The Hollowing

by Robert Holdstock

  Possession of this mask then, was dangerous, and Lacan was not happy that it had been brought into the Station. He pumped up the generator power and made a circuit of Old Stone Hollow, checking the wires, ribbons, and talismans of the defences.

  (iii) Spirit Ghyll

  An hour later, Lacan led Richard between the highly-coloured warning poles at the back of the Station. The path wound tightly through a scrub of knotty hazel and elder in full, white flower, into the deep shadow cast by the high, overhanging rock wall. It felt suddenly cold below this great cliff, and the smells of earth, damp, and vegetation were concentrated powerfully. Richard could hear the distant sound of rushing water, but the scrub was heavily silent, eerily deserted. Their movements became loud.

  Lacan indicated markings on the rock and as Richard’s eyes became accustomed to the shade, so he saw the painted patterns for the first time. The activity of his edge-vision intensified, a swirl of colour, the sensation of two figures running towards him, a ghostly movement that set his hair prickling and caused him to glance round.

  Lacan watched him curiously. “Have you seen such designs before?”

  Lines painted in parallel, complex spirals, rows of brilliant blue circles, cross-figures and stylised human forms and faces. The under-hang was a tapestry of primal patterns and surrealism. Everything seemed to flow towards the earth, gathering towards the place, behind dense bushes, where the sound of water was a constant, distant murmur.

  “Some of them are like rock carvings,” Richard said. “Those old tombs, the megalithic ones…”

  Lacan nodded, satisfied. “Some of them are very like that indeed. Where I come from, in Brittany, the tradition is even older than in this country. But there are patterns here that are like those of the Bushmen. In the Kalahari there are caves and rock faces with the same sort of configurations. It’s like two cultures fused together. Have you ever been to the Kalahari?”

  Richard hadn’t, although he was familiar with the rock paintings from school studies. Lacan beckoned him on, pushing through the brush until the low cave itself opened before them. “This is only the beginning,” he said. “There’s much more inside. Be careful.”

  The open cave lowered and narrowed as they edged through. It became a cramped passage, curving and dropping in alarming fashion into the earth. They crouched, then crawled below the oppressive weight of rock. Richard could hear the sound of rushing water, far away, deep down. The damp, depressing smell of wet stone and stale air, familiar to him from potholing days in the Yorkshire Dales, was at once comforting and threatening.

  “This leads the way to a most dangerous hollowing,” Lacan said. “We’ve lost three good people through it, right at the beginning of the expedition. And more mythagos emerge from it to our world than from anywhere else. Look there…”

  Lacan had suddenly pointed the torch at three hollowsticks wedged into a crevice in the rock. The passage had widened slightly, and two narrow tunnels led away into the darkness, one above the other. One of the wooden figures was clearly female: the carver had shaped crude breasts on the thick twig that formed the body. All three had winding-sheets of green cloth tied around their middles, pouches to contain the relic that gave power to these spirit guides.

  “We’re coming to the main chamber. It’s very slippery.”

  A moment later the crushing rock lifted and Richard was able to straighten into the echoing, cathedral space of Old Stone Hollow. Lacan switched on the lamp that was placed here, and a pale yellow light set sudden illumination and deep shadow to the cascade of shape on the rock walls and the formations of thin stalactites on the ceiling. Water gushed from a narrow crevice to the right, tumbling through a fine mist of spray into a wide ghyll. The floor was strewn with fallen chunks of the roof. The mouths of smaller tunnels opened everywhere.

  All of this, impressive though it was, Richard took in at a glance. Because above him and around him was a swathe of movement and colour that was breathtaking in its expression and overwhelming in its power.

