Halfway down the stairs he heard Jennifer’s cry of surprise as she woke fully. Then her sudden, splendid laugh.
He blocked his ears against the sounds that came next, and went into his study, tears streaming down his face as he fumbled behind the books for his private journal.
THIRTEEN
Will try to speak. But you move slowly, ghostly. Perhaps I am the same to you. I observe the house and Jenny, the boys, and they are real, although they seem to be a dream. But you are slow, the me part, the me factor, too ghostly, and it is hard to speak.
Steven is in the wood, Chris too. Something huge in the wood, some event, some rebirth or regeneration. I sense it. I hear it from mouths, from tales. I have been here so long, and the world of the mythago is my world.
This is puzzling. Why have you not been in the wood, in the same way, in the same wood? Confused. My mind does not focus. But I have had encounters. You have not had the same encounters.
I can’t answer about Steven. As a man, he will come here. Or as a boy and grow to a man. Somehow. It has to do with the Urscumaga. Pursuit. Quest. I cannot say more. I know NO more! Be gentle with Steven. Be careful of him. Be watchful. Love him. LOVE HIM!
Wynne-Jones was in the horse temple. You saw him. You MUST have seen. I think he was killed. He was trapped.
You should know this. Why not? Why do you not?
Perhaps you have forgotten. Perhaps some memory is stripped from you and exists in me. Memory in you is denied me. No. Not true. Your account of Ash is my account. Almost. You describe the amulet as dull. The amulet was bright. You say a green stone. Yes, You say a leather thong. No. Horse hair. Twined horse hair. Can you have made such a mistake?
I see now that you make no mention of Ash previously. Not my journal then, though so many entries are the same. Yes. Snow Woman, Steven’s word, was the same as Ash. I remember her visit, that winter. But Wynne-Jones made contact in February. No mention in the journal of that. But I wrote an account. He understood the basic nature of Ash. But no mention in either journal. Yet it was written.
Are we the same?
Ash: She carries the memory of wood. She is the guardian of ancient forest and can summon from them and send to them. She uses the techniques of the shaman to do this. By casting her charms of wood and bone she can create—and destroy, too, if she wishes—forests of lime and spruce, or oak and ash, or alder and beech. She can send hunters to find pigs, or stags, or bears, or horses. Other things! Forgotten creatures. Forgotten woods. Her skills are legion. She can send the curious to find curiosities. She can even send a stealer of talismans to find … well, what can I say to you? To find a little humility, perhaps. I am certain that she was telling me to leave alone things I did not understand.
The hunters of the land have always believed in her, knowing that she can control all the woods of the world. In her mind, and in her skills, forests are waiting to be born, ancient forests are waiting for the return of the hunters. Through Ash there is a strange continuity. No matter what has been destroyed, it lives in her, and one day can be summoned back.
She sent us to the horse sacrifice for a reason.
We must ask: what reason?
I was riding the horse when it collided with the hooded man. I remember nearly falling. The horse was bolting. It had two bodies on its back. One alive (me) beginning to burn badly. One dead. The hooded man was struck. I fell, the horse ran on. Then I came home. But I am a ghost.
Find Ash! Return us to the horses! Something happened!
He had walked quietly to the landing, tiptoeing up the stairs, shaking badly, but with a rage, now, and not with fear. He stripped off his pyjamas and felt the cool touch of night air on his naked skin. Then he banged loudly on the banister.
As he expected, the door to his bedroom opened and something moved, with blurring speed, into the darkness.
Grey-green man stood at the far end of the landing, and Huxley sensed the way it watched, the way it suddenly grinned.
Jennifer was hissing, “What is it?”
Huxley moved along the landing. Grey-green came at him and there was static in the air where they almost touched.
“Go to the study,” Huxley hissed stiffly. “Wait for me …”
There was hesitation in the ghost, then that mocking smile again, and yet … it acceded to the instruction. It passed Huxley, and went downstairs, lurking in the grim darkness.
Jennifer ran out onto the landing, dragging her housecoat around her. There was no sound of disturbance from the boys’ room, and Huxley was glad.
She sounded anxious.
“Is there someone in the house?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’d better look around.”
Her hand touched his bare back as she peered over the banister into the gloom below. She seemed slightly startled. “You’re so cool, now.”
And a lot flabbier, he thought to himself.
And Jennifer added, “You smell fresher.”
“Fresher?”
“You needed a good bath. But you smell … cleaner, suddenly …”
“I’m sorry if I smelled strong before.”
“I quite liked it,” she said quietly, and Huxley closed his eyes for a moment.
“But perhaps it’s the sheets,” Jennifer said. “I’ll change them first thing in the morning.”
“I’ll investigate downstairs.”
The french windows were open, the study light off. Huxley switched on the desk lamp and peered down at the open page of the journal.
Grey-green man had scrawled the words: then how do I get back? Must think. Will go to Horse Shrine and stay there. But the blood is hot. You must understand. I am not in control.
This entry occurred below the response that Huxley had penned to his alter ego’s earlier, substantial account of Ash, and his questions about the nature of their dual existence.
