The Hollowing

  “I heard his voice in my dream. I was so afraid of him when he came to the camp. He was still wearing the mask. But when I saw his face, I knew him. But I don’t know from where. He just makes me feel wounded…”

  Wounded? Richard watched the anxiety on Sarinpushtam’s lean face, the furrows on her high forehead, the well and ebb of tears in her richly dark eyes. She was Lacan’s mythago. That had to be the answer. But there was something more, and Lacan was in distress about it.

  “Have you tried approaching him?”

  “I’ve called to him. He just growls and crushes into himself.”

  “Why don’t you go back to the house? I’ll try and talk to our bearlike friend. Whatever it is, it can’t last.”

  Sarin hesitated then stood and ran, almost angrily, back down the track, swinging from trunk to trunk, slipping and skidding out of sight, occasionally slapping the trees and regretting with a cry that she’d been so angry.

  The sounds of her departure disturbed Lacan, who turned his head slightly, caught Richard approaching and looked away.

  “Arnauld? Call me a nuisance, throw me over the cliff, tell me to mind my own business. But tell me what’s wrong, if you can. It hurts us all to see you in such pain.”

  “Two hours more,” Lacan grunted, shaking his head. Beyond him, the sky was dazzling. He leaned on his staff and the wind blew his hair. The sun caught fire in his eyes.

  “Two hours?”

  “To think. To be alone. Don’t worry about me. Please, just bugger off. I’ll be down in two hours. Don’t let her get distressed.”

  “Sarin?”

  “Please. Look after her. I smelled blood on her, Richard. Don’t let her do anything foolish.”

  “She was only biting her lip. She’s confused. She’s yours, of course. Your mythago…”

  “Of course. Go away, Richard. I need to be alone a while longer.”

  * * *

  A hind had come down to the lake, but bolted as Richard reacted to its presence with a cry. The hunt, with Helen, took several hours, and it was Helen’s accuracy with the short bow that claimed the kill. She paunched the steaming beast with a confidence that left Richard amazed, and she rebuked the man for his teasing.

  “Fresh meat, Richard!”

  “It’ll have to hang for a while.”

  “Not its liver, my man. That we’ll have tonight.”

  “You’re beginning to sound like Lacan…”

  As they carried the carcass back to Old Stone Hollow, skirting the lakeside, they saw Lacan walking among the distant rocks, his hood drawn over his head against the drizzle. Richard called to him, but he kept walking, glancing occasionally across the wide water, his face grim.

  They hung the deer, and prepared a stew pan of the liver with wild vegetables. Lytton was writing furiously in his notebook. “It’s so important to record everything. Everything. When I write, ideas come. That’s how I worked out the function of the protogenomorph, after McCarthy’s shadowy encounter with it. Explanation later, Richard. And I would like to hear an account of what has happened to you as well. Alex is everywhere. Can you feel him? He’s watching still. He will pick the moment to come to us, and we must be ready, not just physically, but mentally as well. Where’s Lacan?”

  “Still brooding. Still upset.”

  “Upset? About what?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  From the other room, where Helen was stitching hides together, she called, “Matilde!”

  Lytton nodded, said, “I see. Where is she?”

  “Somewhere about. Waiting for him.”

  Without further response, leaving Richard infuriatingly confused, he returned to his notebook.

  Richard went through the curtain and watched Helen at her task. “Matilde? Sarin by another name?”

  Helen cocked her head. She had a length of coarse thread between her teeth, and was using a bone needle very effectively. Her dark eyes engaged Richard for a moment, thoughtfully, perhaps making a decision. Then she nodded. “I guess so.”

  “His daughter?”

  “His wife. He’ll talk when he’s ready.”

  Lytton came through, his notebook closed. He rubbed his chin as he watched Helen work, then sat down, cross-legged on the floor, indicating that Richard should do the same.

