Mythago Wood

by Robert Holdstock

  He did show me a written entry in the manor’s accounts for 1536, or 37, it was not clear which. This was before his family’s time, and he showed me the entry more out of pride at its allusion to King Henry the Eighth than for the reference to Ryhope Wood’s strange qualities:

  The King was pleased to hunt the woodlands, with four of his entourage and two ladies. Four hawks were taken, and a canter across the wild fields. The King expressed admiration for the dangerous hunt, riding without due care through the underwood. Returned at dusk to the Manor. A stag had been killed by the King himself. The King talked of ghosts, and was entertaining on the manner of being haunted in the deeper glades by the figure of Robin Hood, which apparently loosed an arrow at him. He has promised to hunt upon the estates in another season.

  Shortly after Christmas, whilst I cooked in the kitchen, I detected movement beside me. It was a shock to my system, a moment of fright that made me twist around, adrenalin making my heart race.

  The kitchen was empty. The movement remained, a hesitant flickering at the edge of vision. I raced through the house to the study, and sat behind the desk, my hands on the polished wooden surface, my breathing laboured.

  The movement disappeared.

  But it was a growing presence that had to be faced. My own mind was now interacting with the aura of the woodland, and at the edge of vision the first pre-mythagos were forming, restless, ill-defined shapes that seemed to vie for my attention.

  My father had needed the ‘frontal bridge’, the strange machine, paraphernalia out of Frankenstein, to enable his own ageing mind to generate these ‘stored’ mythic presences from his racial unconscious. His journal – the log of his experiments with Wynne-Jones – and Chris, too, had hinted that a younger mind might interact with the wildwoods more simply, and very much faster than my father had ever imagined possible.

  In the study there was a brief escape from these clamouring, frightening forms. The woodland had reached its dark, psychic tendrils only to the nearer rooms of the house – the kitchen and dining-room – and to pass beyond that zone, through the stuffy lounge, along the passage to my father’s studio, was somehow to shake off those insistent movements.

  In time, in a matter of weeks, I became less afraid of the images from my unconscious that were slowly materializing. They became an intrusive, but rather unthreatening part of my life. I kept clear of the woods, imagining that by so doing I was not causing the generation of mythagos which might later emerge to haunt me. I spent a great deal of time in the local village, and journeyed to London, to friends, on as many occasions as I could manage. I avoided making contact with the family of my father’s friend, Edward Wynne-Jones, despite my growing awareness of the necessity of finding the man and speaking to him about his research.

  In all these ways I suppose I was cowardly; and yet, in retrospect, it was more a result of my unease, my distraction at the incomplete nature of events with Christian. He ought to come back at any time. Without knowing for sure whether he was dead, or just totally lost, there was a great tendency to move neither forward nor back.

  Stasis, then: the flow of time through the house, the endless routine of feeding, washing, reading, but without direction, without goal.

  The gifts from my brother – the hares, the initials – provoked something akin to a panic reaction in me. In early spring I ventured for the first time close to the encroaching woodlands, calling Christian’s name.

  And it was shortly after this break in routine, perhaps in the middle of March, that occurred the first of two visitations from the woodland which were to have a profound effect upon me in later months. Of the two emergences it is the second that was most immediately important; but the first would become of increasing significance to me later, even though, on that windy, cold dusk in March, it was an enigmatic haunting that passed through my life like a cold breath, a fleeting encounter.

  I had been to Gloucester for the day, visiting the bank where my father’s affairs were still managed. It had been a frustrating few hours; everything was in Christian’s name, and there was no evidence that my brother had agreed to pass the handling of affairs across to me. My pleas that Christian was lost in distant woodlands were listened to with sympathy, but precious little understanding. Certain standing orders were being paid, certainly, but my financial predicament was growing acute, and without some access to my father’s account I would be forced back upon my education. Honest employment was something I had once looked forward to. Now, distracted and obsessed with the past, I wanted nothing more than to be allowed to govern my own life.

