Merlin's Wood (Mythago Wood)

by Robert Holdstock

  I don’t believe what I’m hearing! Oh God, this can’t be real …

  ‘There’s something I don’t understand, though,’ Conrad went on in a hushed, weary voice. ‘If the woman we think of as Vivien tricked and trapped the old enchanter, all those centuries ago – why is she still here? Why does he taunt her? Something must have gone wrong.’

  Martin was hardly listening. He stared out across the blue lake at the heart of Broceliande, where the moans of a dying man could sometimes be heard, and the cries of a woman, and from which shore came silent boats, and ghostly travellers, escaping whatever evil lay at the heart of the wood.

  I don’t believe it! Merlin and Vivien still playing their tricks, their games … and in the process a family is destroyed?

  But he did believe it. All his life he had believed it. All his life he had accepted that people moved up the path, to vanish below the hill where the church – even as a ruin – had tolled its bells of calling, and mourning, and feasting: bronze-ringing that signalled the changing of the quarters of the year, when the fires were burned in different ways, and the offerings were made in different ways, and the people of the land came to dance and talk and drink and remember.

  Of course he believed it. But what was happening now was something beyond his experience.

  I can’t choose between them! Don’t ask me to choose between them!

  ‘I think we should go back to the edge of the wood.’

  Conrad sighed and snuggled down among the skins, below the protecting umbrella of oilskin. The lake glimmered in the setting sun. It was close to dusk. The pike had been picked clean, the uneaten flesh wrapped carefully.

  ‘I’ll stay here, I think: A boat will be coming for me shortly.’

  ‘A boat?’

  As Martin understood the old man’s point he felt again a moment of intense grief. ‘I don’t want you to die.’

  ‘I’m already dead,’ Conrad breathed, and chuckled through his parchment lips. ‘Do you know the way back? Can you find the way back?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Too bad if you can’t. There’s no way of drawing you a map!’

  The bosker smiled again, then closed his eyes, drawing the skins around his neck as he lay by the lapping waters.

  ‘Goodbye, Martin.’

  ‘Do I just leave you here?’

  ‘I won’t be here for long. The boat’s already on the lake.’

  Martin stood and peered across the water. A wake was spreading, as if a water bird were swimming, but Martin could see no creature there.

  He put more wood on the fire, throwing the bony remains of the pike into the reeds. When he looked back, Conrad’s eyes were closed, his mouth gaping. There was no movement below the furs. He was probably dead.

  Martin made the sign of the Cross and Wheel on his chest, then followed the path, away from the lake, through the crowding trees, running back to the hunting lodge, then the edgewood, and at last to the path and his own house.

  7

  It was early afternoon, now. He had spent too long in the forest and it had been difficult to find his way back to the edge. He had felt crowded and crushed. At times he had imagined himself followed, which had been a disorientating experience.

  As he ran to the house to pick up his car – he was late for Daniel, who had to be fetched from school – he heard the terrible screaming from the kitchen, and for a second was stunned into immobility. Then Rebecca’s terror resolved clearly and he broke into a breathless run, almost flinging himself through the door.

  Rebecca was standing in the middle of the room, which was in chaos. She had thrown the table over, kicked the chairs, broken plates, cups and picture glass. Her hands were bloody, her face smeared with red streaks. Her hair was awry, her long dress torn and stained. She was turning where she stood, and screaming, and shaking her head, battering at her eyes with the raw horrors of her fingers.

  Martin grabbed her and forced her still. ‘I’m here! I’m here! Beck, what’s happened? What’s happened?’

  ‘Shadows!’ she wailed, then collapsed against him, weeping openly, clutching him in an embrace that said never let me go!

  ‘What about shadows?’

  ‘All round. Everywhere. Watching. Laughing.’

  ‘Come on … let’s get you cleaned up.’

  He urged her upstairs. She stumbled, felt blindly, whispered, ‘I can’t see. Anymore. All gone. Shadows only.’ In the bathroom he tended to the cuts on her hands, then undressed her and helped her into a warm bath. She lay back, her plastered fingers playing on his as he washed her, stroked her, comforting her as much as he could.

