The Hollowing

  “Yes,” Lytton said. “And she appeared on the night when Keeton came back from the Otherworld. Like Hallowe’en, maybe a night when the gates went down for an hour or so…” He scribbled in his pad. “Time always goes forward in Ryhope Wood. Not necessarily at the same rate in different places, but always forward. Nevertheless, there’s an odd coincidence here…”

  McCarthy watched the inner walls of the castle dreamily, singing softly to himself. Richard realised Lytton was talking to him. The man repeated, “The ur-Helen … what did she write in the note?”

  Richard confessed that memory had failed him. “Something that you had found. Something that needed my attention. Odd words. When I lost the note, I lost the sense of its contents completely. I’m sorry.”

  Lytton wanted to think. McCarthy, shrinking in his clothes, pale and wan, yet always ready with a smile, nibbled at the thin flesh of their last catch and stared out through the watchgate at the wetland and far forest, where Helen could be seen, prowling the thickets at the edgewood, listening for game.

  Richard stalked the decaying corridors of the castle, feeling the cold silence, the dank stone, the sense of being in an abandoned place among dull shadows. He could not even imagine the sound of voices, of laughter, of the growling of the great hounds that must once have lazed in front of the huge wood fires, until required to bound through the forests in search of game. There was nothing here for him, and he started to return to the watchgate.

  A moment later a shadow passed swiftly through the chamber, an odd touch of warmth, like a breath on his neck. He realised suddenly that he had lost his way. He passed from chamber to cold stone passage, down worn steps and into a sequence of wide rooms, where traces of the wooden partitions could still be seen. He called out for Lytton, but his voice was deadened by the stone walls. He was suddenly back in the main hall, a vast space, echoing to his quickening pace. It smelled of woodsmoke, and he saw the smouldering logs in the wrought-iron grate. On the wall above them he recognised the stone carving of a knight and a giant, clashing swords above the leering, foliate face of a Green Man, replete with branches for its mouth, and fruits and berries in a fringe around the face.

  The atmosphere in the Great Hall suddenly became stifling. Richard reacted to sudden movement in the air, half-aware of hounds, of swirling cloaks and skirts, and the steamy aroma of food in clay pots. He saw nothing of this activity but the smoke in the fire and the cracked, grey carving above.

  And then, whispering startlingly from the shadows, a child’s voice urged at him, “Go back!”

  “Alex? Alex?”

  Somewhere a drummer struck the taut skins in a staccato, military beat. The stone carving shifted, rustled, and as Richard called his son for the third time, the foliate face stretched forward, peered down at him. “Go back!” it hissed, and Richard stumbled towards the doorway. The face twisted on its long stone neck, eyes gleaming in the grey rock, stone leaves falling noisily as the giant head trembled.

  “Go back where?” Richard shouted. “Alex? Are you here? Go back where?”

  The face withdrew and a sudden cold descended. The side-drum had faded, the fireplace was empty. Only Richard’s skin was hot, burning with the shock of the encounter. He ran quickly through the passageways and abruptly found himself stumbling into the light, where the skies still drizzled rain.

  Lytton was just outside the castle gate, staring towards the distant wood. “Richard!” he called without turning. “Quickly! Something’s up.”

  “Alex was here!” Richard called, as he scampered over the muddy courtyard and into the sheltering gate.

  He stopped and drew breath as he saw Helen running towards the castle, shouting, pointing to her right. As she came close, stepping awkwardly across the narrow bridge, she looked at Richard, breathless and excited: “The cathedral—Alex’s cathedral! It’s over there … I’ve seen it!”

  “That close?” Lytton gasped. “So soon?”

  McCarthy struggled to his feet, running out into the light rain and staring into the distance, his eyes half-closed. He walked quickly to the thorn that draped the high walls, and crouched down, his hands running down the broad, ridged wood of the lower branches. He was tracing shadows, hunched and cold, feeling his way through the earth towards the defended site.

  “I can’t touch the shadow!” he called. “He must have put up another barrier.”

  “It’s there!” Helen cried. “I saw it when I climbed a tree to get woodcock eggs. It’s there!”

  “Then let’s fetch him out,” Lytton said. “And let’s do it quickly. Are you ready, Richard? Are you ready to face your lost past?”

