Mythago Wood

by Robert Holdstock

  I am going to keep this diary as a record of what happens to me. There are several reasons. I have left a letter explaining them. I hope the diary will be read. My name is Harry Keeton, of 27 Middleton Gardens, Buxford. I am 34 years of age. Today is the 7th September 1948. The date, though, no longer matters. It is DAY ONE.

  We are spending our first night in the ghostwood. We have walked for twelve hours. No sign of Christian, or horses, or G. We are in the place that Steven’s father discovered and named Little Stone Glade. We reached the glade before last light, and it is a perfect site to recoup from the exertions of the walk, and to eat. The so-called ‘little stone’ is a massive sandstone block, fourteen feet high (we estimate) and twenty paces round. Much chipped, eroded, weathered etc. Steven has found faint markings upon it, including his father’s initials GH. If this is the little stone, what I wonder … ?

  Totally exhausted. Shoulder very troublesome, but have opted for ‘hero’s’ way out, and shall not mention it unless S. notices. I can carry my pack quite adequately, but there is far more scrambling and physical effort than I had anticipated. Tent is pitched. A warm evening. The woodland seems very normal. The sound of the stream is clear, although it is less a stream, more a small river. We have been forced away from its bank by the density of the underbrush. Already there is a quality about the woodland that defies experience, the size of certain trees, gigantic, natural, no sign of having been trimmed or coppiced. They seem to enfold whole areas of underwood, and feel very protective. When the leaf cover is so complete, the underwood is thin, and walking is easy. But of course, it is very dark. We rest below these giant trees quite naturally, though. The whole wood breathes and sighs. Many horse-chestnuts, so the wood is not ‘primal’, but a great abundance of oak and hazel, with whole stands of ash and beech. A hundred forests in one.

  Keeton began to keep his diary from that first night, but maintained the journal for only a few days. It was intended to be a secret, I believe, his last testament to the world should anything happen to him. The skirmish in the garden, the arrow wound that nearly killed him, my account of how close he had come to being cooked liver, all this inspired him with a sense of foreboding, whose deeper nature I failed to grasp until much later.

  Sneaking a look at the diary each night as he slept, I discovered I was glad of this little focus of normality. I knew, for example, that his shoulder was causing him trouble, and made sure he put no undue exertion upon it. He was also quite flattering to me: Steven a fine walker, determined. His purpose, whether consciously or unconsciously guides him inwards with accuracy. He is a great comfort, despite the anger and grief that seethe just below the surface.

  Thank you, Harry. In those first few days of the journey you were a great comfort too.

  If the first day had been a long, but straightforward journey, the second was not. Although we were following the ‘water track’, the woodland defences were still a great nuisance.

  First, there was disorientation. We found ourselves walking back the way we had come. At times it was almost possible to experience the switch in perception. We felt dizzy; the underwood became preternaturally dark; the sound of the river changed from our left to our right. It frightened Keeton. It disturbed me. The closer we hugged the riverside, the less pronounced the effect. But the river itself was defended from us by a screen of thorns which was quite impenetrable.

  Somehow we passed that first defensive zone. The wood began to haunt us. Trees seemed to move. Branches fell upon us … in our mind’s eyes only, but not before we had reacted with exhausting shock. The ground seemed to writhe at times, and split open. We smelled fumes, fire, a stench like decay. If we persisted, the illusions passed.

  And Keeton wrote in his diary, The same haunting that I experienced before. And just as frightening. But does it mean I’m close? I must not begin to expect too much.

  A wind blew at us, then, and this storm was certainly no illusion. It howled through the forest; leaves were stripped from the trees; twigs, brambles, earth, stones, all came surging towards us, so that we had to shelter, clinging on to trees for dear life, threatened with being blown back the way we had come. To escape that incredible gale we had to hack through the thorn on the riverside. It took us a full day to move no more than half a mile or so, and we were bruised, cut and exhausted when we finally camped for the night ….