  “It’s making a sort of sense, now, as much as anything in Huxley’s first forest can ever make sense …

  “The way Keeton described his sojourn in Ryhope reminds me of the land of faerie—unlike Ryhope, in the fey world you age less than the world outside, and that is what happened to Keeton, and what has happened to Alex. Alex has created his own time, and to do this he is using the elemental in him, the earliest myths, the earliest part of consciousness, when notions of time itself became defined, both in the terms we would understand it, and in the mystical time of gods and faerie that these days we would call fantastic.

  “When Keeton lost his daughter in 1957 his anguish, his desperation, entered the wood as an entity apart from him, crystallising—condensing, as Elizabeth Haylock used to say—into the complex matrix of energy and time that underlies this place.

  “Is it possible that Keeton was protected by a form of ‘glamour’? Held out of time by a protecting, sheltering cloak of faerie magic? When he left the wood, the glamour remained behind, an echo. It had formed into the shape of his own daughter, and lingered there for years—it’s still there! When you encountered it, Helen, you followed it to the edge, you passed through it, because it was another form of hollowing, only this passage connected with a time eight years before. It was waiting for you on your return, after leaving the note, and again you tried to encounter the moon-faced girl, and so you passed back to the present.”

  Helen was hunched over her work, her head shaking slightly, the silver locks on each side glinting in the candlelight. She said, quite simply, “If that’s right, then I’m frightened. Too much of my life has been interfered with by time. I’ve wasted too much time. Time has wasted me. Time has wasted my family. By fear, it has tricked us out of our lives. If Coyote is Time, then I’m going to be done with him now.”

  She looked up at Richard. There were tears in her eyes not of sadness but of anger. She reached out and touched his hand, and without even understanding what he was doing Richard folded his arms around her and kissed the moist, warm parting in her hair. “Don’t lose me,” she said. “Every hour, every day—it’s ours, not Trickster’s. Don’t lose me. Don’t let it all go.”

  While Lytton frowned restlessly, watching the kiss, unable to continue because of the sudden passion, the sudden need, Richard embraced Helen with all his heart. As their mouths parted and they smiled, their eyes lingering on each other, Richard had an image of Alex, smiling and clapping his hands in delight.

  “My son’s going to adore you,” he said.

  Alex wouldn’t know about Alice. He wouldn’t know his mother had gone—

  “Glad you’ve come to believe in him.”

  She turned back to Alexander Lytton. “So this ‘echo’ Keeton created was like the ‘moment out of time’ you talked about, like the Manet painting. So much anguish that it formed a focus—”

  “Drawing to it everything that was related to that anguish—shaped like the daughter, but calling to anyone or anything that was associated with Tallis.”

  Richard tried to absorb the images and ideas that were raised by Lytton’s half-distracted account. The man was thinking aloud: he was unfocused, but he hardened that gaze as Richard said, “How does Alex fit in?”

  “Alex was the substitute for Tallis. When Alex stared through the Moondream mask—a hollowing mask, don’t forget—he was torn through it, stripped of everything but flesh and bone and dragged through that mask.

  “Keeton’s anguish, Keeton’s need, his need for his child—he reached from inside the wood through the mask, reaching to the moment of his real-time death and clutched at the memories of Tallis that he could feel there—all of them in your son.

/>   “A reflection of Alex’s mind, in the wood, is in the faces on the Mask Tree. That’s where the boy will come—that’s where we’ll see the moment of his transition, a moment that we’ll follow to the cathedral, where Alex himself is hiding.”

  * * *

  At dusk Lacan called from the river, and Richard went out through the tall grass to find him. He was aware that Sarin was among the elder bushes that concealed the deep cave. She was watching furtively. Lacan, swathed in a dark cloak, eyes glistening with cold, leaned against a heavy tree, staring distantly towards the gully. He acknowledged Richard, then walked away, up the steep bank, back to the Sanctuary, through the place where once the underfoot had been a graveyard of decaying creatures.

  By the hollowing, by the marble pillars where Richard had tricked Jason, he turned and worked his staff into the ground.

  “I am very lost,” he said quietly. “You must help me.”

