The Hollowing

by Robert Holdstock

  There had been a skirmish. Helen traced the slash-marks in the trunk of one of the trees, and pointed out the furrows in the damp earth near the river, where someone had slipped or been dragged. And when we searched the area around the rock, I found a shallow grave, its head marked with a crude cross.

  Without a word, Helen scooped the dry earth away, and exposed the contorted face of a man, his skin greening fast, his teeth now brown and fragile. He had been pistol-shot through the left brow. By uncovering part of his torso, a rustling metal breastplate was revealed, and a coloured linen shirt. The creature looked just like one of Cromwell’s Ironsides, a trooper from the Civil War in England.

  I covered the corpse, remembering the boxed set of model Royalists and Roundheads that I’d bought for Alex one Christmas, forty soldiers on either side. We had re-enacted the battle of Edgehill on the dining table. Somehow, as is the way with such things, a small patrol of plastic American GIs entered on the side of the Parliamentarians, and Alex had won the skirmish.

  Many legends, many heroes, came out of those bitter years of Civil War in the sixteen hundreds. There were as many heroes from Cromwell’s army as there were from the more romantic Royalists, but Alex had always been fascinated by the rigour of the commoners’ army, and less romanced by the swashbuckling reputation of the King’s Own Men.

  Whatever this unfortunate soldier had done, Lytton had dispatched him dispassionately.

  Alex was everywhere, in the high hills, with its earthworks, over which we toiled during that first day’s journey, in the crumbling fortresses that peered greyly through the matted greenwood, in the falls of water with their huge stone guardians, in the rattling chariots and steaming horses, colourful riders full-cloaked and armed, that broke noisily across our path, clattering or galloping along their own roads, too busy in the pursuit of adventure to stop and hail travellers from another time. In all of these things I recognised a reflection of the land around Shadoxhurst, of Alex’s dream-castles, created from fairy tale and our family explorations, on holiday, of the wonderful Norman fortresses along the border between Wales and England. Alex had always seen faces in rocks, or bodies in the hills—it was a game he had played, fitting features to the vision, a sleeping giant here, a witch petrified in limestone there.

  The land beyond the gully pulsed with that life. Each hill hid a giant, whose movement was reflected in cloud shadow. Each woodland stirred as creatures rode through the hollow trunks, inhabiting a world out of sight behind the bark. All rocks watched us with eyes behind the cracks and holes formed from frost and rain and water. For Helen, the experience was frightening. She was continually apprehensive, edgy, sometimes deeply fearful. For me, there was a strange comfort. At least, there was little fear from the land itself—it was Alex.

  It’s so hard to describe, but I felt, for a while at least, that Alex was guiding me. He filled my dreams, but I would have expected that. He was a strong presence in my life again, perhaps I could say in my heart. I seemed to smell him—socks and stale sports gear, the odour that had pervaded his room—and to hear him too, a clatter of activity, running through empty rooms with new model planes, or plastic knights, singing at the top of his voice. All this in a claustrophobic wood, where the only real sound of any permanence was water, the languages of birds, and the murmuring, barking, chittering signals of deer, fox, and weasel.

  For the few days in Old Stone Hollow, Alex had been a sadly remembered loss, talked about by madmen in a mad world into which I had gone willingly, and which I kept at bay, as one always strives to keep the incomprehensible at bay. Not even the encounter near the Sanctuary had fully impinged upon me, although the feeling of Alex calling to me had been a terrible and saddening moment in the dream. At that time I was fascinated by Helen, and I will write here that I miss her, now, more than I can express. Like Alex, she continues to haunt my dreams, but I suppose it’s too late. In Old Stone Hollow something happened to me, something fast, something of which I had had no previous experience. I can’t use a word like love. I came to love Alice, after we had married because we had feared breaking the relationship that had existed for so long. I came to not love her. I probably never felt more than affection for her. I simply don’t know. But when Helen came to me, that night in Shadoxhurst, and when she emerged again from the wildwood, wild and naked, wild and swimming, my God, I had such feelings for her, sexual, yes, but more than that: I felt strong in her presence, I felt vibrant with her.

