The Hollowing (20 page)

Behind the figures the gorge narrowed suddenly to form a roofless cavern, dark and deep, the source of the icy water that flowed below their towering forms.

This, then, was the way into Alex’s domain. Not a hollowing, but the gateway to a place that seethed with the boy’s lost passion, and which was convoluted and impassable, a block to the normal passage of human travellers.

And at once, as Richard thought of this, it occurred to him why the colossi were so familiar! “They’re his soldiers!”

“His soldiers?” Helen followed his gaze upwards.

“His model soldiers. Of course! I bought him a set of Second World War ‘Desert Rats’ to play with. He had an obsession with them. My father gave him cannons and tanks. They fired matchsticks. He was obsessed with soldiers for a couple of years, encouraged by his grandparents! And being Alex, he used heat to soften the plastic of the models. They were only three or four inches tall, of course, but he twisted them into all sorts of attitudes … marching, searching, dying, hiding. He made a real army, set it up in a model wood, around a brick castle. I recognise these figures, the attitudes … they’re his
men.
No guns, no clothes, but the postures are right. Why
are
they naked? That seems odd…”

“Not odd at all,” Helen said. “When Alex created these monstrosities, he drew on several parts of his unconscious: personal imagination was just the model; forgotten folk-lore was the shape. These giants are part of an older myth.”

“Which one?”

“I wish I knew,” she said with a quick glance at him. “But one thing I do know. I hope they stay rooted!”

Above and behind them there was a furtive movement in the trees. Rocks slipped and tumbled down towards the river. Richard watched as the boulders came to rest, leaving a sudden silence. A hundred yards away, a flight of birds took noisily to the air. A tree bent out into the ravine under the weight of something leaning on it, then was still, as if the creature was aware that it had been seen.

“It’s the Jack,” Helen said, ending their moment of rest. She clutched her pack and stepped into the water, wading awkwardly towards the wooden giant, to the gap below its oaken legs. Richard followed apprehensively, stumbling through the cold stream, aware that the earth was shaking slightly and alarmed at the lumps of moss and rotten wood that fell from the cracks and crevices of the huge figures above him. He was glad to enter the narrow gully, with its wet ferns and slippery floor, and ducked with relief into the tunnel through the rock, scrambling towards the bright, yellow light at the far end where Helen was already emerging into the new land.

The Hunted

From Richard’s notebook:

Lacan was right. There is a catharsis in writing about the events that have not just surrounded me but overwhelmed me.

I tried to keep a record in Old Stone Hollow, but was too fascinated and confused by the supernatural (no other word fits) that my record at that time consists only of fractured thoughts and fragmentary descriptions. When I followed Helen through the gully, away from the Colossi, I found even less opportunity for reflection, since we spent long hours running the forest tracks as we strove to catch up with Lytton, and the castle where Alex’s ghost had once been seen. But I am aware now, as I was then, that a new vigour had crept into my soul.

From the moment I emerged from the narrow gully and the cold river, I knew that Alex was close. I could almost touch him—and yet there was nothing to touch. I could speak to him, but there was no child to speak to. I could embrace him—he seemed to be embracing me—but there was only the land, and the strange figures that littered that land, and the shadow of my lost son, reaching for me.

Helen was sitting on the bank, among the drooping and scintillantly yellow branches of a willow which formed a sort of bower in which she rested, half-naked, squeezing water from her clothing. Striking though this vision was, it was impossible to ignore the two huge effigies that rose on each side of the river, facing the gully, as if guarding this entrance to Alex’s world.

The figures were made of straw, each the height of a tree, but both beginning to rot with the weather, to fragment with the rain. One of them was the martyred Christ, the once-extended arms now lost, so that just the stumps remained. Crows had nested in the socket of the left arm, below the drooping, ruined head. Across the stream was the figure of a second martyr, arms behind its back, body flexed. Black rods of thorn, emerging from the straw, suggested spears or arrows. The head was gone, but the identity was clear, for here was St. Sebastian, shot to death by arrows.

