The Hollowing (2 page)

In her hands she held a selection of colourful fungi. She offered these, and he came forward and picked carefully, knowing that some would make him dizzy and sick. The rest he ate gratefully as the holly-jack quickly examined those he had rejected. She was trying to learn.

The hollyjack was disturbed. Her mouth flexed and she made bird noises. Her long fingers stroked her body leaves restlessly, almost nervously. He wanted to go back into the chapel, to safety and security, away from the strange men and creatures who so often prowled among the trees. But he sensed that the hollyjack needed him, so he stayed in the shadow, listening to furtive movement in the woodland and the fluttering of wings in his friend’s body.

He realised quite suddenly that she was inviting him to dream again, and his heart surged.

He had had a dream last night, in the cathedral … as he ate the last of the mushrooms he struggled to recall the details. There had been wild dancing. The green men in the church stalls had slipped out of the wood and run amok. He was like a leaf, unfurling at dawn. The giggler had stepped from the wood and walked into his dreams, hiding there …

But as he tried to remember these things, so they faded, leaving him blank again, empty and restless, lonely and isolated. The details had gone.

A bigger dream was on offer, now. The way the hollyjack crouched and trembled, watching him and chitter-chattering in her funny way, all of this told him that she had heard something. Big Dream, he wondered as he chewed, or Little Dream?

When he was full he left the porch and went over to the hollyjack, curling up in her twiggy arms. The prick of holly leaves made him shudder, but after a while the mixing of blood and sap soothed him, and although the inside of her body shifted and fluttered restlessly, he felt himself slip out into the wood, flowing softly, spreading widely, connected to the forest around him through her roots, now embedded in the earth of the graveyard, and touching the tendrils of wilder trees.

She was sending him on the Little Dream, and he heard his father’s voice again, for only the second time since the hollyjack had come. His father was in the wood. His father was coming closer. He was looking desperately for his son. There was someone with him, a man like a bear, dark-featured and fierce. There was excitement, running, they were afraid. The wood shifted around them, tripped them, snagged them, sucked them deeper. The giggler was watching them, but they weren’t aware of it.

Then he touched his father’s dreams again, his memories, and he shouted with pain at the anguish he felt, the sadness. The hollyjack wrapped her arms more tightly around him, soothed him, rustled and twittered at him with her voice. Blood and sap mingled more deeply. He lay back in the hollybush and started to cry. But he dreamed his father’s dream for a while, feeding on it, bringing himself close again to a man he remembered only as a picture. He moved out of the cathedral and into the wood, a wraith, anxious to touch the man who was searching for him.

Out of the Dark

It was to be an evening of rain and strange encounters. There would be a return from the dead, and the beginning of the ending of a life.

Richard Bradley hastened along the road to his house, at the edge of Shadoxhurst, hatless and drenched by the torrential and freezing late September downpour. The whole town had become dark. The few shops had their lights on, and at four in the afternoon this made a depressingly wintry scene. Richard was wearing only his suit, the collar of his jacket drawn tightly around his neck in a vain attempt to stop the rain coursing down his back. Bedraggled and fed up, he broke into a run as he neared his cottage, then slowed abruptly as he saw the woman dart away from the back gate towards the fields.

She was wearing strange clothes. She too was saturated, he could see, her dark hair plastered to her scalp. He didn’t see her face, only the army trousers, tucked into muddy, black boots, and a full and heavy-looking green anorak drawn tightly around her neck. She had something slung across her shoulder, and although it was hard to be sure, Richard thought it was a short bow and full quiver.

He quickened his step, puzzled by the fact that she had been at his back door, but by the time he reached the gate she was a bulky and distant shape, running through the downpour towards the stream that led to Ryhope Wood, on the estate. The rain made the wood seem grim, as always.

He opened the back door and peered inside the house, noticing the wet footprints that led across the kitchen and into the small parlour. The footprints were small. He assumed at once that they were those of the woman, but what on earth was she doing here? Nothing looked disturbed. The cash box, clearly labelled as such (it contained only coppers), was still on its shelf.