  ‘Please,’ she said quietly, through the steam and the heat. ‘Don’t. Let. Daniel. Home … Please …’

  Even as she spoke, downstairs the back door was flung open. Outside, the sound of a departing car told Martin that one of the other parents had brought their son home.

  The boy pounded up the stairs, came straight to the bathroom, bursting in to stand there, face glowing, breathing hard. ‘Got a lift from Thierry’s dad. Why weren’t you there? What’s up with Mummy? I’m hungry. Can I have some bread? It’s all messy downstairs. Have you been fighting? Why weren’t you there?’

  ‘Go downstairs and straighten the table and the chairs. I’ll get you a sandwich in a minute.’

  Daniel stepped quickly to the side of the bath and looked at the pinkish water, at the rigid, naked body of his mother, her hands wrapped firmly, tensely around Martin’s. She stared blindly at the ceiling.

  The boy said, ‘I love you, Mummy. Don’t be hurt. I really do love you. I always did.’

  Rebecca turned her head to the tiled wall, slipping slightly in the water. ‘Away!’ she hissed.

  Daniel grinned at his father. ‘I think I’m in the way. Shall I close the door?’

  And with a suggestive chuckle he ran to the landing, pulling the bathroom door shut behind him.

  Downstairs, the sound of noisy rearranging was testimony to Daniel’s efforts to tidy up after his mother’s period of hysterics. Martin led Rebecca to the bedroom, insisting she get under the covers. She was shaking, a terrified creature, confronting darkness saved for shadows – and no shadows that were cast by the warm and familiar sun. She had few words, now. She struggled to speak, resorting to a scrawled note as Martin sat on the bed, close to tears himself.

  She wrote: ask Jac and Suz to have the boy. Ask priest to visit.

  ‘You’re going to stay with Uncle Jacques for a few days.’

  ‘Why?’ Daniel asked. He was sitting at the table, staring defiantly as ever, his face that of a ten-year-old, though only six summer suns had warmed his lanky body. He had cut a chunk from a stale baguette, toasted it and spread it with brie. He chewed slowly, arms folded on the table, eyes fixed firmly on his father. ‘Why?’ he repeated.

  ‘Because I said so. Mummy isn’t well and I need to look after her, and it will be easier if you stay with Uncle Jacques.’

  Daniel shrugged. ‘All right. When do I go?’

  ‘When you’ve finished your sandwich. Pack some clothes and I’ll drive you over.’

  The boy did as he was told. He appeared downstairs, a small case in one hand, his New York Yankees windcheater opened to expose a Spookbusters T-shirt. Martin knelt down and pinched the boy’s cheek. ‘You don’t mind, do you? It’s only for a while, to help mummy get better.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Daniel said, then dropped the case and flung his arms around Martin. He was fighting back tears, and when Martin pulled away slightly he could see how the boy’s lip trembled.

  ‘It’s not for ever.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘Mummy doesn’t love me. She told me.’

  ‘Nonsense. Mummy loves you very much. When did she tell you?’

  ‘In a dream. She’s frightened of me. She thinks I’m trying to hurt her.’

  ‘She’s very ill, Daniel. And I really want to do everything I can to get
her better. But part of her being ill is that she behaves strangely, she says things she doesn’t mean. I want you to go and stay with Uncle Jacques and Aunt Suzanne, and behave yourself, and do what you’re told, and in a few days you’ll come back here.’

  And in his head, as he spoke these words, a voice whispered, you liar. You liar. You’re terrified of what is happening. You suspect your son. Conrad’s words have frightened the life out of you. You liar … liar …

  Martin left the priest and Rebecca alone, the woman sitting huddled by the window, apparently staring out across Broceliande, the man, in jeans and track-suit top, standing behind her, talking quietly.

  Later he came down and accepted a mug of coffee. ‘She’s made her peace,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t realised her spirit was still so strong.’

  ‘Is that why she wanted to talk to you? To make her confession?’