  And during the night the sounds of beasts haunted us. The earth vibrated, the tent was shaken violently, and lights glowed in the darkness, throwing eerie, wispy shadows across the canvas. We didn’t sleep for a minute. But the following day we seemed to have overcome the defences. We made good progress, and eventually found we could encroach upon the river with greater facility.

  Keeton began to experience the formation of pre-mythagos. He became jumpy during the fourth day, starting with shock, hissing for silence, crouching and searching the woodland. I explained to him how to distinguish between real movement and the hallucinatory forms of the pre-mythagos, but after the terrors of the first few days he was not at ease, and didn’t become so until much later. As for real mythago forms, we heard one on that easy first day, but saw none.

  Or is that true?

  We had come to a place marked on my father’s map as ‘Stone Falls’, a place he had often referred to. The river – our tiny sticklebrook – had widened to about ten feet, and was a crystal torrent of water, swirling through the thin woodland that crowded banks more sandy than muddy. The place felt open, a delightful site for a camp, and indeed we found the signs of such an encampment, traces of rope, the marks where fastenings had been driven into trees. But there were no tracks, no signs of fire, and though my spirits leapt at the thought of being on Christian’s trail, I had to acknowledge that the site had been constructed by a mythago, at some time long in the past.

  Away from the river the land sloped steeply upwards, a rising woodland of thin trees, mostly beech. They sprouted from an earth that was strewn with great boulders and jagged promontories of dark rock. The map had shown a track over this rise of ground, cutting off a meander in the river, where the bank was marked as ‘dangerous passage’.

  We rested, then moved away from the river and through the beechwood, pulling ourselves up the steep slopes by hanging on to the slender trunks of the trees. Each outcrop of stone was like a cave, and there were traces of animal life outside many of them.

  It was hard going. The river dropped away below us, in sight and sound. The silence of the wood enveloped us totally. Keeton was labouring with his sore shoulder, his face so red that the ferocious burn didn’t show at all.

  We crossed the mossy rocks on the ridge and began to descend to the river on the other side. A great stone was leaning at a sharp angle from the slope. It looked – and Keeton remarked upon the fact as well – like a standing stone that had slipped. We skidded and ran towards it, fetching up sharp and hard against its smooth side. Keeton was breathless.

  ‘How about this!’ he exclaimed, running his finger around the design that had been deeply chipped into the rock. It was the face of a wolf against a diamond background; weather had blurred the finer detail. ‘Is someone buried here, I wonder?’

  He stepped round the rock, still leaning against it. I glanced about me and realized that there were at least ten such stones, although smaller, rising from the underbrush of the beech wood.

  ‘It’s a cemetery,’ I murmured.

  Keeton was standing below the imposing monument, staring up at it. From somewhere on the slope came the sound of wood cracking, and the noisy tumbling of a stone down towards the river.

  Then the ground shook slightly. I glanced about apprehensively, wondering if something was approaching. Keeton’s cry of, ‘Oh Christ!’ jerked my attention back to him, and I saw him madly scrambling towards me. It took me a second to realize what was happening.

  The great stone was beginning to move, slowly toppling forwards.

  Keeton got clear. The monolith slipped majestically over, crashed throug
h two slender young trees and slid heavily down the slope for about forty yards, leaving a great gaping hole behind it.

  We edged forward to the pit and cautiously peered in. At the bottom of the hole, just visible through the packed earth, were the bones of a man, still clad in armour. The skull, which stared up at us, had been cracked open by a blow. A slender, pointed helmet, of green but bright metal, had been placed above the head. The warrior’s arms were crossed on the flattened breastplate. The metal looked polished, even though it had tarnished. Keeton thought it was bronze.

  As we stood staring reverently down at the corpse, earth fell from the breastplate, and the skeleton began to move. Keeton cried out in shock, and I felt every organ in my body twist with fright. But it was just a snake, a brightly coloured adder. It came sliding from the ribcage, below the breastplate, and tried to ascend the earthy slope of the grave.

  That brief movement had totally unnerved the two of us.

  ‘God Almighty,’ was all Keeton said, save to add, ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  ‘It’s only a skeleton,’ I said. ‘It can’t harm us.’

