Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle) (23 page)

It had not been painted. It had not been bearded.

As she walked home she had the uncanny feeling that someone was keeping pace with her, just out of sight among the underbrush.

She read all afternoon and into the early evening, and began to make a little sense of the sprawling journal entries, although most of what was legible was beyond her comprehension. When her eyes began to water with the strain of deciphering she closed the book and carried it downstairs. Her father was in the sitting room, working at the round table, a cigarette smoking between his fingers. He looked up as Tallis quietly entered the room and stubbed the cigarette into a glass ashtray.

From the music room came the sound of scales as Margaret Keeton loosened up her fingers for an hour or so of practice. As Tallis placed the journal on the table so the sound of a sonata replaced the scales and Tallis felt relaxed, enjoying the familiarity and delicacy of her mother’s playing.

Her father sniffed the air, then peered hard at the damp book. ‘What have you got there? It stinks. Where did you dig it up?’

‘In Ryhope Wood,’ Tallis said. Her father glanced at her, a touch of exasperation in his expression. His grey hair was damp from being washed – the Keetons were going to a dinner that evening – and he smelled faintly of after-shave.

‘More fantasies?’ he murmured, closing the file on which he had been working.

‘No,’ Tallis stated flatly. ‘It was in a desk in the ruined house at the edge of the wood. Oak Lodge. I went exploring.’

Her father stared at her, then smiled. ‘Did you see any ghosts? Any sign of Harry?’

With a shake of her head, Tallis said, ‘No ghosts. No Harry. But I saw a mythago.’

‘A
mythago?
’ A brief moment’s thought. ‘That’s one of your grandfather’s gobbledegook words. What is it, anyway? What does it mean?’

Tallis brought the journal round to where her father sat. She opened the book at one of the easier pages, where the water had not stained the sheet with ink; where Huxley’s writing was less cryptic than so often during his frantic entries. She said, ‘I’ve tried to read bits of the writing, but I can’t manage very much. This page is obvious, though …’

Keeton stared at the words, then read softly: ‘
Have detected clear mythopoetic energy flows in the cortex: the mythago form comes from the right brain and its reality from the left hemisphere. But where is the pre-mythago genesis zone? WJ believes deep in the brain stem, the most primitive part of the neuromythogenetic structure. But there is activity in the cerebellum whenever he is inducing mythogenesis in the wood. Our equipment is too crude. We may be measuring the wrong psychic energy
… This is all nonsense. It doesn’t make any sense. It sounds scientific, but it’s just gobbledegook …’ He turned a page. ‘
The Hood form is back, in a very aggressive form. No merry men for this particular Robin, just prehistoric wood-demon
…’

He looked up, frowning at his daughter. ‘Robin Hood?
The
Robin Hood?’

Tallis nodded vigorously. ‘And Green Jack. And Arthur. And Sir Galahad the noble knight. And the Twigling …’

‘The Twigling? What in Heaven’s name is that?’

‘I don’t know. It’s a hero of some sort. From before the Romans. There are heroines too, some of them very strange. All in the wood …’

James Keeton frowned deeply again, struggling to understand. ‘What are you saying? That these people still
live
in the wood? But that’s silly …’

‘They’re there! Daddy, I’ve
seen
some of them. Hooded women. Granddad knew about them too. They come out of the wood sometimes and whisper to me.’

‘Whisper to you? What do they whisper?’

Violent chords sounded from the music room and Tallis glanced at the intervening wall, then turned back to her father. ‘How to make things. Like dolls, and masks. How to name things. How to remember things, the stories … how to
see
things … the hollowings …’

Keeton shook his head. He reached for another cigarette but toyed with it in his fingers rather than lighting it. ‘You’ve lost me. This is one of your games, isn’t it? One of your fantasies?’

That made Tallis angry. She pushed back her hair and gave her father a grim, cold stare. ‘I knew you’d say that. It’s your answer for everything …’

‘Steady on,’ the man warned, wagging a finger briefly. ‘Remember the pecking order in this house …’

Unabashed, Tallis tried again. ‘I’ve
seen
them. I really have. The stag. My Broken Boy. Everybody knows he should have died years ago. But he’s still out there –’

‘
I’ve
never seen him.’

