The Hollowing (38 page)

“She’s strong,” he whispered. “I’ve got to know her. She’s strong.”

“Not strong enough. Look at her. There’s nothing on her, no flesh even for the crows. But it
is
her. After so long … she
has
surfaced from the wood. And I know, I just
know,
that she will never surface again…”

“Then go and be with her while you can. What more is there to do?”

“What more? Why, to save her from Matilde’s fate, of course. I couldn’t bear that. I feel lost. I think I must become lost again.”

There was a fleet movement ahead of them, and both men ducked slightly, scanning the trees, the ruins. Richard strung his bow, drew a flighted arrow. Lacan glowered at the shadows, hands caressing the blackthorn staff.

He looked at Richard abruptly. His sadness was overwhelming, but now there was almost anger painting his features.

“Were you born close to this wood?”

“Far away. I moved to Shadoxhurst when I married Alice.”

“There’s the difference between us, then, since I
was
born near a wood like this. In Brittany. A vast forest through which you could only follow certain tracks, certain paths, much as we experience in Ryhope. It was a wonderful place. Huge stones circled it, hidden by the edge: it was a wood that had grown inside a stone circle and had reached out its skirts to hide the grey markers. It was a place of ponds and lakes, and deep, moist hollows. It was a place of magic.

“I lived in a cottage at the bottom of a hill. Some nights, winter nights especially, people came from the wood and passed along a lost track, close to my garden. They walked over the hill and to a vanishing place on the other side. Sometimes I followed them, but I could never see where they went. Perhaps I didn’t have the faith, the belief in them, perhaps I simply didn’t have the right way of looking.

“When I was a child I would explore the lakes, hiding in the bushes and watching the grey shapes, like mist creatures, that would come and stand by the water, staring into the depths. They were ghosts. Many of them cried silently before returning to the wood. All seemed to be searching for something. I have no idea what.

“When the war came, my father fought and came home wounded. I was too young, but eager to fight. In 1943 I left Brittany by fishing boat for England, to join a French Canadian command. I was sixteen. Before I left I went back to the lake. It was dusk. A woman came out of the shadows, a grey woman, and touched my eyes and my lips. She had appeared so fast, and she disappeared so fast, that I was too shocked to think. I remember only that I had been kissed on each eye, each cheek, each lip.

“When I arrived in England, I was there for only two weeks and suddenly the war ended. I came home, dizzy and confused, because I found that two years had passed.

“The cottage was shuttered, my parents were gone. Neighbours told me that they had followed a laughing woman into the wood one winter, and that was the last they had seen of them. I had been held safe in some sort of spell. Or had I? Two years had passed and I have memory of only two weeks.

“Then, in the edgewood, I met Matilde. I thought she was from a local village. Perhaps she was. She looked very like the woman who had touched me with her glamour, but Matilde was only sixteen. She was delicious in every way, sensuous in every way. Her laughter a joy.

“We lived together in the cottage. I stopped grieving for my parents. I was consumed with love for her, with her smell, her voice, her teasing. Then our son was born, but he was not born well. In a few months we realised that he was blind. And although he made an infant’s sounds, he didn’t speak as he reached the age when other children begin to chatter. He had no language. By the time he was four … it was terrible. I can’t tell you how terrible, Richard. Matilde was—well, there is only one word: she was ruined. The boy gradually began to see—only colours at first, then shapes, then the whole world, except for shadows. He began to speak—little words at first, then wild descriptions, then haunting accounts of what his mind’s eyes could see. At the same time, Matilde faded.

“In her dreams she screamed and fought with shadow creatures. She barricaded the cottage obsessively. She gradually lost her sight, until all she could see were shadows. She lost her speech. As the boy learned words, so they vanished from her, until she could only say two words aloud, my own first name being one of them, the other, something I never understood. It was such a terrible thing. She saw the world as shadows, and the shadows were alive in ways that were not right. She tried to communicate this to me. The shadows of trees chased her. The shadows of foxes prowled around her on moonless nights. It was as if she was being punished for having the badly-born child. I called him ghost-born, but as Matilde faded, so he grew stronger.