  ‘Somebody buried him,’ Keeton pointed out correctly.

  We grabbed our packs and slipped and slid our way down the slope, to the more protective trees of the riverside. I laughed when we got back to what felt like safety, but Keeton stared back through the crowded trees, up towards the stone ridge where the megalith lay.

  Following his solemn gaze I saw the unmistakable flash of light on green metal. After a second it vanished.

  Day five. Fifth night. Colder. I am very tired, shoulder in great pain. Steven tired too, but very determined. The incident with the standing stone was more terrifying than I can admit. The warrior is pursuing us. Convinced it is. I see flashes of light on its armour. Noisy progress through underbrush. Steven says I should put it from my mind. We are well equipped to deal with pursuers. He has confidence. The thought of battling with that thing, though. Horrible!

  I am haunted by these edge of vision images. S explained them to me, but I had no idea of how distracting they could be. Figures, groups, even animals. I see them, sometimes, very clearly. Frightening visions. He says I am beginning to shape them, and they do not exist, to try and concentrate only on the forward vision until I am used to them.

  Tonight, wolves have sniffed at us from across the river. Five in all, great beasts, rancid to smell, so confident. They made no sound. They were quite real. Padded off silently back towards the edge woods.

  We have walked, now, for five days. A total of sixty hours by my reckoning. My watch is broken for no reason that I can fathom. Steven came without. But sixty hours is about right, and that means eighty or ninety miles at least. We have not yet reached the place where my photographs showed figures/buildings. We looked at the photographs by torch-light. We could have walked through the wood twenty times over, and we are still at the edge.

  I am frightened. But this is certainly a ghostwood. And if S is right in everything he tells me, then the avatar and the city will be here too, and the damage can be undone. God watch me, guide me!

  The avatar and the city will be here ….

  The damage can be undone ….

  I read the words through again, while Keeton slept silently close by. The fire was low, no more than a flickering flame, and I pushed two more pieces of wood upon it. Sparks flew into the night. In the darkness around us there was stealthy sound, clear and unnerving against the perpetual rush of the sticklebrook.

  The avatar and the city will be here ….

  I watched Keeton’s slumbering form, then gently replaced the small notebook in the sealed pocket of his haversack.

  So Keeton’s relationship with Ryhope Wood – the ghostwood, as he called it – was more than a companion-out-of-curiosity to me. He had been in such a wood before, and more had happened to him there than he had told me.

  Had he encountered a mythago form in that woodland? An avatar, the earthly form of a God? And what damage did he mean? His burnmark?

  How dearly I would have liked to have talked to him about it. But I couldn’t reveal that I had read his diary, and he had mentioned the ghostwood in France only briefly. I hoped that in time he would entrust me with whatever secret he carried, whether dread, or guilt, or revenge.

  We broke camp an hour after first light, having been disturbed by wild animals, probably wolves. Looking at the map we carried, it was uncanny to recognize how far we had not come, how close to the edge of the woodland we remained. We had walked for so many days, and yet had hardly begun our journey. Keeton was having great difficulty in accepting the changing relationship of space and time. For my part, I wondered what the wildwoods themselves would do to us.

  For these, as yet, were not the wildwoods. The cemetery, Keeton told me, had been an area of ancient coppice. Ryhope Wood, growing wild, had returned to a natural form at its edges, but the signs of man were everywhere abundant. Keeton showed me what he meant: that the large, standard oak we passed below had self-seeded and grown to its majestic size without being affected by man, but close by was a beech that had been neatly lopped ten feet from the ground, albeit hundreds of years before, and the resulting cluster of new shoots that had grown from this pollard had thickened to give the several immense trunk-like limbs that reached skywards, and cast such gloom across the underwood.

  But had the coppicing been performed by man or mythago?

  We were passing through the zones of habitation of such strange forest beings as the Twigling, the Jack-in-the-Greens, Arthur; and of communities too, according to my father’s journal: the shamiga, outlaw bands, gypsy villages, all of the mythic peoples associated, either in fear or magic, with thick woodland.