  He had seen the prehistoric cave paintings in Les Eysies and Niaux, and of course knew of the paintings at Lascaux and the Spanish Altamara, but these startling images of animals, elongated, deformed, yet brilliantly executed and astonishingly coloured, were like nothing from those ancient shrines. As he stared at them, so they seemed to move, to shift and extend further, their bodies draining down towards the deepest part of the cave, as if, again, being sucked by the mouth of the earth itself—or perhaps running towards it. Odd, disturbing patterns, dizzying to focus upon, seemed to interweave with the spirit creatures. They appeared to dart between the pounding legs, to pass straight through the ethereal and stretched bodies of bison, stag, horse, and wolf. And other forms between these stampeding creatures reminded Richard of men, hunters dressed in strange garb, not at all the sticklike figures of the Bushmen caves with their stylised weapons, but rather shapes that drew as much from the world of trees as from the world of human beings. And yet it was clear that they too, as they hunted, as they ran, were moving into the shrine, apparently racing inwards towards the swirling “pot” at the cavern’s deepest point.

  Richard slipped and slid across the wet floor, bracing himself on fallen boulders, and cautiously peered into the deep well. Someone had fixed a rope to the rock, the cable dropping into the darkness. It was then that he noticed the vague shapes of humans in the rock itself. He used his torch to pick out the details more clearly and realised they were hollowsticks, but petrified now, hardened by the calcium-rich water that had been dripping steadily upon them.

  “Who were they?”

  “From another age,” Lacan said. His own torch ranged restlessly about the well, picking out other stone dolls, perhaps as many as twenty. “They’re very old, more than a hundred years from the amount of petrification. It’s where we learned about the spirit guides. People went down this swirl-hole, reaching for unknown lands, knowing that they needed to mark the place of their departure to ensure their safe return.” He reached out and ran fingers down the smooth stone that now covered the dark figure below. “These have obviously failed. Their makers are trapped somewhere.”

  A thought occurred to Richard, something puzzling about several of the figures. They were inside the well, and they seemed to be facing into the claustrophobic darkness. Could they have been the guides of people emerging? he suggested. Maybe coming from the hollowing to Lacan’s own world, and marking the way back?

  “It’s true,” Lacan agreed, turning his dark gaze upon Richard approvingly. “That’s what Lytton believes, when he isn’t attributing everything to George Huxley. Our own world is the spirit world as far as some mythagos are concerned. They emerge to touch their maker, the mind from which they were drawn.”

  It was bitterly cold in the cavern, and even Lacan was shivering through his bearskins. He led the way back through the crawl-space to the welcome airiness of the overhanging cliff, below the confusion of painted symbols. “As you have seen, Richard, this is a dangerous place. Avoid it, and avoid following anyone or anything into it. But whatever you witness here must be reported at once. We are three good travellers short.”

  Lytton

  A beautiful twilight spread across the Station at Old Stone Hollow, the sky on fire, the canopy bright with dusk colour. The painted symbols and shapes on the wall of the overhang, where Richard walked with Helen, deepened in tone as the light caught them, so that the ochres began to round out, to burn redly on the bodies of the animals, those that caught this last of the light.

  They returned to the compound and sat at a trestle table, quiet and relaxed, save for the conspicuous shift of movement at Richard’s edge-vision, the glimpses of a world forming from his mind in the vampire wood around him.

  A few minutes later an odd breeze started to blow through the camp, a pulsing wind tingled with ice and movement. Birds flew in panic, and the screen of trees rippled with movement. The hanging masks and artefacts clacked and knocked against the poles.

/>   From somewhere in the camp, one of the team called, “Elementals…”

  At once Helen rose to her feet. “It’s Lytton,” she said. “He attracts elementals like some people attract flies. We’ll have to be on our guard.”

  Lacan was already scanning the twilight skies, turning in a slow circle, one of his hand-sized machines held against his chest.

  “He’s coming from the north,” he called suddenly, and there was a general movement toward the trees at the edge of the great overhang. The breeze grew in strength, and from the branches, eyes watched the camp, tantalising faces that flickered in and out of vision.

  Lytton, Richard discovered, was returning through a hollowing which opened between the fallen boulder and the curved trunk of a lightning-struck elm. It was a narrow gap, leading to a bright glade, now tinged with evening’s orange. It was easy enough to see how the wind, and an oddly formless flow of shape, was coming from that area.

