Mythago Wood

by Robert Holdstock

  How had my father entered the woodland? How had he managed to penetrate so deeply? From his journals, from the detail on the map that now hung upon the study wall, he had managed to walk some considerable distance into Ryhope Wood before the defences had turned him around. He had known the way, I was sure of that, but his journal had been so pillaged by the man in his last days – hiding evidence, hiding guilt, perhaps – that the information was gone.

  I knew my father quite well. Oak Lodge was a testament to many things, and to one thing in particular: his obsessive nature, his need to preserve, to hoard, to shelve. It was unthinkable, to me, that my father would have destroyed anything. Hidden, yes, but never obliterated.

  I had searched the house, I had been to the manor, and asked there, and unless my father had broken in one evening to use the vast rooms and silent corridors to his own ends, then he had hidden no papers at the manor house either.

  One possibility remained, and I sent a letter of warning to Oxford, hoping that it would arrive before I did, something that could not be guaranteed. The following day I packed a small bag, dressed smartly, and made the laborious journey by bus and train to Oxford.

  To the house where my father’s colleague and confidant, Edward Wynne-Jones, had lived.

  I had not expected to find Wynne-Jones himself. I could not remember how, but at some time during the previous year – or perhaps before I went to France – I had heard of his disappearance, or death, and that his daughter was now living in the house. I didn’t know her name, nor whether she would be receptive to my visit. It was a chance I would have to take. In the event, she was most courteous. The house was a semi-detached on the edge of Oxford, three storeys high, and in a bad state of repair. It was raining as I arrived, and the tall, severe looking woman who answered the door ushered me quickly inside, but fussily made me stand at the end of the hall while I shrugged off my soaking coat and shoes. Only then did she exercise the usual courtesies.

  ‘I’m Anne Hayden.’

  ‘Steven Huxley. I’m sorry about the short notice … I hope it’s convenient.’

  ‘Perfectly convenient.’

  She was in her mid-thirties, soberly dressed in grey skirt and a grey cardigan over a high-necked white blouse. The house smelled of polish and damp. All the rooms were bolted on the corridor side: a defence, I imagined, against intruders coming in through the windows. She was the sort of woman who summons, unbidden, the epithet ‘spinster’ in untrained, inexperienced minds, and perhaps there should have been cats clustered about her feet.

  In fact, Anne Hayden was far from living in a style that appearance would have suggested. She had been married, and her husband had left her during the war. As she led me into the dark, leathery sitting-room, I saw a man of about my own age reading a paper. He rose to his feet, shook hands and was introduced as Jonathan Garland.

  ‘If you want to talk quietly, I’ll leave you for a while,’ he said, and without waiting for an answer went away, deeper into the house. Anne made no more explanation of him than that. He lived there, of course. The bathroom, I noticed later, had shaving things lining the lower shelf.

  All of these details may perhaps seem irrelevant, but I was observing the woman and her situation closely. She was uncomfortable and solemn, allowing no friendly contact, no touch of rapport that would have allowed me to begin my questioning with ease. She made tea, offered me biscuits, and sat totally silently, for a while, until I explained the reason for my visit.

  ‘I never met your father,’ she said quietly, ‘although I knew of him. He visited Oxford several times, but never when I was at home. My father was a naturalist and spent many weeks away from Oxford. I was very close to him. When he walked out on us I was very distressed.’

  ‘When was that, can you remember?’

  She gave me a look part-way between anger and pity. ‘I can remember it to the day. Saturday, April the 13th, 1942. I was living on the top floor. My husband had already left me. Father had a furious argument with John … my brother … and then abruptly left. It was the last I saw of him. John went abroad with the forces and was killed. I remained in the house ….’

  By dint of careful questioning, gentle prompting, I pieced together a story of double tragedy. When Wynne-Jones, for whatever reason, had walked out on his family, Anne Hayden’s heart had broken for the second time. Distressed, she had lived as a recluse for the years following, although when the war ended she began to move in social circles once more.

