Merlin's Wood

by Robert Holdstock

  The specialist in Rennes could well understand Martin’s anxiety, when Daniel was presented for examination. ‘Whatever is at fault with his sight, I’m afraid you’ll have to live with it, short of a miracle. But the acquisition of language is a complex process, and it comes as a surprise, but not a shock to me, to discover that your son is approaching language through song. I’m quite certain that he’ll begin to talk within a very short time.’

  ‘The boy is deaf! He can’t hear. How can he start to speak?’

  ‘I know! This is what is so beguiling. As far as our tests are concerned he has no response to auditory stimulation at all. Nevertheless: he hears. And everything suggests he’ll soon start to talk coherently.’

  Indeed, the day before the boy’s fourth birthday, Martin entered his room in the early hours to find again that his son was pressed against the window.

  ‘Come on, Daniel. Back to bed, now.’

  He lifted the boy down, then felt the tug of a fist on his shirt collar. Dead eyes stared vaguely nowhere in the half-light, but from the boy’s mouth hissed the words, ‘Put me back!’

  ‘Daniel …’ Martin breathed, shocked by the sound, instantly suspecting that he had simply dreamed the words.

  ‘Put me back,’ Daniel said determinedly.

  ‘Can you understand what I’m saying? Can you hear me speaking?’

  ‘Back!’ hissed the boy.

  ‘Back on the window? What are you doing there?’

  ‘Put me back.’

  Martin lifted the lad back to the sill. Daniel flung himself against the glass, his breath misting, his nose flattening, his fingers spread out like the suckered pads of a frog. He stood there, trembling, breathing gently, and every so often his head jerked, as if he were listening.

  As far as Jacques and Suzanne were concerned, this was a miracle and to be celebrated as such. Father Gualzator came round and listened to the boy’s sharp, staccato speech. Daniel sat back in the chair, his legs drawn up against his chest, his eyes unfocused; he shouted words, random phrases, each uttered in a tone of delight: ‘Eat! The woods! Bright water! Bubbling. The well. Keep him in. Here they are! Food, please. Falling, always falling. Hah hah!’

  ‘This is quite remarkable,’ the priest whispered. ‘I’ve watched a hundred children start to talk – signals first, then grammar, slowly becoming coherent. Daniel seems to be using scattershot. His pronunciation is excellent. The words clearly have meaning for him, but no meaning to the rest of us.’

  ‘Kill bird! Stone sinking. Into the sea! Storm coming. Keep him down. Shadows!’

  ‘It’s as if he’s creating his vocabulary from scratch. There can be no meaning to these shouted words; it has a curious feeling of Tourette Syndrome, but he communicates a sense of understanding, which I find powerful and alarming …’

  ‘The dell! The shaft! Drowning! Bread on the table. Cold home down. Getting free! Sing song, sing song. Hah hah …’ a curiously knowing laugh and a body posture that suggested listening. ‘Oh yes! The shadows! Dancing on the path! Almost out. Cheese!’

  Daniel stumbled from his seated position and reached the table, scrabbling among the plates for the ripe brie, gouging it with his fingers until Martin eased his small hand away, led him to a chair and guided his touch to a slice of the food, with a soft piece of bread. Daniel ate and laughed, bobbing on the chair, dark hair flopping about his pale face, as if sharing some secret joke.

  He had also discovered the TV, now that he had acquired a rudimentary degree of hearing, and he laughed furiously at some of the programmes, even when the subject matter was serious or completely inane.

  These were the weeks leading to Christmas, and it seemed that each day something new that was also odd occurred. The children who occasionally ran the path, dancing with the spirits, now took to screaming with terror, disturbing the early hours of morning with their fear as they scattered and ran. None of them would talk to their parents about the cause of the panic, but it was clear that the apparitions, once so benign, now seemed nightmarish.

  This change for the worse didn’t last very long. Soon there was just the drifting, dreamy dancing, again, and the sound of laughter and excitement.

