The Hollowing

by Robert Holdstock

  “I’ll make a rich sauce of your blood if you give me that job…”

  Irritably, Lacan hacked the head off one of the hares. “Then sacrifice some carrots and cloves of garlic, finely, very very finely.”

  “Much better.”

  “I wish them to be practically molecular!”

  “No problem.”

  Richard was told to build a fire in the pit where meat was barbecued. McCarthy accepted the task of thinning the jugged blood. Lytton and Haylock gathered wild herbs and edible mushrooms before settling to a study of artefacts and a further hour’s conversation with Richard about his son’s last years in Shadoxhurst. Lacan fussed and sang, bellowed and criticised, but the morning passed and the “first operation” was declared a success: the hares were slowly braising.

  Richard made only one mistake. Watching Lacan from outside the blue ribbon cordoning off the cooker area from the “uncivilised” part of the Station (Lacan’s little joke) he said, “Of course, the true Celts would never have eaten hare. It would have been sacrilege. Did you know that?”

  Lacan looked up sharply, his eyes wide with surprise, then scowling. He leapt the “cordon bleu” and grabbed Richard by his shirt lapels, glowering down at him.

  “Which madman told you that?”

  “It’s a know fact,” Richard said evenly, trying not to smile. “The hare was a sacred animal … to the true Celts. They worshipped it.”

  Lacan breathed slowly, gaze meeting gaze, then he released Richard and smoothed his shirt. “Well, of course!” he said loudly. “Of course we worshipped it. We worshipped it alive. We worshipped it dead. Best of all, we worshipped it when cooked!” He shook his head despairingly as he returned to the cooking area, muttering, “Foolish man … he knows nothing about worship … he must be going bosky … it happens … perhaps I’ll ignore him … maybe he’ll go away…”

  * * *

  Richard had slept late, his dreams disturbed by thoughts of Alex. After talking to Lytton again, he looked for Helen, and found her at the lake, swimming. “It’s freezing!” she called. “But wonderful. Come on in.”

  He stripped naked and shuddered and shivered into the cold water, finally diving head-first to get the shock over and done with. The lake was crystal clear. Helen trod water, her limbs an unnatural pale hue, but slender and shapely as she slowly cycled. When he surfaced in front of her she was smiling. “You need to lose some weight.”

  “In water this cold I’m glad of the blubber.”

  “Swim with me…”

  She somersaulted in the lake, legs kicking as she dived deep, then surfaced, yards away, striking powerfully toward Wide Water Hollowing and its warning markers. Richard’s best stroke was the crawl and he followed in her wake, soon warm enough to enjoy the cold. When they stopped, bobbing vertically in the deep water, Helen peered downwards. “There’s a castle below us. Can you see?”

  Richard dived, descending as far as he could before the pressure-pain in his ears was intolerable. He saw the walls and weed-covered structure of a stone building a long way down. A mass of sinuous movement in one place resolved itself as eels. Two vaguely human figures seemed to be crouching by one of the ramparts. He was astonished at the clarity of the ruins, at how much light reached them. But they were too far down to explore without proper equipment.

  Breathless, he surfaced again, to see Helen on her back, stroking lazily to the shore.

  When they were dry they sat by the water and pitched stones across the shimmering surface at the haze that marked the hollowing. Richard asked, “What’s come through in your time?”

  Helen shrugged. “Boats, mostly. A selkie, a serpent, but mostly boats. They usually end up on the far shore—I guess they don’t like the look of this one. The most dramatic was a Viking longship, wonderful sail, bizarre creature carved on its prow. It had only two men crewing it, one dressed in white skins and helmeted in gold, the other holding the ends of the sail in his hands, guiding the vessel. We didn’t recognise the legend, and the mythagos vanished into the deepwood as soon as they’d beached.” She pointed further round the lake shore. “The vessel is over there, somewhere. Lytton uses it when he sails round the lake calling for Huxley, which is something he does frequently.” She glanced at Richard, jade-green eyes curious. “What do you make of Lytton?”

