‘Is this where he worked?’
‘Yes.’
He rode into the hall, through the parlour and into the kitchen, striking the metal pans hanging on the wall, sweeping the storage jars from their shelves.
‘What’s this?’
‘The kitchen.’
‘Did she work here?’
‘My mother? Yes. She did the cooking for the family.’
‘Why isn’t she here?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps she’s gone to one of the villages.’
‘She should be here.’ He beat his crop against the pans, drumming on them and delighting in the various tinny sounds.
Then back through the parlour and stumbling up the stairs. The horse bucked and whinnied, but Mabon thrashed it. On the landing he paused, leaned forward over the grey’s nape, looked at the doors, then made the animal kick into Steven’s bedroom.
My brother lay fast asleep and Mabon rode round the bed, peering down at him, flicking the feathered crop at the face in repose.
‘Who’s this?’
‘My brother. Steven.’
Mabon peered at him closely. ‘His sleep is charmed.’
Yes, I thought. It is! But this was Steven several years after the time when young Guiwenneth had come from the wood, years after our mother’s death. This was an image from later in our lives. I was confused, hanging on with one hand to the restless man-boy, nervous in anticipation of the next wild move or gallop. It would not have surprised me if Mabon had leapt the grey out of the window, a long drop to the garden below.
Had I chosen the gate correctly? Had I sent Guiwenneth – had I followed Guiwenneth – through the Ivory Gate, into the land of lies? Confusion tormented me, and yet … And yet this seemed right. From the moment I had smelled the field of barley, and the summer air, I had felt that this was the same place that I had once inhabited.
Mabon said, ‘Stop talking.’
‘I’m not talking.’
‘You are! You are talking incessantly. Is it true, is it real, is it a lie?’ His voice mocked me. ‘My head is hurting with your doubts. All that matters is that we see the truth of her death.’
‘My mother’s death?’
‘If you know of another death, I’d like to see that too. But yes. Of course! Your mother’s death. Where is she?’
I tried to remember what had happened that day of Guiwenneth’s wild ride. Had my mother stayed away overnight? Where had Huxley been? Steven had been away at school. This strangely isolated image from my past had so much that was true and so much that was false.
At last I remembered that my mother had spent the evening staring at the fire, the unnecessary fire that she had laid and maintained during the warm summer’s night. But though the wood in the fireplace was newly set, there was no sign of her at all.
We had come through the wrong gate.
‘Not at all,’ Mabon whispered as he rode the horse back through the kitchen and out into the late afternoon, blinking against the light, staring at the silent wood.
There was no food in the house. In the evening, Mabon walked outside, whistled into the dusk sky, and a while later his eagle flew in with a chicken clutched in its claws. Mabon took the dead creature, stripped some feathers, sniffed the flesh disapprovingly – ‘Smells young. No blood!’ – then went into the kitchen, clattering among the pots and pans, running cold water from the tap, laughing and complaining, delighting in the long, sulphur-tipped matches, which he called ‘fire sticks’, finally boiling the stripped and gutted fowl, which we ate with our fingers after dark.
My mother did not return.
While the chicken was still boiling, however, the man-boy walked with me to the woodland’s edge.
‘I’m glad you brought me here,’ he said. ‘I like your house. I like the warmth in the rooms. I like the fire sticks, I like the iron pans, I like the way it is clean and orderly. I like this dry garden, that gentle field of yellow grass. I like the strong trees, the way they stand alone in the fields, like watching giants. This is a strange yet lovely place in which you live.’
‘I never thought so myself. It always seemed very empty.’
‘But what made it seem empty? Did you ever ask yourself that?’
‘No.’
‘Was it the land? Or was it the father? It certainly wasn’t the mother.’
‘No. It wasn’t my mother. It felt very lonely in the house at times.’
‘Because a father was missing!’
‘Yes. Because a father was missing.’
‘In the forest.’
