock curved out of sight.

He pulled himself up the steep path and came onto the cliff top, caught for a moment by the richness of colour, the spread of fire where the sun was rising over Ryhope. Then he saw the hunched figure of the girl, a few yards away, so dark against a tree that for a moment he had missed her. She was watching Lacan, who was hunkered down on his haunches, supporting himself with a heavy staff, his ringleted hair hanging lank around a bowed head.

As Richard moved up to Sarin he saw tears in her eyes and blood on her lower lip. He put a comforting arm on her shoulder and felt her tremble through the thin cloth of her dress.

“How long have you been here?”

“Since he called me. Before first light.”

“He called you?” Richard watched the motionless figure on the cliff top. Lacan might have been a statue, save for the fact that the wind rattled the shells at the ends of his ringlets, and occasionally his broad back, below the draping black cloak, heaved deeply.

“I heard his voice in my dream. I was so afraid of him when he came to the camp. He was still wearing the mask. But when I saw his face, I knew him. But I don’t know from where. He just makes me feel wounded…”

Wounded? Richard watched the anxiety on Sarinpushtam’s lean face, the furrows on her high forehead, the well and ebb of tears in her richly dark eyes. She was Lacan’s mythago. That had to be the answer. But there was something more, and Lacan was in distress about it.

“Have you tried approaching him?”

“I’ve called to him. He just growls and crushes into himself.”

“Why don’t you go back to the house? I’ll try and talk to our bearlike friend. Whatever it is, it can’t last.”

Sarin hesitated then stood and ran, almost angrily, back down the track, swinging from trunk to trunk, slipping and skidding out of sight, occasionally slapping the trees and regretting with a cry that she’d been so angry.

The sounds of her departure disturbed Lacan, who turned his head slightly, caught Richard approaching and looked away.

“Arnauld? Call me a nuisance, throw me over the cliff, tell me to mind my own business. But tell me what’s wrong, if you can. It hurts us all to see you in such pain.”

“Two hours more,” Lacan grunted, shaking his head. Beyond him, the sky was dazzling. He leaned on his staff and the wind blew his hair. The sun caught fire in his eyes.

“Two hours?”

“To think. To be alone. Don’t worry about me. Please, just bugger off. I’ll be down in two hours. Don’t let her get distressed.”

“Sarin?”

“Please. Look after her. I smelled blood on her, Richard. Don’t let her do anything foolish.”

“She was only biting her lip. She’s confused. She’s yours, of course. Your mythago…”

“Of course. Go away, Richard. I need to be alone a while longer.”

*   *   *

A hind had come down to the lake, but bolted as Richard reacted to its presence with a cry. The hunt, with Helen, took several hours, and it was Helen’s accuracy with the short bow that claimed the kill. She paunched the steaming beast with a confidence that left Richard amazed, and she rebuked the man for his teasing.

“Fresh meat, Richard!”

“It’ll have to hang for a while.”

“Not its liver, my man. That we’ll have tonight.”

“You’re beginning to sound like Lacan…”

As they carried the carcass back to Old Stone Hollow, skirting the lakeside, they saw Lacan walking among the distant rocks, his hood drawn over his head against the drizzle. Richard called to him, but he kept walking, glancing occasionally across the wide water, his face grim.

They hung the deer, and prepared a stew pan of the liver with wild vegetables. Lytton was writing furiously in his notebook. “It’s so important to record everything.
Everything.
When I write, ideas come. That’s how I worked out the function of the protogenomorph, after McCarthy’s shadowy encounter with it. Explanation later, Richard. And I would like to hear an account of what has happened to you as well. Alex is everywhere. Can you feel him? He’s watching still. He will pick the moment to come to us, and we must be ready, not just physically, but mentally as well. Where’s Lacan?”

“Still brooding. Still upset.”

“Upset? About what?”

“I’m not sure.”

From the other room, where Helen was stitching hides together, she called, “Matilde!”

Lytton nodded, said, “I see. Where is she?”

“Somewhere about. Waiting for him.”

Without further response, leaving Richard infuriatingly confused, he returned to his notebook.

Richard went through the curtain and watched Helen at her task. “Matilde? Sarin by another name?”

Helen cocked her head. She had a length of coarse thread between her teeth, and was using a bone needle very effectively. Her dark eyes engaged Richard for a moment, thoughtfully, perhaps making a decision. Then she nodded. “I guess so.”

“His daughter?”

“His wife. He’ll talk when he’s ready.”

Lytton came through, his notebook closed. He rubbed his chin as he watched Helen work, then sat down, cross-legged on the floor, indicating that Richard should do the same.

“It’s making a sort of sense, now, as much as anything in Huxley’s first forest can ever make sense …

“The way Keeton described his sojourn in Ryhope reminds me of the land of faerie—unlike Ryhope, in the
fey
world you age
less
than the world outside, and that is what happened to Keeton, and what has happened to Alex. Alex has created his own time, and to do this he is using the elemental in him, the earliest myths, the earliest part of consciousness, when notions of time itself became defined, both in the terms we would understand it, and in the mystical time of gods and faerie that these days we would call fantastic.