‘But you have! You saw him when I was born, and you
know
that he has been seen near the wood since you were a boy yourself.
Everybody
knows about it. He’s a legend.
He’s real, but he came from
here
!’ Tallis tapped her head as she said this. ‘And
here
…’ Tapping her father’s skull. ‘It’s all in the book.’

Keeton touched the open page, fingered it, then turned it; he was silent for a long time. The cigarette broke in his fingers and he let it drop. Perhaps he was torn between the two conflicting beliefs: that his daughter was slightly crazy; and that he had before him the journal of a scientific man, and that journal contained statements as strange as his daughter’s visions …

And he
had
seen Broken Boy, and could not deny that the stag was an oddity.

He leaned forward again and flipped the dank pages of the book. ‘Mythogenetic zones,’ he read, scanning down the writing. When he spoke his tone was disbelieving, then incredulous; he articulated the words as if to say: this is astonishing, this is simply unbelievable. ‘Oak vortices! Ash-oak zones … reticular memory … pre-mythago vortices of generative power …
ley matrices
for God’s sake. Elemental image forms …’

He slammed the book shut. ‘What does it all mean?’ He stared at Tallis darkly, but was a confused rather than an angry man. ‘What does it mean? It’s all just so much –’

‘
Gobbledegook
!’ she finished for him, knowing the word he would use, using it sneeringly. ‘But it
isn’t
gobbledegook. You have dreams. Everybody has dreams. People have always dreamed. It’s as if those dreams were becoming real. All the heroes and heroines from the story-books, all the exciting things that we remember from being young –’

‘Hark at the girl. Hark at the way she speaks. She’s possessed …’

Ignoring his astonishment, Tallis said, ‘All of those
things, they somehow come
real
in Ryhope Wood. It’s a dream place …’

She sighed and shook her fair head. ‘Granddad must have understood it better than me. He talked to the man who wrote this journal. Then he wrote to me in my folklore book.’

“I read the letter,’ Keeton murmured. ‘Rambling. Silly. An old man going senile.’ Wistfully, he added. ‘An old man dying.’

Tallis grimaced, then bit her lip. ‘I know he was dying, but he wasn’t losing his mind. He just didn’t understand
everything
. Same as you. Same as me. But he said something in the letter that I
am
beginning to understand now. And in this journal –’ she quickly turned to the leaf-marked page, where the ink had run so much – ‘this page is important, but I can’t read it. I thought – I thought you might read it to me. You see? Here, where it says “Forbidden places …” I can read that sentence all right, but nothing else.’

Her father stared at the blurred page for a long while, nibbling at his lower lip, then rubbing his lined forehead, then sighing, then bending closer to scrutinize the writing. And at last he straightened up.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I can make sense of it. Of the words, anyway …’

Later I learned this: that he has been further into the wood than either of us. Subjective time for WJ is two weeks, a frightening thought. This simple relativistic effect seems confined to certain woodland zones. There may be others where the effect of time on the human body is the opposite, the traditional time of the fairy world, where a traveller will return after a journey of a year to find a hundred years have passed.

WJ says he has proof of this, but he is more excited about what he calls his ‘geistzones’, and I must record as best I can his rambling, difficult description of his recent experience.

He has come to believe that the mythogenetic effect works not only to create the untouchable, mysterious figure of lore and legend, the hero figure, it also creates the forbidden
places
of the mythic past. This would seem obvious enough. The legendary clans and armies – such as the ancient
shamiga
who guard their river crossings – are also associated with
place
. And the ruined castles and earthworks, too, would fit into this category. But WJ has glimpsed these realms he calls
geistzones
, archetypal landscapes generated by the primordial energies of the inherited unconscious, lost in the lower brain. He has found a mythago which he designates ‘oolering man’ after the chanting cry that the figure emits before it steps from the woodland through the entrance to the
geistzone
which it has created, or made to appear.