  And perhaps, too, we were passing through the genesis zone of Guiwenneth herself. How many Guiwenneth mech Penn Evs were there? Guiwenneth, daughter of the Chief. How many wandered this expansive forest? It was a world of mind and earth, a realm outside of real laws of space and time, a giant world, with room enough for a thousand such girls, each the product of a human mind, drawn from the towns and villages around the estate where Ryhope Wood grew.

  How I missed her. How right Keeton was to refer to the fury bubbling just below. There were times when an uncontrollable rage overcame me, and I could hardly bear to be with the other man, stalking ahead into the brush, striking at anything and everything, shaking with rage at what my brother had done to us.

  It had been days since the attack, and he would be miles ahead of us. I should not have delayed! I had so little chance of finding her, now. The woodland was a gigantic landscape, a primal place, endlessly wide.

  The depressions passed. And halfway through that sixth day’s trek I found evidence of Christian in a form I had not expected, evidence which made it clear that he was not so far ahead of us after all.

  We had been following a deer track for nearly an hour along the river’s edge. The carpet of dog’s mercury and bracken was thin, here, and the spoor of a small stag was so obvious in the soft mud patches that a child could have followed it. The trees crowded closer to the water. Their outer branches almost closed over the river, forming an eerie, silent tunnel. Light shafted through the broken foliage and formed a gloriously-lit underworld, into which we pursued our prey.

  The animal was smaller than I had expected, and was standing, proud and alert, near to a spinney, where the river bank was wide and dry. Keeton had trouble seeing the beast, it was so perfectly camouflaged against the dark wood behind. I approached cautiously under cover, holding Keeton’s pistol. I was too hungry for fresh meat to care about the ignominity of this kill. I placed a single shot, just above the animal’s anus, and splinters of backbone perforated the hide for two feet along the spine. The stag was maimed, and I fell upon it, swiftly ending its agony. After butchering it as Guiwenneth had showed me, I tossed a raw haunch to Keeton, with a smile, and told him to get a fire going. Keeton was pale and disgusted. He jumped back from the blood-raw meat, then looked at me
startled. ‘You’ve done this before.’

  ‘Indeed I have. We’ll feed well, for the moment. Keep several pounds of cooked meat for tomorrow, and carry two joints, as much as we can manage.’

  ‘And the rest?’

  ‘Leave it. It’ll keep the wolves off our backs for a while.’

  ‘Will it, though?’ he murmured, and gingerly picked up the deer haunch and began to brush the leaf litter and dirt from it.

  It was as he was gathering wood for the fire that Keeton gasped with horror and called to me. He was standing beyond the spinney, staring at the ground. I walked up to him, conscious, again, of an odour I confess I had noticed as soon as I had gone stalking the deer: the decay of an animal of large size.

  The offending objects were human animals, two in number. Keeton gagged slightly, then closed his eyes. ‘Look at the man,’ he said, and I stooped, peering through the gloom, and saw what he meant. The man’s breastbone had been split, the same motion that the Fenlander had been about to make upon Keeton himself, to extract the liver from the corpse.

  ‘It’s Christian,’ I said. ‘He killed them.’

  ‘Two, three days dead,’ said Keeton. ‘I’ve seen corpses in France. They’re flexible, do you see?’ He leaned down, still shaking, and moved the girl’s ankle. ‘But beginning to swell. Damn. She was young … look at her ….’

  I cleared the brush from around the bodies. They were certainly young. Lovers, I imagined, both quite naked, although the girl still had a necklace of bone around her neck, and the boy had strands of leather around his calves, as if the sandals that he had been wearing had been too crudely looted from his corpse. The girl’s fists were clenched. I reached out and the fingers unfurled quite easily. In each hand she held a broken partridge feather, and I thought of Christian’s cloak, which had been fringed by such things.

  ‘We should bury them,’ Keeton said. I noticed that he had tears in his eyes. His nose was wet. He reached down and moved the boy’s hand into his lover’s, then turned, presumably to see where a good site for burial might be.