‘You know a lot about me, Mabon …’
He grinned through his white mask, which was beginning to crack, revealing the older face below. Every hour, the youthful and female look of his disguise was degrading into a harsher, ageing masculinity. ‘I know nothing about you at all, Christian. That’s why I’m here. Feeding from your dreams! I want to see for myself. I don’t need to know you to know that your father was as distant as that cloud up there. I don’t need to know you to know that you loved your mother to the point of fury with your father. I don’t need to know you to know that you love Guiwenneth, whose shape I took, though I’ve shed it now, I prefer my own body to a woman’s and especially to a girl’s. I know you for the man you are, though you look like a boy. But I know that you did something in your boyhood that you cannot face. I did something in my boyhood that I cannot face.’
‘What was that? What did you do?’
He laughed. ‘If I knew that, there would be no point in all of this!’
I couldn’t help smiling at this admonition, since it reflected Issabeau’s words, from her own account of her story with the Sea-Cave Boy, the lad who had asked her the secret that kept her in the glade: if I knew that, it wouldn’t be a secret …
This place was neither real nor false; it had echoes of many memories, and from what I had seen, the memories were accurate. I felt as if I had come home, but this was not my home at all, and Mabon was a visitor, creating the familiar landscape around us in order to explore my own childhood.
And yet, knowing that the place was both real and unreal did not discomfit me. Perhaps if I had passed through the Ivory Gate, there would have been terrors and nightmares gnawing at my consciousness as I surveyed this Dreaming Land. Here, though, there was familiarity, peace, and an impending sense of discovery.
Full of fowl, thirst quenched with strong tea, which Mabon also enjoyed, I lit the fire and waited for my mother, staring at the flames as they consumed the wood, feeling the sweat run from my skin in the stifling room. Mabon watched me from the corner, curious, quiet.
‘Your father is here,’ he whispered suddenly, and when I looked up he was holding out a hand to me. He smiled, then put a finger to his lips. He looked so odd, in his short tunic, his hair lank and white with lime, his face like a cracked, Japanese mask.
I followed him to the study. Huxley was hunched over the desk, writing furiously in his journal. He looked up as we entered, frowned, changed his spectacles from the horn-rimmed reading pair to the slightly larger, horn-rimmed lenses that he used to see into the distance, stared at me and stared right through me, then rose and walked to the shattered windows, his hands behind his back. He peered at Ryhope Wood for a long minute, then came back to his desk; changed glasses again; picked up his pen and continued to write.
I couldn’t get over how young my father looked. His hair was full and dark, shaved smartly above his ears, parted precisely on the left side of his crown, hair-cream reflecting the light from his desk lamp. There were no lines, no shadows on his skin. His mouth was pink and youthful. He was enveloped in a cocoon of inspiration and enthusiasm. This was my father as he must have been when he first realised that he had discovered something wonderful, literally in his own back garden.
I saw him now through Mabon’s eyes. Mabon and I were two ghosts, haunting the scientist as he recorded his latest insights, his most recent observations.
What date, I wondered, what day, what year was
this? I peered more closely at the tight, neat writing.
… from the wood again.
I must keep calm. I must maintain control over the physical and mental environment. I have seen these creatures in the flesh, the forms of the Green Jack, of the Hoods and Arthur, Hereward, Finn, Tam Lyn, Tom Rhymer – all the brutal, stinking forms that have come down to us as heroes. I can smell the woman. She is around me always. She is watching me. Why? I cannot answer the question, but I know this: these myth images are watching me, and are curious about me, with the same intensity that I watch them and am curious for my own part. Here we are, at the edge of two worlds. My careful curiosity drives me to question their past. Their own curiosity drives them to question their present. And I must fight against the arrogant assumption that I am superior …
They haunt me every second of the day. They are here, watching me. I can glimpse them from the edge of vision, and because my mind is frail in its way, I think I see my son Christian; and the girl, of course. The girl from the wood.
Like laughing clowns, they crowd down on me and peer at my scrawl.
GET AWAY!