Richard followed the footprints. They ascended the stairs and showed clearly, though slightly faded, how the intruder had looked into each room. The carpet had dried the wetness from her boots by mid-landing of the return, but downstairs, on the bureau, he found a note, which he read with astonishment.

Why aren’t you here? Everything’s OK with Old Stone Hollow. I really hoped you’d be here. I miss you. It’s been too long.

IMPORTANT: Lytton reckons he knows how to locate the boy’s protogenomorph, but we need YOU there. Come to the Station. I’m going back into the wood by the old brook, taking path through Huxley’s Lodge. Follow me the moment you get back. This may be our only chance to find the true cathedral! Just do it! I miss you.

The note was unsigned. The paper was wet where she had held it, the pen, a cheap biro, flung on the table. She had rested a hand on the polished wood and he placed his own hand upon the vague outline, noting its smallness, the details of her fingerprints, three of which were crossed with scars.

A thought had occurred to him, that he should fetch the police, but he stood there unwilling to do so. He just looked at the handprint, and the note, savouring its strangeness and its incomprehensibility. And remembering the image of the woman, wet, dark-haired, bulky with clothes, but fast, running along the bridleway towards the wood that had so fascinated Alexander’s young friend Tallis Keeton, before she and her father had so tragically and mysteriously disappeared, over a year ago, now.

Alex came bounding up to the front door and rang the bell. Richard folded the note and tucked it into his trousers pocket, then opened the door to the wet, excitable thirteen-year-old. The boy ran straight to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of orange juice, then crashed upstairs to get ready for the school play.

On impulse, Richard followed his son to the “treasure house,” as he and Alice called Alexander’s room.

“Do you want tea?” he asked from the door, watching the boy poring over some typewritten sheets.

“No thanks. Had crisps and two Lion bars.”

“Well, that sounds healthy enough.” Alex didn’t respond. “We’ll be leaving at six, if they want you there at six-thirty, so don’t lounge around reading for long.”

“I’m not reading—I’m memorising. Mr. Evans and me wrote a new scene today.”

“Mr. Evans and
I
…”

Alex groaned tiredly.

Richard looked around the room, reaching out to flick one of the many model planes that were suspended from the ceiling. Alexander’s costume—he was to play the red-bearded Lord Bertolac in the third year’s production of
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
—was draped around a tailor’s dummy. The red beard and hair had been fashioned from two very old wigs and looked hilarious upon the boy. Another pupil would be playing the Green Knight himself (who was, in fact, Lord Bertolac in otherworldly form) as the change of costuming was too difficult.

There was something about Alex’s den that both embraced and unnerved Richard. It was a difficult feeling—there was so much obsession here, so much passion, from the paintings of knights, with odd insignia and helmet crests, to the drawings of dinosaurs and the carefully ordered trays of fossils and crystals, gathered from all over Britain, all labelled and all imbued with mystery. Chunks of iron marcasite from chalk pits were questioningly labelled “Spacecraft remains?” The intricate patterns of fossils were related to Star Creatures, lost in the chalk seas in primordial times. Models, in plastic and wood, were everywhere, and the boy could tell a story about each one.

It was an imagination inherited from his grandfather (along with a love of toy soldiers), but a trait completely missing from Richard himself, although he tried hard to remember what had been his own childhood dream: he had walked, lazed in the sun, and swum in the freezing seas off the Welsh coast. He had very little to show for growing up.

He realised that Alex was watching him anxiously. He asked, “What is it?”

Alex said simply, “You can come in, if you want. You can test me.”

Feeling awkward, for no reason he could identify, Richard turned to go downstairs. “I’ll test you in the car, shall I? I’d better get some tea going.”

Leaving Alexander to memorise the final few lines of his part in the heavily adapted play, he went down to the kitchen, taking out the note and re-reading it. It had an odd, foreign quality to the language—
Lytton reckons he knows how to locate the boy’s protogenomorph.
It had an American twang to it. And what on earth was a
protogenomorph?

The rain drummed monotonously. He heard the sound of the family car, an old Rover that roared and spluttered as the engine was turned off. Alice struggled out onto the kerb and cursed the rain.