  Conrad became very ill. He would come to the house, wheezing badly, and beg food and medicines, but any attempt to take him in, to nourish and nurture him through these bouts of illness, was met by his instant departure. A pale man, his eyes hollowing out, his lips drawing back to expose the cold, blank skull behind his kindly, canny face, he would accept expectorants, aspirins, and vitamin pills, but not hospitality.

  Elsewhere, near Broceliande, he treated himself with infusions of various herbs, bringing the petals and leaves to Yvette, who created the potions for him.

  The man was dying, and Rebecca in particular felt a strong sense of loss as Conrad moved, edgy and remote, through the scrub wood, and along the lesser paths about the area.

  For a year or more, Rebecca had earned a small amount of money, and gained a great deal of pleasure, by teaching two local children folk songs, and music in general, using the small piano at the farmhouse. These lessons stopped when she discovered she could no longer sing; indeed, as she struggled for the final time with one of the girls, she realised that she could no longer focus clearly on the music.

  ‘I need glasses,’ she moaned. ‘Thirty years old, perfect vision all my life, and suddenly I’m getting short-sighted.’

  4

  With four days to Christmas, the church bell intoned the dawn hour to signal Winter’s Deep. From all over the region, people came by car and cart to the church on the hill, arriving for midday, wrapped well against the frost. The sky was brilliant azure, the sun low to the south and west. The forest of Broceliande glistened whitely. Breath hung in the air, streamers of mist behind each walking human shape. When noon came, the congregation, spread around the base of the hill, joined hands. Daniel, between his parents, laughed as the whole circle stepped carefully, with many a collapse, many a trip, much humour, once around the hill, while the priest lit the fire at the porch entrance and the flame streamed high into the crisp day.

  At the end of the clumsy dance, the children raced up the hill, scrambling over walls and through the hedge to be the first to carry the fire to the villages. They set off, thirty mufflered shapes, torches held high streaming black smoke. The adults crowded into the warm church and gathered round the copper cauldron of warm, spiced red wine.

  As usual, the talk was of presents, and the extortionate price of computer games, radio-controlled cars and the other sophisticated toys that the little horrors of the villages were demanding, from Saint Nicholas in most cases, or from Old Provider in just a few.

  Old Provider had been Rebecca’s choice of gift bringer, with his one good eye, riding his black dog at dawn and with his wailing daughter stumbling after. He was an ogrish figure ready to take the child’s head if the offering of fowl and fish at the doorstep was insufficient. Rebecca had always enjoyed the sense of terror associated with the gifts from Old Provider, and as a child had dismissed Saint Nick, in his white fur robes with his moon-chariot pulled by eight white harts, as just a fairy-tale.

  Daniel had indicated that Old Provider was his choice. The gift he would risk his head for was a collection of Disney songs on disc – he was an avid fan of TV and radio, now, sitting with his left ear pressed to the sound box – with bendy models of some of his favourite Disney characters: Baloo the Bear, Dumbo, One Eye and Three Eyes, and the Seven Little Miners (he didn’t want Snow White!).

  The proper way to summon Old Provider was to write the gift-request on paper, wrap the paper round a black stone and throw it into Broceliande (or whichever was the child’s local wood). One child in every hundred was supposed to be able to hear the Black Dog growl as it snatched the stone, before bounding through the tangle-wood to where its master, the one-eyed man, lay sleeping below a pile of stones.

  Daniel enjoyed this ritual, although his first attempt to throw the rock almost kno
cked Martin unconscious, the shot, from the blind boy, being almost completely in the wrong direction. When the stone finally struck the trees Daniel clapped and laughed but a second later he screamed and turned away from some sound that only he could hear, holding his hands to his ears. He ran back to the path, and towards the farm. Martin chased after him, caught him and hugged him reassuringly.

  ‘What is it? What is it?’

  ‘Monster …’ the boy whispered, shaking. ‘Heard monster … Black Dog … crunching bone …’

  ‘It’s only a story,’ Martin assured him, wrapping arms around the trembling lad. ‘Nothing’s going to hurt you. It’s just a bit of fun.’

  ‘I know! I know!’ Daniel crowed triumphantly. ‘Joke! Joke!’

  And he squirmed away from his father, giggling and screeching, stumbling over a rock as he celebrated his trickery.