But why should I write that? I welcome these hauntings. My life depends upon them! I have not yet found the way into Ryhope Wood, the way deep. Perhaps these ghastly reflections at the edge of vision will harden into the true ghosts they are, and take me by the hand, and guide me gently into a place I wish to know so well, and which I do not know at all – I am an Outsider in my own life. I long to be inside the world of Mythago Wood!
I whispered to him, ‘My son Christian is a sensible boy. He will “guard the fort” …’
My father wrote the line.
Mabon whispered, ‘There is a beast that is at the heart of the world.’
There is a beast … at heart of the world … Huxley wrote, and I caught my breath.
‘Shall we call it Urscumug? Call it Urscumug!’ mocked the white-faced Mabon.
I call it Urscumug. Man-like, but with the tusked features of a boar. Ancient and forgotten, now. It is the first hero …
‘Oh this is good, this is good,’ said Mabon with a laugh, clapping his hands together across the hunched form of the young man, my father, that young-old man.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked. ‘This isn’t real. My father’s discoveries were his own. We weren’t here then, all those years ago, haunting him.’
‘We are here now, haunting him,’ Mabon whispered through Guiwenneth’s crack-faced features.
‘But we are not in the past. This is just a play on the past!’
‘Really? Are you sure? Breathe on his neck. Go on. Breathe on his neck. He will feel that breath!’
‘I know he will. Look at his writing!’
Huxley had written:
… they are near me. I feel their breath on my neck. They are watching. This is wonderful! I have no rational way of explaining it. It is as if inspiration is falling from a bright, yet unseen sky. I document not my own experience, but the whispered fears and fantasies of men and women long dead, heroes, heroines, the forgotten folk of time who have been waiting to express their hearts and their stories to someone, anyone who would listen. This wood, this wonderful, ancient forest, has waited in time for a moment when someone … someone like me – some man, some woman, some entity would sit quietly at its edge and hear its whispered tales of terror, of beauty and of great deeds performed in great times when there was no man, no woman, to remember that moment.
George Huxley is here, though. I am here! Whisper all you want, I will deny you nothing. Just tell me the names. Tell me the names of those ancient heroes … Urscumug? What in God’s name is that? But I will write it down. I will remember it.
‘Just a piece of invention,’ mocked Mabon over the frantic, possessed figure of my father. ‘Do you hear me? Just a piece of fancy. A piece of unreality. A little tale from the Ivory Gate.’
The ghostly whisper was confusing my father.
I raged at Mabon: ‘You said we had come through the Horn Gate. The “true” gate.’
‘We have. I’m teasing this fool! I know those gates well, in all their forms, and I have learned how to draw a little sustenance from each of them!’
‘Was my father’s work a lie, then? Were you here, years ago? Have you made his obsession into something that is false?’
‘If only I had that power!’ Mabon said. ‘Alas! Only in our lives can we turn something true into something that is a lie. It’s a human failing; and it is also a human strength. If Huxley did that to himself … if he created his own lies, his own visions in this place … then there was a reason for it. And that reason has nothing to do with my own interference, now or in the past.’
‘Unless you are lying about it,’ I whispered, and Mabon grinned boyishly from his ancient mask.
‘We create stories to illuminate truth. We create lies to hide pain. Don’t we?’
‘Stories to illuminate truth? I would think so. Yes, Fables. Yes.’
‘And don’t we create lies to hide pain? The truth is masquerade?’
‘Yes. I’m sure we do. But I can’t think about this for the moment. Go away for a while, Mabon. I want to be alone with this dream.’
Like Puck making his exit from the glade, Mabon’s light winked out.
I stared down at my young father and after a while he looked up at me, his focus not quite on my eyes.
‘I’ve found her,’ I said. ‘And I’ve found love. I don’t care from whose mind she came. We love each other. I’ll never let her go! I know you loved her too. And I know you are looking for her still. But if you can hear me … if you can hear these words … stop looking for Guiwenneth. You can never find her, not as I have found her. She will never love you, because you can’t create the love you need!’
