Lavondyss

  Everything about the clearing by the ruined house suggested to her that it was a living place, that someone used it. The fire-pit was old; the ash had been compacted by many rains, and the bones had been dragged about the garden by animals. But there was a sense of occupation, not unlike the occupation of an occasional camp – a hunter’s camp, perhaps.

  Something moved past her, swiftly, silently.

  She was startled. Her eyes were still dazzled by the brilliance of the sun, glimpsed partially against the corrupt outlines of the wooden effigy. She had the idea that it was a child running past her. But it had swiftly vanished into the undergrowth, the same patch of wood from which she had earlier made her cautious entry into this small, abandoned garden.

  All around her there was movement in the woodland, an enigmatic and frustrating flickering at the edge of her vision. It was a sensation with which she had become quite familiar, and it did not alarm her.

  She must have imagined the child.

  She felt suddenly very calm, very peaceful. She sat down by the immense carved trunk, glanced up at the jagged outlines against the bright sky, then closed her eyes. She tried to imagine this house when it had been used. Her grandfather would have told her about it. Perhaps his words could be made to surface from the primitive, infant parts of her mind.

  Soon she imagined a dog prowling the garden; chickens pecking the ground, roaming free. There was the sound of a wireless drifting through the open door from the kitchen, where a woman worked on the pine table. The French windows were swinging free; she could hear voices. Two men sat around the desk, examining the relics of the past they explored through their own minds. They were writing in a thick book, scratching out the words …

  A young man walked by the garden fence, fresh-faced, tanned from the sun.

  Then the sun paled and a biting wind chilled her. Snow piled high; black clouds swirled above her. The snow drove at her remorselessly, freezing her to her bones –

  Through the storm a figure walked towards her. It was bulky, like a bear. As it came into vision she could see that it was a man, heavily clad in furs. Icicles hung from the white animal’s teeth that decorated his chest. His eyes glittered like ice, peering at her from the blackness of hair and beard.

  He crouched. He raised his two hands, holding a stone club. The stone was smooth and black, brightly polished. The man was crying. Tallis watched him in anguish. No sound came from him – the wind and the snow made no sound –

  Then he opened his mouth, threw back his head and screamed deafeningly.

  The scream was in the form of a name. Tallis’s name. It was loud, haunting and harrowing and Tallis at once emerged from her daydreaming, the perspiration breaking from her face, her heart racing.

  The clearing was as before, one side in deep shadow, the other bright with sun. Distantly her name was being called, an urgent sound.

  She walked back the way she had come, glancing into the ruined study where the oak tree filled a room whose cases, cabinets and shelves were shattered by time and weather. She noticed the desk again. She thought of the dream image of the two men writing. Had her grandfather whispered to her about a journal? Was there a journal to be found? Would it mention Harry?

  She retraced her steps to the edge of the wood. At the last moment, as she walked through the darkness, she saw a man’s figure, standing out on the open land. All she could see of him was his silhouette. It disturbed her. The man was standing on the rise of ground, immediately beyond the barbed-wire fence. His body was bent to one side as he peered into the impenetrable gloom of Ryhope Wood. Tallis watched him, sensing the concern … and the sadness. His whole posture was that of a saddened, ageing man. Motionless. Watching. Peering anxiously into a realm denied him by the fear in his heart. Her father.

  ‘Tallis?’

  Without a word she stepped forward into the light, emerging from the tree line and stepping through the wire.

  James Keeton straightened up, a look of relief on his face. ‘We were worried about you. We thought we’d lost you.’

  ‘No, Daddy. I’m quite safe.’

  ‘Well. Thank God for that.’

  She went up to him and held his hand. She glanced back at the wood, where a whole different world was waiting in silence for the visitors who would come to marvel at its strangeness.

  ‘There’s a house in there,’ she whispered to her father.

  ‘Well … we’ll leave it for the moment. I don’t suppose you saw any sign of life?’

  Tallis smiled, then shook her head.

  ‘Come and eat something,’ her father said.

