In such circumstances, scientific curiosity rather than personal survival overtook him. True, it was an unhappy way to end his days . . .
Yet he told himself, at least I shall have the rare benefit of observing my own death, which should be interesting to say the least.
Moments later, his chest already beginning to cause him pain as he realized he could not involuntarily hold his breath for ever, a new thought occurred to him.
Ah! he reasoned. I spy another opportunity. Most certainly death is of interest, but I cannot say I am enjoying the process of drowning. Let me therefore work out how to swim from first principles. Now . . .
He might well have done so there and then – though not in time to save his life, seconds only remaining – when, hitting the bottom of the lake, his eardrums hurting, his lungs feeling as they were about to explode, his mind beginning to spin, he found himself staring into the eyes and then mouth of a creature of the deep, the kind of which nightmares are made.
Its eyes were a luminescent yellow, its mouth set in a gaping grin of welcome and its teeth sharp, long and rather evilly curved.
Reason deserted him, replaced by fear. All interest in the study of his own death gave way at last to the instinct for survival. The fish he had fallen upon was a pike. As it swished its tail and wiggled its spiked dorsal fin Stort’s feet sought the lake floor, found purchase and he launched himself upward like a shooting star. So hard did he push that he shot straight to the surface, and upward a good way after that, before landing back on the surface with a splash.
Even as he did so he realized that, if he was not to sink back into the welcoming mouth of the pike, he had indeed better learn to swim, and fast. He therefore thrashed his arms in the water like the wheels of a cart, and pushed his legs back and forth like the pistons of a steam train. It was a cumbersome manoeuvre but it worked.
He moved through the water with remarkable speed, continuing until his strength began to fail. As he weakened, he discovered he was still as afloat as before, yet quite free of that difficulty of movement he had suffered when he still possessed his buoyancy aids.
In short, Stort had taught himself to swim!
Euphoria set in and he gadded about the surface for quite a time until he realized two things: first, that the evening had become night and he was utterly lost, and second that he had lost his combinations and all else and was now in a state of nature.
It was then that he heard his friends frantically shouting his name, and shortly after, the water carrying the sound all too clearly, he heard raised voices and suspected that Brief and Pike were angry with him.
That, and his desire not to be discovered naked, made him turn tail and swim as quietly as he could in the opposite direction. Matters, he trusted, could be sorted out in the morning. And, anyway, the wind was with him and it seemed the current too, for he felt himself being carried along without much effort.
However progress to the shore – any shore – proved slow, and he gradually became unpleasantly aware that a luminous shadow was swimming along just beneath him. He put his head under the water and saw the clear outline of what seemed a fish, but a monstrous one, and not the one he had seen before, which was a tiddler by comparison. This was its father, or possibly grandfather, and it looked vast and terrifying.
When his fears were realized and he felt the clamp of the new predator’s teeth on his right calf, he let out a terrible cry and tried to pull his leg free. But the fish sank his teeth in deeper, and Stort felt himself beginning to be pulled under the water. Reason, logic and even curiosity once more gave way to blind panic.
He reached down to rid himself of the fish, if he could, felt the thick waterlogged trunk of a tree, and realized that what had seemed to be teeth were but branches and twigs.
Strangely a new and worse panic immediately set in, as if, though this monster fish was but a chimera, a true monster of the deep, disturbed by the commotion, might now lazily emerge from the darkness below and swallow him whole.
Kicking free of the tree, he threshed on through the water until his knees and then his hands and finally his chest hit mud and gravel. Despite the sharpness of the stones he crawled ashore, a cold and broken shadow of what he had been but an hour or two before.
There he lay, beached, like a dying whale, gasping and utterly spent.
56
EPIPHANY
When Stort finally found the energy to restore himself to full consciousness, rather hoping that what had happened was only a bad dream from which he might awaken to find himself somewhere comfortable, warm and dry, he understood at once the harsh reality of his situation.
He was very cold, very lost and very alone.
He struggled upright and shouted out across the dark waters of the lake, which now shone coldly under the risen moon, ‘Help! I . . . I . . . I’m-m-m-m . . . here! Help!’
No one heard him and so no answer came.
He knew he needed to move and find warmth, something to wear and shelter as quickly as he could, so he decided to make his way along the shore. The gravel underfoot was sharp and the mud squelched between his toes like icy worms.
The exercise brought feeling back to his limbs and torso, and with it came a heightened sense of the bitter cold and the reminder that he had lost his underwear. But Stort was a hydden whose natural curiosity and engagement with all about him and eager interest in the challenge of a new idea meant that he was never long downhearted or much affected by personal discomfort.
So it was that as he roamed in the dark in a state of nudity it occurred to him that it was impossible for his combinations to have removed themselves from his body of their own accord. Impossible but intriguing as an idea, so much so that he paused for a few moments and he made a mental note that, should he survive the night, he might try and design and build some mechanical combinations which would have the power to divest themselves of their owner, then launder, iron and fold themselves and put themselves away until they were needed again.
