Merlin's Wood

by Robert Holdstock

  Again, the boy’s voice, ‘Martin. Martin! Hurry!’

  He peered out into the brightening dawn. It was Richard, the Lordez’s eldest child, a familiar and cheery youth who kept his pony in Martin’s field. The boy saw the man and beckoned, then pointed to where Clarisse, his sister, was cautiously circling an invisible spot on the path, astonished by what she was seeing.

  He went downstairs and drank copiously from the water bottle, then walked outside, shivering with the chill.

  Richard called to him. The boy, fourteen now, was frightened, or perhaps apprehensive.

  ‘What is it? What have you seen?’

  ‘People on the path,’ Richard said, his voice a whisper, his pale eyes wide. ‘Your people.’

  ‘My people?’

  ‘It’s Daniel. And Rebecca. They’re walking up to the hill.’

  It took a moment for the meaning of the words to register. Then Martin was running, gaining speed, all sleep gone, all alcohol drained from a mind that was suddenly racing. Rebecca? Daniel? And as he ran he murmured, ‘Rebecca …?’ and his voice began to rise in volume until he screamed, literally screamed, ‘Rebecca!’

  He reached the suddenly startled girl and gripped her by the shoulders. ‘Where? Where is she? Where’s Rebecca?’

  Clarisse looked terrified, trying to pull away from the unshaven man, her eyes a window into combined terrors.

  ‘Where is she?’ Martin shouted, shaking her. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘You’re inside her,’ Clarisse whispered and her face twisted into a sob. ‘Please – let me go.’

  He released the girl. She scampered away, then stood with her brother, slightly hunched, watching the path.

  Martin turned, his arms outstretched. He could feel nothing. But he danced on the path, turning, turning, remembering Seb, desperate to touch the dead.

  ‘Beck. Oh God, Beck. Are you here?’ And loudly to the children, eyes still closed, ‘Where is she? Am I still inside her?’

  Clarisse’s voice was a howl of sadness, ‘No. You’ve danced in front of her. Just stand still.’

  Martin stood on the path, eyes closed, trying to feel. There was the scent of dawn, and a gentle breeze. He could hear the girl making noises, like a kitten, frightened. She was crouching, now, her brother with her, watching the man as he embraced the empty path.

  ‘She’s passing through you again,’ Richard called, and Martin closed his arms around his body, trying to hold the ghost.

  ‘What about Daniel? How does he look?’

  They walked together up the path. The children described what they could see, and Martin tried to remember how it had been when he had been a child. Rebecca was walking slowly. She was dressed as she had been dressed when he had dragged her from the lake. Daniel was looking back, looking worried. Why was there always one person on the path who looked back, as if haunted, as if hunted?

  They came to the church and Martin began to cry. He could feel nothing! He ran to the frightened children, grabbed at Clarisse. ‘Dance inside her. Please! Dance inside Rebecca. Tell me what you hear, tell me what you feel!’

  ‘It’s too dangerous,’ Richard said, but he hesitated. The girl shuddered, gripped by Martin’s hands. Her eyes filled and flowed, but she remained silent, blinking nervously.

  Martin was desperate. ‘Please? Clarisse, will you?’

  ‘Dangerous!’ Richard said earnestly. ‘Our parents always told us – not inside people we know!’

  Screaming, not hearing those odd words not inside the people we know, Martin implored the girl. ‘Dance inside her! I must know how she feels! For Christ’s sake, do it! Clarisse – do it! Please! For me!’

  The girl burst into tears, but nodded. ‘Look after me,’ she wailed as she tugged free and ran in pursuit of the invisible people on the path. Richard stared icily at the man, terrified. His sister’s sobs turned to screams of fear as she slowed to enter the ghosts, looking back.

  And at that moment Martin realised what he had done. He raced after the girl, grabbed her, swung her round and hugged her as she cried out and sank down with relief. ‘I’m sorry. Clarisse, I’m so sorry. I was forgetting how dangerous it is. I’m so confused, so frightened. I’m so sorry, love. Of course you mustn’t dance inside her.’

