Authors: Robert Holdstock
The Hollowing
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Contents
PART ONE:
From the Unknown Region
PART TWO:
In the Wildwood
PART THREE:
Long Gone, Long to Come
Also by Robert Holdstock from Tom Doherty Associates
For Wendy, Brian, Alan, Marjya, and Robert, fellow travellers in the realm …
and for Hilary Rubinstein, with much appreciation.
Acknowledgements
My thanks, for a variety of reasons, to Chris Evans, Jane Johnson, Sarah Biggs, Malcolm Edwards, Andrew Stephenson (chats scientific), Dave Arthur (chats mythic), and Garry and Annette Kilworth. And of course, to the unknown author of
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,
and the long-forgotten dreamer who inspired the tale.
“Now certainly the place is deserted,” said Gawain.
“It is a hideous oratory, all overgrown,
And well graced for the gallant garbed in green
To deal out his devotions in the Devil’s fashion.
Now I feel in my five wits, it is the Fiend himself
That has tricked me into this tryst, to destroy me here.”
From
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
One of the deep silences fell on them, that seemed so much more natural than speech, a timeless silence in which there were at first many minds in the overhang; and then perhaps no mind at all.
William Golding,
The Inheritors
PART ONE
From the Unknown Region
The Green Chapel: 1
Each dawn, since the hollyjack had come to the cathedral bringing her strange dreams, the boy had started to think of waking as the opening of petals, or a form of budding. At this time the light was not green, it became green later, but he could never wait to wake, and in the same way that flowers opened to the sun, and leaves turned and unfurled, so he unfurled, so he opened. At first curled up on the inscribed marble floor, arms and legs gathered in for warmth during the night, now he began to straighten, then stretch, face to the open sky where the roof had been, mouth agape and damp with dew.
His eyes remained closed but he knew the cathedral was not yet green, it was still in
stark
light, and the world was not yet
quick.
And like the pores of the leaves, still closed, the water stayed inside him. He liked the feeling of the water. It pressed painfully against his belly, but he kept the water with him, waiting for green light. He rolled on the hard, cold marble, touching the grooves in the slab, the hidden names of the dead carved in the floor that guarded their bones. He listened to the cathedral stir, to the forest beyond begin to wake, to the hollyjack as she woke and moved restlessly, like a bird, in her nest of vegetation at the end of the aisle, against the great outer doors of the church.
The hollyjack had been here for days, now, weeks perhaps. She had changed his dreams. He could dream more widely, and feel his way over great distances of the forest, peering up from the roots, or glimpsing the ground as he flowed through the branches. She still frightened him, but until she had come he had been unable to see anything at all. With her arrival he had seen how like a leaf he was, unfurling with the new day. But last night, the dream last night had been startling. He didn’t want to let it go.
The sun moved over the line of the trees. The ragged edges of the cathedral’s fallen roof caught its warmth, its light. On the cold marble the brilliant edge of the green light spread, moving like a growing thing, an unfurling plant, towards the unfurled boy.
He felt it touch his legs. He woke fully and cried out as the light spread across him and birds fled from the nest where the hollyjack chattered. The bones of the dead below him shifted as roots prowled among them. The cathedral shuddered into life, from nave to chancel. The rotting wood of the pews began to steam, and he could smell this, and the carved dancing men drew deeper into the knots and rings of the old trees, their night of freedom and exuberance finished for a while.
He let the water go, now, adding his own moisture to the heavy dawn as his belly deflated. The water stank of nettles as it passed, and this mingled with wood sorrel and anemone in the rising steam of the chapel. He was relieved, out of pain, and felt at last that it was time to open fully. To open his eyes. To let green light shape him for the day.
The hollyjack had left her nest. He saw her moving up the ivy-covered wall towards the high arch of a window, where tree branches reached into the ruins of the cathedral and stone faces grinned down at him. She hesitated for a moment, glancing back at her nest, and at the boy, then had gone, outside into the forest.
He wanted to call to her, to tell her about his dream, but it was too late. He stood and stared through the leaning trunks of oaks at the rows of rotting wooden pews, some of them crushed, others raised above the floor as the forest grew from below them. The altar space was a distant grove among white-flowered thorns, the gold cross sparkling through the leaves. Saplings were sprouting everywhere, coming up from the crypt below. Only the marble slabs, with the names and dates of the dead, defied the forest as it struggled to emerge into the cathedral, keeping a clear channel to the high altar. Since the hollyjack had come to him, he had begun to imagine how the roots and branches in the crypt, and the bones themselves, were all entangled, all pushing at the floor, a great pressure ready to erupt upwards.