“When he slept, my passion for Matilde was always in earnest, and she responded with such need, such longing, such desperate physicality, clinging to me without break, that I began to realise that these moments of intimacy were her only way of expressing the love she felt, at a time when she was safe. And yet she never opened her eyes, never uttered sound, except for my name.

“I was heartbroken. I was dying. It was an endless battle with her to stop her sealing the house, with wood, with corrugated iron, with animal skins, with sheets of plastic, with anything she could find.

“Then one day she was gone, and my son had gone too. I searched for them desperately.

“I found them in the lake. When I dragged them to the shore, when I pushed the wet hair from their faces, when I kissed the white flesh on each face, the eyes, the cheeks, the lips, I could not tell them apart. I obliterated my son’s name from my memory, because at that moment I believed he had never existed. It was the moment of my own death, and I entered the lake and fell into a sleep without pain.

“I woke in my own cottage, on the couch, covered by a blanket. I had been found by one of the villagers wandering aimlessly, not drowned at all. The man knew nothing of Matilde. He knew nothing of my son. He said I was a hermit, always barricading my cottage, and he was terrified of me. Indeed, I looked frightful.

“And the rest you know. She dwelt in my dreams continuously, but I began to snare and trap the ghosts of my wood, in the hope of finding her. I became famous for it, and word spread. One day, Alexander Lytton found
me.
I learned of mythagos. I clung to his invitation to come to Ryhope Wood because it was a last chance to resurrect Matilde. Maybe Lytton exaggerated the possibilities. He wanted what he wanted for his team and he saw possibilities in me. I came gladly, Richard. Life was then, and still is, as nothing without that lovely woman.”

“Then go to her.”

Lacan turned furiously. “But don’t you see? After all I’ve said? She never existed! I was touched by something, some charm … my life was a charm, and Matilde a part of that charm. She was only my dream, made real. I have tried to make her real again, but she is still just that, a dream, a shadow. There never was Matilde. There never was a son. And now there is a woman who is everything my heart longs for, but she exists only because I needed to fulfil my selfish needs in
one
life. Long gone! I have created the shadow of a shadow. This Sarin is less even than a mythago. She’s the hopeless object of desire of an ageing Frenchman. If I touch her, she’ll die, I know it. She’ll die.”

Richard shouted his frustration with the big man. “And maybe she won’t! If you even have a few days with her, then have them, Arnauld. Sarin is very moved by you. She feels strongly for you. Tell her what you’ve told me. Maybe the two of you, maybe together you’ll
find
the strength to survive. How can you tell until you try it?”

Lacan glanced at Richard, frowning, his eyes filled with sadness. “There is more to it,” he whispered, looking away. “But perhaps only things that should be forgotten. Ryhope Wood, the wood in France: they are the same wood, they share a common time, a common space, a dimension we cannot really see, the same shadows, the same dreams. We have no way of defining it, this imaginary time, this
sylvan
time. It’s beyond our language.” He was in despair again, sighing deeply. “What do I do? I couldn’t bear to see her die through grief and fear, like Matilde…”

Remembering the encounter of a few days before, Richard said, “Sarin nearly died when I switched on the defences, but she survived. She’s strong, Arnauld. One of Jason’s argonauts only lasted seconds. Don’t underestimate her. Love the shadow while you can…”

And suddenly, perhaps because she’d been listening, Sarin was there, standing a short way away, her wiry body wrapped firmly in a thick wool cloak, her face dark with anguish and curiosity, and perhaps a touch of longing. Her gaze was fixed on Lacan. The Frenchman watched her, then smiled, extending his arm, hand outstretched to her. As Richard took his leave, the girl came over to the marble pillar and entered Lacan’s deep embrace.

Curious, which is to say nosy, Richard watched them from the shadows. The two of them cried for a while, then laughed. Lacan began to speak and they walked away from the Sanctuary, deeper into the wood. Their movement disturbed birds, but soon there was silence. An hour later, crows erupted from the canopy a half-mile or so distant. As the sun began to set a nest of herons set up a clattering of bills, a vile objection to movement below.

At dawn, Richard was woken by the strident sound of bagpipes playing a jig, just outside the palisade, where two people were washing in the crisp water of the river.