  Martin chased after him, wrestling him to the ground. ‘Why you little … you little monster! … I’ll teach you to pretend that there’s monsters in them there woods …’

  The boy laughed hysterically as his father’s fingers engaged with ribs and soft belly, tickling powerfully through the heavy winter clothing.

  Then suddenly Daniel glanced away. ‘Look at Mummy.’

  Martin followed the glance. Rebecca was standing facing Broceliande, a hunched figure, arms tight around her chest.

  ‘Something wrong. Mummy shadow wrong,’ Daniel whispered.

  Martin sat up, holding the boy. ‘What’s up, Beck?’ he said to himself, disturbed by the dark figure, the motionless, living statue of the woman, everything about her suggesting that she was in distress.

  And then he looked at Daniel, at the way the boy was staring at the distant figure. He moved an open palm across Daniel’s gaze but the eyes never flickered, the pupils remained fully dilated as usual.

  ‘What’s Mummy doing?’ he asked cautiously.

  ‘Listening. Big dog,’ Daniel replied.

  ‘Can you see her?’

  ‘I hear shadow,’ came the quiet reply. ‘Mummy shadow. Mummy shadow frightened.’

  Leading Daniel by the hand, Martin went over to Rebecca, and put his arms around her, kissing her quickly on her cold, right ear. ‘What’s up with Mummy shadow?’ he whispered. ‘What’s upset you?’

  ‘Mummy shadow?’

  ‘Daniel’s words. I think he feels the fact that you’re upset. What’s upset you?’

  ‘For a second it was like being a kid again, seeing the ghosts. I thought I saw the Black Dog. Seriously, it seemed to hover in the woodland edge, up on its hind legs, watching me, like one of those bloody great big dogs from Grimm. Or was it Hans Andersen?’

  ‘The soldier? The tinder box? That story?’

  ‘That one. Yes. Each dog was bigger than the last, and had bigger eyes, like saucers. I saw the biggest. And it was so real. But it was so shadowy, everything is so shadowy … maybe I need a stronger prescription.’

  She took off her silver-framed spectacles and peered at them. ‘My sight’s really going. I find it so hard to read these days.’

  ‘Then it’s the opticians for you, my girl,’ Martin said with mock severity. ‘As soon as they open after Christmas.’

  He looked at the wood, frowning. ‘But maybe you really saw what you saw.’

  ‘New lakes, wolf-girls and wailing men. Why not Black Dogs?’ Rebecca smiled and reached for Martin’s hand. ‘There’s something changing in the forest …’

  Daniel was tugging at his jacket, staring up at his father.

  ‘Dog’s gone, now,’ he said.

  *

  It hadn’t snowed at Christmas for years and Daniel was disappointed, having heard all about snow from the poem ‘Night of Old Christmas’. As far as Martin was concerned, it was too damned cold anyway, but they spent Christmas Eve in traditional style, with Jacques and Suzanne. The priest came by for an hour or so, taking a little supper and several glasses of the spiced wine that every house would have in abundance.

  Daniel ran around the warm kitchen, a bat with outstretched wings, guided by sound, flawless in his negotiation of obstacles, such as the inebriated adults who sat around the wide table, the remains of Eve Goose spread before them. Christmas day itself was a day of fasting, not that anyone ever took much notice of that particular tradition.

  ‘Night of Old Christmas! Night of Old Christmas!’ Daniel chanted, as he realised Rebecca was trying to get him into his nightshirt, to put him to bed.

  He was allowed to sit with the adults a while longer, warm, wrapped in a blanket. Martin read the long poem by the heir to the British throne, a parody of the Victorian classic by Clement Moore, watching the enthralled boy curled against his mother and feeling the shivers of his own childhood as some of the stanzas brought back memories of Christmas past …

  ‘The Deep of the Winter was now in the past,

  And the snow that had fallen looked fair set to last,

  And deep in the heartwood a cairn of grey stones

  Was shifting and stirring and full of strange groans

  For down in the earth, all wrapped up and snug

  Old Provider was waking, his mind in a fug.

  The black dog was barking, away in the wood,

  And the children were quarrelling, who had been good?