  “Scots—obsessive—bad breath—romantic—probably brilliant…” He thought of the uneasiness in the conversation above Old Stone Hollow, the evening before. “He’s angry with Alex. He seems to think the boy is a malignancy, destroying some unseen and subtle structure in the wood. I’m sure he doesn’t mean it.”

  Helen’s laugh was sour. She took her jacket from around her shoulders and shrugged into it, looking hard at Richard. “He does mean it. He’s frightened of what Alex is doing. He does mean it, and you should never let that thought leave you. Don’t trust him. Listen to him, yes. He understands Ryhope Wood better than any of us. He’s the one who called us together in the first place. He knows Huxley, and mythagos, inside out. Yes. But Richard—be careful of him. Watch him.”

  “He wants to get Alex out of the wood. He wants to help him.”

  “He wants Alex out of Huxley—he’ll do anything to achieve that.”

  Richard stared across the blue water. Everything was so quiet, so peaceful, so remote. He had just thought this when, distantly, Arnauld Lacan’s voice roared faintly, another demand, another irritation during the preparing of his brace of hares.

  Helen frowned as she listened. “Something about ‘the first removal of the fat being completed’?” She shared Richard’s grimace. “Thank God all I had to do was cut vegetables.”

  “He’s a good man, is Lacan.”

  “Yes he is. And a good friend.” She was suddenly wistful. “He’ll never find what he’s looking for. There are times when I feel very sad for him.”

  “What is he looking for?”

  Helen looked down, shook her head. “If he didn’t tell you, I shouldn’t talk about it. Sorry. It’s a sort of rule, here. A part of the ritual.”

  “That’s OK. How about you? What are you seeking?”

  “Me? Trickster. As I told you last night. That Ol’ Trickster Coyote. Old Man Fox himself! The haunter of conscience. The first deceiver. The laughing friend, the gloating foe. Trickster. He’s here, I’ll find him. And when I do, I’ll…”

  She smiled, breaking off her flow and tugging at the silver lock of hair that grew from her temple. “I’ll find him,” she repeated. “He and I have something to say to each other.”

  “Everybody’s looking. Everybody’s seeking. Everybody’s dreaming.”

  “That’s why we’re here. You too. Except that, unlike us, your goal is not a mythago.”

  “Yes, I know. I was astonished when you found out about the cricket bat so fast—”

  Again, Helen laughed. “It took a week! McCarthy encountered the shadow of Alex on one of the castles.” Richard remembered Lytton talking about this and said, “Sciamachy?”

  “Something like that. Alex is in difficulties, but he can move through the rootweb. He’s got help. Someone’s helping him. When he appears, it’s literally as a shadow, but someone like McCarthy—and sometimes me—can communicate with him. We ask a question, we get a dreamlike reply. Like talking to someone who’s in a lucid dream? When McCarthy asked the shadow about the fire-dance, it unleashed a storm of emotion. A lot of memories, almost overload. That night was important to your son. More important than perhaps you realise.”

  Richard whispered, “I let him down. I wouldn’t dance. I was embarrassed. And he was so desperate for me to dance.”

  “You wouldn’t dance? Why you old square.” She smiled. “It was more than that. It was the moment when he linked with the heartwood. We all do it, we all get trapped. If there’s a significance in that evening, it’s to do with the dancing figures, the fire, not your cricket bat! We’ll find out eventually. For the moment, only one thing is important.”

  He glanced a
t Helen, then looked more deeply, drawn to her looks, her eyes, and the warmth and strength she offered him. Beads of lake water had formed on the braided locks of dark and silver hair. She breathed softly, watching him, then said, “Do you believe Alex is here? In your heart? Do you believe us? We won’t find him unless you do.”

  “I so much want to. The cricket bat—how else could you have known? Unless you can read my mind.”

  “We can’t read minds. Talk to ghosts, yes, but not read minds.”

  “I do so much want to believe he’s alive. I gave him up so easily after the accident. I gave so much up so easily … But I saw him dead and I buried him. Something came for him, struck him through a mask, took him away from us. When he finally died—oh God, I’ll say it. I’ll say it. When he died I was glad. It was such a relief. Like a depression lifting. I felt free again. I felt there was something to live for again. But that didn’t happen.”

  “Alice drifted away…”

  “And I drifted on. I stopped living. I just started to get old.”

