Herald of the Hidden

by Valentine, Mark

  He had drawn lines around the part of the forest where sightings of strange lights had at times occurred, and superimposed upon this the locations of the otherwise unknown emblems in Bozeat’s heraldic notebook. The result was a narrow, angled plot of land, somewhat prism-like to look at, sited in the east at the point where the forest began to lap at the borders of the next county. It was one of the loneliest parts of the domain, with few tracks shown, and hardly any clearings.

  ‘That’s where we should look,’ Ralph declared.

  **

  We made our way to the edges of Solsey that evening. However placid woodland may look in the sunlight of day, it is always transformed by night. A deeper stillness seems to descend, and there are brittle, echoing sounds that strike at atavistic emotions inside us. That chill sliver of a cry may be no more than a nocturnal bird out hunting: the rustle in the undergrowth will be a woodland creature seeking shelter; things drop from trees in the daylight too; and yet as we stood in a grove at the end of a rough bridlepath, all these were given a keen edge, were intensified so as to play upon our wariness, our sense of trepidation.

  The stark black outline of the trees against the icy November sky drew my gaze. Despite the cold and the sense of foreboding in me, I admired this exquisite tracery: the effect was like the delicately carved fretwork of a Moorish gate or door. To my wandering thoughts, the dark arc of trees could easily be the entranceway to another domain, to a twilit territory. But we began to follow a narrow path, just greyly visible in the gloaming, and the vista vanished from view: the thick, gnarled trunks of the oak, ash and beech around us showed we were entering an ancient part of the woods.

  After we had been walking for several minutes, often stumbling over roots and brushing against brambles, Bozeat muttered, ‘What’s that?’

  We stopped and stared ahead. There was a slow flapping above us. The starlit sky was a crystalline blue-black. For a few moments I could not see what he had noticed. The twisting of the trees, and the curved fronds of the bronze ferns, did have a suggestion of sentience about them, as if these were living creatures suddenly caught turning from flesh to flora, from blood to sap. I had to stare hard to realise that I was surely only seeing chance resemblances, that these were not really the simulacra of animals. They were just contortions of wood and leaf, not ears, jaws, snouts, horns.

  And then I thought I caught sight of what had arrested Bozeat’s attention.

  ‘There it is,’ he exclaimed, in a hoarse whisper.

  Ahead of us the undergrowth and the grove of trees seemed to fall away to reveal a dim hollow. Above this, lights hovered: they were bright, and hard to look at. At first, I just felt a fascination for them, while my mind ran through all the explanations it could surface. They were not from a plane—too low, too near the trees, and there was no engine sound. These were nothing known to astronomy—too vivid, too close to be shooting stars and so on. Nor could they be a remote house—certainly too tall and intense. These ideas raced through me in a quick dismissive stream, until I realised I had no idea what I was staring at, while still clinging to the conviction that an explanation, a simple solution, would present itself to me soon. I even anticipated the wave of amused relief I would feel when the source of the lights became clear. With this in view, I did not mind when Ralph Tyler advanced hurriedly forward, and followed him with a sort of elation in my spirit.

  We came upon the opening in the wood, much closer to where the great lights loomed in mid-air, a burst of white flame against the blackened sky. I had to move my gaze away from them, to look at the space beyond. I blinked, winced, craned my stare again. Shapes were forming in the grey haze of the night. Against my instinct, I looked up once more. Then there came to me the clear realisation that the burning lights that gleamed above us were not tall lamplit windows, not aeroplanes, stars, comets, or even flying saucers. They were eyes. The eyes possessed by gigantic beasts, truly vast in proportions, whose powerful limbs were rippling before us as far as we could see. First one, then, slightly further away, another, and then the dimmer shapes of more in the shadowed distance.

  I heard Ralph Tyler murmuring an incantation, almost as if to himself. But the images before us only seemed to become starker, sharper, and the furnaces of their eyes blazed even more strongly. And all around us was a vast silence, a complete and utter abyss.

  ‘Give me the, the—trickery,’ Ralph demanded urgently of Bozeat.

  I saw the white, stiffened face of our friend, the scholar of heraldry, caught in a stare of ice. Ralph shook his shoulder and repeated his demand.

  There was a hurried fumbling in coat pockets, and the manuscript book was passed to him. Ralph flicked through the pages swiftly, then held it open, peered closely, and began reading in an insistent, terse tone.

  I tore my attention away from the spectacle before us, to look at Ralph.

  The words he recited were not in any tongue I had ever heard. But Ralph kept on repeating them. I had just enough attention to hear that he was slightly changing them each time.

  Still the terrible great eyes blazed at us from above, and still there began to form, in the uncanny light, the outlines of huge limbs, with a hint of curved claws, sharp scales and arrow-headed wings. They were like no creature I had ever encountered, not even in bestiaries or illustrated medieval apocalypses, utterly unearthly, completely remote from any human imagining.

  In the presence of these vast and powerful images, I found I still did futile things. I backed against the silver trunk of a beech tree. I held my hand over my brows, as if to shade my eyes from the searing light. I cast about for a path through the thicket too narrow for the beast to pass, as if it were not obvious that it could crush anything underfoot, and was anyway made of unearthly dimensions, where our limitations were of no consequence.