  And whose head was forfeit, that dread time of dark

  If the fish and the fowl should fall short of the mark

  And the man in his rags, with his good gleaming eye

  Should bring gifts for the three, but the fourth child should die?’

  Before he went to bed, Daniel reached to the big bowl of chicken and trout that was put out for the Odinesque Old Provider. ‘Feel plump enough?’ Martin asked.

  ‘I’m good!’ Daniel said emphatically, adding, ‘Is Old Provider … hungry?’

  ‘Very hungry. But there’s enough fish and fowl here to feed him, his dog, and his wailing daughter.’

  ‘Why? Wailing?’

  ‘Enough questions, young man. Daughters wail because daughters wail, and presents come at dawn, because that’s the way it works.’

  A simple way of saying he had no idea.

  ‘Head in sack, slung on his back,’ Daniel murmured, and shuddered, making a chilled sound as he curled into Martin’s arms and was lifted from the cold flagstones of the porch.

  ‘But you’ve been good. There’ll be no head in a sack on the end of my bed tomorrow – or on Old Provider’s back. Just lots of fun toys, and funny songs. But only if you sleep, now, and don’t make any noise during the night …’

  He used his foot to open the door to the stairs, and glanced back at the group around the table, where Father Gualzator was using a teaspoon to scoop the last of the mulled cider from the copper tureen into his glass.

  ‘Do we have any more holy water?’ Martin asked with a grin, and Rebecca grasped the signal, went to the wood stove and uncorked another flagon of the apple.

  In his arms, Daniel murmured, ‘Rest of my bones, under grey stones.’

  ‘Why? Wailing? Uncle Jacques. Why?’

  ‘Because she was Old Provider’s eldest child and favourite child, but she wanted gifts without earning them, and she wanted gifts that he couldn’t give. So he took away everything that she had, except her sorrow, and made her run blindly after the dog, to pick up every gift that fell from his sack, especially the heads that he gathered from the greedy and the evil and the pretenders, and you know how many pretenders there are among the children of the world, so his sack was full of heads with their tongues sticking out, and their eyes crossed, even some still with their fingers stuck up their noses. Sometimes he put the head in a flour sack and left it on Christmas Eve for the parent. But sometimes he put the head on a small tree, and if the child repented the tree grew into a new body and walked home on its roots. If the parents took the tree-child back, they would have to cut a small piece of the skin, or bark, every year to offer to Old Provider with the fish and fowl. That’s where we get the expression, a chip off
the old block. You remember the song Auntie Suzanne and I taught you?’

  ‘A chip off the block,

  I’ll live a full clock.

  A splinter forgot

  I’ll end full of rot.’

  ‘That’s right. You do remember things well, young man. Well, sleep now, and in the morning we’ll dance around the kitchen to Baloo’s Song …’

  ‘Saw Black Dog. Saw shadow.’

  ‘You saw the Black Dog?’

  ‘It’s hungry. It wants Mummy.’

  ‘Where did you see it?’

  ‘It runs up the path. It eats shadows.’

  ‘What do you mean, It wants Mummy?’

  ‘Mummy shadow. Black Dog wants to eat Mummy shadow.’

  Old Provider duly provided, and Christmas Day passed with pleasure, leftovers, and a long walk over the fields. There was no more talk of Black Dogs and Mummy shadows, and Martin’s frisson of excitement when he had thought, for that instant, that Daniel had actually seen something was soon forgotten.

  The songs from Disney’s Jungle Book became semi-permanent residents in the house until well into the Spring, when the weather, which until then had been abysmal, began to improve dramatically, heralding an early and warm summer and the opportunity for the family to spend time outside.

  Resurrection Sunday was particularly fine, and Martin drove the family across to the megalithic site at Carnac, encouraging Daniel to touch the stones, describing the ranks of uprights, stretching miles towards the west.

  Daniel made it clear that he wished to hear the sea, and they drove to a small bay and descended the steep path to the red sand. Here, Rebecca sat on the rocks peering gloomily through her thick lenses at the shifting ocean. Martin searched for fossils, and Daniel wandered in circles, laughing and shouting.