Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle) (6 page)

‘Good God,’ James Keeton said, and added, ‘This must be the old road, then. Gaunt’s “rough track”.’

At the woodland edge a thin fencing of barbed wire had been erected. The KEEP OUT notice was prominent but weathered.

Tallis was aware that her father was concerned. Margaret said to him, ‘You must have made a mistake. Perhaps it’s further on …’

‘I can’t have made a mistake,’ her father said, exasperated. He stood by the barbed wire holding on to it, looking up at the trees, staring into the darkness. Finally he drew away and looked around at the farmland.

‘There was a house here, once. I’m sure of it. A lodge of sorts, called Oak Lodge. Gaunt assured me that there was. At the end of the rough track, he said.’

He paced along the weathered road, then turned back to look at the thick woodland. ‘It’s where Harry came. It’s where my father came before the war. To visit those historians … Huxley. And the other one … Wynne-Jones.’

‘Before my time,’ Margaret said.

They stared at the broken road, where it vanished into the dense growth. Tall oaks, crowding together, cast an unwelcoming darkness on the tangle of haw and blackthorn and rose briar below. The high grass growing among the edgewood waved in a gentle breeze. The notice rattled on its perch and the rusting wire shook.

A strange expression touched James Keeton’s face and Tallis realized that her father had suddenly become very frightened. He was pale, his eyes wide. And his breathing was quick, nervous.

Tallis stepped right up to the wire and stood there, staring through the gloom. As she watched that earthy darkness so she began to see a gleam of light, sunlight in a clearing a long way beyond the outer line of trees.

‘There’s a glade in there,’ she said, but her father chose to ignore her. He was walking away from the wood. He stood on the earth bank lining the road and stared into the distance. Her mother had spread out the picnic cloth below a solitary elm and was unpacking the hamper.

‘There’s a glade in there,’ Tallis repeated loudly. ‘The house might be in the glade.’

Her father watched her for a moment, then stepped off the bank, ignoring his daughter. He walked towards the elm, saying ‘Gaunt must have been mistaken. You’re right. But I can’t believe it …’

‘Daddy! There’s a
glade
in the wood,’ Tallis called.

‘Don’t go too far away,’ he called back, and Tallis, her body tense with excitement, sagged a little.

He was not listening to her. He was so wrapped up in his own thoughts, his own concerns, that the fact that the house might be abandoned in the wood was refusing to register.

There had been a house here, and now it was gone. Tallis stared at the road, at the way its rough concrete surface was sheared off, as if by a knife, as if it had been consumed by the wood, eaten whole. Perhaps that same bite had swallowed the lodge, an entire house overwhelmed by trees.

Where this strange thought came from she didn’t know, but the image was there, as clear in her mind as the images from the fairy-tales she had read all her life.

Dark forests, and remote castles … and in the yellow, sunlit glades, there were always strange treasures to be found.

She trod on the lower wire and cautiously lifted the barbs above it, ducking through as best she could. She looked back at her parents, who were sitting on the rug, sipping tea and talking.

Turning, she started to walk through the undergrowth towards the patch of brightness ahead of her.

She could still feel the cracked and fragmented road, hard beneath her thin shoes. Roots sprawled across the concrete and low branches had to be brushed aside as she stepped cautiously forward in the gloom. She came closer to the glade and was able to see that it was a small clearing, enclosed by enormous, dark-trunked oaks. Dead branches, cracked and twisted by winter winds, rose starkly above the foliage.

She could also see the sheer rise of a brick wall. There were two windows on that wall, the glass in them long
since gone. Branches of the overwhelming wood hung from them, like dead limbs.

She took another step, pushing aside a sprawling web of red-berried thorn. Now she could see that in the centre of the clearing, in front of the house, was a tall, wooden pillar. Its top was carved in the vague semblance of a human face, simple slanted eyes, a gaping mouth, the slash of a nose. The wood looked rain-blackened and rotten, split vertically and crumbling. Tallis felt deeply uncomfortable as she stared at it …

Edging her way around this hideous totem pole, she stepped into the garden of what had once been the house called Oak Lodge. The first thing she saw was a shallow fire-pit, cut into the wild turf that was all that remained of the lawn. Animal bones were scattered around and she saw the burned remains of sticks which had been used in the fire.

She called out nervously. She had the strongest sense of being watched, but could see no betraying detail or movement. Her voice, when she called, was almost dead in the confined space; the heavy trunks of the besieging oaks absorbed her words and replied only with the quiver of bird life in their branches. Tallis patrolled the small garden space, observing everything: here, the remains of the wire fence; there, impaled by roots, several slats of wood which might have come from a chicken coop, or kennel.

And dominating all, casting its sombre shadow over the small clearing: the carved trunk, the totem. Tallis touched the blackened wood and it broke away in handfuls, exposing seething insect life beneath. She stared up at the angry features, the evil eyes, the leering mouth. She could see how the shape of legs and arms had been added to the column, now corroded almost into obscurity.

This ancient effigy watched the house; perhaps it was keeping guard on it.

The house itself had become a part of the forest. The floors had burst open under the pressure of trees growing up from the cold earth below. The windows were framed by leafy branches. The roof had been punched through in the same way and only the high chimney stacks rose above the tree tops.

Tallis looked into two rooms; first, a study, its French windows hanging loose, its desk covered with ivy, its space dominated by an immense V-shaped oak trunk. Then, the kitchen. There were the mossy remains of a pine table in this small room, and an old cooker. Branches stretched like vines across the ceiling. The pantry was completely empty. When she picked up a cast-iron saucepan from the hook on the wall she nearly jumped out of her skin as the twig that had burrowed through the brick beneath it sprang out, released from its confined space.

When she peered into the parlour she was daunted by the tree growth that occupied every foot of the room, crushing furniture, embracing walls, penetrating the faded, framed pictures.

Tallis returned to the garden. The sun, high overhead, made it difficult for her to look up at the grinning totemic figure carved on the immense trunk of wood. She wondered idly who had erected the statue, and for what purpose …

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?’