“When Keeton lost his daughter in 1957 his anguish, his desperation, entered the wood as an entity
apart
from him, crystallising—
condensing,
as Elizabeth Haylock used to say—into the complex matrix of energy and time that underlies this place.

“Is it possible that Keeton was protected by a form of ‘glamour’? Held out of time by a protecting, sheltering cloak of faerie magic? When he left the wood, the glamour remained behind, an echo. It had formed into the shape of his own daughter, and lingered there for years—it’s still there! When you encountered it, Helen, you followed it to the edge, you passed
through
it, because it was another form of hollowing, only this passage connected with a time eight years before. It was waiting for you on your return, after leaving the note, and again you tried to encounter the moon-faced girl, and so you passed back to the present.”

Helen was hunched over her work, her head shaking slightly, the silver locks on each side glinting in the candlelight. She said, quite simply, “If that’s right, then I’m frightened. Too much of my life has been interfered with by time. I’ve wasted too much time. Time has wasted me. Time has wasted my family. By fear, it has tricked us out of our lives. If Coyote is Time, then I’m going to be done with him now.”

She looked up at Richard. There were tears in her eyes not of sadness but of anger. She reached out and touched his hand, and without even understanding what he was doing Richard folded his arms around her and kissed the moist, warm parting in her hair. “Don’t lose me,” she said. “Every hour, every day—it’s ours, not Trickster’s. Don’t lose me. Don’t let it all go.”

While Lytton frowned restlessly, watching the kiss, unable to continue because of the sudden passion, the sudden need, Richard embraced Helen with all his heart. As their mouths parted and they smiled, their eyes lingering on each other, Richard had an image of Alex, smiling and clapping his hands in delight.

“My son’s going to adore you,” he said.

Alex wouldn’t know about Alice. He wouldn’t know his mother had gone—

“Glad you’ve come to believe in him.”

She turned back to Alexander Lytton. “So this ‘echo’ Keeton created was like the ‘moment out of time’ you talked about, like the Manet painting. So much anguish that it formed a focus—”

“Drawing to it everything that was related to that anguish—shaped like the daughter, but calling to anyone or anything that was associated with Tallis.”

Richard tried to absorb the images and ideas that were raised by Lytton’s half-distracted account. The man was thinking aloud: he was unfocused, but he hardened that gaze as Richard said, “How does Alex fit in?”

“Alex was the substitute for Tallis. When Alex stared through the Moondream mask—a hollowing mask, don’t forget—he was torn through it, stripped of everything but flesh and bone and
dragged
through that mask.

“Keeton’s anguish, Keeton’s need, his need for his child—he reached from inside the wood through the mask, reaching to the moment of his real-time death and clutched at the memories of Tallis that he could feel there—all of them in your son.

“A reflection of Alex’s mind, in the wood, is in the faces on the Mask Tree. That’s where the boy will come—that’s where we’ll see the moment of his transition, a moment that we’ll follow to the cathedral, where Alex himself is hiding.”

*   *   *

At dusk Lacan called from the river, and Richard went out through the tall grass to find him. He was aware that Sarin was among the elder bushes that concealed the deep cave. She was watching furtively. Lacan, swathed in a dark cloak, eyes glistening with cold, leaned against a heavy tree, staring distantly towards the gully. He acknowledged Richard, then walked away, up the steep bank, back to the Sanctuary, through the place where once the underfoot had been a graveyard of decaying creatures.

By the hollowing, by the marble pillars where Richard had tricked Jason, he turned and worked his staff into the ground.

“I am very lost,” he said quietly. “You must help me.”

Richard started to reach a reassuring hand, but drew back as angry eyes caught his. He said only, “I’ve offered friendship. Helen and Lytton are very discreet. I know that Sarin reminds you of your wife. I have a half idea that you’ve been seeking her … that she died, and you’ve been seeking her…”

Lacan seemed to collapse slightly, nodding, as if both relieved and comforted by Richard’s simple intuition. “I remember telling you—so many years ago, now—but I remember saying in answer to a question of yours that I was looking for the moment of my death. Richard … if you had known Matilde … if you could have once seen her, heard her speak, been touched by her glamour … she was ethereal. I know that, now. I always have. I loved her so much. When the wood killed her, it should have strangled me with its creepers too. But it left me to mourn her, and to die and be reborn, as it were, and then to hunt for her with a force of life that is all that protects me from the shadowland.”

Richard was about to make a comment, a naive interruption questioning why, if Lacan had now found his beloved Matilde, he found it so hard to speak to her. The Frenchman silenced him angrily, then apologised and walked stiffly back to a point, beyond this copse, where the ridge of the high cliff could just be seen.

Softly, he said, “I didn’t expect to find her like this. I’ve spent so long looking, I need her so much … and suddenly I am aware that she is dying. She has no life, only an appearance in our world for a few days, a few weeks. Like all these things we summon, she is no more than a shadow, strong in the sun, doomed to dusk beauty and then annihilation. I’ve always known it. Of course I have. But I’ve never accepted the truth of the matter, that when I found her she would be wood and earth, she would be transient. Oh God in Heaven, I can’t bear to lose her again, I can’t bear to lose her again…” He started to shake and Richard squeezed his shoulder, helpless and distressed as his friend’s emotion began to surface.