As soon as we could we left these effigies of agony behind and followed the river into the deeper wood. The land was rising toward hills which we had glimpsed distantly and Helen had pointed out the fires that burned on the skyline. We found few traces of Lytton, the vaguest of tracks, until we came upon a fire, set back from the river, below a rock overhang, where traces of a bark and branch shelter could be seen. The fire had been constructed between stones, on one of which was a small pile of half-burned tobacco, the leavings of Lytton’s pipe.

There had been a skirmish. Helen traced the slash-marks in the trunk of one of the trees, and pointed out the furrows in the damp earth near the river, where someone had slipped or been dragged. And when we searched the area around the rock, I found a shallow grave, its head marked with a crude cross.

Without a word, Helen scooped the dry earth away, and exposed the contorted face of a man, his skin greening fast, his teeth now brown and fragile. He had been pistol-shot through the left brow. By uncovering part of his torso, a rustling metal breastplate was revealed, and a coloured linen shirt. The creature looked just like one of Cromwell’s Ironsides, a trooper from the Civil War in England.

I covered the corpse, remembering the boxed set of model Royalists and Roundheads that I’d bought for Alex one Christmas, forty soldiers on either side. We had re-enacted the battle of Edgehill on the dining table. Somehow, as is the way with such things, a small patrol of plastic American GIs entered on the side of the Parliamentarians, and Alex had won the skirmish.

Many legends, many heroes, came out of those bitter years of Civil War in the sixteen hundreds. There were as many heroes from Cromwell’s army as there were from the more romantic Royalists, but Alex had always been fascinated by the rigour of the commoners’ army, and less romanced by the swashbuckling reputation of the King’s Own Men.

Whatever this unfortunate soldier had done, Lytton had dispatched him dispassionately.

Alex was everywhere, in the high hills, with its earthworks, over which we toiled during that first day’s journey, in the crumbling fortresses that peered greyly through the matted greenwood, in the falls of water with their huge stone guardians, in the rattling chariots and steaming horses, colourful riders full-cloaked and armed, that broke noisily across our path, clattering or galloping along their own roads, too busy in the pursuit of adventure to stop and hail travellers from another time. In all of these things I recognised a reflection of the land around Shadoxhurst, of Alex’s dream-castles, created from fairy tale and our family explorations, on holiday, of the wonderful Norman fortresses along the border between Wales and England. Alex had always seen faces in rocks, or bodies in the hills—it was a game he had played, fitting features to the vision, a sleeping giant here, a witch petrified in limestone there.

The land beyond the gully pulsed with that life. Each hill hid a giant, whose movement was reflected in cloud shadow. Each woodland stirred as creatures rode through the hollow trunks, inhabiting a world out of sight behind the bark. All rocks watched us with eyes behind the cracks and holes formed from frost and rain and water. For Helen, the experience was frightening. She was continually apprehensive, edgy, sometimes deeply fearful. For me, there was a strange comfort. At least, there was little fear from the land itself—it was Alex.

It’s so hard to describe, but I felt, for a while at least, that Alex was guiding me. He filled my dreams, but I would have expected that. He was a strong presence in my life again, perhaps I could say in my heart. I seemed to smell him—socks and stale sports gear, the odour that had pervaded his room—and to hear him too, a clatter of activity, running through empty rooms with new model planes, or plastic knights, singing at the top of his voice. All this in a claustrophobic wood, where the only real sound of any permanence was water, the languages of birds, and the murmuring, barking, chittering signals of deer, fox, and weasel.