But then, finding his thighs shivering and his teeth chattering, he muttered, ‘N . . . n . . . not one of my better ideas,’ and turned his attention instead to the mystery of where they now were, so that he might quickly put them on again.
He knew for certain he had not removed them, and he doubted that the fishes of the deep had done so either, for they would have removed some of his flesh at the same time and an earlier examination had shown that he was unwounded and all his parts present and correct.
He therefore retraced his steps and scrabbled about the shoreline looking for the lost apparel, certain it must be somewhere nearby and gratified there was enough light from stars and moon to see, if only murkily.
What he found were various items of rubbish cast up on the shore, which together presented him with a deepening puzzle that put into him a growing sense of deep unease. A tiny cola bottle, a minute and soggy box of matches, a cracked ballpoint pen such as dwarves might use, and then a plastic yellow hard hat of the kind that humans use on building sites, which looked a lot smaller than the ones he had on occasion found discarded there.
Except there was something very odd about it, which put his mind into a spin. Knowing that body heat is lost most rapidly through the head, he casually tried the hard hat on and was surprised to find that far from it being too big it fitted perfectly. He kept it on, some covering being better than none, and continued his perambulation as a hard-hatted nocturnal naturist, striving as he went to put to the back of his mind the horrible thought that was now right at the front of it.
‘No!’ he kept muttering. ‘Absolutely not! No, no, and no again!’
His right foot connected with something soft, clammy and familiar. He sank to the ground, happy again. He had found his missing combinations.
‘Bad!’ he said, addressing them as if they were animate and capable of thought, ‘Very bad of you to sneak off like that.’
He stood, held them up in the moonlight, and saw to his regret that they were in tatter
s and unwearable, as if ripped apart by a monster. Unhappily, like everything else around him, they too seemed to have shrunk to half their size.
No mortal alive was more wedded to the pursuit of truth and a desire for learning and understanding than Bedwyn Stort. But what he now had to confront was a truth beyond imagining, and a horrible one too: if his combinations were half the size they had been but an hour or two before, he needed to ask the reason why.
He knelt upon the ground again, spread them out and reassembled them, so that he could see which parts were missing.
Nothing was missing. They were in tatters but complete.
He stood up again and threw his luckless combinations back into the lake, thinking that if he could not see them he at least would not have to think about them.
But they fell in such a way that they ballooned up on the surface and the fickle breeze shifted, billowed into them, and set them on a course back across the lake like a ghost ship in the night.
Stort realized that there were only two conclusions, both impossible, to be drawn from what he had so far seen. Either his combinations and the other objects he had come across had shrunk . . . or . . .
‘No, it cannot be!’
. . . or he had grown.
He frantically retraced the previous evening’s events in his mind, searching for clues as to what had happened.
It took only moments to get to the heart of the matter: what he had done was to swim out of the henge specifically on its north-east side, which all students of henges knew very well could be, in certain circumstances, its portal to the human world. But that ancient art of travelling had been lost to Englalond for many centuries.
Was it possible that he had rediscovered it by accident and in doing so had unwittingly morphed into something bigger than he was before?
‘No, no! Too horrible!’
Stort began walking in ever-increasing circles, as if in search of his former self.
He then retraced his steps to find the matchbox and the cola bottle. Compared with his hand they were indeed half the size they ought to be, and therefore confirmed the possibility that there had been a relative change in his own size.
Still unwilling to be convinced by this evidence, he rushed hither and thither on the lonely shore, in search of absolute proof. The means was unfortunately readily available.
The area was prone to flooding, so the humans had erected a white post a yard or two out into the water on which gradations marked in feet and inches had been placed to show changes in the level of the lake.
The moon was bright, the gradations clearly visible.
Stort stared at the post in horror, reluctant to put his theory to the test. Eventually, he waded into the water and stood next to the measuring post.
The post was eight feet high – it clearly said so.
His head reached up to the six-foot mark, leaving only two feet above.
He peered more closely at the gradations, but there was no doubt, for they were clearly marked in the imperial measure humans used and that the hydden themselves had adopted a century before.
‘I have grown in the course of my passage across the lake and become . . . become . . .’
He could not easily bring himself to say what he had become, but he finally did so.
‘I have become a human being!’
This appalling realization so shocked him that he had to clutch hold of the post itself for support, as he cried out in a strangled way, ‘This is a fate worse than death! I, Stort, a hydden through and through, am now a monstrous human being. That means Bedwyn Stort as he was known is no more.’
It was at this moment of ghastly realization that he saw advancing towards him along the shore a ghostly apparition about his own size.
It was, or seemed to be, in female form and it – she – was not messing about. No, she was advancing upon the innocent and naked Stort at a considerable speed of knots.
