Merlin's Wood

by Robert Holdstock

  10

  Steven remembers nothing of the incident with the frontal bridge. It is as if the electrical surge that sent him into such hysteria has blanked the last five days from him. His most recent memory is of school, on Tuesday. He remembers eating his lunch, and walking to a class, and then nothing. He is happy again, and the fever has died down. He didn’t wake last night, and has no memory of the grey-green man. I walked with him by the edge of the wood, then ventured in through the gate, down by the thin stream with its slippery banks. Inside the wood I sensed the pre-mythagos at once and asked Steven what he could see.

  His answer: Funny things.

  He smiled as he said this. I questioned him further, but that is all he would say. ‘Funny things.’ He looked quite blank when I asked him to look for the grey-green man.

  I have destroyed something in him. I have warped him in some way. I am frightened by this since I do not understand even remotely what I have done. Wynne-Jones might know better, but he remains lost. And I cannot bring myself to explain in full just what I did to Steven. This act of cowardice will destroy me. But until I understand what has happened, who is writing in my journal, I must keep as free as possible of domestic difficulty. I am denying something in myself for the sake of a sanity that will collapse as soon as I am free of mystery. This is limbo!

  Jennifer treats me harshly. I am spending as much time as I can with the two boys. But I must find Wynne-Jones. I must find out what has happened to bring this haunting upon myself.

  11

  So tired he could hardly walk, Huxley walked across the night field, glad of a moonglow behind clouds that showed him the stark outline of Oak Lodge. Using this as a marker he stepped slowly towards his home, the sickness in his stomach still a jarring pain and a nauseous surge. Whatever he had eaten, he should have been more careful.

  This excursion had been short, again, but he had hoped to have returned before nightfall. As it was, he imagined dawn was just an hour or so away.

  The sound of Jennifer’s cry stopped him in his tracks. He listened carefully, close to the gate, and again he heard her voice, a slightly strangled, then increasingly intense evocation of pain. She was gasping, he realised. The sound of her voice stopped quite suddenly, and then there was a laugh. The sound was eerily loud in the night, in the still night, this solitude of sound and sensation that was so close to dawn.

  ‘Oh my God. Jennifer … Jennifer!’

  He began to walk more swiftly. An image of his wife being attacked in the night was insisting its superiority over the obvious.

  The doors of his study were shattered abruptly. Glass crashed and the doors flung wide. Something moved with incredible speed across the lawns, through the trees, causing leaves and apples to fall. Whatever it was stopped suddenly close to the hedges, then crashed through them, passing Huxley like a storm wind.

  And stopped. And moved in the moonlight.

  Grey-green man …?

  There was nothing there. There was moon-shadow only. And yet Huxley could sense the outline of a man, a naked man, a man still hot from exertion, the smell of the man, the heat of the man, the pulse of heart and head, the shaking of the limbs of the man …

  Grey-green …

  ‘Come back. Come and talk.’

  The garden was aflow with movement. Everything was bending, twisting, writhing in a wind that circled the motionless shadow. And the shadow moved, towards Huxley, then away, and there was no glimpse, no sight, no feeling of reality, just the sense of something that had watched him and had returned to the wood.

  Huxley ran back to the broken gate, tripping on the shattered wood. He had not even heard the breaking of the gate, but he followed the wind with his ears and night vision, and saw the scrubwood thrash with life, then die again into the steadiness of night, as whatever it was passed through it and beyond, into the timeless realm of the wood.

  ‘Jennifer … oh no …’

  She was not in the room. The bed was still warm, disturbed and dishevelled in an obvious way. He walked quickly out onto the landing, then downstairs again, following the slightest of sounds to the smallest of rooms. She was seated on the toilet, and pulled the door shut abruptly as he opened it.

  ‘George! Please! A little privacy …’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m very all right. But I thought you were going to have a heart attack.’