  And she, too, was not backward in coming forward about her attraction to me. Dear God, I must have seemed so fumblingly shy. After Alice walked out on me I had only two, tentative, terrible relationships with women. I must have been such a bitter man, such a detached man, not a lover to linger with. Those years in London are like a bad dream. A form of limbo. Suddenly there was Helen, an American Indian (not pure blood, I think she said) who reminded me of Cher from the pop duo Sonny and Cher, who was attractive to look at, whose presence excited me—such a good feeling!—who at first seemed abrasive towards me, but who was fond of me and let me feel that fondness. I thought Alex dead. I didn’t believe in life after death. Helen was a stronger need than Alex, even in this unnatural realm where I should have known that the impossible might be happening, that the lad might truly be alive.

  And then we passed beyond the gully, and it was like living inside Alex’s skin. Like being in my private room, aware that my son was behind me, watching my every move, hearing my every sigh, my every word, and gripping my shoulder, urging me forward. The presence of Alex was so powerful that he came back to me. I began to flounder, to cry, to need the boy so much. And Helen, in those first hours of our journey, comforted me greatly. She seemed to understand what was happening. “My God, we’re going to find him,” she said, and for the first time I was not chasing a dream, for the first time it was not a photograph of Alex that was being talked about, but the real boy, the living boy. He was here. He was alive. And he was close.

  Helen said that previous explorations of this part of young Alex Bradley’s mental landscape had led to confusion, to circularity, to unwitting, unwilling return to base. But now Helen and I, following Lytton and McCarthy, entered more deeply than anyone before, save the sciamach, McCarthy, whose shadow had flowed with the clouds and wild beasts, to reach as far as the castle, although not to the cathedral itself, where Alex was hiding.

  I began to have such hope … and yet though I felt comfortable in this place of family memory, the darker products of Alex’s imagination also populated the confused and entwining landscape, and on the second night of our journey we encountered two of the more threatening of the boy’s mythagos.

  Lytton and McCarthy had marked their route well, and with more than tobacco ash; they left chalk arrows, and on this occasion a short note, which Richard discovered, rolled inside a tube of bark and marked, where it was hidden, by a cross. It was hard to read, because it had been written in such haste, but Helen managed to decipher it by firelight.

  You are entering a part of Alex that has been influenced by Conan Doyle. This is the Lost World, even though it is not located at the top of a plateau. Last night our camp here was attacked by a small, ferocious reptile, the size of a child, with murderously sharp teeth, a velociraptor, we believe they’re called, like a small version of a tyrannosaur. There were four of them and they reacted satisfyingly to fire. Since memory of such creatures cannot exist within the human unconscious, these are creations from his own learning.

  An ursine of immense proportion, a form of cave bear, has its den close by. It will attack if provoked. Don’t underestimate its speed. McCarthy did, and only just escaped. It runs faster than a hound, but fortunately is reluctant to climb trees. I am fascinated by this mythago-genesis. It defies Huxley’s understanding and account of the process, which is that a mythago is a remembered hero, a hope figure, or a place of aspiration, such as a castle, or a cathedral … unless, of course, such beasts are part of Alex’s private hope, but I cannot work out the me
chanism. Be on guard, and hasten to find us. Alex’s castle is close. Once there I can give you two days to catch up with us before the final strike for the cathedral. There is something moving between our parties, however: a shapechanger. McCarthy senses it through the shadows. We are being hunted. Take special care.

  “Hunted? Could he mean the Jack?” Richard asked as Helen finished the note.

  “Of course he means the Jack,” she said, scanning the scrawled words again. “It’s got ahead of us. Damn!”

  She was agitated and irritable and Richard kept both his curiosity and apprehension concerning the giant ursine to himself. They were in a place of massive trees, with wide spaces below the heavy canopy, a hard encampment to defend. Lytton had made a windbreak of dead wood in the overhang formed by a low bough. The river flowed on the other side of a raised bank.