  Something pinched his cheek and Richard slapped at it, turning quickly and in time to see a pointed face and quizzical eyes. Then his hair was tugged and blown as if by a sudden breath. He tried to follow the shape, but it had vanished.

  He saw Helen struggle irritably with thin air, then look to the river where the waters became turbulent for a few seconds, a fish thrashing, perhaps, or something invisible exalting in the cool flow.

  “Here he comes…” Haylock said, her voice calm.

  Lacan called out, “There’s something behind him. It’s coming up fast!”

  The generator whined and Richard got the sense that extra power had again been pumped into the circular network of wires, beams, and cables around Old Stone Hollow.

  Between boulder and elm, the air pulsed, the view shrank, then expanded, whitening, as if looking into snow, then becoming intensely red. A man’s shape was silhouetted there, frozen, one arm reaching out from its body, but as if hurrying. It hovered in the frame, a shadow against the red glow, immobile. Behind it a fainter shadow began to grow, looming up into the trees, then bending towards the frozen image of the running man.

  A second later the tableau broke, and a tall, thin figure stumbled into the Station, yelling violently, the space around him contracting dizzyingly, almost swallowed, colourless, before becoming once again the twilit glade, the stone, the dark tree.

  The ground trembled. Lytton turned and stared anxiously back to the hollowing, then grinned and shouted, “Close, but not close enough, damn your eye!” After a moment he relaxed, ran a hand through his grey-streaked hair and tossed his slim backpack to the ground. His shirt was made of skins held together by bronze pins down the front. He was wearing the army-issue trousers and boots that Helen sported. As he walked into Old Stone Hollow he waved a hand at the air behind him, then slapped at his cheek. Richard sensed laughter and curiosity from the bushes near to him, and subtle, flowing movement, not unlike the movement of the cave paintings, half there, half not there.

  Lacan, staring at his machine, pronounced, “It’s gone.” Then with a slap on the new arrival’s shoulder, he asked, “What have you been dragging up this time, eh, Alexander?”

  “God only knows,” said Lytton with a grim smile. His way of speaking was very deliberate, and his accent distinctly Scottish. “One of Huxley’s nightmares, I imagine. But I’ve some good photographs.” He passed a small camera to Lacan, who took it and peered at it as if he had never seen such an object before. “I need to change,” he went on, pulling the restraining pins from the ragged ski-shirt as he walked over to Richard. “Mr. Bradley, I presume. Of course.” He shook hands.

  His eyes were like ice, a pale grey. Richard couldn’t engage with them. He sank through them. Lytton looked old, his lean features heavily lined. His teeth behind the engaging smile were yellow and bad. But those eyes, the depthless feel to them, that gaze was disorientating. He was shorter than Richard and smelled rank. His ribbed torso was heavily scratched, but very tanned. He exuded strength and certainty. He was very curious about the other man, and slightly apprehensive. “I shan’t be long,” he continued. “I lost my shirt and had to rifle a corpse for this uncomfortable piece of rabbit skin. No sense of style, the Jutes. Not in 800 AD, at any rate. I’ll just freshen up. Then there’s something I’d like to show you. You’re not in any sort of hurry, are you, Mr. Bradley?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Of course you’re not!”

  He smiled again, slapping Richard’s arm in a curiously stiff show of welcome, then stripped off the shirt and his heavy army gear before walking naked (and unconcerned) to the river, there to stretch out in the cold flow, his voice a murmur of pleasure, punctuated only by his irritated shouts as one of the elementals prodded or probed too close to him.

  * * *

  “As I’m sure you’ve been told,” Lytton said later, his words slow, the tone dropping as if always making statements, never questions, “I’m plagued by Huxley’s damned elementals. They must like my blood!”

  He was leading the way through the undergrowth along the side of the cliff. The path began to rise steeply, away from the deep cut of the cave, and they dragged themselves up through wiry trees, stumbling on the mossy boulders that stuck from the ground like broken teeth. The sounds of the camp dropped away, behind and below. The wood was restless, bird life—or perhaps Lytton’s attachments—frantic about them. The twilight played tricks with perception. The sun was brilliant as it sank low, although there was something almost diffuse about the orb, about the clouds reflecting the intense orange light. Stretching away, to the side of him, as Richard climbed, the canopy was a misty sea of shape and silence, a few tall trees probing the heavens, bony, storm-racked limbs spread out above their smaller charges.