  She laughed, then pulled the chain. When she emerged into the dark corridor she reached for him and put her arms around his neck. She seemed startled to discover him wearing his jacket. ‘You’ve not got dressed again! Good grief, George. There really is very little hope for you.’ She hesitated, half amused, half anguished. ‘Well … perhaps there’s some hope …’ Her sudden kiss was deep, moist and passionate.

  Her breath was strong, a sexual smell.

  ‘I’m going back to bed. I rather hoped you’d be there too …’

  ‘I have to think.’

  In the darkness he couldn’t see her face, but he sensed the smile, the weary smile. ‘Yes, George. Of course. You go and think. Write in your journal.’ She walked away from him, towards the stairs. ‘There are fresh bones in the pantry should you get peckish.’

  But her voice gave away her sadness. He heard the moment’s crying, and intuited instantly and painfully that something she had thought renewed she now realised was not.

  So he had been here again. The encounter in the garden, in the darkness … that had been the grey-green man. And he had seduced Jennifer!

  Huxley drew the journal from its hiding place, and with shaking hands opened it, switching on the lamp.

  *

  The same? You and I? No. No! It feels wrong. I am no ghost.

  Am I a ghost? Perhaps. Yes. When I read your words. Yes. Perhaps right.

  I am confused. I live in brief moments, and the dreams are strong and powerful. I am dreaming a life. But I belong in Oak Lodge. When I am there I feel warmth. But the wood pulls me back. You are right. You other writer. I am your dream and I am free, but not free. Oh confused! And ill. Always so ill. The blood is so hot.

  The dreams, the urging. I am such a hunter. I run them down and use my hands. I am plastered with detritus from the forest.

  My son Steven. You have tampered with my son. This was wrong. Such fury in me. If I see you I fear to control my anger. Leave Steven alone. I am aware of him in the wood. He is here. Something has, or will happen, and he is everywhere. Something with happen to him. Do not interfere with him. An immense event is shaping around him, not yet happened, but already changing the wood, and time is recoiling and refashioning. I watch seasons in frantic change, in full, seconds-long flight. I hear sounds from all times. This is Ash’s doing.

  The horses, the time of horses. Something happened there, something small. Something to you/me to cause this you/me, this wild split. What happened? I see it only in dreams. I am too wild, too base, when I am free of dreams I am wild and running, the merest scent of blood is an enragement, the scent of flesh sends me surging, Jennifer is not safe from me, guard her guard her, even though you recognise that passion.

  Find Ash and find where she sent you. Why did she send you there? The horse, the fire in that wood. All a dream.

  Guard Jennifer from the ghost and the bloody obsessions of the ghost

  I am so close to this earth, so much matter of rock and wood and silent night that lives, claws, crawls, devours, desires, surges and comes into all life that interferes and crosses paths and tracks

  Kill me?

  How?

  Join again, return me to you. Ash. The key. The wood is tugging, a root around me. It draws me tight. The smell of must and rotten wood. The stink. Each a chain around me. Each a tug. I am a prisoner

  Steven will be lost to us. He will never

  But with this tantalising and terrifying half sentence, the entry ended.

  12

  What had happened in that living dream of the cold wood, and the running horses? He had b
een run down by one of the creatures. He had tried to see the face of the corpse on its back, but had failed. He had, when he thought about it clearly, felt himself torn spiritually apart: there had been that moment of wild riding, of moving with horse and cadaver through the trees …

  Had that been the moment of division?

  Had that been when Green-grey man had split from him?

  He wrote in his journal:

  To my shadow: What do you know of Ash? What do you remember of the moment when the horse collided with you in the birchwood glade? How shall I contact Ash again? Why do you think Wynne-Jones is dead? Why do you think Steven will be lost? What is the great event that you feel forming? Is there any way that we can talk? Or must we continue to correspond through the pages of this journal?