  Father Gualzator nodded, staring into the mug. ‘What are you going to do?’

  The question unleashed in Martin the full burden of helplessness. What to do? What could he do?

  ‘I have no idea. Specialists … speech therapists … psychologists … opticians … Rebecca says she can only see shadows, not even shadows of objects that are real. Like a kid round here, dancing through the people on the path, but they were never terrifying. She’s terrified of these shadows.’

  ‘There’s something else,’ the priest said, frowning. ‘Her language—’

  ‘Almost gone …?’

  ‘Almost completely gone, I think. I believe she has clung to these last few words to make her peace with God and the hill. Now, she has begun to speak strange words. Literally, strange words, but familiar. I can’t be sure … I wrote some down …’

  He came over to Martin and showed him the page of his notebook. He had scrawled Rebecca’s murmured phrases phonetically.

  ‘It’s gibberish,’ Martin said.

  ‘I don’t think so. There are constructions here that have familiarity. Look: iambathaguz. That sounds like Mabathagus, a particularly unpleasant entity from mythology, a sorcerer.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘Of course you haven’t. All you do is use your eyes to read. You don’t use your eyes to remember. But then who am I to criticise? Here’s something else: jingux. In Basque, that’s almost the word for God, although not God as the church and the hill would understand it. Jinx.

  ‘I think a lot of the rest of this is a deeper peace being made, but there is so much, she is speaking so much, and keeps laughing, as if triumphantly. I don’t understand it. Not at all. But this fascinates me. I’m going to go south for a while, to find an old friend, someone who has a wider eye, an older eye than mine, someone who might see a little deeper into this, er …’ he hesitated, searching for the word.

  ‘Gibberish?’

  ‘It’s not gibberish, Martin. It’s pain. Look after Rebecca. She’s terrified.’

  ‘I know she is. I’ll look after her with all my heart.’

  8

  Almost as soon as the priest had departed for Basque country Martin took Rebecca to Paris, to her appointment with a specialist, André Benvenista, at the National Institute for Parapsychology. Suzanne accompanied them, while Jacques took care of Daniel.

  The meeting, the observation on Rebecca, was unsatisfactory and distressing.

  She lay in a room overlooking the Seine, her scalp covered with a fine tracery of electrodes and sensors. It was a bright day, and Paris, at least, was alive with activity.

  Martin sat quietly by the window, watching the technicians about their business, aware of strange patterns on black video screens, outlines in three dimensions of the brain of the silent, shadowed woman. Colour flickered in the infra-red as she was tested – reds, blues, starbursts of yellow. Martin thought of turbulent or boiling water.

  Everything was recorded and later he was shown the findings, understanding nothing. He watched the screens. Bursts of activity in the frontal lobe triggered sequential activities in the temporal lobe, limbic system and brain-stem. This was as it should have been. But he listened, uncomprehending, as he was shown a ‘furious’ echo from the limbic system, an ‘after-event’ that spread rapidly back, insidiously setting off activity in other regions of the neuro-cortex, a pattern of response that was meaningless to the psychologists who watched.

  This ‘event’ occurred when Rebecca spoke words in the strange tongue that Martin had listened to in the deep of the night. But each time she spoke in what Father Gualzator had suggested was some form of early Basque, a normal speech pattern could be observed, though once, when she was whispering at random, she suddenly murmured in the deep-of-night sounds again and set up what Benvenista called a ‘standing field of bio-electric activity’, a split-second in which her whole brain was illuminated, as if awakened at once, a terrible shock that caused her to gasp, sit bolt upright from where she lay, to stare and froth, a fit of tremendous power, but a moment only, a moment of ancient memory too strong for her sheltered twentieth-century mind to cope with.

  Immediately after this there was nothing but darkness on the screen, but she whispered ‘Martin …’ and a small glow appeared, a flicker of light, a guttering candle, a calm flame in the Stygian darkness that was the web within her skull.