  Dressed in faded Levi’s and a rugby shirt, Lytton grunted with effort as he picked his way up the steep and tangled incline. When he stopped for breath, he smiled and patted at the large, leatherbound book below his arm. The covers were new, the pages inside were old and crisped with time. “Have you read much of George Huxley’s journal? Did Lacan instruct you?”

  “A little.”

  “You have a treat in store, Richard. Truly, Huxley was a man of genius—” He broke off sharply, pointing through the trees. “Look! Look there!”

  A sudden flight had signalled the dusk departure of an immense heron from its nest in an elm standard high above the wood. Its throat feathers were blood-red, its back striped with black and grey. It sailed out over Old Stone Hollow and disappeared into the glow of the sun.

  “Magnificent!” Lytton said with admiration. “Do you know what nature of bird you’ve just witnessed, Richard?”

  “A heron. A bloody big one.”

  “A bloody extinct one! It was hunted out of existence by tribes living in what is now the Atlantic basin, west of France and Spain. But that was in the last interglacial, fifteen thousand years ago. Can you imagine, Richard? Fifteen thousand years. And now someone, some thing in this place, has brought the bird with it. A lost legend, a forgotten hero, a creature associated with that hero, and there it is, exquisite in its flight, beautiful, timeless, a brief glimpse of something our world has lost.”

  His voice was still breathless, but his pleasure at this giant heron radiated through the wide smile on his face as he watched its last shadow in the distance.

  Richard said, “Lacan would smack his lips and wonder how it tasted.”

  Lytton laughed and turned away, climbing again. “You’re not wrong there. The man’s a true barbarian.” Then he slapped at the air in front of him. Richard smelled something rotten and felt a brush of icy breeze. “Damned elementals!” the Scot shouted furiously, reaching for a sapling as he hauled onwards. “Do you understand the notion of them, Richard? Do you know what we mean by an elemental?”

  “Something fairy-like?” Richard suggested. His legs were getting tired, but he could see the leading edge of the overhang through the foliage. The climb was almost at an end. Lytton brushed irritably at his left shoulder where, if the light wa
s a certain way, Richard could just discern the small, hunched shape of an elfin-faced creature, lank hair waving. It was riding backwards, staring at him and grinning.

  Lytton had been highly amused by that answer. “Fairy-like! Indeed! But what exactly is a fairy? Have you ever cast your mind around that question, Richard? Something with wings out of a Victorian fancy, perhaps? Not in the least! Then maybe a wee, green guardian of pots of gold? That’s the Irish for you, boundlessly optimistic! But a leprechaun’s no fairy. A fairy is something corrupt, Richard. Something shrivelled and shrunken. Something so old that the flesh of myth has withered from its bones, and the bones of its story dissolved to a thin marrow.” He spoke slowly, his voice almost a growl. “Like the terrible creature which rules them, elementals come from the first of times, the worst of times, the time of the first forests, the first fires, the first language that consisted of more than simple signals. Do you get my drift? The time of first insight, first irrational fear. First nightmares, if you will. Lacan calls them ‘shape-memories,’ from the earliest time of human consciousness. They are all we have left of the savannah, of the great lake cultures around Olduvai, of the long walks out of Africa. But because they are so old, they are tenacious, by God. They have lingered in our minds, as unshakable as our shadows on a bright day. And in this place, this wildwood, they condense and exist as easily as an English rain.”

  Lytton led the way from the tree-line onto a grassy slope leading to the cliff edge. Dusk was deepening and they would be staring into its reddening mask on the horizon. Both men were exhausted with the walking and talking, but Lytton drew a deep breath, his eyes closed, smiling face to the heavens. Richard had been about to respond to the mini-lecture on “elementals” with a question concerning the role of toadstools, but thought better of it.