  He placed the book behind the shelves, then went out into the rising dawn. Wisps of what looked like smoke, funnels of greyish smog, rose, from over Ryhope Wood. As the light increased, the odd vortices vanished. The last thing he saw before returning to the house was the shimmering movement of leaves and green, running, it seemed, for several yards along the edgewood. He could not quite focus upon it, although the sensation of movement was strongest when he looked away, catching it from the corner of his eye.

  *

  The new day was a Saturday and both boys were at home. By mid-morning the sound of their antics and play had begun to irritate Huxley as he tried to concentrate his mind – his tired mind – on thinking through the experience with Ash. He watched the boys from his study window. Christian, the more rumbustious of the two, was swinging from every branch he could find during a game of some form of chase. Steven seemed to become aware of his father, watching him, and froze for a moment, his face anxious. Only when Huxley moved away did he hear the sound of the game restart.

  They are both afraid of me. No: they are both missing closeness with me. They hear their friends talk about fathers … they think of their father … I feel so helpless. I am not interested in them as boys, only in the men, the minds, the thoughts and explorations of deeper thought that they will become … they bore me …

  The moment he had written these lines, he inked them through, so strongly, so savagely, that none would ever read this terrible and sickening moment of self honesty.

  No. I am envious of them. They ‘see’ in a way that is beyond my ability. Their fantasy games include glimpses of pre-mythago forms that I would give anything to witness. They are attuned more deeply to the wood. I hear it in their stories, their fantasies, their games. But if they were too aware of what was happening, to them … might that not diminish their spontaneous ‘seeing’? These thoughts seem irrational, and yet I feel that they must be kept in ignorance for their talents to be pure.

  Later in the day the boys left the garden. The sudden cessation of their noise attracted Huxley and when he went to see where they had gone he noticed them, distantly, tearing round the edge of the wood, in the direction of the railway tracks.

  He knew where they would be going, and out of curiosity followed them, taking his stick and his panama hat. The day was bright, if not hot, and there was a brisk, moist-smelling breeze, heralding rain later.

  They had gone to the mill pond, of course. Christian was sitting on the old jetty, where the boat had once been tethered. The pond was wide, curving round between dense, overhanging trees, to end in a sprawling patch of rushes out of sight. The oaks at that far end were like a solid wall, great thick trunks, the spaces between them a clutter of willow and spreading holly. It was as if the wall had been deliberately built to stop the wood being entered at that point.

  Once, there had been fish in abundance in this pool, but at some time in the twenties the life had faded. A pike or two still could be seen, gliding below the water. But there was little point in fishing, now, and the old boat was rapidly rotting.

  Huxley had warned both boys never to take that boat out, but he could see that Christian was contemplating such an act, as he dangled his feet in the water. Such a headstrong boy. So wilful.

  Steven was beating through the reeds with a stick. No, not beating: cutting. He gathered a thick armful and carried them back around the pond’s edge, and Huxley drew back into the concealing undergrowth.

  The exchange of conversation between his sons confirmed that they were planning to make a reed boat, and float it on the pond.

  He smiled, and was about to withdraw and walk silently back along the short path that led from open land to this pond, when he realised that the boys were alarmed.

  Christian was running over the decaying piles of the boathouse, pointing into the thick woods. Steven followed him, and they dropped to a crouch, peering into the gloom.

  From his lurking place, Huxley followed the direction of their interest. He realised that a wide, strange face was watching from high in the branches of a tree. He was reminded of the Cheshire Cat from Alice, and smiled. But the face wasn’t smiling.

  It withdrew abruptly from the light. Something crashed noisily to the ground, startling and scattering birds from the tree tops. It moved with great speed through the woodland, round the pondside, was silent for a moment, then crashed noisily into the deep wood, finally vanishing from earshot.