He and Helen went out to join in the icy fun, and it was then that they saw the first signs of the world dying around them.

The Triumph of Time

Winter, like a branching white scar, had begun to streak the greenwood, patches and lines of frost in the verdure that slowly spread, ice killing the summer leaf and the hardwood trunks, stone turning into the same soft, crumbling decay that had infested the cast-off cathedral.

Sarin scampered naked from the river, grabbing for her cloak. Lacan, rotund and hairy, crawled out after her, using his hand self-consciously to protect his groin. Around them, leaves fell like ash. The air was winter crisp, and their breath steamed.

From outside the longhouse Lytton shouted excitedly, “This is Alex’s work! He’s calling to us!”

Helen looked at the encroaching winter, frowned, then whispered to Richard, “How the hell can he always be so sure?”

“I don’t know. But I’m not about to argue. Are you?”

“To what end? Lytton knows what Lytton knows; Huxley’s shade whispers to him…”

She turned and ran to the longhouse, to find warm clothes and food supplies. Richard thought of Old Stone Hollow and curiosity took him through the ice-glazed elderwood.

Below the cliff, the paintings on the overhang had faded, the rock flaking away and taking the colours and the shapes with it. The flow of water had dried. The cavern was a barren place. Lytton entered the overhang and stared around him, taking his weight on his staff, his grey locks iridescent with frost. “I suspected as much: this place was from Alex’s imagination, and like the rest, he’s killed it now. What else I wonder? He’ll be killing all his creations.”

Anxiously, Richard thought of Sarin, but the woman, bulky in her new furs, was following Lacan towards the Hollow. She looked vibrantly alive.

“What’s happening?” the Frenchman asked.

“We need to return to the Mask Tree,” Lytton murmured, his face to the sky as he sniffed and tasted the winter air. “Alex is close to us again. I can feel it. He’s calling to us. He’s
coming
to us.”

“He’s coming here?” Richard asked.

Narrow eyes in a bone-white face glanced briefly, irritably at him. “No. Not here. He’s trapped in the cathedral. But I think he must be breaking from the moment of frozen time … He’ll come to the Mask Tree. I’m sure of it!”

“We’ll have to risk the hollowing,” Helen said. “Through the cave.”

“Too dangerous. Besides, Richard only got through because he was bosky, and his son was able to guide him. Perhaps he did the same for you, when
you
went through the pipe. But we can’t risk the cave, now. Too many outflows…”

“But it’s a four-day trek along the land route,” Richard said, appalled at the thought of the return journey to the Tree.

Lytton smiled at him, a gesture of dry amusement. “Then let’s waste no time. If we miss him, Alex may have no choice but to stay hidden forever. And what he’s shed to the wood will stay in the wood, and I simply can’t have that.”

While the rest made their brief preparations, Richard scoured the area around the Station. The Sanctuary was intact, although the white and frozen corpses of a man and a woman were crouched nearby. In the summer wood beyond he found the icy mass of a boar, the broken spear with which it had run for most of its life still embedded in its flank. From the lakeside, where Jason had landed, he watched the Viking longship become engulfed in frost and slowly crack. Warm, summer air gusted, followed by the frozen blast of deep winter. The clouds, the water, all seemed to be divided between the seasons, and Richard marvelled at the way his son was drawing back his creations, sucking the magic forests, lands, and creatures of childhood back toward the cathedral, and the giant elm, with its shallow faces, the place, Lytton now believed, that had been Alex’s first entry into the world of Ryhope Wood.

The last thing he saw, before Helen came up behind him putting her arms around his chest and whispering, “Stop brooding. It’s time to go and find the boy,” was the frozen body of the serpent. It surfaced suddenly, a coiled iceberg, the head twisted up and away from the rest of its body, the haunting eye glazed-over and lifeless now. The creature floated there, melting slowly, disintegrating. As it decayed so it turned, seeming to watch the shore, then subsiding, taking the last memory of a terrible encounter, the last memory of Taaj, as it condensed back into the lake above the stone castle.

It was such an odd feeling: the realisation that Alex had created both the courageous boy, a powerful reflection of himself, and the monster that had consumed him.