  He grinned coldly as he slung his small pack across his shoulder and followed Helen to the open land. Richard said nothing, but caught McCarthy’s quick glance, a look of uncertainty, of apprehension. There was something of a warning in the frail Irishman’s expression. Richard whispered, “Is Lytton still armed?”

  McCarthy held up a hand with four fingers raised, indicating the number of rounds. “It’s only a pistol. But he’s a bloody fine shot.”

  * * *

  “Go back!” the green face had said, and it occurred to Richard that he had been urged to leave the castle because Helen had now seen the way to the cathedral, and the castle itself was becoming dangerous as shadows crept back into the lifeless shell.

  Lytton had not heard the drumming. It had been sound for Richard’s ears only, a memory of the legends of ghostly drummer boys, and as such, a certain signal from Alex that he was close to his father again. But “Go back!” …

  The whispered words unnerved Richard as he entered the woodland, following Helen as she pushed through the lush, summer growth toward the light again. It was too still in the wood, too quiet. Was this simply anticipation affecting him, making him dread the moment of contact again with a boy from his past? His stomach churned violently, his legs shook, and he stopped for a moment, listening to the others ahead of him. He felt tears in his eyes and the pulse of blood in his temples and a moment later was sick. He wiped his mouth with wet leaves, then jumped as a gentle hand touched his shoulder.

  “What is it?” Helen asked. She recoiled slightly from his breath, but touched a finger to his cheeks, her eyes watching his. “I guess that’s an idiotic question. I can imagine how hard it’s going to be to see him again. If you don’t think you can face it just yet … if you need some more time … to watch from a distance for a while?”

  “I don’t know,” Richard confessed awkwardly, still shaking. “He whispered to me. In the castle … he whispered ‘go back.’ I wonder if he meant go back from here? I remember in his school play, the words were used as a warning.”

  “Against what?”

  “The Green Knight, I think. Someone was trying to stop Gawain entering the Green Chapel and finding its secrets.”

  “But Alex wants you to find him. You’ve felt this strongly. He wants you to help him out…”

  Distantly, Lytton called loudly, summoning Richard. Helen kissed Richard quickly on the cheek, whispered, “Courage!” and led him to the edge of the wood.

  The cathedral rose high and ruined, grey through the heavy mist that drowned the steaming land. Richard crouched beside Lytton and followed his pointing finger to one of the arched windows, below the craggy line of the wall where the roof had been torn away. A boy’s face watched them over the stone sill. A second later the head vanished, but reappeared lower down in a circular portal where once there had been stained glass.

  “I can’t get a touch,” McCarthy was saying. “He’s not allowing contact.”

  “Call to him,” Lytton said, pushing Richard forward.

  Richard called out his son’s name twice, and a moment later came an answering cry, not a word, more of a sob, a high-pitched sound that was filled with longing, and relief, and fear.

  “My God … he’s in danger!” Richard gasped, and ran from the cover of the undergrowth, through the grass, to the gaping doorway of the side porch. br />
  Lytton came after him, crouched low. The saturating mist swirled about them as they entered the bleak and deserted interior of the ruin, Lytton running to the centre of the space, Richard touching one of the broken columns that marked the side aisle. Helen came through the door, looking quickly round, then up to where the boy had just been glimpsed.

  “This isn’t right,” she said.

  Outside, McCarthy yelled, “Get out of there!”

  “Daddy! Go back!”

  The sound of his son’s voice startled Richard. For a moment he couldn’t locate the source of the words, and then the small figure stepped forward, a grey statue, up on the altar space. It had seemed to detach from the stone, to come away from the hard surface, and now raised its arms sideways. The boy’s eyes sparkled, his mouth stretched wide, though not in a grin, nor a grimace—something oddly expressionless. But it was Alex, long-haired, naked, undeniably Alex, a small boy, frail in build, watching his father with an expression that suddenly shifted into anguish.

  “Alex! Come on, lad. Get out of here!”

  The cathedral shuddered, the walls bending inwards, the floor dropping so that the rising columns seemed to buckle. Helen yelled and grabbed at Richard. The boy on the altar started to scream, and Richard pulled away from Helen, only to feel her foot kick his legs from under him so that he sprawled headlong.