  Helen’s hand was a gentle touch on his shoulder, then she shuffled closer and put her arm around him, surprising him. “Is this OK? Does it bother you?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  She squeezed him harder, grinning at his discomfiture, his reserve, looking hard at his profile, teasing. “Then why are you so stiff?”

  “You can tell that? Without looking? Amazing.”

  “Why are you so tense?” she corrected with a laugh. “Don’t you do this in England? Get close to a friend when you know they’re sad?”

  “Maybe I’ve been thinking of more than friendship—” His face burned as he said the words, wondering where in the name of heaven he’d found the nerve to blurt out such an obvious truth.

  Helen hesitated, then glanced away, thoughtful for a moment, but her arm held him tightly. “That’s OK,” she said suddenly. “Why not? I’m attracted to you too. I was attracted to you the first moment we met, all those weeks ago.”

  “Three days ago, if you don’t mind.”

  “Three days, five weeks—I’ve been in deep. I’ve had longer to think about you than you have about me. You’re a hard man to shake off, Richard Bradley. You feature in my dreams. I like that. And I think Dan will like you too. And it’s OK, before you start getting edgy. He’s not the macho, possessive type.”

  “Not a Jack Daniels and Marlboro man, then?”

  She laughed. “No way. The occasional Southern Comfort and lemonade, maybe. Marijuana, of course, but then who doesn’t? But how about you? I know Alice left you. You still on your own?”

  “A regular bachelor boy. Cliff sang about me and no body but me.”

  “Cliff Richard? He’s too pretty. Mick Jagger, now…”

  “The Stones? With you all the way. The only music I’ll dance to, these days. But I still have a fondness for The Shadows…”

  Helen laughed loudly. “Then, Mr. Bradley, have you come to the right place!”

  * * *

  A horn blast brought everyone running to the river’s edge, through the gates of the compound, and a great cheer went up as two bulky figures appeared among the trees at the top of the slope. They came down through the bone yard, and again the man raised the bone horn to his lips and emitted the deep, sonorous call, laughing as Lacan shouted to him to be silent.

  They came over the bridge and flung their packs to other members of the team, then stripped down to sweat-stained skin suits. They were Finnish mythologists and had been coming home for some weeks, vaguely tracked by McCarthy. Their arrival was sudden and unexpected and a special delight for Lacan, whose Lièvre à la Royale was sumptuously ready to eat. The woman of the new team, Pirkko Sinisalo, had an arrow nick in her right wrist and Elizabeth Haylock led her to the medical tent.

  A few minutes later they came over to meet Richard, Pirkko reeking of antiseptic, her partner, Ilmari Heikonen, holding a half-finished bottle of snapsi, ice-cold and fragrant, which Richard happily tasted. They had been searching for Tuonela and the hero Vainamoinen, but had ended up on the tundra of an early Siberian myth-cycle, fighting for their lives against mammoth hunters.

  As dusk drew close, music started up on an old gramophone, a loud country song, up-tempo and jaunty, made unusual with the voices of Lacan and Helen adding their own accompaniment.

  The hare was served, so tender that it melted from the bones, so tasty that everyone forgave Lacan for his temper and his tantrums, and the jobs he had given them.

  After the hare, and the compliments, and Lacan’s voluminous and voluble acceptance of his culinary genius, there was dancing to Breton jigs and waltzes, supplied by Lacan on a set of ancient bone bagpipes, which he played with immense vigour and much foot-stomping, and Ilmari on a violin. Richard was quietly pleased that Helen danced with him early on, taking him through the steps of the country dances that, familiar in tune, he had only ever seen, never tried. The coals from the fire, plus dry wood, had been used to create a bonfire in the middle of the clearing, and the occupants of Old Stone Hollow wheeled and skipped around the flames, voices adding hysterically to the singing and guitars from the scratchy records.