For the few days in Old Stone Hollow, Alex had been a sadly remembered loss, talked about by madmen in a mad world into which I had gone willingly, and which I kept at bay, as one always strives to keep the incomprehensible at bay. Not even the encounter near the Sanctuary had fully impinged upon me, although the feeling of Alex calling to me had been a terrible and saddening moment in the dream. At that time I was fascinated by Helen, and I will write here that I miss her, now, more than I can express. Like Alex, she continues to haunt my dreams, but I suppose it’s too late. In Old Stone Hollow something happened to me, something fast, something of which I had had no previous experience. I can’t use a word like love. I came to love Alice, after we had married because we had feared breaking the relationship that had existed for so long. I came to not love her. I probably never felt more than affection for her. I simply don’t know. But when Helen came to me, that night in Shadoxhurst, and when she emerged again from the wildwood, wild and naked, wild and swimming, my God, I had such feelings for her, sexual, yes, but more than that: I felt strong in her presence, I felt vibrant with her.

And she, too, was not backward in coming forward about her attraction to me. Dear God, I must have seemed so fumblingly shy. After Alice walked out on me I had only two, tentative, terrible relationships with women. I must have been such a bitter man, such a detached man, not a lover to linger with. Those years in London are like a bad dream. A form of limbo. Suddenly there was Helen, an American Indian (not pure blood, I think she said) who reminded me of Cher from the pop duo Sonny and Cher, who was attractive to look at, whose presence excited me—such a good feeling!—who at first seemed abrasive towards me, but who was fond of me and let me feel that fondness. I thought Alex dead. I didn’t believe in life after death. Helen was a stronger need than Alex, even in this unnatural realm where I should have known that the impossible might be happening, that the lad might truly be alive.

And then we passed beyond the gully, and it was like living inside Alex’s skin. Like being in my private room, aware that my son was behind me, watching my every move, hearing my every sigh, my every word, and gripping my shoulder, urging me forward. The presence of Alex was so powerful that he came back to me. I began to flounder, to cry, to need the boy so much. And Helen, in those first hours of our journey, comforted me greatly. She seemed to understand what was happening. “My God, we’re going to find him,” she said, and for the first time I was not chasing a dream, for the first time it was not a photograph of Alex that was being talked about, but the real boy, the living boy. He was here. He was alive. And he was close.

Helen said that previous explorations of this part of young Alex Bradley’s mental landscape had led to confusion, to circularity, to unwitting, unwilling return to base. But now Helen and I, following Lytton and McCarthy, entered more deeply than anyone before, save the sciamach, McCarthy, whose shadow had flowed with the clouds and wild beasts, to reach as far as the castle, although not to the cathedral itself, where Alex was hiding.

I began to have such hope … and yet though I felt comfortable in this place of family memory, the darker products of Alex’s imagination also populated the confused and entwining landscape, and on the second night of our journey we encountered two of the more threatening of the boy’s mythagos.

Lytton and McCarthy had marked their route well, and with more than tobacco ash; they left chalk arrows, and on this occasion a short note, which Richard discovered, rolled inside a tube of bark and marked, where it was hidden, by a cross. It was hard to read, because it had been written in such haste, but Helen managed to decipher it by firelight.

You are entering a part of Alex that has been influenced by Conan Doyle. This is the Lost World, even though it is not located at the top of a plateau. Last night our camp here was attacked by a small, ferocious reptile, the size of a child, with murderously sharp teeth, a
velociraptor,
we believe they’re called, like a small version of a tyrannosaur. There were four of them and they reacted satisfyingly to fire. Since memory of such creatures cannot exist within the human unconscious, these are creations from his own learning.

An
ursine
of immense proportion, a form of cave bear, has its den close by. It will attack if provoked. Don’t underestimate its speed. McCarthy did, and only just escaped. It runs faster than a hound, but fortunately is reluctant to climb trees. I am fascinated by this mythago-genesis. It defies Huxley’s understanding and account of the process, which is that a mythago is a remembered
hero,
a hope figure, or a place of aspiration, such as a castle, or a cathedral … unless, of course, such beasts are part of Alex’s private hope, but I cannot work out the mechanism. Be on guard, and hasten to find us. Alex’s castle is close. Once there I can give you two days to catch up with us before the final strike for the cathedral. There is something moving between our parties, however: a shapechanger. McCarthy senses it through the shadows. We are being hunted. Take special care.

“Hunted? Could he mean the Jack?” Richard asked as Helen finished the note.