Merlin's Wood (Mythago Wood) (31 page)

11

So tired he could hardly walk, Huxley walked across the night field, glad of a moonglow behind clouds that showed him the stark outline of Oak Lodge. Using this as a marker he stepped slowly towards his home, the sickness in his stomach still a jarring pain and a nauseous surge. Whatever he had eaten, he should have been more careful.

This excursion had been short, again, but he had hoped to have returned before nightfall. As it was, he imagined dawn was just an hour or so away.

The sound of Jennifer’s cry stopped him in his tracks. He listened carefully, close to the gate, and again he heard her voice, a slightly strangled, then increasingly intense evocation of pain. She was gasping, he realised. The sound of her voice stopped quite suddenly, and then there was a laugh. The sound was eerily loud in the night, in the still night, this solitude of sound and sensation that was so close to dawn.

‘Oh my God. Jennifer … Jennifer!’

He began to walk more swiftly. An image of his wife being attacked in the night was insisting its superiority over the obvious.

The doors of his study were shattered abruptly. Glass crashed and the doors flung wide. Something moved with incredible speed across the lawns, through the trees, causing leaves and apples to fall. Whatever it was stopped suddenly close to the hedges, then crashed through them, passing Huxley like a storm wind.

And stopped. And moved in the moonlight.

Grey-green man …?

There was nothing there. There was moon-shadow only. And yet Huxley could sense the outline of a man, a naked man, a man still hot from exertion, the smell of the man, the heat of the man, the pulse of heart and head, the shaking of the limbs of the man …

Grey-green
…

‘Come back. Come and talk.’

The garden was aflow with movement. Everything was bending, twisting, writhing in a wind that circled the motionless shadow. And the shadow moved, towards Huxley, then away, and there was no glimpse, no sight, no feeling of reality, just the sense of something that had watched him and had returned to the wood.

Huxley ran back to the broken gate, tripping on the shattered wood. He had not even heard the breaking of the gate, but he followed the wind with his ears and night vision, and saw the scrubwood thrash with life, then die again into the steadiness of night, as whatever it was passed through it and beyond, into the timeless realm of the wood.

‘Jennifer … oh no …’

She was not in the room. The bed was still warm, disturbed and dishevelled in an obvious way. He walked quickly out onto the landing, then downstairs again, following the slightest of sounds to the smallest of rooms. She was seated on the toilet, and pulled the door shut abruptly as he opened it.

‘George! Please! A
little
privacy …’

‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m very all right. But I thought you were going to have a heart attack.’

She laughed, then pulled the chain. When she emerged into the dark corridor she reached for him and put her arms around his neck. She seemed startled to discover him wearing his jacket. ‘You’ve not got dressed again! Good
grief
, George. There really is very little hope for you.’ She hesitated, half amused, half anguished. ‘Well … perhaps there’s
some
hope …’ Her sudden kiss was deep, moist and passionate.

Her breath was strong, a sexual smell.

‘I’m going back to bed. I rather hoped you’d be there too …’

‘I have to think.’

In the darkness he couldn’t see her face, but he sensed the smile, the weary smile. ‘Yes, George. Of course. You go and think. Write in your journal.’ She walked away from him, towards the stairs. ‘There are fresh bones in the pantry should you get peckish.’

But her voice gave away her sadness. He heard the moment’s crying, and intuited instantly and painfully that something she had thought renewed she now realised was not.

So he
had
been here again. The encounter in the garden, in the darkness … that
had
been the grey-green man. And he had seduced Jennifer!

Huxley drew the journal from its hiding place, and with shaking hands opened it, switching on the lamp.

*

The same? You and I? No. No! It feels wrong. I am no ghost
.

Am I a ghost? Perhaps. Yes. When I read your words. Yes. Perhaps right
.

I am confused. I live in brief moments, and the dreams are strong and powerful. I am dreaming a life. But I belong in Oak Lodge. When I am there I feel warmth. But the wood pulls me back. You are right. You other writer. I am your dream and I am free, but not free. Oh confused! And ill. Always so ill. The blood is so hot
.

The dreams, the urging. I am such a hunter. I run them down and use my hands. I am plastered with detritus from the forest
.

My son Steven. You have tampered with my son. This was wrong. Such fury in me. If I see you I fear to control my anger. Leave Steven alone. I am aware of him in the wood. He is here. Something has, or will happen, and he is everywhere. Something with happen to him. Do not interfere with him. An immense event is shaping around him, not yet happened, but already changing the wood, and time is recoiling and refashioning. I watch seasons in frantic change, in full, seconds-long flight. I hear sounds from all times. This is Ash’s doing
.

The horses, the time of horses. Something happened there, something small. Something to you/me to cause this you/me, this wild split. What happened? I see it only in dreams. I am too wild, too base, when I am free of dreams I am wild and running, the merest scent of blood is an enragement, the scent of flesh sends me
surging, Jennifer is not safe from me, guard her guard her, even though you recognise that passion
.

Find Ash and find where she sent you. Why did she send you there? The horse, the fire in that wood. All a dream
.

Guard Jennifer from the ghost and the bloody obsessions of the ghost

I am so close to this earth, so much matter of rock and wood and silent night that lives, claws, crawls, devours, desires, surges and comes into all life that interferes and crosses paths and tracks

Kill me?

How?