Huxley had written:
We are clearly not the same, but only similar. We are aspects of two versions of George Huxley. If I am incomplete then it is in a way that is different from the incompleteness of you. You seem to be the most isolated. Perhaps your existence in this world, my world, is wrong for you. Perhaps there is a part of me that is running, fearful and dying, in a world that is more familiar to you.
If I had no other reason for concluding these things it is this: I have never called Jennifer “Jenny”. Not ever. It is not possible for me to even contemplate writing that nickname. She is J. in my journals, or Jennifer. Never the shorter form.
Your Jennifer is not my Jennifer. I have let you loose upon the woman I love, and you have taught me one thing, about how callous I have become, and I accept that lesson. But you will not enter this house again, not beyond the study. If you do, I shall endeavour to destroy you, rather than help you. Even if it means losing Wynne-Jones forever, I shall certainly find a way to disseminate the bestial spirit that you are.
I should prefer to return you to the body from which you have gone missing: my body, albeit in another location, another time, some other space and time that has somehow become confused with my own world.
Yes, other things give away the fact that we are living parallel lives, closely linked, yet subtly different. I refer to the “Urscumug”, not “Urscumaga”. You know more about Ash than I do. Wynne-Jones, in your world, has raced ahead of my own, pipe-reeking friend. The talisman most definitely was hung with leather, not horse hair. Clearly I am the hooded man over whom you ran, in your mad canter from the forest glade. My oilskin hood was torn, quite beyond repair!
And so you must propose a way for us to meet, to engage, to communicate.
But I repeat, you are not to enter my house beyond this desk.
If you doubt that I have the skill to destroy you, then look into your own bestial heart: remember what I / you have achieved in the past. Remember what happened to you / I in the Wolf Glen, when we discovered a certain magic of our own, destructive to mythagos!
And below this entry, Grey-green man
had scrawled then how do I get back?
Huxley closed and concealed the journal. He walked out into the garden, and stepped carefully across the lawn to the bushes. The ground was wet with dew, the air scented with raw, rich night perfume of soil and leaf. Everything was very still.
Huxley stepped among the moist bushes of rhododendron and fuchsia. He pressed the wet leaves and flowers against his torso, and found, to his mild surprise, that he was excited by the touch of nature upon his dry, cool body. He rubbed leaves between his fingers, crushed fuchsia flowers, reached down and rubbed his hands over the dewy soil. He drew breath in through his nostrils, filling his lungs, and as he stood so he smeared his hands over his shoulders and belly …
A blur of night-lit movement, the earth vibrating, the undergrowth shaking, and Grey-green man was there, shimmering and shadowy, watching him.
They stood in silence, man and ghost, and then Huxley laughed. “You frightened me once, but no longer. And yet, I feel sympathy for you, and will try to send you back. By doing that I believe I can release Wynne-Jones.”
Grey-green man took a slow step forward, reaching to Huxley.
Huxley stepped forward too, but ripped up a branch of bush, and swept it at the ghost.
“Go to the Horse Shrine! I’ll meet you there tomorrow.”
Grey-green man didn’t cower, but there was something about it, something less triumphant than before. It hovered, then withdrew, then turned (or so Huxley thought) to stare again at its alter ego. It seemed to be questioning.
Huxley squeezed sap from the torn branch and rubbed it on his face.
“She liked the smell,” he said, and laughed as he tossed the branch aside, before turning and entering the house.
Locking the french windows behind him.
Jennifer was sitting up in bed, the covers round her knees. She stared at Huxley by lamplight, her face puzzled, anguished.
“I want you to tell me what’s going on,” she said quietly, firmly. She was looking at him, staring at him, taking in his nakedness. He imagined he knew what she was thinking: he did not look like the body she had so recently felt against her. He was broader, chubbier, less fit.
“It will take some time.”
“Then take time.”
He climbed into bed beside her and on a new and strong impulse turned towards her, putting his arm across her to turn out the lamp.
“I would like to kiss you first,” he said. “And then I’ll tell you everything.”
“One kiss, then. But I’m angry, George. And I want to know what’s happening …”
FOURTEEN
The boys were at school. Huxley entered their room and stood, for a moment, surveying the truly appalling mess that the lads had left after a weekend of playing, pillow fighting, and reading. They had been making a model boat, and against their father’s instructions had brought the model up to their bedroom. The floor, the surfaces, the bed itself, were covered with bits of reed.
He reached down and picked up several sheets of white paper with pencil drawings. They were the blueprints for the model: crude, but skilful, and he recognised Christian’s imagination at work here. He was impressed. Plan view, side view, rear elevation, cross section …
Of the ship itself there was no sign. It was an ambitious project. They usually contented themselves with smaller, wooden models.
The room was quiet and he closed his eyes for a moment, summoning the imaginations at work here. He banished from his mind the smell of unwashed socks that instantly struck his consciousness. What he wanted was to feel the fantasies of the boys, their dreams, and in this room he might be able to touch the edge of those dreams.
It was an odd thought, and yet: he was convinced that one of the boys had created the Ash mythago.
He went through their drawers, where clothes were crushed and crumpled, apple-cores rotted, penny dreadfuls were concealed, and rock hard ends of sandwiches—made for midnight feasts—nestled side by side with pictures torn from magazines.