  The bus was late, and the journey home through the Herefordshire countryside was slow and continually held up by cattle being moved along the roadways. It was late afternoon before I cycled the final miles from the bus station to Oak Lodge.

  The house was cold. I pulled on a thick, Shetland jumper and busied myself at the fire-grate, cleaning the ashes of the wood fire from the previous day. My breath frosted and I shivered violently, and at that moment I realized there was something unnatural in that intense chill. The room was deserted; through the lace-covered windows, the front gardens were a blur of brown and green, a fading vision in the gathering gloom of dusk. I put the light on, wrapped my arms around my shoulders and walked quickly through the house.

  There could be no doubt. This cold was not right. Ice was already forming on the insides of the windows, on both sides of the house. I scraped at it with a fingernail, peered through the lesions so made, out across the back yard.

  Towards the woodland.

  There was a movement there, a vague stirring, as tenuous, as intangible as the flickering motions of the pre-mythagos which, though they occupied my peripheral vision, had ceased to concern me. I watched that distant stir in the forest as it rippled through the trees and undergrowth, and seemed to cast a moving shadow across the thistle-covered field that separated treeline from the edge of the garden.

  There was something there, something invisible. It was watching me, and slowly approaching the house.

  Not knowing what else to do, terrified that perhaps the Urscumug had returned to the woodland edge in search of me, I picked up the heavy-hafted, flint-bladed spear that I had made during the December weeks. It was a coarse and primitive means of defence, but was satisfyingly secure in a way that no gun could have been. What else, it had occurred to me, should one use in offence against the primitive but a primitive tool?

  Passing down the stairs, I felt a breath of warm air on my frozen cheeks, a touch like the quick exhalation of breath of someone close by. A shadow seemed to hover about me, but it disappeared quickly.

  In my father’s study the haunting aura vanished, perhaps unable to compete against the powerful residuum of intellect that was my father’s own ghost. I peered through the French windows at that woodland which could be seen from here, rubbing at the frosted glass, watching as my father had once watched, frightened, curious, drawn to the enigmatic happenings beyond the human limit of the house and grounds.

  Shapes darted about the fence. They seemed to pour from the woodland edge, spiralling and leaping, grey, shadowy forms that vanished as quickly as they came, like the tongues of grey smoke from a gorse fire. From the trees, and back to the trees, something reaching, feeling, prowling about the grounds.

  One of the tendrils passed over the fence and extended to the French windows themselves, and I drew back, startled, as a face stared at me from the outside, then vanished. The shock had made my heart race and I dropped the spear. Reaching down for the heavy weapon, I listened as the French windows were rattled and banged. The woodshed door was struck a violent blow, and a sudden fury swept among the startled hens.

  But all I could think of was that face. So strange: human, yet with qualities that I can only describe as elfin; the eyes had been slanted, the inside of the grinning mouth a glowing red; the face had possessed no nose, nor ears, but a wild, spiky growth of fur or hair had sprouted from cranium and cheeks.


  At once mischievous, malevolent, funny, frightening.

  Abruptly the light drained from the sky, and the land outside became grey and foggy; the trees had become shrouded in a preternatural mist, through which an eerie light shone from a direction towards the sticklebrook.

  My curiosity at last outweighed my apprehension. I opened the windows and stepped into the garden, walking slowly through the darkness towards the gate. To the west, in the direction of Grimley the horizon was bright. I could clearly see the shapes of farmhouses, copses and the roll of hills. To the east, towards the manor house, the evening was similarly clear. It was only above the woods, and Oak Lodge itself, that this storm-dark pall of gloom hovered.