  That same afternoon she made her first doll, compelled to do so, but not questioning from where that compulsion might have come.

  She had found a piece of hawthorn, twelve inches long, quite thin; she stripped off the bark and rounded one of its ends using a knife which she’d borrowed from Gaunt’s workshop. It took some effort. The wood was unseasoned, but still very hard. When she tried to carve the eyes she found that even making simple patterns was strenuous activity. The end result was recognizably anthropomorphic, but only just. Nevertheless Tallis felt proud of her Thorn King, and placed him on top of her dressing table. She stared at him, but he didn’t mean anything. She had tried to copy the hideous pole in the garden-glade, but she had come nowhere close. As such, this, her first experiment with woodcraft, was empty; meaningless.

  But an idea came to her and she went to the woodshed, picking her way through the cut elm until she found a thick log. It was still in its bark. This, she carefully detached and cut in half, to make a curved sheet that she could fashion into a mask.

  Back in her room she worked into the evening, cutting the rectangular wood down to a roughly face-shaped oval. Elm bark is hard and she found, again, that her tiny strength, even with the sharp knife, could only make slow progress in chipping and slicing. But soon she had gouged out two eyes, and scratched a smiling mouth. Exhausted, sitting among the shards, she took out her paint box and painted concentric green rings about each eye, and a red tongue poking from the scratch of lips. The rest of the bark she painted white.

  When she placed this on the dresser, and stared at it, she decided to call it the Hollower.

  When her father entered the room, a few minutes later, he was surprised and shocked at the mess. ‘What on earth …?’ he said, brushing the wood shavings from Tallis’s bed. ‘What have you been doing?’

  ‘Carving,’ she said simply.

  He picked up the knife and checked the edge. He shook his head and looked at his daughter. ‘The last thing I need now is having to sew your fingers back on. This is terribly sharp.’

  ‘I know. That’s why I used it. But I’m careful. Look!’ She held up two bloodless hands. Her father seemed satisfied. Tallis smiled because, in fact, she had cut the back of her right hand quite badly, but had a plaster on the gash.

  Her father came over to the two monstrosities on her dressing table. He picked up the mask. ‘It’s ugly. Why did you carve this?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you going to wear it?’

  ‘One day, I expect.’

  He placed the mask against his face and peered at the girl through the tiny eyeholes. He made low, mysterious grumbling sounds and Tallis laughed. ‘You can hardly see anything,’ he said, lowering the bark face.

  ‘It’s the Hollower,’ she said.

  ‘It’s the what?’

  ‘The Hollower. That’s the mask’s name.’

  ‘What’s a Hollower?’

  ‘I don’t know. Something that watches holloways, I suppose. Something that guards the tracks between different worlds.’

  ‘Gobbledegook,’ said her father, though he sounded kindly. ‘But I’m impressed that you know about holloways. There are several around the farm, you know. We walked along one today …’

  ‘But they’re just tracks,’ she interrupted impatiently.

  ‘Very old tracks, though. One of them runs through St
retley Stones meadow. Stretley, you see? It’s an old word for street. The stones probably mark a crossroads.’ He leaned forward towards her. ‘Men and women dressed in skins and carrying clubs used to walk along them. Why, some of them probably stopped right here, where the house now stands, to eat a haunch or two of uncooked cow.’

  Tallis pulled a face. It seemed to her that the notion of eating raw meat was silly. Her father wasn’t a very convincing storyteller.

  ‘They’re still just old roads,’ she said. ‘But some of them …’ she lowered her voice dramatically. ‘Some of them led away deep into the land, and wound around the woods, and suddenly disappeared. The old people used to mark those places with tall stones, or great pillars of wood carved into the likeness of a favoured animal, pillars made out of whole trees …’

  ‘Did they indeed?’ her father said, watching his daughter as she prowled about the room, hands raised, body tensed, as if she was stalking an animal.

  ‘Yes. Indeed they did. These days we can still see the stones, out in the fields and on the hills, but the old gates have been lost. But hundreds of years ago, when you were still young –’

  ‘Thanks very much.’