The
geistzone
is a logical archetype, logically generated by the mind. It can be both the desired realm, or the most feared realm; the beginning place or the final place; the place of life before birth, or life after death; the place of no hardship, or the place where life is
tested and transition from one state of being to another accomplished. Such a realm would appear to exist in the heartwoods. There are clues enough to this fact in the mythic ruins that abound in the outer zones of the wood.

WJ sees the ‘oolering man’ as a guardian of the
way
to that land. It is a shaman figure, that much is clear. Its attributes are a face painted white but with the eyes and mouth striped with red; a body clothed in ragged strips of uncured hide and skin, some blackened with age, some fresh and still bloody; a necklet of severed birds’ heads, long-beaked birds such as herons, storks and cranes being central, and the colored bills of smaller birds taking up the back; various rattles and whistles to simulate bird-song; and a dancing movement that imitates a wading bird, pecking through the water to the mud below.

WJ will try to relate this to the myths of birds as messengers of the dead, bringers of omens, and transformation into human form. (From the eyepoint of a bird, all the
extremes of the land
are visible, and the shaman emulates this far-seeingness by adopting the trappings of flight.) But the ‘oolering man’, with its function at the entrance of heaven, or hell, is of more interest than this simple shamanism. It seems to be able to
create
these gateways. Belief in such a thing must once have been very strong. The
geistzone
that WJ witnessed was a winter land, and a freezing and hellish wind blew from it for three days, while the ‘oolering man’ sat before it, facing the unwelcome visitor, almost defying him to approach. WJ has suffered from this, though the ‘oolering man’ seemed to come to no harm. Eventually he rose, stepped through the entrance to his
geistzone
and folded space around him.

When James Keeton looked up from the smudged text he saw his daughter standing by the window, watching him through the crudely gouged eyes of the white and red mask which she held to her face.

‘Oolering man?’ he said. ‘Geistzones? Shamiga? Do you understand
any
of what this means?’

Tallis lowered the mask. Her dark eyes were bright, her pale skin vibrant. She stared at her father, but at the same time was looking through him. ‘Hollowers …’ she whispered. ‘
Oolering
man …
hollower
… the same. Guardians. Creators of the path. Creators of the ghost realms. The story is coming clearer …’

He was confused. ‘Story? Which story?’ He rose to his feet as he spoke, adjusting his braces, pacing round the sitting room. The smell of rotting wood and earth was strong.

Tallis said, ‘The story of Old Forbidden Place. The journey to Old Forbidden Place. Harry’s geistzone. So near yet so far …’ She suddenly became excited. ‘It’s what Harry said to me. Do you remember me telling you?’

‘Remind me.’

‘He said that he was going somewhere very strange. Somewhere very close. He would do his best to keep in touch.’ Tallis walked over and took her father’s hand, and Keeton closed his two hands around the small, cold fingers. Tallis went on, ‘He went into the wood. But he went further. He went into a geistzone, through a hollowing. I thought they were just visions, but they’re gates. He’s here, Daddy. He’s all around us. He’s somewhere close, perhaps trying to get home right now. He might be in this very room, but to him … the room is somewhere else, a cave, a castle. An unknown region.’

She raised the mask to her face again. The sinister features stared at Keeton from another age. Tallis, from
behind the wood, whispered, ‘But he’s in the wrong part of the Otherworld. I’m sure of it, now. He’s in hell. That’s why he called to me. He’s lost in hell and he needs me to go to him.’ Lowering the mask, looking confused. ‘I’ve opened three gates. I’ve
hollowed
three times. But I only opened them to the senses. I could only see things and hear things and smell things … no … in Stretley Stones meadow I threw stones into the other world. But I don’t know how to travel yet. I don’t know how to open the space and close it again, like the “oolering man”.’

Her father looked alarmed. ‘You’re not planning to run away, now, are you? To hell? I’ll have to put my foot down about that. When you’re twenty-one, you can do as you please.’