Huxley smiled at me, or seemed to; and a moment later bent to his journal, writing in an impassioned scrawl.
I half dozed, half dreamed in front of the roaring log fire, the sweat running from my body, hot on my chest, cooling on my back. The flames seemed to lick out of the wood, curling like mocking tongues about me. I shivered in that heat. There was movement around me, the murmuring drone of voices, the dull clatter of crockery. Touches on my shoulder …
Whispers in my ear.
But I half dozed, half dreamed, and I dreamed of my mother. Is this how she had felt, those last nights of agony before she had walked to the solitary oak and calmly, calculatedly hanged herself?
There was a crashing of glass, and a sonorous, moaning sound that might have been music on a gramophone slowing to a stop. I looked up at the clock, but the glass face was steamed up, time invisible behind the condensation. I rose and walked unsteadily to the study, stood in the doorway for a moment staring out at the night, and at the shapes that moved around the room.
I was beckoned to the desk and stood with my legs against the mahogany edge. The smells of the night mingled with the smell of the leather covering on the desk, where Huxley had written away his life and mind. I dreamed I was my mother for a moment …
An old woman in garish clothes, layer upon layer of skirts, a shawl above a shawl, the glitter of metal on her ears and nose, grey hair hanging in ringlets, walked up to me and whispered something in my ear.
The words were incomprehensible, but my blood turned cold, my heart began to face, my head filled with terror!
And a voice whispered, ‘Is this how it was? Is this how it happened? Or should I say – is this how it will happen?’
Daylight flooded the room. I stepped into the garden, walked around the house to the yard, with its chicken huts and sheds. The wood was ablaze. Steven stood there, with Guiwenneth! And another man, staring at the fire, the forest fire, frozen in their movements as if statues, though their hair moved and the woman’s dress flowed slowly with the heat.
I stood behind them, dreaming, a dream that made no sense, seeing events that were meaningless to me, though the way my body reacted, surged with fear, brought them horribly alive.
&
nbsp; Golden shapes tumbled from the fire, hawk-faces on running bodies.
Horses came through, and tall, dark men.
An arrow struck the stranger who was my brother’s companion, sent him tumbling towards me, clutching at the shaft that had entered his chest. His face was marked, as if burned; he was in agony as he died.
Rough men struck Guiwenneth, bundled her over the back of a horse, led her away. An ageing, scarred man flung a rope around my brother’s neck, pushed him against the shed, kissed his lips, then walked away. And a man I recognised – the Fenlander! – pulled the rope tight over the roof of the shed so that Steven hung there, limp and strangled. The fire consumed the figures again, but the ageing man looked back for an instant, blew a kiss, and through the beard that covered his face I recognised someone I knew.
I had seen myself!
I had seen myself through my mother’s eyes.
I had seen her eldest son kill her youngest son. Myself killing my brother Steven!
And Mabon whispered again, ‘Is this how it will be? Is this what must happen?’
* * *
She was running through the tall barley. I followed as fast as I could, calling for my mother, but she ran so fast, in her best suit, with the blood from her eyes splattering on the ripening ears and broken stalks. I called to her but she seemed not to hear. She ran to the solitary oak and wept for a few seconds, then saw me coming, tried to fling the rope across the bough but her throw wasn’t strong enough, even though the branch was within jumping distance of her outstretched hands.
By the time I had reached her, though, she had secured the noose loosely around her neck and stood there watching me, tearful and blood-stained, sobbing as she swayed on her feet.
‘What are you doing?’ I screamed at her, but she shouted back at me.
‘Go away, Chris. You can’t help me – only yourself!’
She looked up and again flung the rope across the branch, and this time it curled over the bark and draped back down. I stood in terror, staring at the half-hunched shape of my mother as she racked with tears, blood on her shoes, her breast red with blood, her pearl earrings catching the light as she held the free end of the rope, as if still reluctant to complete the act she had planned.