  Richard suddenly screamed, ‘Be careful! Clarisse! Watch out—’

  The girl’s eyes had widened and she smiled. Somewhere, a long way away, the sound of someone running …

  Martin held the girl, noticing how she seemed to melt, how her eyes glowed. Richard was running towards them.

  ‘Get out! Get out!’

  They were inside the people! Rebecca and Daniel were passing through them!

  Martin dragged the girl to the side. Richard thumped him hard on the back, a small man, furious. ‘You let them into her! You shouldn’t have done that!’

  ‘I didn’t know. I thought they were ahead of me. I can’t see them, Richard. I can’t see them. Only you can see them. Christ, I want to see them! Where are they now?’

  The boy hesitated, fury calming, then he looked towards the hedge around the cemetery. ‘Passing through. Rebecca is looking back at you. Do you think she knows you’re here? Did she feel something?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Did you feel anything?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  They both looked at Clarisse.

  ‘Sis? Did you feel anything?’

  ‘Let me out,’ the girl said quietly. ‘So close, now. So near. Let me out!’

  ‘Who’s saying this?’

  ‘The old man. The old man in Rebecca. Let me out. I’m nearly out. Let me out!’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  But all Clarisse would say was, ‘Stuck in the shaft. Trapped in the tree. Let me out. Let me free!’

  Her brother Richard took her home. A few hundred yards down the path the huddled pair broke into a run, holding hands, racing against the rising of the sun to return to their house.

  Martin swung on the iron gate, imagining the way that Rebecca and Daniel were now descending below the hill, to pass through their own gate into a world beyond his understanding.

  Let me out? Trapped in the tree. Trapped in the shaft …

  I’m nearly out. Let me out …

  And Martin remembered Sebastian’s drawings, made years ago, shortly before the boy had died.

  It took him two hours to find the faded paper, the scrawled sketches that Sebastian had made. Eveline had kept them safe, of course, as she had kept everything that her sons and daughter had drawn and written. They had been locked in one of many boxes, and the boxes stacked in orderly array within the attic. It was volume and security that made the task of discovery so difficult, but at last, from the filed and ordered memories of his mother, Martin found the sketches of the ‘vases’, the odd drawings that his brother had produced shortly before his death.

  By the time he reached the church, Matutinus was underway, the priest, in his black robe, singing the words-of-morning to a congregation of two (the Delbondes, who never missed Matutinus). Candle smoke filled the church. Martin sat quietly at the back, and when the Delbondes scurried out, ready for breakfast, Father Gualzator snuffed the candles and came quickly down the aisle.

  ‘I was watching you. I saw everything. This morning.’

  ‘Richard and Clarisse?’

  The older man nodded, taking the papers from Martin’s hand as if he had already intuited their content.

  ‘My old eye didn’t fill in the figures, but the children could see the ghosts of Rebecca and Daniel. And I heard the old man’s voice: Let me out.’

  ‘You heard it as an old man’s voice? It was the girl who was speaking.’

  The priest laughed drily. ‘Old eyes do see, old ears do hear. It was an old man, speaking through the girl. He’s trapped, like the genie in the bottle. Except that he’s close to getting free. He’s been close to getting free for nearly two hundred years, now. These sketches are fascinating. They confirm something I
’ve half suspected since I came to Broceliande. Come into the vestry.’

  ‘I wish you’d shown me these before. Look here …’

  Father Gualzator produced a box file, opening it to reveal yellowed parchment, vellum, torn pages from note books, schoolbooks, even the blue tint of quality writing paper from earlier in the century. He spread the sheaf of paper on the table. On all of them were sketched, in childish hand, bottles and vases, all with bits of tree and bone inside them, each stoppered with little hats, or caps, consisting of round blobs.