He had hidden the note before she entered the house to begin her relentless domestic routine and preparing for the evening out. She had little time for idle chat. Richard prepared tea and wrote two letters, but he was distracted and disturbed—indeed, he was enjoying a welcome if vicarious experience.

The note had surely been intended for someone else, not for Richard Bradley. But he couldn’t get over the odd and thrilling sensation that nine words in the woman’s hand gave him.

I really hoped you’d be here. I miss you.

*   *   *

Alice was half-asleep in the passenger seat, her head rocking as the car bumped slowly over the uneven road, leading back to Shadoxhurst. The headlights cut a bright path through the rain. Houses appeared grey, windows reflecting dully; trees were dark, looming shapes that appeared and disappeared from vision in seconds. The road curved across the country; two foxes scampered across the path of the car, casting gleam-eyed glances, hesitating as the vehicle approached.

Behind Richard, Alexander stared at the night land, awake, alert, excited. He was still dressed in his Lord Bertolac costume, all but the bushy beard. His performance had been warmly applauded.

In fact, it had been a spectacular performance all round, from the mad chase around the stage for the Green Knight’s severed head, which took on an unintentional role of its own, to the sub–Gilbert and Sullivan words of the songs, all written by the children.

Even now, Richard found himself singing the “Wild Man’s” song:

“I am a Mountain Wodwo,

“I live on leaves and fish roe…”

There had been no subtleties, of course, simply an adventure, with monsters and supernatural entities. The Green Knight’s beheading, his magical return to life and subsequent challenge to Gawain, to meet a year later at the Green Chapel (an ancient burial mound) for a return stroke, were powerfully played; the three attempts at seducing Sir Gawain by the enchantress Morgan le Fay, disguised as Lady Bertolac, were excruciating, as the boy playing Morgan couldn’t keep the pitch of his voice constantly high. Alex’s innovation to the story had been to make the pagan Green Knight the guardian of a fabulous talisman. At the end, Gawain, disguised as a hunting falcon, tricked the monstrous knight out of his chapel, entered the mound to the fairy Otherworld and stole the treasure.

Alexander had been singled out for special applause. Richard and Alice had felt very proud of the lad and joined heartily in the encore, a refrain from the final song (“One bloody nick at the side of my neck—All for the sake of My Lady’s Green Girdle”).

Headlights cut through the dark, swinging across trees, hedges, walls, briefly illuminating a land that was silent, saturated and sleeping.

The man who suddenly staggered in front of the car was wearing only a dressing gown. He waved both hands helplessly as Richard swerved to avoid him. He was holding what looked like a round, white mask.

For a second, in the headlamps, the man had been startled like a wild animal, frozen in the road. Then he flung himself aside to escape hurt. Richard saw only his white body, naked beneath the gaping gown. He had been thinly bearded, and everything about him had glistened like oil, the effect of light on rain-drenched skin.

The car stopped heavily and Alice woke up abruptly.

“What the hell is it?”

“A man just ran into the road. I nearly knocked him down.”

“You should drive more slowly,” Alice said predictably.

Richard was already outside the car, peering into the darkness behind. He listened through the rain but could hear nothing.

Alice said, “I’ll drive, shall I? That way we might get home safely.”

“I didn’t
hit
him, Alice. And he
did
run into the road…” But Richard was disturbed by the man’s appearance. “I just thought for a minute…”

He got back into the car and sat quietly. As Alice woke more fully from her drowsy state so her shock and her irritation passed away. “Let’s get home.”

“I thought I recognised him. I only glimpsed him…”

“Probably a farmer’s lad, drunk. As you said, you didn’t hit him, so let it alone. I’m cold.”

“He was wearing a dressing gown. Gaping open. Did you see him, Alex?”

Behind him the boy nodded palely. His eyes were wide and he looked upset.

“Alex?”

“It was Mr. Keeton,” the boy said quietly. He was shaking. Richard went cold as the man’s face became clearer to him. “It was Tallis’s father,” Alex repeated. “It was Mr. Keeton.”