  At every moment it seemed the forms grew stronger in definition and clarity. But still Ralph Tyler continued his chanting. In the deep silence that had descended upon the forest, his voice was no more than a leaf in a storm, and seemed to be seized and flung away just as swiftly.

  I glanced away from him. I could not bear to see his fierce efforts so futile. And then, at the edge of my seared sight, I thought I saw a different shape begin to glimmer at the heart of the unknown clearing we had discovered. It seemed at first like a column of silver: like the glamour of the moon upon the tall, elegant trunks of beech trees. But it began to gather into itself other spiralling fragments of the forest, golden leaves, delicate pine needles, the scarlet of toadstools, the bronze of the ferns, the mist of purple that lingered in the depths of the brake at dusk. I watched, transfixed, forgetting in the wonder of this new vision the vast forms above. There before me were the lineaments of a human figure arrayed in glory, a radiant form, with all the shimmering, shifting colours of the forest upon him.

  In my wonder, I still dimly heard Ralph’s voice now softly saying the same word, carefully, as if he were uttering a solemn invocation.

  He broke off only once, to say to us:

  ‘Look only at him. Look only at him. It is the Keeper of the East.’

  We both did as he bid us. For moments that seemed to echo on and on, I regarded the shining figure, which seemed to draw strength from our homage, to become clearer, more definitely human in form as we watched. Slowly, the great silence that had descended began to give away to glimmerings of sound—a bird call, a susurrus in the tops of the trees, in the distance the limpid trickle of a stream. I chanced a quick gaze upwards. Receding towards the darkened horizon were an array of golden beacons, with only the dim outlines of forms around them.

  I clutched at a dappled birch sapling for support, and it swayed slightly. Above, the intricate stipples of the tips of its branches were a delicate tapestry of grey and hazy lilac.

  Ralph Tyler closed the herald’s notebook with careful solemnity, and handed it back to Bozeat. The intaglio on his white fingers glinted as he took the volume unsteadily.

  ‘What did you do?’ I asked, still
somewhat dazed, ‘What were you chanting?’

  ‘It was the mottoes. The mottoes noted against the arms in the book. I thought they might be the key. I’d copied them out, but obviously not well enough. I had to check and try again. And I had to keep trying, because they’re in some special language. The exact pronunciation is crucial, but hard to get. Barbarous words . . .’

  And then Ralph’s breath became short, and he had to break off to take in great gulps of the icy night air.

  **

  ‘It’s my guess,’ said Ralph, after we had returned to 14, Bellchamber Tower in a very subdued mood, each preoccupied with his own images, ‘that each of the three, shall we say, mortal keepers in the forest, had a copy of this heraldic notebook, to warn them where the forest’s secrets were, and with a watchword—the mottoes—to call for the Eastern Keeper when he was really needed. What better concealment? Who but specialists would ever look at such a difficult looking, technical work? Presumably those for the North and South Lodge were more carefully handled, but when the last Western Keeper died, it just ended up in the sale with all his other effects. Some attempt at erasure had been made, as Bozeat noticed, but the book itself had survived. You said, Bozeat, that you could just about make out a few details of the supporters drawn in the trickery, though they’d been scored out?’

  ‘Yes—but there were only a few horns, talons, scaled wings . . .’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Ralph, drily. ‘So we noticed out there. And I also think I saw glimpses of those things in the bark of the trees and the shimmer of the leaves when we first went there. It gave me a hint. It’s as if all this part of the forest is imbued with their image. But didn’t you think there was something not quite right in what was left of the drawings?’

  Percy Bozeat thought for a moment, polishing his eyeglass, then shook his head.

  ‘Have you ever heard of the Royal Beasts?’ asked Ralph.

  ‘Of course,’ riposted Bozeat, with some asperity, ‘they are the height of our heraldry. The lion, the unicorn, the white hart, the yale (that’s a kind of bull, you know), the—but, but, what does it matter? The beasts tricked in this notebook weren’t those, I could tell that much, even with the blurred remains of the images. Quite different.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Ralph, quietly. ‘It’s just my point. What your trickery depicted was emphatically not the forms of the Royal Beasts, and you’d found the arms were not those of local magnates either. So what else was in play? Solsey has always had this lonely, curious reputation: great parts of it, especially in the eastern fringes where we were, have been left pretty much untouched, known only by some of the hereditary keepers. But I had not realised the extent of this seclusion. In my researches in the forest records, I noted that where the eastern keeper had authority, hunting was apparently never done; the swanimote, the forest court was never held; and the king’s officers, the verderers and regardants, seem rarely to have visited. And yet there was no sign of an eastern lodge on the map. It didn’t make sense to me. Why have part of the forest untouched, and why have a keeper where you don’t need one?’

  Ralph paused, and lit a tatty scroll of cigarette.

  ‘The reason is that Solsey was never just a royal forest. It had a stranger, shaded purpose too. Because the Keeper of the East wasn’t keeping game. He was in charge of something else, a sort of grand, dæmonic menagerie. A place where the secret lost beasts of England, the great hidden heraldic beasts, were preserved—are preserved. Those things with—what was it you said?—oh, just a few horns, talons, scaled wings. I suspect if we had got any closer, we’d have found they had great roaring maws, or flickering forked tongues, too.’