  Richard started to reach a reassuring hand, but drew back as angry eyes caught his. He said only, “I’ve offered friendship. Helen and Lytton are very discreet. I know that Sarin reminds you of your wife. I have a half idea that you’ve been seeking her … that she died, and you’ve been seeking her…”

  Lacan seemed to collapse slightly, nodding, as if both relieved and comforted by Richard’s simple intuition. “I remember telling you—so many years ago, now—but I remember saying in answer to a question of yours that I was looking for the moment of my death. Richard … if you had known Matilde … if you could have once seen her, heard her speak, been touched by her glamour … she was ethereal. I know that, now. I always have. I loved her so much. When the wood killed her, it should have strangled me with its creepers too. But it left me to mourn her, and to die and be reborn, as it were, and then to hunt for her with a force of life that is all that protects me from the shadowland.”

  Richard was about to make a comment, a naive interruption questioning why, if Lacan had now found his beloved Matilde, he found it so hard to speak to her. The Frenchman silenced him angrily, then apologised and walked stiffly back to a point, beyond this copse, where the ridge of the high cliff could just be seen.

  Softly, he said, “I didn’t expect to find her like this. I’ve spent so long looking, I need her so much … and suddenly I am aware that she is dying. She has no life, only an appearance in our world for a few days, a few weeks. Like all these things we summon, she is no more than a shadow, strong in the sun, doomed to dusk beauty and then annihilation. I’ve always known it. Of course I have. But I’ve never accepted the truth of the matter, that when I found her she would be wood and earth, she would be transient. Oh God in Heaven, I can’t bear to lose her again, I can’t bear to lose her again…” He started to shake and Richard squeezed his shoulder, helpless and distressed as his friend’s emotion began to surface.

  “She’s strong,” he whispered. “I’ve got to know her. She’s strong.”

  “Not strong enough. Look at her. There’s nothing on her, no flesh even for the crows. But it is her. After so long … she has surfaced from the wood. And I know, I just know, that she will never surface again…”

  “Then go and be with her while you can. What more is there to do?”

  “What more? Why, to save her from Matilde’s fate, of course. I couldn’t bear that. I feel lost. I think I must become lost again.”

  There was a fleet movement ahead of them, and both men ducked slightly, scanning the trees, the ruins. Richard strung his bow, drew a flighted arrow. Lacan glowered at the shadows, hands caressing the blackthorn staff.

  He looked at Richard abruptly. His sadness was overwhelming, but now there was almost anger painting his features.

  “Were you born close to this wood?”

  “Far away. I moved to Shadoxhurst when I married Alice.”

  “There’s the difference between us, then, since I was born near a wood like this. In Brittany. A vast forest through which you could only follow certain tracks, certain paths, much as we experience in Ryhope. It was a wonderful place. Huge stones circled it, hidden by the edge: it was a wood that had grown inside a stone circle and had reached out its skirts to hide the grey markers. It was a place of ponds and lakes, and deep, moist hollows. It was a place of magic.

  “I lived in a cottage at the bottom of a hill. Some nights, winter nights especially, people came from the wood and passed along a lost track, close to my garden. They walked over the hill and to a vanishing place on the other side. Sometimes I followed them, but I could never see where they went. Perhaps I didn’t have the faith, the belief in them, perhaps I simply didn’t have the right way of looking.

  “When I was a child I would explore the lakes, hiding in the bushes and watching the grey shapes, like mist creatures, that would come and stand by the water, staring into the depths. They were ghosts. Many of them cried silently before returning to the wood. All seemed to be searching for something. I have no idea what.

  “When the war came, my father fought and came home wounded. I was too young, but eager to fight. In 1943 I left Brittany by fishing boat for England, to join a French Canadian command. I was sixteen. Before I left I went back to the lake. It was dusk. A woman came out of the shadows, a grey woman, and touched my eyes and my lips. She had appeared so fast, and she disappeared so fast, that I was too shocked to think. I remember only that I had been kissed on each eye, each cheek, each lip.

  “When I arrived in England, I was there for only two weeks and suddenly the war ended. I came home, dizzy and confused, because I found that two years had passed.