  Lytton was running towards the altar. Alex screamed again and crouched defensively as the man raced towards him.

  “Don’t touch my son!” Richard bellowed, and struggled to rise.

  Lytton’s first shot stunned him. The second made him cry his pain. The bullets penetrated Alex’s head, blowing muddy tissue across the altar. The boy kept standing. The cathedral seemed to be falling down around them, and Helen was tugging at Richard, her words meaningless, even though he knew she was shouting at him to get out, get out!

  Lytton emptied the final two shots into the brain-dead boy on the altar, then swung his staff so that it crushed the skull, then knocked the small figure sideways. The walls around him flowed down and bulged, grey stone melting into an organic flow that began to swell and surround the screaming man, tendrils of liquid rock reaching out and wrapping around him. The shape of the boy was absorbed into the floor. A new human figure erupted like new growth to tower over the struggling form of Alexander Lytton.

  Dark, piercing eyes stared across the shrinking cathedral from below a shock of green hair, above a body that was clad in coloured rags.

  “The Jack…” Richard hissed.

  Stone tendrils probed for him and he used his staff to strike them away. The whole building was drawing into the Jack, a giant trap, shrinking, now with its human prey.

  The door through the porch was closing down, but Richard felt a final tug on his shoulder and this time turned and followed Helen through into the rain, where McCarthy stood in shock at the woodland edge. He shouted, “Alex is close. He’s shouting for you! That’s not Alex in there!”

  A moment later the earth itself rose up around him. McCarthy screamed once, struggled, shouted “Christ!” and was gone, sucked down below the yellow grass.

  Richard ran for his life. He glanced back once to see that the cathedral now had the shape of a grinning stone head, watching him below flowing hair. From the huge open mouth two snaking branches erupted and raced towards him, sprouting side shoots as they came, full-leafed trees that formed a consuming tunnel as the tendrils bore down upon him. Somehow, somewhere above the roar of the earth and the rustling of this hunting growth, he could hear Lytton’s death agony, shrill and desperate.

  Where was Helen?

  He saw her in the distance, leaping the moving earth like a cat, outrunning the snares the Jack was sending at her. There was a moment when she hesitated, caught sight of Richard in the distance and waved at him furiously: Get the hell away from here!

  And a moment later she was gone.

  A towering man-shape loomed in the mist, stepping forward, arms outstretched and holding two tall poles. Richard sobbed with exhaustion and fear as the Long Man barred his way. But then the figure beckoned, shouted words that could have been “Come on!” The Long Man turned his back and braced his legs apart, the poles held to each side.

  Aware that everything behind him had suddenly stopped, that all was silent, that the Jack-chapel head had disappeared beneath a tangle of hawthorn and oak from which the hedges grew, he ran at the Long Man’s back, and grabbed for the figure’s shoulders. Long Man and frightened man stepped forward together, and the world closed around them.

  A moment later they were stumbling against a red-brick wall, startling pigeons in the trees and a wild cat, that hissed, spat, then bolted into the dense undergrowth. The Long Man brushed himself down, peering up and around at the glade. But Richard recognised instantly where they were.

  “Oak Lodge,” he breathed. “You’ve brought me back to the starting place.”

  The Long Man rubbed his eyes as he looked nervously at the ruined house and the rotting wooden statue that leaned against the wall. Perhaps he could feel Lacan’s defences. In any event, he didn’t like this place. His expression showed it. He picked up his staffs and stepped away from the wall of the lodge.

  “Thank you,” Richard called. “Thanks for bringing me home…”

  Alex. Oh God, Alex. Was it you! Or the Jack? What happened? Helen. I’ve lost you. Helen! What happened? This can’t have happened!

  The Long Man shook his head sadly, long hair waving. By word and gesture he invited Richard to follow him back, but Richard shook his head, too disturbed by what had happened to contemplate returning to the nightmare.

  The Long Man grinned, touched a finger to his right eye, then turned and stepped between his poles. The air popped, sending a gust of wind around the small clearing that had once been a garden, and the giant had gone.

  Crying softly, suddenly very weary, Richard left the wood and stumbled along the bridleway to Shadoxhurst, to his house, to the silence of the grave.