  But they weren’t vases. They were shafts into the earth, and the stoppers were:

  ‘Stones. These are votive shafts, dug deeply into the ground and capped with stone cairns. Do you see? The image was confusing for the children who glimpsed them from the ghosts, and they’ve always drawn jars, or vases. But they’re shafts. It’s a familiar device from pre-history, running on into late Celtic times. The shafts were filled with bones, stones, trees, whatever, and there is no reason why a shaft in one area of the world should necessarily function in the same way as a shaft from another. But they are clearly an attempt to commune with the earth, perhaps to mollify the earth. Sebastian, like all the other children whose drawings I’ve managed to accumulate, has shown a shaft with a tree inside it. That was very common. The deepest shaft I know was dug about two hundred years before Christ, and was one hundred and forty feet deep, and very narrow. A whole tree had been thrown down it, plus pottery and bones, a dog, a stag, some bits and pieces of gold and bronze. Right at the bottom, below everything, was the corpse of a child, a deformed child, mind you, its skull neatly divided by a single blow.’

  Martin leafed through the drawings. The similarities were astonishing. Each of these had been drawn by a child after dancing through the people on the path. Yet the oldest was from the early eighteen hundreds. The proportions were so much the same. The lopped off tree, its branches cut, all showed the same number of stubs: six, six for the stubs of a dismembered male human body.

  ‘Then this is the evil at the heart of the wood. Conrad knew it. He told me, just days ago. Merlin is trapped in the heart of Broceliande. His grave is there. Just across the lake, according to Conrad. It’s always been there, hidden from prying eyes, but no longer hidden, I think. We can get to it. We can dig him up!’

  Father Gualzator smiled and leaned on the table. ‘This is the pain at the heart of the wood. And yes, it’s Merlin, or whatever it is that we’ve come to call Merlin. A vague memory of the killing in ancient times has survived as a legend of Merlin trapped in a tree, in a shaft of air, accessible only to Vivien. But it’s an earth shaft. And probably very deep. And he, or it, is down there. And it wants to be let out. It’s been creeping out for ages. It’s been trying to tell us where it’s buried. That sounds dangerous to me.’

  Martin let the priest’s words flow into and over him. All he could think was: perhaps he can help. If I let him out, perhaps he can bring back Rebecca. Perhaps he can give life again to Daniel. There is old magic in song, as Rebecca discovered. I must try. I must try …

  But he couldn’t do it on his own.

  Martin watched as the priest filed the drawings, adding Sebastian’s own sketches to the collection.

  ‘I’m going to dig him up.’

  Father Gualzator shrugged, frowning. ‘Most of me wants to counsel against such an act. It should have occurred to you that you stand to release not just Merlin, but to revive Merlin’s tormentor again. They’re both down there, although how and why Vivien was trapped is beyond me. Something went wrong, all that time ago. She has been a vengeful and violent spirit for two thousand years, striking from the grave – possessing, using, destroying …’

  ‘Nevertheless …’

  Martin hesitated. The priest was in a cold sweat, his hands shaking as he tied the ribbon on the box-file.

  ‘Will you help me?’

  ‘I suppose so. I’ll try. I’ll help until I can’t. Then you’ll have to forgive me, but I’ll not help if I feel the people in this parish are threatened. Do you understand that?’

  Martin understood and said so.

  *

  They moved through the woodland for hours, following the path by Conrad’s first home, by his hunting lodge, dragging the canoe on its makeshift sled, lowering it down the rock faces, hauling it across the marshy ground, around the giant oaks, through the sun-bright glades, shifting their packs as they sweated on the path. Breathless and hot in the humidity of Broceliande, the priest in physical distress despite his fitness, they listened for the sound of the lake.

  The canoe could carry two. Martin had driven to Bordeaux to buy it. It was made of fibreglass and was styled like the canoes of the North American Indians. It should easily transport them across the lake, from home-shore, to heart-shore.

  Towards the end of the day they were moving still, dragging the long canoe along the path, but at dusk, just as the sun was blinking out of sight above the trees, they found the quiet water and the old bosker’s ruined fishing lodge. The body of Conrad lay there, drawn deeply into its skins. The cross above the grave where Martin and his uncle had buried Rebecca and Daniel was dark in the tree line. Father Gualzator went and blessed the hump of earth before coming back and watching the mist rise on the water.

  ‘Did you wrap them in linen?’

  ‘Very carefully.’

  ‘In one piece, I hope—’

  ‘I’m no butcher.’

  ‘Good. We should stay overnight here, I think. Cross the lake at dawn.’

  Martin hauled the canoe to the reeds, pushing it half across the mud so that it was taken by the lake. He heaved the two packs into the middle of the craft, then came back for the shovels and the winch.