  “The cottage was shuttered, my parents were gone. Neighbours told me that they had followed a laughing woman into the wood one winter, and that was the last they had seen of them. I had been held safe in some sort of spell. Or had I? Two years had passed and I have memory of only two weeks.

  “Then, in the edgewood, I met Matilde. I thought she was from a local village. Perhaps she was. She looked very like the woman who had touched me with her glamour, but Matilde was only sixteen. She was delicious in every way, sensuous in every way. Her laughter a joy.

  “We lived together in the cottage. I stopped grieving for my parents. I was consumed with love for her, with her smell, her voice, her teasing. Then our son was born, but he was not born well. In a few months we realised that he was blind. And although he made an infant’s sounds, he didn’t speak as he reached the age when other children begin to chatter. He had no language. By the time he was four … it was terrible. I can’t tell you how terrible, Richard. Matilde was—well, there is only one word: she was ruined. The boy gradually began to see—only colours at first, then shapes, then the whole world, except for shadows. He began to speak—little words at first, then wild descriptions, then haunting accounts of what his mind’s eyes could see. At the same time, Matilde faded.

  “In her dreams she screamed and fought with shadow creatures. She barricaded the cottage obsessively. She gradually lost her sight, until all she could see were shadows. She lost her speech. As the boy learned words, so they vanished from her, until she could only say two words aloud, my own first name being one of them, the other, something I never understood. It was such a terrible thing. She saw the world as shadows, and the shadows were alive in ways that were not right. She tried to communicate this to me. The shadows of trees chased her. The shadows of foxes prowled around her on moonless nights. It was as if she was being punished for having the badly-born child. I called him ghost-born, but as Matilde faded, so he grew stronger.

  “When he slept, my passion for Matilde was always in earnest, and she responded with such need, such longing, such desperate physicality, clinging to me without break, that I began to realise that these moments of intimacy were her only way of expressing the love she felt, at a time when she was safe. And yet she never opened her eyes, never uttered sound, except for my name.

  “I was heartbroken. I was dying. It was an endless battle with her to stop her sealing the house, with wood, with corrugated iron, with
animal skins, with sheets of plastic, with anything she could find.

  “Then one day she was gone, and my son had gone too. I searched for them desperately.

  “I found them in the lake. When I dragged them to the shore, when I pushed the wet hair from their faces, when I kissed the white flesh on each face, the eyes, the cheeks, the lips, I could not tell them apart. I obliterated my son’s name from my memory, because at that moment I believed he had never existed. It was the moment of my own death, and I entered the lake and fell into a sleep without pain.

  “I woke in my own cottage, on the couch, covered by a blanket. I had been found by one of the villagers wandering aimlessly, not drowned at all. The man knew nothing of Matilde. He knew nothing of my son. He said I was a hermit, always barricading my cottage, and he was terrified of me. Indeed, I looked frightful.

  “And the rest you know. She dwelt in my dreams continuously, but I began to snare and trap the ghosts of my wood, in the hope of finding her. I became famous for it, and word spread. One day, Alexander Lytton found me. I learned of mythagos. I clung to his invitation to come to Ryhope Wood because it was a last chance to resurrect Matilde. Maybe Lytton exaggerated the possibilities. He wanted what he wanted for his team and he saw possibilities in me. I came gladly, Richard. Life was then, and still is, as nothing without that lovely woman.”

  “Then go to her.”

  Lacan turned furiously. “But don’t you see? After all I’ve said? She never existed! I was touched by something, some charm … my life was a charm, and Matilde a part of that charm. She was only my dream, made real. I have tried to make her real again, but she is still just that, a dream, a shadow. There never was Matilde. There never was a son. And now there is a woman who is everything my heart longs for, but she exists only because I needed to fulfil my selfish needs in one life. Long gone! I have created the shadow of a shadow. This Sarin is less even than a mythago. She’s the hopeless object of desire of an ageing Frenchman. If I touch her, she’ll die, I know it. She’ll die.”