  The elementals came in force, then, emerging from the very ground itself, rising about me, hovering, probing, and making strange sounds very like laughter. I twisted and twirled, trying to glimpse some rational form to the gusting creatures, occasionally glimpsing a face, a hand, a long, curved finger, the nail a polished claw that jabbed towards me, but curled away before contact could be made. I glimpsed female shapes, lithe and sensuous. But mostly I saw the grimacing faces of something more elfin than human; hair flowed, eyes sparkled, broad mouths parted in silent cries. Were they mythagos? I hardly had time to question it. My hair was touched, my skin stroked. Invisible fingers prodded my back, tickled me below the ears. The silence of the grey dusk was interrupted by abrupt and brief bursts of wind-shrouded laughter, or the eerie cries of night birds that hovered above me, broad-winged, human-faced.

  The trees at the edge of the wood swayed rhythmically; in their branches, through the hanging mist, I saw further shapes, shadows chased each other across the sunless fields about. I was surrounded by poltergeist activity of uncanny and immense proportions.

  Swiftly, then, the activity died away, and the light from the sticklebrook grew more intense. The stillness was frightening, chilling. The cold was numbing, and my body was racked with cramp. I watched the light as it emerged from mist and woodland both, and was astonished when I saw its source.

  A boat came sailing from the trees, moving steadily along a stream far too small to contain its width. The boat was painted with bright colours, but the glowing light came from the figure which stood upon its prow, peering intently towards me. Boat and man, both were among the strangest things I have ever seen. The boat was high-prowed and high-sterned, with a single sail set at an angle; no wind took the grey canvas or the black rigging; symbols and shapes had been carved upon the wood of the hull; bizarre figurines surmounted both prow and stern, and each of those carved gargoyles seemed to twist to watch me.

  The man glowed with a golden aura. He stared from beneath a bronze-bright helmet, its crown elaborately crested, half-hidden between the twisting cheek guards. A flowing beard, chalk-white with streaks of red, reached to his broad chest. He leaned upon the railings of the ship, his patterned cloak wrapped about his body, the light that surrounded him glinting on the metal of his armour.

  About him played the ghouls and ghosts of the forest edge, and they seemed to be pushing and tugging at the ship, accounting for its movement forward on the shallow waters of the stream.

  This mutual regard across a distance of no more than a hundred yards lasted for a full minute. Then a strange wind began to blow, filling out the broad sail of the eerie vessel; the black rigging tugged and twanged, the boat rocked and the glowing man glanced up to the sky. Around him, the dark forces of his night-time entourage gathered, clustering about the boat, whining and crying with the voices of nature.

  The man tossed something towards me, then raised his right hand in that universal symbol of acknowledgement. I stepped towards him, but was blinded by a sudden dust-laden wind. Elementals swirled around me. I saw the golden glow disappear slowly back towards the wood, the stern now the prow, the sail filled with a healthy breeze. Try as I might I could not step forward through the barrier of protective forces that accompanied the mysterious stranger.

  When at last I was free to move, the ship had gone, the dark pall of mist above the land was suddenly sucked away, like smoke swirling towards a fan. It was a bright evening; I felt warm. I walked to the object the man had thrown and picked it up.

  It was an oak leaf the size of my palm, fashioned out of silver, a masterful piece of craftmanship. As I stared down at it, I saw the shallowly inscribed letter C within the outline of a boar’s head. The leaf was pierced, a long thin tear, as if a knife had been thrust through the metal. I shivered, although why the sight of this talisman should fill me with such dread I was not, at that time, able to understand.

  I went back to the house, to think about these most bizarre mythago forms yet to have emerged from the edge woods.

  Two

  Rain swept across the land, a drenching shower that seemed to come from a sky too bright to have carried the downpour. The fields became slick and treacherous as I raced back towards Oak Lodge. The rain penetrated my thick pullover and flannels, and was cold and irritating on my skin. I had been caught unawares, strolling down from the manor house after a few hours gardening, undertaken in exchange for a cut of mutton from their supplies of salted meat.

  I ran across the garden and flung the heavy piece of meat into the kitchen, then stripped off my saturated jumper, still standing in the rain. The air was heavy with the smell of earth and woodland, and as I stood there, shedding my wet clothes, so the storm passed, and the sky brightened slightly.