  ‘Thousands of years ago, those places were forbidden to anyone except the Hollowers. Because they led to the kingdoms of the dead … And only a few ordinary people could go there. Only heroes. Knights in armour went there. They always took their dogs, enormous hunting dogs, and they pursued the great beasts of the Underworld, the giant elks whose antlers could scythe down trees, the huge, horned pigs, the belly-rumbling bears, the man-wolves which walked on their hind legs and could disguise themselves as dead trees.

  ‘But sometimes, when one of the hunters tried to get back to his own Castle, he couldn’t find the holloway, or the stones, or the wood, or the cave … and he became trapped there, and ever more ghostly, until his clothes were like ragged grave-shrouds on his body, and his swords and daggers were red with rust. But if a man had a good friend, then the good friend would go and rescue him. If …’ she added with a final dramatic flourish, raising the wooden mask to her face and imitating her father’s jokey growl, ‘if … the Hollower would allow it …’

  Eight years old and she had shamed his ‘raw haunch of cow’. James Keeton stared at his daughter in astonishment.

  ‘Where on earth did you get all that from? Gaunt?’

  ‘It just came to me,’ she stated honestly.

  She was without doubt her grandfather’s girl. Her father smiled and conceded defeat.

  ‘Did you enjoy the walk today?’ he asked by way of changing the subject.

  She stared at him, then nodded. ‘Why didn’t you come with me? Into the wood?’

  Her father just shrugged. ‘I’m too old to go gallivanting around in woodland. Anyway, there was a KEEP OUT sign up. Can you imagine what would happen to my business if I was prosecuted for trespassing?’

  ‘But the house was there. You came all that way to see the house, and then gave up! Why?’

  Keeton smiled awkwardly. ‘KEEP OUT signs mean what they say.’

  ‘Who put the sign up?’

  ‘I have no idea. The Ryhope estate, I expect.’

  ‘Why didn’t they rescue the house? Why did they just leave it? All overgrown, all run down. But it still has furniture in it. A table, a cooker, a desk … even pictures on the wall.’

  Her father stared at her, frowning slightly. He was clearly astonished by what she was telling him.

  ‘Why would they do that?’ Tallis persisted. ‘Why would they just leave the house to be overgrown?’

  ‘I don’t know … I just don’t know. Really! I have no idea. I have to admit, it seems very strange …’

  He went over to the window and leaned heavily on the sill, looking out into the clear evening. Tallis followed him, thoughtful, then determined.

  ‘Did Harry go to that house? Is that where Harry went? Is that where you think he died?’

  Keeton drew a deep breath, then let it expire slowly. ‘I don’t know, Tallis. I don’t know anything any more. He seems to have told you far more than he ever told me.’

  She thought back to the evening when Harry had said goodbye to her. ‘I told you everything I remember. He was going away, he said, but he would be very close. He was going somewhere strange. Someone had shot him with an arrow … that’s all I remember. And he was crying. That too.’

  Her father turned and dropped to a crouch, hugging her. His eyes were wet. ‘Harry didn’t say goodbye to us. Only to you. Do you know something? That has been hurting me more than anything, all these years.’

  ‘Perhaps he didn’t expect to be gone very long.’

  ‘He was dying,’ James Keeton said. ‘He must have thought he was protecting my feelings by not saying goodbye. He was dying …’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I just do. There was something about him, those last few weeks … something resigned.’

  When Tallis thought about Harry, she couldn’t imagine him as dead and cold in the ground. She shook her head. ‘I’m sure he’s still alive. He’s just lost, that’s all. I’m sure he’ll come home to us.’

  Her father said kindly, ‘No, darling. He’s in heaven now. We shall all have to come to terms with the fact.’

  ‘Just because he’s in heaven,’ Tallis protested, ‘doesn’t mean to say he’s dead.’

  Her father straightened up again, smiling and resting his hand on her shoulder. ‘It must be a wonderful world in there …’ he tapped her head. ‘Full of giant elks, and knights in armour, and dark castles. A hundred years ago they’d have burned you as a witch …’

  ‘But I’m not a witch.’