  ‘Oh, don’t say it,’ said Bozeat feebly.

  ‘No: better not even try to wonder at the names of those secret beasts. In some of our visionary literature, you know, in Milton and Blake and others, there are references to giant forms in the landscape, vast powers. I think they must have heard rumours of Solsey. Here, in the heart of the country, far from any intruder, these forces were once conjured, guarded, and held. Except when sometimes the keeper’s powers have for a while waned, or faltered, unsustained, and the sleeping beasts began to blink, opening wide their great shining eyes . . .’

  Heritage of Fire

  Spirals of ochre-coloured smoke performed ethereal pirouettes above Ralph Tyler’s ragged armchair.

  ‘What are you trying this time?’ I enquired.

  ‘Agrimony and dandelion for all I know,’ replied Ralph, scowling.

  His attempts to substitute herbal tobaccos for the more noxious fumes of his favourite continental brand had not so far met with much success, but he showed commendable perseverance.

  A wooden-cased clock clicked and gave out ten gentle gong-notes.

  ‘Five past,’ I remarked, ‘He should be here soon.’

  Ralph’s venerable timepiece could never be induced to keep pace with the actual hours, but so long as one knew of its diffidence in this respect, this was no real impediment.

  ‘What did you say his name was, again?’

  Ralph handed me a business card.

  ‘James Ethelred. Environment Potential Consultant,’ I recited.

  I frowned.

  ‘Developer,’ explained Ralph briefly.

  There was a dull thud in the hallway caused by Ralph’s defunct door bell. He extinguished his cigarette, which spat little sparks as he did so, and went to admit his visitor. A neatly dressed man, with a trim dark moustache, receding but well-groomed hair, and a slightly plump form, introduced himself, and perched rather reluctantly on Ralph’s second-best armchair.

  ‘I’ll come straight to the point, Tyler. You got my card. We’re involved in converting the shell of Marlestone House—what was left after that fire years ago—into a Heritage Hotel.’

  ‘A what?’ Ralph interrupted.

  ‘More than just a place to stay, it will be a unique opportunity to experience the ancient traditions of the English countryside. We want to actively encourage guests to learn about our history and culture. Exhibitions, lectures, guided tours will all be available, and what better place to achieve the right ambience than an old baronial hall?’

  I had a feeling Mr Ethelred had made this speech before.

  He held up one hand.

  ‘Now, I know your feelings about old places. I’ve heard a little about your exploits at Langborough and on Madberry Hill. You’re an old conservationist. But this is different. We really are trying to do a sympathetic restoration. Everything is being maintained exactly as it once was. Of course, it is important to reassure visitors that this is a genuine ancestral home. We’re even returning the grounds to their former glory. That’s going to be a substantial investment in itself. There’s an ornamental garden not far from the house which is completely overgrown and derelict, but we’re putting in the resources to set it to rights. I really feel we’re achieving an empathy with . . .’

  ‘Quite so,’ interjected Ralph. ‘So why do you need me?’

  ‘Ah, yes. Well, you specialise in spooks and all that, and we seem to be getting something of the sort. I suppose it’s inevitable really that rumours should fly when you start disturbing an old ruin, but I’m getting reports so often that I begin to think there’s something in them. Now, I can’t give you anything definite. Our people have got more to do than hang around sampling the sights. This is a priority project. But—well, one tells me he thinks we’ve got squatters, because he’s seen lights glinting at night where there shouldn’t be any. A surveyor says the acoustics of the place are very strange and swears he heard kind-of whispers. Our natural history adviser reckons there’s bird-song there which is totally alien. And I myself have picked up the sound of footsteps . . . and so have others.’

  Ralph stirred in his armchair, reached for another green-papered weed-taper and, amid a spluttering sound, lit it. James Ethelred recoiled a little.

  ‘Anyway, we’re both very busy, so I’ll give you your brief. What I want is the story
behind this. I don’t mind telling you it won’t worry me unduly if the place is haunted. Adds to the atmosphere a lot. It can all go in the brochure. But firstly, of course, I need to be sure it’s not going to turn into anything unpleasant—if that were possible. Don’t want to frighten people away. And secondly there ought to be a good yarn behind it all. It’s too vague at the moment. So, see what you can turn up. I’m not asking you to invent, of course, Ralph, but naturally you’ll have to hypothesise a bit. Whatever fits the facts. I see you have plenty of other genuine cases to draw on. . . .’

  He indicated the tatty folders filed on a perilously-angled shelf on Ralph’s wall.

  ‘If this works out all right, we won’t forget it. It may be we shall need a folklore consultant and you could be just the man. So, are we together on this?’

  Ralph grinned at his new client through the yellow haze.

  ‘I shall need a full report on the incidents so far.’

  ‘Been done. I’ll send it round.’

  ‘And unlimited access to the site.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘And an advance to cover initial expenses.’

  ‘Of course.’

  With that, the deal was concluded, our visitor departed, and Ralph turned to me.