  The Green Chapel: 5

  “He’s gone!” Alex screamed, and erupted from the sharp embrace of the hollyjack. He climbed the creepers to the high window and stared out across the wood.

  “Don’t go!” he cried. “Daddy! Don’t go!”

  There was no movement. Everything was still. His father had been close—Alex had shouted his warning about the giggler, setting his trap, and his father had escaped the snare.

  But he had gone—just vanished from the Little Dream. He had been running. There was the tall traveller. And his father’s shadow had disappeared from the wood, just yards from where Alex was sheltering behind his defensive wall.

  He had been so close …

  The hollyjack whistled from below. Alex went back to her and cried in her arms. She was very weak. She clattered and chirruped.

  Winter is coming. There will be danger. We must draw deeper, to protect ourselves.

  Alex closed his eyes. The wood in the chapel shivered, then seemed to freeze. Light caught the broken coloured glass above the doors, a last glimpse of the knight and the monster, before the shadows closed in on him. The window had grown—the glass had filled out, the colours deepened. He could see so much of the scene of battle.

  Something was not right. The knight—Gawain—not right.

  The hollyjack trembled.

  They slept for a long while.

  PART THREE

  Long Gone, Long to Come

  Spirit Rock

  (Two months later …)

  There’s a fire up by Hunter’s Brook—they’re dancing by the fire—

  “Daddy—wake up—there’s a fire—

  “They’re dancing—”

  “Daddy!”

  Richard woke with shock, yelling out into the pale dawn light. The room was cold and damp, dew-encrusted. The window was wide open and he could see rolling clouds, threatening rain. It was four in the morning. The crows were flapping and cawing in their roosts and Richard’s head was pounding as the
image of Alex, reaching out to shake him awake, began to fade.

  He was fully clothed, having slept sprawled on two blankets on the floor. The bedroom was a mess. Downstairs, from sitting room to kitchen, the chaos was far worse. In the month since he had resigned from his job in London and returned permanently to Shadoxhurst he had become a slob through distraction. He walked the perimeter of Ryhope Wood every day, and filled his evenings in the local pub, writing an account of his experience at Old Stone Hollow and points beyond, and getting very drunk.

  The more he wrote, and the longer he stayed out of the wood, the more dreamlike the events became. It began to seem as if he had been the audience at a film. The characters were vivid, but they were all actors. Arnauld Lacan, McCarthy, Alexander Lytton—a fine cast, certainly, but they were now playing other roles in other films. Ryhope Wood was a small, dangerous, marshy woodland, far bigger than it seemed, but surely just a wood, tricky, deceptive, but as tame, in its way, as everything in England. His son was not hiding there. His son was dead. His bones were in the earth. Even Helen had become an artificial memory of beginning love. She filled his waking dreams and occupied his thoughts obsessively: they had grown so close, in those few days in the wood, but now she too was dissembling into image, voice, laughter, becoming detached from him.

  But the dream—it had been so real—it had been his first real dream since coming back here.

  Standing stiffly, rubbing the small of his back where it ached from the hard floor, he staggered to the window and greeted the misty dawn. He saw, at once, the column of smoke that rose steeply from Hunter’s Brook before being whipped by the cross-winds. Was that a figure standing on the grey skyline? He squinted, trying to make out the detail, and a moment later the shape had vanished.

  “Christ! Oh Christ—Helen!”

  He tugged on his shoes and windcheater, walked groggily down the stairs and splashed cold water over his face. He was unkempt and unshaven, but gave no more thought to this than to the ants that crawled over the sink where his dirty crockery was heaped, ready for cleaning. Outside, he relieved himself against the elm at the bottom of the garden, then walked briskly along the bridleway. Soon he saw the orange lick of flame below the shifting smoke, and as he came over the low rise towards the brook and the trees, he saw the crouched, black-caped and hooded figures, one in front of the small fire, two below the trees, mostly in shadow. The moustached face of the nearest man was very bronzed. Slightly oriental eyes watched Richard from below the hood. Somewhere in the trees there was movement in the mist and Richard was distracted. When he looked back at the crackling fire, the hooded man was standing and holding out a wooden object. Richard approached cautiously.