  Sun broke through cloud, and for a few seconds a wave of warmth encouraged me in my thinking that as late April was about to give way to early May, the first signs of summer were at hand.

  Then I saw the fragmentary carnage near to the chicken coop, and a chill of apprehension made me dart to the side of the kitchen door …

  Before I left I had closed the door, I was certain of that. But it had been open as I had scampered out of the wet weather.

  Wringing out my jumper I walked cautiously to the chicken coop. Two chicken heads lay there, their necks still bloody where they had been struck from the bodies with a knife. In the rain-softened soil round about were the marks of a small-footed human being.

  Entering the house I could see at once that I had entertained a visitor in my absence. The drawers to the kitchen table were open, cupboards were open, and tins and jars of preserved foods had been scattered, some jars opened and sampled. I walked through the house and observed the muddy prints of feet as they toured through the sitting-room, into the study, up the stairs and through the various bedrooms.

  In my own bedroom the prints, a vague outline of toes and heels, stopped by the window. The pictures of myself, Christian and my father, that were placed on my bureau, had been moved. By holding the framed photographs to the light I could see the smudges of fingerprints on the glass.

  The prints of both fingers and feet were smallish, but not like a child’s. I suppose, even at that moment, I knew who my mystery visitor had been, and felt not so much apprehensive as intensely curious.

  She had been here within the last few minutes. There was no blood in the house, which I felt there should have been had she carried the spoils of her raid about with her, but I heard no disturbance as I had come across the fields. Five minutes before, then, no more, no less. She had come to the house under the cover of the rain, had toured the establishment, poking and prying with admirable thoroughness, and had then raced back to the woods, stopping in her passage to strike the heads swiftly from two of my precious hens. Even now, I thought, she was probably observing me from the woodland edge.

  In a fresh shirt, my trousers changed, I walked out into the garden and waved, scanning the dense undergrowth, the shadowy recesses that were the several pathways into the forest. I could see nothing.

  I resolved, then, that I would have to learn to go back into the woodland.

  The next day was brighter, and considerably drier, and I equipped myself with spear, kitchen knife and oilskin wrap and walked cautiously into the woods, as far as the clearing
where I had made my camp, some months before. To my surprise there was hardly a fragment of that camp site left. All the tent canvas had gone, the tins and pots purloined. By carefully feeling the ground I discovered a single, bent tent peg. And the glade itself had changed in a remarkable way: it was covered with oak saplings. They were no more than two or three feet high, but they clustered in the space, too many to survive, but too high by far to have grown in that space of a few months ….

  And winter months too!

  I tugged at one of the saplings and it was deeply rooted; I skinned my hand, and tore the tender bark, before the plant at last relinquished its fervent grip upon the earth.

  She did not return that day, nor the next, but thereafter I became increasingly aware that I was entertaining a visitor during the dark hours of night. Food would vanish from the pantry; implements, ordinary items of kitchenware, would be misplaced, or replaced. Also on some mornings there was a strange smell in the house, neither earthy, nor female, but – if you can imagine this bizarre combination – something that was a little of both. I noticed it most powerfully in the hallway, and would stand for long minutes, just letting the peculiarly erotic aroma seep into my system. Dirt and leaf litter were always to be found on the ground floor and stairs of the house. My visitor was becoming bolder. I imagined that, whilst I slept, she stood in the doorway and watched me. Strangely, I felt no apprehension at the idea.

  I tried setting my alarm clock to awaken me in the dead hours, but all this succeeded in doing was giving me a restless night and a bad temper. On the first occasion I used the alarm I discovered I had missed my visitor, but the pungent smell of woodland female filled the house, thrilling me in a way that I felt almost ashamed to acknowledge. On the second occasion, she had not visited. The house was silent. It was three in the morning, and the only smell was of rain; and onions, part of my supper.