  During the early evening, the creature moved cumbersomely from its den, among the rocks on the high ground behind the encampment, and padded down to the river. Breathless, Richard watched it from cover, hoping that Helen, who was at the water’s edge, washing, would hear it coming. The beast was familiar, its body bearlike if huge, its long muzzle thrown up into fleshy ridges. Overlapping canines pressed outside its mouth. Its shoulders were covered with a thick shawl of spiked, black hair, on a body that was otherwise grey and brown.

  Close to where Richard crouched in total silence, waiting his moment to warn Helen, it rose onto its hindlegs and browsed at the foliage twenty feet above the ground, its stomach rumbling loudly, its breath a series of muffled snorts. When it dropped to all fours again, it hesitated half-way down, front paws with spreading claws held expectantly, the whole beast hunched as if listening.

  When it moved on to the river, Richard followed it, spear held firmly. He wished sincerely, at that moment, for Lytton’s pistol. There was no sign of Helen by the flowing water. The cave bear approached the tree-fringed river and drank.

  There was a furtive movement opposite and it reared up to its full height, arms extended. The wood was suddenly full of chattering and three sleek, lizard shapes dropped from the overhanging branches onto the huge beast. The bear screamed in an oddly human way and turned, slashing at the reptiles. One of the wide-eyed lizards had its teeth in the bear’s neck. One hung onto the black shawl with tiny hands, slashing with a blade-like hind claw at the ursine’s eye. The third was kicking at its bulging and exposed paunch, trying to rip through the hide with its glinting knife. The whole attack held a fascination for Richard, probably because of the thought that these were living dinosaurs, engaged in the hunt: he eased down the bank, crouching in cover to watch the kill. Absorbed by the bloody mayhem by the river, he failed to notice the narrow, grinning face that was staring at him, until the reptile chattered suddenly and dropped toward him, killing jaws open.

  He cried out as the sleek body swung down, ducking away from the claws that flashed before his eyes, narrowly missing him; the creature’s whip-like tail struck him across the face. A second later, a bloody iron point erupted from the wide jaws of the creature and the dinosaur wriggled, gurgled, and finally went limp. Behind it stood Helen, lowering her spear before working the point out of the skull.

  “You should pay more attention!” she said angrily to Richard. “This vicious little bastard had been watching you for over a minute.”

  Richard watched as the hind claws flexed in the death throes, six inches of razor-sharp curved horn. “Thanks. That’s one down; only three to go—”

  By the river, the ursine had broken the back of one of the rapacious reptiles. It used the limp body to thrash at the others.

  Then, unexpectedly, a fifth reptile appeared, running like a sleek bird along the river bank, nervous, jerky, its long tail horizontal until it stopped, at which point the tail undulated stiffly. It glanced at the humans and uttered a croaking taunt, then ran to join its kin. Oddly, the two dinosaurs had detached themselves from the bloody fur of the giant mammal, leaving it to lumber away, still roaring with pain. They were spitting and tail-flexing at the newcomer. Richard sensed their panic, as they circled on the spot, watching an animal that was identical to them, but which they clearly did not recognise. The bear appeared suddenly close to Richard, but it ran heavily through the trees toward its den, shaking its massive head to alleviate pain, spraying blood to right and left.

  By the river, the fifth reptile rapidly grew and changed its shape, and as the two killers turned to flee it hunted them down, so fast that its actions were a blur. It bit through each neck, severing the head, then stood on its hindlegs, the corpses in its hands as it tore and nibbled at the muscle and tissue of the bloody necks.

  It was ten feet tall. There was a human quality to its face and limbs, though the tail, held almost vertically, quivered and flexed at the tip. It was a lurid red on its belly, bright yellow and green on face and back, the colours of the Jack that had been born in the hornbeam glade.

  As it ate, it croaked a challenge to the woods, certainly intended for the human observers.

  Richard withdrew discreetly, following Helen who had fled the location long seconds before. A last glance at the river afforded him the glimpse of a man, shaggy-haired and clothed in coloured rags, standing by the water watching the wood, the dead dinosaurs held easily in his hands.