  When the young man who lived with her brought a fresh pot of tea, the contact between them was warm, briefly expressed and genuine. She had not ceased feeling, even though the scar of her double tragedy was blatant.

  I explained in as much detail as I felt necessary that the two men – our two fathers – had worked together, and that my father’s records were incomplete. Had she noticed, or discovered, journal extracts, sheets, letters that were not Wynne-Jones’s?

  ‘I have hardly looked at anything, Mr Huxley,’ she said quietly. ‘My father’s study is precisely as he left it. If you find that a touch Dickensian, you are welcome to think so. This is a large house, and the room is not needed. To clean it, and maintain it, would be unnecessary effort, so it is locked and remains so until he returns and tidies it up himself.’

  ‘May I see the room?’

  ‘If you wish. It’s of no interest to me. And, provided you show me the items, you may borrow anything you like.’

  She led the way up to the first floor, and along a dark corridor whose flower-patterned wallpaper was peeling badly. Dusty pictures lined the walls, dim prints by Matisse and Picasso. The carpet was threadbare.

  Her father’s study was on the end; the room overlooked the city of Oxford. Through its filthy net curtains I could just make out the spire of St Mary’s. Books lined the walls so heavily that cracks had appeared in the plaster above the sagging shelves. The desk was covered by a white sheet, as was the rest of the furniture in the room, but the books themselves laboured below a depth of dust as thick as a fingernail. Maps, charts and botanical prints were stacked against one wall. Stacks of journals and bound volumes of letters were thrust to choking point into a cupboard. Here was the antithesis of my father’s meticulously laid out studio, a cluttered, confused den of labour and intellect, which confounded me as I stared at it, wondering where to begin my search.

  Anne Hayden watched me for a few minutes, her eyes narrow and tired behind the horn-rimmed spectacles she wore. ‘I’ll leave you for a while,’ she said then, and I heard her make her way downstairs.

  I opened drawers, leafed through books, even pulled the carpets back to check for loose floorboards. The task would have been gigantic, examining every inch of the room, and at the end of an hour I acknowledged defeat. Not only were there no pages from my father’s journal discreetly concealed in his colleague’s office, there was not even a journal by Wynne-Jones himself. The only link with the mythago wood was the clutter of bizarre, almost Frankensteinian machinery that was Wynne-Jones’s ‘frontal bridge’ equipment. This jumble of invention included headphones, yards of wire, copper coils, heavy car batteries, coloured stroboscopic light discs and bottles of pungent chemicals, labelled in code. All of these were stuffed into a large, wooden chest, covered with a wall drape. The chest was old and intricately patterned. I pressed and prodded at its panels and did indeed discover a concealed compartment, but the narrow space was empty.

  As quietly as possible I walked through the rest of the house, peering into each room in turn, trying to intuit whether or not Wynne-Jones might have fashioned himself a hidey-hole away from his study. No such feeling struck me, nothing but the smell of must, damp sheets, decaying paperback books, and that awful generalized atmosphere of a property that is unused and uncared for.

  I went downstairs again. Anne Hayden smiled thinly. ‘Any luck?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  She nodded her head thoughtfully, then added, ‘What exactly were you looking for? A journal?
’

  ‘Your father must have kept one. A desk diary, each year. I can’t see them.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a thing,’ she said soberly, still thoughtful. ‘Which is odd, I grant you.’

  ‘Did he ever talk about his work to you?’ I sat on the edge of an armchair. Anne Hayden crossed her legs and placed her magazine down beside her. ‘Some nonsense about extinct animals living in deeper woodlands. Boars, wolves, wild bear … ’ She smiled again. ‘I think he believed it.’

  ‘So did my father,’ I pointed out. ‘But my father’s journal has been torn. Whole pages missing. I just wondered if they might have been concealed here. What happened to any letters that were sent after your father’s disappearance?’

  ‘I’ll show you.’ She rose, and I followed her to a tall cupboard in the front room, a place of austere furniture, cluttered bric-a-brac, the occasional attractive ornament.