  “What, no cricket bat?” Helen called, as she waltzed with Lytton, who kept roaring out words of song in such a broad Scots accent that it sounded like a battle-cry. Haylock’s black hair flowed around her like a veil as she and Wakeman pirouetted, the man holding himself rigidly upright, like a robot, his movements sudden and jerky. Richard and Pirkko, dressed only in the body webs against the heat of the fire, performed a sort of sedate Regency to the slower Breton rhythms. Pirkko sweated, kept saying things to Richard which he couldn’t hear, pressed close to him and laughed familiarly. He concentrated on Lacan and McCarthy, tussling with each other as they danced awkwardly, the small Irishman trying to control the monstrous Frenchman as they twirled together, at arm’s length, scowling and insulting, stumbling and laughing.

  The dancing stopped abruptly, almost shockingly. Ilmari Heikonen was screaming at them to be quiet. He was by the gates through the palisade, pale and frightened, illuminated by the fire.

  “Turn the music off!” he shouted, and the strains of the Celtic dance ended suddenly, leaving an eerie silence broken only by the crackle of burning wood and Heikonen’s words. “There’s something coming towards us. Out by the Sanctuary. It’s coming fast, through the roots…”

  Richard had never seen such activity. Within moments everyone was jacketed up, swinging cameras and monitors onto their backs and running to the river. Helen flung Richard’s heavy jacket to him, and he struggled into it, following, confused, behind the others, over the bridge and up the dark incline towards the Sanctuary, stumbling as he went, aware of the torchlight ahead.

  Suddenly the wood was very silent. Lights flashed in the dark, spread in a wide arc. Helen was breathing hard, leaning against a tree. Suddenly she shouted, “He’s here!”

  At once two figures slammed themselves against trees, hands outstretched, scraping against the bark. Richard noticed Helen rubbing the blackened, coarse skin on the back of her own hand. He smelled blood.

  “It’s rising. Concentrating,” came McCarthy’s voice.

  Then Helen’s, “It’s the boy. He’s hesitating. He knows we’re here…”

  “It’s your son,” she whispered a moment later. “He’s aware of you. He’s probing for you. Quickly … we might get a chance to see him.” She dragged Richard forward.

  Lacan bellowed: “He’s shifted through the web … to the right, forty degrees … He’s in the Sanctuary!”

  Helen changed direction, running between grey stones and carved columns, following the flash and flicker of torches ahead. Bulky shapes crossed in the light, or loomed up and scrambled away, each trying to find a position, to feel the flow of whatever energy Alex was projecting. Their voices merged and mingled.

  “Here!”

  And then a flight of birds and a wild crashing through crisp undergrowth.

  “He’s risin
g again!”

  “But where? Where?”

  “He’s close! Who’s got his shadow? McCarthy?”

  “I’m with him. He’s stretched thin—he’s searching very hard. I can see his trail—he’s frightened.”

  All around him Richard could hear movement among the trees and the ruins, but suddenly he felt cold, isolated, standing with his back to an oak, facing the sombre shadows of a wood whose outline was broken, high above, by a fragmentary moonlight.

  And then someone called him “daddy.”

  The voice had seemed to come from the edge of the world, but had shocked him. It was a boy’s voice, a whisper only, not recognisable, yet powerful. A single word, a dream word, and he felt weak and leaned heavily back, staring at darkness.

  It started to rain, warm and sticky. The tree against which he was leaning began to ooze and he pulled away, shocked by the unpleasant sensation. The whole glade rustled and trembled as the sap squeezed from the leaves. The atmosphere became heady, heavy, quite stifling, and the air pressure built until his eardrums began to hurt.

  From the corner of his eye he saw a camera flashbulb triggered, a brief glare. The air was sucked slowly from his lungs so that he gasped.

  An immense and ghostly face rose suddenly from the dark ground, a grey luminosity in the night, a half-glimpsed image of eyes and nose, a flop of hair, a mouth that worked silently, the gigantic visage of a boy thrusting up into the glade. As it rose, so it dispersed, fragmenting at the edge, but re-forming and leaning towards Richard, who backed again into the weeping tree. The spectre’s eyes were wide, and in the glowing grey shape he could see what looked like tears. The face rose further and shoulders and arms appeared. A hand swept through him, tenuous fingers seeking to touch him. The figure began to enlarge then, spreading thinly through the trees, expanding unnaturally, then silently bursting, like a flock of white birds scattering in sudden alarm.