It had been
such
a dream. It had been his first
real
dream since he had come to the forest. He said the words aloud into the decaying church.
Real dream.
For so long his dreams had been of endless snow, and endless forest, and endless running, and endless water, an endless flight across unchanging lands. All that had
broken
with the first dream of the unfurling leaf. And now this one. He had begun to remember so much again.
“They danced!” he shouted, staring into the brightening sky, through the crossing branches of the trees, through the green light. As if to answer his cry, one of the carved wooden faces on a pew moved slightly, then stretched forward from the end of the stall, poking out into the aisle. It turned and peered at the shouting boy, who watched back through the sunlit mist that hung heavily in the great space. It looked like the hollyjack, branches extending from its mouth, leaves around its face. As quickly as it had stretched to look at him, it withdrew and was silent again. The boy blinked, then laughed. He was still dreaming. Last night that same figure and twenty others had come all the way out of the wooden benches, small, gnarled shapes with willow-thin arms and legs. They had led a wild dance up the stone walls and into the branches, among the stone faces in the high eaves, which had laughed and twisted too, stretching out from the pillars and cornices of the cathedral, peering at the wild activity below them and around their vaulted positions.
In the stillness of the new day, the boy went to the hollyjack’s nest and peered through the small hole into the stinking mass of rotten wood and foliage, grass, bracken, and dead birds that the creature had compacted against the tall cathedral doors. Above those doors, half of a stained glass window began to glow purple and red as it was struck by first light. He liked the shape of the knight with his lance and silver armour, but now—another question! He was so full of questions these days—now he wondered what the knight was fighting—he could just see the creature’s legs—what was missing from the shattered area of the window.
Away from the nest, he went into the gloom of the sacristy and looked at his disjointed reflection in the cracked mirror. His hair was long and filthy now, falling in a lank, black mass around his pale, smooth face. A new thought occurred to him (he smiled at the pleasure of it) that he looked like the picture of an Apache Indian boy he had seen in a book at school. The boy in the picture had worn animal skins. The boy in the mirror was naked. The picture of the Apache now blurred and shifted in his mind, then faded. The chapel boy’s teeth were still white when he grinned, shifting his head across a distorting fracture in the glass.
The deep scratches on his chest and right arm were healed, now no more than bright red lines. They no longer hurt. The skin around them was still yellowed with bruising. He could hardly remember the attack, now, it had been so fast, and at dusk. He hadn’t even seen the creature, just heard its awful laugh. He thought of it as the giggler.
He was grimy with dirt and remembered that he should wash, so he thought of the well, but the well was at the edge of the clearing outside, and the wood was dangerous there. When the giggler had snatched at him and ripped him, it had hurt him badly, and when the hollyjack had tried to help him it had torn her leaves before retreating into the deep bosk of the wood. She mightn’t help him again.
The moment of apprehension faded as fast as the memory of the Indian boy from the book. He was suddenly on the ivy “ladder,” hauling himself up the stonework to the open roof, over an empty gallery, then across a broad sill that was carved with intricate rose and leaf patterns. He held the long neck of an ugly stone animal, and peered back down into the body of the church, swinging gently in the vast space and watching the wooden seats below, but they were quite lifeless now. Then he had clambered over the gargoyle and out onto a branch, crawling into the daylight and slipping down the twisted beech tree and onto the slate roof of the porch. The clearing stretched around him, ending at the wood. A few granite headstones poked from mounds in the tall grass and nettles. The stone well was half in shadow. The crowding wood was dark, crushing, and he felt a tingle of apprehension again. The giggler came and went, usually at dusk, but he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t there now, watching him from the shadows. He needed to drink, though.
Without really thinking, he reached the well and drew up the bucket, splashing water into his mouth and over his body, liking the cold touch on his bruises. Some impulse, faintly remembered, made him rub water between his toes.
Something moved suddenly in the dark wood, startling him, and he scampered back to the open door of the porch, yelping at the stings he received from the dense nettlebed. It was only the holly-jack, in fact. She hovered in the gloom, then stepped quickly past the well, crouching against a headstone. He knew that her eyes would tell him of fear, but her eyes said nothing. They gleamed from deep in the holly leaves that wreathed her face. The thin twigs that stretched from each side of her round mouth were wet. She had been feeding, then. She was fat, these days, and her body often moved as if she was being kicked from inside.