  Finally, she spoke words in the sequence of lisps and glottal sounds that was the deep-of-night language, and there was no signal at all from the language centre of her cortex, only from the motor area, showing nothing more than that her tongue was moving. She spoke words from a darkness so deep that it no longer registered. Over and over these odd sounds whispered, yet among them came the name ‘Martin’, and when ‘Martin’ was sounded there was that comforting flash from the frontal lobe, but thereafter, just the gloom of visual silence until she was stopped and brought back to whatever consciousness she could experience through touch and sound and shadow.

  ‘To put it simply,’ Benvenista said, ‘it’s as if her learned language has been scraped away, exposing older forms, primitive forms – like a city, destroyed to expose the hill where the first settlers camped in prehistoric times. The core of our language is embedded – we build upon that core as we grow and experience communication. But the core of Rebecca’s language no longer registers. It is either still there, but has been hidden somehow; or it has been destroyed.

  ‘But there are no tumours, no areas of necrosis, no fibrous masses, no signs of a stroke, no abnormalities. Everything in physiological and anatomical terms is healthy. And it’s the same with the visual cortex: show her a shadow and it registers. But the shadows she sees – at least, that she indicates she sees – do not show – except, of course, in the motor cortex as she follows the ghost with her eyes.’

  ‘But you think her language might still be there? All of her senses? Somewhere – just hidden?’

  Benvenista spread his hands and shrugged as he stared out at the bright day. ‘In the absence of damage, I can’t imagine an alternative.’

  Martin almost said, what if someone had stolen her words, her songs, her dreams, but he refrained from speaking. Across the room, Rebecca was making incoherent sounds and staring in the direction of the voices.

  Although Benvenista would have liked to keep Rebecca longer, she was signalling with her body, with her crude speech, that she did not wish to stay. Martin drove them all back to the farm by Broceliande and spent an hour ringing around for a full-time, live-in nurse. He eventually found someone to take the position as from the next day.

  Suzanne stayed the night, but Rebecca, once in her room and seated by the window facing the forest, was relaxed. She could perform most bodily functions without assistance, but gave no indication of being aware of either Martin or the older woman.

  Two days later, Father Gualzator returned.

  Martin was walking along the path with Daniel, holding the boy’s hand, talking to him gently. Daniel’s behaviour at school that day had been disruptive, and Martin had been advised to take him home. He was coming down with flu,
perhaps, was the diplomatic suggestion. As Martin had entered the classroom to take his son home there had been an almost tangible tension. Daniel was by the window, at a desk on his own, illuminated by the pale sun. The rest of the class whispered and wrote in exercise books. Daniel came quickly over to his father, and the teacher, a fair-haired man in his late twenties, smiled reassuringly as he closed the door behind Martin.

  ‘I’m sure it’s just a temporary upset,’ he said.

  As Martin led Daniel down the corridor, behind him the classroom erupted into the sound of baying, barking and cheering, only subdued after thirty seconds of the teacher’s shouting.

  On the path, Daniel suddenly stopped, clutching Martin’s hand more tightly. He was listening against the light wind. ‘It’s the priest,’ he said. ‘He’s hiding something.’

  Martin scanned the land around, the dark wood, the hill with the sun setting, the scatter of houses. After a few minutes he saw the wobbling figure of Father Gualzator, approaching them on his ancient bicycle.

  Smiling broadly, breathing hard, the priest dismounted. He was wearing his track-suit and a Redskins baseball cap. His smile, as he greeted Daniel, was transparently fixed, but he dropped to a crouch and embraced the boy.

  ‘How are you getting on with Uncle Jacques?’

  ‘All right. I miss Mummy, though.’

  ‘I’m sure you do.’

  ‘Uncle Jacques watches football all the time, and his computer can’t play good games.’

  ‘Oh dear. That is a tragedy. But he has a lot of books, doesn’t he?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Would you like to have a wobble on the bike? It’s a bit big for you, but it’s good exercise. Too bloody good,’ he added with a smile at Martin, taking a deep breath. ‘I’m out of condition.’

  Daniel had grabbed the bicycle and was racing it away towards the church, hidden from view over the nearest hill. As he cycled furiously, he called back, ‘I can hear everything you say!’