  “Why didn’t he take us? The Jack—why is he taunting us?”

  Helen had rolled up her sleeping things and filled her pack, then squatted down behind it, an arrow nocked to her bow, her iron-bladed spear to hand. “I don’t know. Part of its nature would be my uneducated guess. We can’t move until dawn; in the meantime let’s defend ourselves as best we can.”

  * * *

  In the event, the night passed swiftly, with only the grumbling roar of the wounded bear, high in the rocks, disturbing the snatched sleep of whichever one of them was not on watch. With first light they followed Lytton, cautious and apprehensive, but nothing was waiting for them, although Richard could not shake off the feeling of their tracks being dogged quietly. It was an understandable anxiety, he imagined.

  * * *

  Helen’s apprehension did not lighten. On the third evening they heard the sound of fife and drum coming from a clearing in the wood, and she skirted widely, anticipating danger. Richard crept close to the small fire and saw the three tunicked soldiers, seated in the fire’s glow, one of them practising the thin flute, a second drumming happily on his side drum, the third smoking a long, clay pipe. They were British soldiers of the eighteenth century, redcoats, and in Alex’s mind would probably have been associated, from the Grimm brothers’ tales, with giant dogs whose eyes were as wide as saucers. Indeed, the baying of a hound sounded later, but by that time they were ensconced inside the walls of an old tavern, huddled in the canvas tent as the night’s dew formed. Empty oak barrels, stacked against one wall, were a tease to Richard’s appetite for a pint or two of strong beer.

  For warmth they slept in the same roll of blanket. They had come to this arrangement without really addressing it. Although intimate, in its way, it was also too practical for either embarrassment or exploitation. In the morning, Helen’s arms were round Richard, her breath soft in his ear, the flop of silver hair tickling his nose. When he stirred, stiff and damp with dew, she murmured softly and tugged him back. “This is too comfortable,” she said. “Let’s have a few more minutes.”

  This welcome lie-in was rudely interrupted moments later when the bushes outside the ruined tavern were crushed violently and a tall shape peered over the wall, startling them. Against the brightening sky it was hard to see detail save that the figure was a man, a tall, lean man of huge height, carrying two staffs. He peered at the tent quizzically for a few seconds, then spoke in a deep voice, guttural words whose intonation suggested a question. He repeated the query, frowning at Richard’s silence. Again he spoke, a single word, “Helpen!”

  Richard called up to this fairy-tale figure, “We don’t need help. Thank you for offering.”

  He laughed h
uskily, then reached over the wall and with a hand the size of an armchair picked up one of the tuns, shaking it then discarding it with a sigh. A moment later he withdrew.

  From the doorway Richard watched his unsteady passage through the trees, his short cloak ragged, his breeches tied with leather in the Saxon way, his face grey with a bristling beard.

  “What the hell is he?” Helen whispered.

  “A Long Man,” Richard said, and there was little else to add. That the visitor was a Long Man was obvious: he was the living reflection of the chalk figures that could be found on the English downlands, and whose origins and identities and functions remained a mystery.

  Just before he was out of sight, the Long Man turned and called again, pushing aside the foliage with one of the staffs, bending the high branch easily. When Richard shook his head he shrugged, then turned and reached out his arms, a tall pole in each hand, an absolute image now of the Long Man of Wilmington, in Sussex. He stepped forward and faded, both poles following him into obscurity.

  Behind Richard, Helen gasped and laughed at the same time. “He carries his own hollowing!” she said. “We should have made friends with him … he could have saved us hours!”

  * * *

  A distant rumble, a freshening breeze, told of the storm approaching. They had set off from the ruins, anxious to make the rendezvous with Lytton, but had gone no more than half a mile when the thunder came closer, and the sky darkened to such an extent that they lost the track below the canopy in the gloom and the constant, wind-whipped motion of the undergrowth. When the first rain began to trickle through the foliage, Helen led the way swiftly back to the tavern. They re-erected the tent and crouched in misery as the heavens opened and the downpour began.