  ‘I don’t suppose any of them were. Come on. Supper time. And you can tell us another story before you go to bed.’

  He laughed as they walked from the room. ‘It’s usually the parents who get pestered to tell the bedtime stories to their offspring, not the other way round.’

  ‘I’ve got a good one,’ Tallis said. ‘It’s about a man whose son goes for a walk in the woods, and the man is so certain that his son has been eaten by wolves that he can no longer see the boy, even though he’s right there, in the house.’

  ‘Cheeky little devil,’ her father said, tugging her hair before racing her down to the parlour.

  (iv)

  Some of the tension in the house faded, after that. James Keeton seemed a little brighter, more cheerful, and Tallis imagined this was because he had finally expressed his feelings about Harry to her. She remained puzzled by his apprehensive behaviour outside the wood, but her mother said simply, ‘He thought he needed to see the place where Harry went; now he realizes he doesn’t want to.’

  It was a confusing and unsatisfactory explanation, but it was all she got.

  Nevertheless, Tallis herself felt considerably more at ease, now, and after school she continued to explore and to name the territory around the farm. She also developed her skills in carving the masks and small wooden dolls which had become an obsession. She was continually aware of the fleeting figures which pursued her when she journeyed across the meadows, but they no longer startled her, nor worried her. Whenever she was close to the enclosed pasture known as Stretley Stones, her peripheral vision seemed to have a life of its own, a flowing, quivering world of movement that could never be observed directly, but which hinted at strange human shapes, and lurking animal forms.

  And there were sounds: singing, from the field known as The Stumps, but whose secret name now became Sad Song Meadow. Tallis never saw the source of the singing, and after a while stopped searching for it.

  More dramatically, one day, sitting and daydreaming in the field by Fox Water, she woke to find herself in the mouth of a wide, windy cave, staring out across a lush, dense forest towards high mountains where a blazing wall of fire and smoke could be glimpsed distantly. The strange dream lasted for a second only, and thereafter she was aware of the windy cave only fleetingly, the merest touch of an alien breeze
on an otherwise perfectly still, hot day.

  She soon established that there were three of the cowled, female figures which seemed to haunt the edge of her vision, hovering in the denser woodland thickets, watching her through painted wooden masks. Tallis began to get an idea that the strange things happened to her whenever one of these women was close by. When White Mask was hovering her mind filled with fragments of stories and the land seemed to speak to her of lost battles and wild rides. When the woman with the green mask was around she got ideas for carving, and about carving, and saw odd shadows on the land. The third figure, whose mask was white, green and red, made Tallis think of her own ‘Hollower’; this figure she associated with such strange glimpses as the windy cave and the sad song.

  It made little sense beyond the idea of being ‘haunted’, and for a while she was not concerned by it. But she fashioned masks to copy those of the ‘storyteller’ and the ‘carver’. As she did so, so names came to her …

  The white mask she called Gaberlungi, an odd name, but one which made her smile as she said it. Gaberlungi was memory of the land, and sometimes when she wore or carried the crudely fashioned oak-bark the stories crowded and jostled her mind with such intensity that she could concentrate on nothing else. The third mask, made from hazel and painted green, she called Skogen, but this, too, had a second name, shadow of the forest. It was a landscape mask; when she held it to her face, the cloud shadow on the land seemed different: it cast patterns that might have been the shadows of higher hills and older forests.

  Over the years she became an expert at the craft; she worked masks from different wood, became skilful at trimming down the bark and cutting the holes for eyes and mouth. She developed, or purloined, a number of tools to make the crafting easier, even using differently-shaped heavy stones as hammers, chippers and gougers.

  To the first three she added four more. Lament was the simplest; a few days after carving this from willow bark she heard the first of several songs from the field called The Stumps; she was also aware of the haunting presence of the female ‘hollower’, her white and red mask catching the grey light of an overcast day as she watched Tallis from the hedges. Lament was a sad mask, its mouth sullen, its eyes tearful; its colour was grey.