  The cupboard was as packed as the cupboard upstairs, with journals still in their envelopes, and faculty newspapers still rolled tight and bound with tape. ‘I keep them. God knows why. Perhaps I’ll take them to the college later this week. There seems little point. These are the letters …’

  Beside the journals was a stack nearly a yard high of private correspondence, all the letters neatly opened, and read, no doubt, by the grieving daughter. ‘There may be something from your father there. I really can’t remember.’ She reached in and eased out the pile of mail, thrust it into my arms. I staggered back to the sitting-room and for an hour checked the handwriting of each letter. There was nothing. My back ached with sitting still for so long, and the smell of dust and mould was making me feel sick.

  There was nothing I could do. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked loudly in the heavy silence of that room, and I began to feel I was overstaying my welcome. I passed Anne Hayden a sheet of writing, of inconsequential nature, from an earlier diary of my father’s. The handwriting is reasonably distinctive. If you should discover any loose sheets, or journals … I would be very much obliged.’

  ‘I should be glad to oblige, Mister Huxley.’ She took me to the front door. It was still raining outside, and she helped me on with my heavy mackintosh. Then she hesitated, staring at me peculiarly. ‘Did you ever meet my father when he visited?’

  ‘I was very young. I remember him more from the mid-thirties, but he never spoke to me, or my brother. He and my father would meet, and immediately go out into the woodland, seeking those mythical beasts …’

  ‘In Herefordshire. Where you live now … ?’ There was pain in the look she gave me. ‘I never knew that. None of us knew. Something, perhaps as long ago as those same mid-thirties, something changed him. I always remained close to him. He trusted me, trusted the affection I felt for him. But he never talked, never confided. We were just … close. I envy the times you saw him. I wish I could share your memories of him doing what he loved … mythical beasts or no. The life he adored he denied to his family ….’

  ‘It was the same for me,’ I said gently. ‘My mother died of heartbreak; my brother and I were cut off from his world. My own father’s world, I mean.’

  ‘So perhaps we have both been losers.’

  I smiled. ‘You more than I, I think. If you would like to visit Oak Lodge, and see the journal, the place –’

  She shook her head quickly. ‘I’m not sure I dare, Mr Huxley. Thank you all the same. It’s just that … I wonder, from what you say …’

  She could hardly speak. In the gloom of the hallway, with the rain a monotonous beat against the stippled window, high above the door, she seemed to burn with anxiety, her eyes wide, now, behind the glasses.

  ‘It’s just what?’ I prompted, and almost without thinking, without pause, she said, ‘Is he in the wood?’

  Taken aback for a moment, I realized what she meant. ‘It’s possible,’ I said. What could I tell her? What should I say about my belief that within the woodland edge, in the heartwoods themselves, was a place whose immensity was beyond simple credence? ‘Anything is possible.’

  Six

  I left Oxford, frustrated, filthy, and very tired. The journey home could not have been worse, with one train cancelled, and a traffic jam outside Witney that held my bus up for over half an hour. Mercifully, the rain passed away, though the sky was lowering, threatening, and distinctly wintry, something I did not wish to see in early summer.

  It was six in the evening before I got back to Oak Lodge, and I knew at once that I had a visitor: the back door was wide open, and a light was on in the study. I hastened my step, but paused by the door, looking nervously around in case the trigger-happy cavalier, or a mythago of like violence, might be lurking nearby. But it had to be Guiwenneth. The door had been forced open, the paint around the handle scarred and pitted where the shaft of her spear had repeatedly struck. Inside there was a hint of the smell I associated with her, sharp, pungent. She would obviously need to bath a lot more often.

  I called her name, walking carefully from room to room. She was not in the study, but I left the light on. Movement upstairs startled me, and I walked to the hallway. ‘Guiwenneth?’

  ‘You catch me snooping, I’m afraid,’ came Harry Keeton’s voice, and he appeared at the top of the stairs, looking embarrassed, smiling to cover his guilt. ‘I’m so sorry. But the door was open.’

  ‘I thought it was someone else,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing much worth seeing.’

  He came down the stairs and I led him back to the sitting-room. ‘Was there anybody here when you came in?’