Eventually he found the fragments of wood and bone that Ash had left. They were still in their leather container. Huxley placed them on the desk, rolled them over the surface, remembered the time last winter when Snow Woman had left these items at the gate.
Then he went over to the bed and sat down, staring at the magic from across the room.
Why did you leave these pieces? Why? Why did you come to Oak Lodge? Why did you destroy the chickens? Why did you ensure that Steven would see you?
Why?
Steven and his passion for presents, his need for gifts. Had he created a mythago that was designed to fulfil that need in him?
Give me something. Bring me something. Bring me a gift. Give me something that makes me feel … wanted …
Was she Steven’s mythago, then? Gift-bringing Ash. But what sort of gift was implied in two fragments of thorn, and a piece of wild cat?
Perhaps Steven was intended to wear them. Perhaps then he would journey, in the same way that Huxley had journeyed. These bits of wood represented a different forest, though.
Why did you come out of the wood? Why did you leave these fragments? Why the chickens? What did you hope to achieve?
He thought back to the time in the Horse Shrine. Ash had watched him closely and carefully for a long while, and perhaps there had been disappointment in her face? Was she expecting someone else?
She had been waiting for someone. She had been at the Horse Shrine since the winter, if the evidence of the waste spoils was to be believed. She had been trying to make contact with the Huxleys, and yet all she had done was send George Huxley on a nightmarish trip to a freezing wood, long in the past …
If she had wanted Steven, what had she wanted to do with him?
And if Wynne-Jones had been present in the same ancient mythago-realm—and the grey-green man suggested that perhaps he had—what had Ash wanted with him?
How had he come to play a part in the same ancient sequence?
Why had he played any part at all, if Ash had wanted Steven …?
Huxley prowled the room, drinking in the disorder, tapping the imagination that reverberated here.
Steven and Ash … a shocking visitation to the henhouse … a bed of dead hens … just like in the story …
He went quickly to the window, staring down at the yard, the spring sunshine. He tried to replay the whole of that snow-deadened encounter, after Christmas.
What had Steven said to his mother? “Got them all … just like in the story …”
What story?
Steven hadn’t seen inside the shed, but Huxley had told him that all the hens had been killed. A fox had done it, he said, and Steven had seemed to accept that statement, despite the fact that Ash had clearly been to the henhouse herself.
What story?
Steven had said, “That old drummer fox …”
Huxley had taken no notice, and Jennifer had simply responded to the shock of losing all their hens.
Who was that “old drummer fox”?
He looked at the scattered books, searched among them, but found nothing. He called for Jennifer and she came into the room, frowning at the mess. She looked as tired as she felt. It had been a long night, and a long talk, and Huxley had told her much that she should have known before, and explained about the supernatural event that was occurring.
Not unsurprisingly, Jennifer was shocked, and was still shocked, and had spent an hour on her own, fighting a feeling of nausea. He had left her alone. It had seemed inappropriate to try to explain that in a way she had slept only with her husband, that no man from this, the real world, had touched her apart from Huxley. But that was not how she saw it, and there were other considerations too, no doubt.
“Drummer Fox and Boy Ralph? That was Steven’s favourite story for years, when he was much younger. He was obsessed with it …”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“Of course,” she said acidly. “You never read anything to the boys. I did all the read
ing.”
“Rebuke accepted,” Huxley said quickly. “Can you find the book? I must see that story.”
She searched the shelves, and the scatter of books on the floor, opened the wardrobe where albums, school books, and magazines were stored, but couldn’t find the volume of tales that included Drummer Fox.
Huxley felt impatient and anxious. “I must know the story.”
“Why?”
“I think it may be the key to what is happening. What can you remember of it? You said you’d read it to him—”
“Hundreds of times. But a long time ago.”
“Tell me the story.”
She leaned back against one of the desks and gathered her thoughts. “Oh Lord, George. It’s so long ago. And I read so many stories to them, Christian especially …”
“Try. Please try.”
“He was a sort of gypsy fox. Very old, older than any human alive. He’d been wandering Europe for centuries, with a drum, which he beat every dawn and dusk, and a sack of tricks. He either played tricks on people to escape from them, or entertained them for his supper. He also had a charge, an infant boy.”
“Boy Ralph.”
“That’s right. Boy Ralph was the son of a Chief, a warrior of the olden days. But the boy was born on a highly auspicious day and his father was jealous and decided to kill the infant by smothering him. He was planning to use the carcase of a chicken for the vile deed.
“Drummer Fox lived at the edge of the village, entertaining people with his tricks and sometimes giving them prophecies. He liked the boy and seeing him in danger stole him and ran away with him. The King sent a giant of a warrior after the fox, with instructions to hunt him down and kill them both. So Drummer Fox found himself running for his life.
“Wherever Drummer Fox went he found that humans were tricky and destructive. He didn’t trust them. Some were kind and he left them alone. He always paid a small price for whatever he had taken from them. But others were hunters and tried to kill him. At night he would make his bed in their chicken sheds, making mattresses and blankets from the dead chicks—”
Huxley slapped his knees as he heard this. “Go on …”