  Huxley remained where he was. The excited lads passed by him, talking about the ‘monkey face’, and sharing the burden of reeds for the hull of their reed ship, which they intended to build in the woodshed. As soon as they were gone Huxley went round to the boathouse, and struck into the tangle of undergrowth behind. There was no path, and his trousers were snagged and torn by the screen of briar rose and blackberry bramble. He found that the simple barrier of this untamed wood would not allow him in, but after a while he found a patch of nettles, stamped them down, laid his jacket over them, and sat, screened from sight, surrounded by the heavy silence and air of the wood, watching through the shifting light for any further sign of ‘monkey face’, a mythago that he had not yet observed himself at quarters close enough for him to make a judgement upon its mythological nature.

  It was a fruitless wait, and he returned to Oak Lodge a disappointed man. There were no further entries in his private journal, and he made a short entry in his research journal, defining the mythago as far as he was able. He asked Steven and Christian about their day, and teased their perception of the creature from them, affecting idle interest. But neither boy could add more to what he himself had seen, save to say that the face was wide, high-browed and painted. It was perhaps, then, an early manifestation of Cro-Magnon belief? Its appearance was too modern for it to be associated with the culture that had given rise to the man from Piltdown, the nature of whose belief systems constantly exercised Huxley’s imagination and interest.

  *

  At eleven o’clock Jennifer announced that she was retiring for the night, and as she walked past him paused, held out her hand. ‘Are you coming?’

  It horrified Huxley to feel such shock, such fear of accepting his wife’s invitation. A cold sweat tingled on his neck and hairline, and he said casually, ‘I do need to read a little further.’

  ‘I see,’ she breathed with resignation, and went to bed.

  How could he feel like this? He noticed that his hands were shaking. The intimacy that had characterised their first years together more by its regularity than its passion, had certainly, in recent years, changed to a self-conscious routine of tentative suggestion, almost unknowing touch, and brief encounter by darkness. And yet he had accepted this change for the worse – it always occurred to him that Jennifer might have been accepting the status with far less complacency – without really conscious thought. It had taken the sound of her pleasure to remind him of their early years, and to make him aware, now, of the avoidance that he had been practising.

  He nearly cried as he thought of how much he had denied the closeness of their life that Jennifer so needed.

  He stared hard at the ceiling, thinking of her in bed, thinking of holding her. And gradually he forced himself to his feet, and walk
ed upstairs, and entered the bedroom where she slept softly, half exposed from below the summer sheet, her body faintly illuminated by moonlight from the bright summer night.

  She was naked, he realised, and the shock made him catch his breath. He was almost embarrassed to look at her, at the leg that lay outside the covers, the soft breast that was crushed in the bend of her arm, as she slept, her head turned half towards him.

  He undressed and pulled on pyjamas. In bed beside her he watched her for a long time, long enough to bite all skin from the inside of his lower lip, so that he tasted blood, and his lip was sore.

  He almost woke her once, his hand out to her, the fingers hovering just above her tousled hair.

  But he didn’t. He closed his eyes, sank a little lower, and thought of the primal mythological form of humankind, his great quest: The Urscumug …

  Somewhere in the woods, the creature lives. It must have formed many times. But it is deep. It is in the heart. How to find it? How to find? I must devise a way of calling it to the edge …

  He was still thinking about his quest when he heard the sound of movement downstairs. It startled him at first, but then he lay quietly, listening hard.

  Yes. It was in the study. There was a long time of silence, then again the sound of furniture being moved, drawers opened, cabinets opened as perhaps his souvenirs were examined.

  Then a sudden sound on the stairs, someone coming up the stairs at great speed.

  Again, silence.

  It was on the landing. It moved along the landing to the door of the bedroom and again stopped; then the door was opened and something sped into the room, a fleet shadow crossing the floor to the window in an instant, and closing the curtains. A deeper darkness descended, but in the moment of dim light Huxley had seen the man shape, the deep shadow shape that was unquestionably a naked human male. The shoulders were broad, the body hard and lean, and the creature’s member was distended and almost vertical. A strong odour filled the room, something of undergrowth, something of the sharp smell of an unwashed man.