  ‘Someone, I’m not sure who. As I say, I came up the front way; no answer. Went round the back and found the door open, a funny smell inside, and this … ’ He waved his hand around the room, at the furniture all disarrayed, shelves swept clean, the books and objects cluttered on the floor. ‘Not the sort of thing I do by habit,’ he said with a smile. ‘Someone ran out of the house as I went into the study, but I didn’t see who. I thought I’d hang on for you.’

  We straightened the room, then sat down at the dining table. It was chilly, but I decided against laying a fire. Keeton relaxed; the burn mark on his lower face had flushed considerably with his embarrassment, but it became paler and less noticeable, although he nervously covered his jaw with his left hand as he spoke. He seemed tired, I thought, not as bright, or as perky as when we had met at Mucklestone Field. He was wearing civilian clothes, which were very creased. When he sat down at the table I could see that he wore a hip holster and pistol on his belt.

  ‘I developed the photographs I took on that flight, a few days back.’ He drew out a rolled package from his pocket, straightened it and opened the top, taking out several magazine-sized prints. I had almost forgotten that part of the process, the monitoring and photographing of the land below. ‘After that storm we seemed to encounter I didn’t expect anything to show up, but I was wrong.’

  There was a haunted look to him, now, as he pushed the prints across to me. ‘I use a high precision, good spying camera. High grain Kodak film; I’ve been able to enlarge quite a bit …’

  He watched me as I stared at the foggy, occasionally blurred, and occasionally ultra-sharp scenes of the mythago wood.

  Tree tops and clearings seemed to be the main view, but I could see why he was disturbed, perhaps excited. On the fourth print, taken as the plane had banked to the west, the camera had panned across the woodland, and slightly down, and it showed a clearing and a tall, decaying stone structure, parts of it rising to the foliage level itself.

  ‘A building,’ I said unnecessarily, and Harry Keeton added, ‘There’s an enlargement …’

  Increasingly blurred, the next sheet showed a close-up of the building: an edifice and tower, rising from a break in the tree-structure of the forest, where a number of figures clustered. No detail was observable, beyond the fact of their humanness: white and grey shapes, suggestive of both male and female, caught in the act of walking about the tower; two shapes crouched, as if climbing the crumbling s
tructure itself.

  ‘Probably built in the middle ages,’ Keeton said thoughtfully. ‘The wood grew across the access roadway, and the place got cut off ….’

  Less romantic, but far more likely, was that the structure was a Victorian folly, something built more for whim than good reason. But follies had usually been constructed on high hills: tall structures, from whose upper reaches the eccentric, rich, or just plain bored owner could observe distances further than county borders.

  If this place, the place we observed on the photograph, was a folly, then it was peculiarly inept.

  I turned to the next print. This showed the image of a river winding through the densely packed trees; its course meandered, the tree line broken in an aerial reflection of the pathway. At two points, out of focus, the water gleamed, and the river looked wide. This was the sticklebrook? I could hardly believe what I was seeing. ‘I’ve enlarged the river parts as well,’ Keeton said softly, and when I turned to those prints I realized that I could see more mythagos.

  They were blurred again, but there were five of them, close together, wading across the fragment of river that had caught the attention of the camera. They were holding objects above their heads, perhaps weapons, perhaps just staffs. They were as dim and indistinct as a photograph of a lake monster I had once seen, just the suggestion of shape and movement.

  Wading across the sticklebrook!

  The final photograph was in its way the most dramatic of them all. It showed only woodland. Only? It showed something more, and I was unwilling, at the time, even to guess at the nature of the forces and structures I could see. What had happened, Keeton explained, was that the negative was underexposed. That simple mistake, caused for no reason he could understand, had captured the winding tendrils of energy arising from across the great span of the woodland. They were eerie, suggestive, tentative … I counted twenty of them, like tornadoes, but thinner, knotted and twisted as they probed up from the hidden land below. The nearer vortices were clearly reaching toward the plane, to encompass the unwelcome vehicle … to reject it.