Join again, return me to you. Ash. The key. The wood is tugging, a root around me. It draws me tight. The smell of must and rotten wood. The stink. Each a chain around me. Each a tug. I am a prisoner

Steven will be
lost
to us. He will never

But with this tantalising and terrifying half sentence, the entry ended.

12

What
had
happened in that living dream of the cold wood, and the running horses? He had been run down by one of the creatures. He had tried to see the face of the corpse on its back, but had failed. He had, when he
thought about it clearly, felt himself torn spiritually apart: there had been that moment of wild riding, of moving with horse and cadaver through the trees …

Had that been the moment of division?

Had that been when Green-grey man had split from him?

He wrote in his journal:

He placed the book behind the shelves, then went out into the rising dawn. Wisps of what looked like smoke, funnels of greyish smog, rose, from over Ryhope Wood. As the light increased, the odd vortices vanished. The last thing he saw before returning to the house was the shimmering movement of leaves and green, running, it seemed, for several yards along the edgewood. He could not quite focus upon it, although the sensation of movement was strongest when he looked away, catching it from the corner of his eye.

*

The new day was a Saturday and both boys were at home. By mid-morning the sound of their antics and play had begun to irritate Huxley as he tried to concentrate his mind – his tired mind – on thinking through the experience with Ash. He watched the boys from his study window. Christian, the more rumbustious of the two, was swinging from every branch he could find during a game of some form of chase. Steven seemed to become aware of his father, watching him, and froze for a moment, his face anxious. Only when Huxley moved away did he hear the sound of the game restart.

The moment he had written these lines, he inked them through, so strongly, so savagely, that none would ever read this terrible and sickening moment of self honesty.

Later in the day the boys left the garden. The sudden cessation of their noise attracted Huxley and when he went to see where they had gone he noticed them, distantly, tearing round the edge of the wood, in the direction of the railway tracks.

He knew where they would be going, and out of curiosity followed them, taking his stick and his panama hat. The day was bright, if not hot, and there was a brisk, moist-smelling breeze, heralding rain later.

They had gone to the mill pond, of course. Christian was sitting on the old jetty, where the boat had once been tethered. The pond was wide, curving round between dense, overhanging trees, to end in a sprawling patch of rushes out of sight. The oaks at that far end were like a solid wall, great thick trunks, the spaces between them a clutter of willow and spreading holly. It was as if the wall had been deliberately built to stop the wood being entered at that point.

Once, there had been fish in abundance in this pool, but at some time in the twenties the life had faded. A pike or two still could be seen, gliding below the water. But there was little point in fishing, now, and the old boat was rapidly rotting.

Huxley had warned both boys
never
to take that boat
out, but he could see that Christian was contemplating such an act, as he dangled his feet in the water. Such a headstrong boy. So wilful.

Steven was beating through the reeds with a stick. No, not beating: cutting. He gathered a thick armful and carried them back around the pond’s edge, and Huxley drew back into the concealing undergrowth.

The exchange of conversation between his sons confirmed that they were planning to make a reed boat, and float it on the pond.

He smiled, and was about to withdraw and walk silently back along the short path that led from open land to this pond, when he realised that the boys were alarmed.

Christian was running over the decaying piles of the boathouse, pointing into the thick woods. Steven followed him, and they dropped to a crouch, peering into the gloom.

From his lurking place, Huxley followed the direction of their interest. He realised that a wide, strange face was watching from high in the branches of a tree. He was reminded of the Cheshire Cat from
Alice
, and smiled. But the face wasn’t smiling.

It withdrew abruptly from the light. Something crashed noisily to the ground, startling and scattering birds from the tree tops. It moved with great speed through the woodland, round the pondside, was silent for a moment, then crashed noisily into the deep wood, finally vanishing from earshot.

Huxley remained where he was. The excited lads passed by him, talking about the ‘monkey face’, and
sharing the burden of reeds for the hull of their reed ship, which they intended to build in the woodshed. As soon as they were gone Huxley went round to the boathouse, and struck into the tangle of undergrowth behind. There was no path, and his trousers were snagged and torn by the screen of briar rose and blackberry bramble. He found that the simple barrier of this untamed wood would not allow him in, but after a while he found a patch of nettles, stamped them down, laid his jacket over them, and sat, screened from sight, surrounded by the heavy silence and air of the wood, watching through the shifting light for any further sign of ‘monkey face’, a mythago that he had not yet observed himself at quarters close enough for him to make a judgement upon its mythological nature.

It was a fruitless wait, and he returned to Oak Lodge a disappointed man. There were no further entries in his private journal, and he made a short entry in his research journal, defining the mythago as far as he was able. He asked Steven and Christian about their day, and teased their perception of the creature from them, affecting idle interest. But neither boy could add more to what he himself had seen, save to say that the face was wide, high-browed and painted. It was perhaps, then, an early manifestation of Cro-Magnon belief? Its appearance was too modern for it to be associated with the culture that had given rise to the man from Piltdown, the nature of whose belief systems constantly exercised Huxley’s imagination and interest.

*

At eleven o’clock Jennifer announced that she was retiring for the night, and as she walked past him paused, held out her hand. ‘Are you coming?’

It horrified Huxley to feel such shock, such fear of accepting his wife’s invitation. A cold sweat tingled on his neck and hairline, and he said casually, ‘I do need to read a little further.’