  ‘No. Let’s cross now. I’m impatient to go, impatient to be there.’

  Without a further word, the priest clambered into the prow of the canoe, picking up one of the paddles. Martin pushed the boat afloat, splashing through the muddy shallows, then flinging himself aboard. The mist parted before them, even as the sun dropped from view and the whole lake, the whole wood, became grey and silent.

  It took less than fifteen minutes to float, rowing gently, to the farther shore, pulling the boat onto the bank and turning it over, to make a crude shelter for the rest of the night, close to the thin trail they could see leading inwards.

  The stone cairn had spread under its own weight and, of course, the weight of time. Perhaps it had once been as high as the man whose dismembered corpse, represented in blue-stone, now probed obscenely from the spill of boulders, earth and weeds. The cairn, now, was no more than a hump, half-filling the curious glade with its eight confining oaks, its single stone, a piece of grey stone, fallen, resting heavily against the broadest of the spreading trees. There was room, in this clearing, to sit, to camp. The flowers were yellow, the thistles high, the branches draped with old, old rags. The canopy was heavy, but left a clear space to the sky and the light, as the day began, gleamed on the blue torso of the stone statue.

  ‘Are you feeling fit?’

  Father Gualzator grinned as he rolled up his shirtsleeves, responding to Martin’s question with a shrug. ‘Soon find out. Statue first?’

  They scrabbled the stones away from the broken statue. The eyes in the sharply carved face stared blindly; the mouth gaped as if in death. It was made of green and white marble, and the skin of the naked form was covered with tiny marks, a complete tattoo of designs and symbols which the priest examined with fascination.

  ‘Everything, from cuneiform … see? Here, the little wedges … to ogham, over here, over most of it. These are a sort of rune, these … only the Lord knows. Interesting man, below, our Merlin.’

  Together they managed to prop the statue against the leaning grey-stone. By day’s end they had cleared the cairn to expose the stone slab that covered the shaft and fixed up the winch, which made the tree sigh as weight was taken. The stone slab was a foot thick, and the metal hook could hardly grip it, but as the last of
the dark birds returned to their nests, and Father Gualzator’s small fire, with its jug of coffee, began to signal the end of the first day’s work, so Martin got the stone to rise, exposing the compacted earth below. The priest came to lend a hand and they pushed the slab away from the shaft. It fell heavily. The earth felt as cold as ice.

  ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are,’ Martin whispered, digging his fingers into the hard soil.

  But the genie below remained quiet.

  In the morning, Martin discovered the priest sitting shivering, terrified, cold and puffy-eyed. The man had not slept during the night, or rather, he had fallen asleep, only to be woken by the sound of terrible screaming.

  ‘Whilst you slept, I saw the murder. She used an axe and a great knife. He was a small man, young, dark-haired, dark-bearded, trim and tidy, like a prince. He lay motionless, as if helpless, as she hacked off his limbs, then blinded him. I have never seen such fury, such triumphant fury. This woman, like death in a white and green robe, raced into the wildwood, came back with a tall thin tree and lopped off its branches. She sharpened the point of the tree and drove it through the body in the glade until a full four feet extended from the skull. She made a pit, the air around her was filled with spinning earth, and into that pit she flung the body.

  ‘And then she screamed, and the vision faded, save for the sound of fury and despair.

  ‘When the screaming passed away there was an hour or more of silence, but there was movement here, movement I can’t understand. Even my Old Eye wasn’t sufficient to show the process by which the people came to be on the path. But they came, I know it. The wood, while you slept, became alive with activity. I heard children’s voices, I think I counted seven in all, and a man’s voice intoning in a lost language. At last a man appeared, the ghostly white image of a man, who seemed at first bemused by the glade, then behaved as if he had been struck, holding his eyes, his head. For a while he had walked normally, despite his ethereal thinness. Now he began to flow, that sublimely delicate movement which you will remember from your childhood visions and which I can still see at times. He left the glade towards the lake. I followed him along the trail. He became immersed in the fog that sits on the water, but flowed away from this glade, across to the path by Rebecca’s grave.