‘I shall not yield to her!’ he cried out and, turning from the same apparition, began to run back the way he had come.
He ran all the faster when he heard the unmistakable sound of her subtle female feet chasing after him across the gravel and mud, and then yet faster behind him, until she reached out to touch him, even caress him, and his terror nearly froze him to the spot.
All he could do was turn to face her as she, helped by a following wind, reached her arms and legs around him, blocking out the moon and stars with her vast and confusing body, which left him breathless before tumbling him backwards as if falling to an inevitable doom.
Bang!
He hit the muddy gravel, flailed at her strange clinging form and felt himself beginning to asphyxiate for the second time that night until, his head breaking free of her clammy hair, he saw what she truly was: a large square section of abandoned bubble-wrap adorned with sticky tape which cleaved to him with annoying tenacity.
‘Ah! I am mistaken,’ he said with relief, his natural optimism returning at once to turn this disaster into success. ‘This is not some rampant female after all, but a life saver! This excellent human-made material will keep me warm and help me survive the night!’
He gratefully draped it around himself and retreated up the hostile shore to hunker down in the grass and gorse on higher ground. Thus insulated, Stort began to get warm again. A mood of mystical contentment came over him.
He breathed deeply, and began to meditate on the meaning of life and of what it was now to be a human being, and to have once been a hydden and much else.
It was now that Bedwyn Stort, inventor and scrivener, began a journey into his own mind and heart which resulted in the greatest epiphany of his relatively short life.
He saw that there was no difference between a human and a hydden except what the mind itself – that mischievous, uncontrollable thing mortals spend their life being deluded by . . .
‘Illusion is all,’ he told himself. ‘I am most of all what I think I am. I am human, I am hydden, I am both, and I am neither.’
How long these astonishing insights occupied his mind he had no idea. The moon certainly carried on its progress across the sky during that time of discovery, and the stars shifted too.
He felt the awe of one who knows that, though he is as vulnerable and friendless as he has ever been, yet his solitary tribulations are as nothing compared with the firmament of stars and moon and planets above, which he looked at with new wonder, all feeling of cold now leaving him and in its place occurring one of warmth and oneness.
He saw the risen moon as if it were a friend.
He felt the rough, hard gravel of the Earth beneath his feet as though it were his mother.
He felt the wind as something wholesome and cleansing; and the distant sounds of the world beyond as something to love.
He saw the dawn reflected in a growing cloud and that everything was One and therefore to be seen in everything else.
It was then that he realized that using the henges as portals betwixt and between the human and hydden worlds – which he would need to do again if he was to get back to being a hydden – was not as hard as it seemed. It was all a matter of using the natural energies of a henge to make a shift in relative perception. But whether he would recover this insight in the light of a new day was a matter of some doubt.
His work for the night was done and so he fell asleep, cocooned still in bubble-wrap.
Soon after, as dawn came and the wind brought its mists around him and drifting out across the lake, there came clip-clopping along the shore the White Horse and its rider, who looked down at Bedwyn Stort and smiled.
For once Imbolc wore no guise.
She was very old now and even the soft dawn light did not make her seem less so. Perhaps even more.
The horse dropped to its knees that she might more easily dismount. She walked with pain, the horse rising when she was ready so that it could now walk at her side and she grasp its reins for support. Her feet were swollen and her fingers bent. Her teeth were almost gone, he
r hair thin, her face lined and lived-in.
Yet, seeing Stort all huddled up, his eyes closed, his mouth a little open, his face showing the contentment of a difficult problem solved, she smiled at him and her face lit up, all her tiredness and pain momentarily gone.
She kissed him so tenderly that he stirred, as if Love itself had come visiting and he had known it, though asleep, and he murmured words that for a few moments held no form but that of pure happiness.
The White Horse reared, suddenly impatient to be gone.
It dropped to its knees to make it easier for the Peace-Weaver to climb on its back once more. Then rider and horse turned away and raced on and were lost in the mists of the dawning sky.
57
NIGHTMARE
After her flawed escape from the Fyrd, which had left her alone in the tunnels without food, light or adequate clothing, Katherine’s night had been even more fearful and isolated than Stort’s had been.
That she was being followed was certain and that it was a tomter seemed likely. Its rank odour and terrifying speed and agility as it ran around her grunting and jumping up on the walls, sometimes so close to her face she could feel its hot breath, seemed to confirm it. It was able to navigate in the dark and was playing with her as a cat does with a mouse.
Until a more sinister trend emerged.
The only way she could move was by running her feet along the tunnel floor and her hands on its wall. Since the tomter did not immediately attack her and if anything seemed calmer when she moved, she did so as best she could, hoping to find light and a way to get away.
In this way she had reached a spot in the tunnel onto which street light filtered from far above and she was finally able to see the beast.
Hyddenworld: Spring Bk. 1 (Hyddenworld Quartet 1) Page 27