The Bone Forest (Ryhope Wood)

by Robert Holdstock

  He read through what he had written shortly before the last trip with Wynne-Jones.

  And he suddenly realised that there were six additional lines to the text!

  Six lines that he had no recollection of writing at all.

  “Good God, who’s been at my journal?”

  Again, he stopped himself going to Jennifer, or confronting the boys, but he was shocked, truly shocked. He bent over the pages, his hands shaking as he ran a finger word by word along the entry.

  It was in his own handwriting. There was no question of it. His own handwriting, or a brilliant forgery thereof.

  The entry was simple, and had about it that haste with which he was familiar, the scrawled notes that he managed when his encounters were intense, his life hectic, and his need to be in the wood more important than his need to keep a careful record of his discoveries.

  She is not what she seems. Her name is Ash. Yes. You know that. It is a dark world for me. I will acknowledge terror. But there is

  I cannot be sure

  She is more dangerous, and she has done this. Edward is dead. No. Perhaps not. But it is a poss

  The time with the horses. I can’t be sure. Something was watching

  “I didn’t write this. Dear God. Am I going mad? I didn’t write this. Did I?”

  Jennifer was reading and listening to the radio. He stood in the doorway, uncertain at first, his mind not clear. “Has anyone been to my desk?” he asked at length.

  Jennifer looked up. “Apart from you yourself, no. Why?”

  “Someone’s tampered with my journal.”

  “What do you mean ‘tampered’ with it?”

  “Written in it. Copying my own hand. Has anybody been here during my excursion?”

  “Nobody. And I don’t allow the boys into the study when you’re not here. Perhaps you were sleepwalking last night.”

  Now her words began to fidget him. “How could I have done that? I didn’t get home until dawn.”

  “You came home at midnight,” she said, a smile touching her pale features. She closed the book, keeping a finger at the page. “You went out again before dawn.”

  “I didn’t come back last night,” Huxley whispered. “You must have been dreaming.”

  She was silent for a long time, her breathing shallow. She looked at him solemnly. The smile had vanished, replaced by an expression of sadness and weariness. “I wasn’t dreaming. I was glad of you. I was in bed, quite asleep, when you woke me. I was disappointed to find you gone in the morning. I suppose I should have expected it …”

  How long had he slept at the edge of the wood, before the woman and her dog had woken him? Had he indeed come home, unconscious, unaware, to spend an hour or two in bed, to write a confused and shattered message in his own journal, then to return to the woodland edge, to wait for dawn?

  Suddenly alarmed, he began to wonder what other magic Ash had worked on him.

  Where was Wynne-Jones? He had been gone over a week, now, and Huxley was increasingly disturbed, very concerned for his friend. Each day he ventured as far into the wood as the Horse Shrine, seeking a sign of the man, seeking, too, for Ash, but she had disappeared. Four days after returning home Huxley trekked more deeply, through a mile or so of intensely silent oakwood, emerging in unfamiliar terrain, not at the Wolf Glen at all.

  Panicked, feeling himself to be losing touch with his own frail perception of the wood, he returned to Oak Lodge. He had been gone nearly twenty hours by his own reckoning, but only five hours had passed in the house, and Jennifer and the boys were not at home. His wife, no doubt, was in Grimley, or had perhaps taken the car to Gloucester for the day.

  So it startled him to enter his study through the locked main door and to see his french windows opened wide, and the cat nestling in his leather chair. He shooed the animal away from the room, and examined the doors. There was no sign of them having been forced. No footprints. No sign of disturbance in the room. The study door had been locked from the outside.

  When he opened his desk drawer he recoiled with shock from the bloody, fresh bone that lay there, on top of his papers. The bone was in part charred, a joint of some medium-sized animal, perhaps a pig, that had been partially cooked, so that raw and bleeding flesh remained at the bone itself. It was chewed, cracked and worried, as if a dog had been at it.

  Gingerly, Huxley removed the offending item and placed it on a sheet of paper on the floor. The key to his private journal was not in its place, and shakily he fetched the opened book from its hole behind the shelves.

  Bloody fingerprints accompanied the scrawled entry. This one was hastier than before, but unmistakably a copy of his own hand.

  A form of dreaming. Moments of lucidity, but am functioning in unconscious.

  No sign of WJ. Time has interfered.

  These entries seem so controlled, the others. No recollection of writing them. I have so little time, and feel tug of woodland. Have linked somehow with sylvan time, and everything is inverted.

  So hungry. So little chance to eat. I am covered with the blood of a fawn, hunted by a mythago. I grabbed part of carcase. Ate with ferocious need.

  Pangs strong. Flesh! Satiation! Blood is on fire, and night is a peaceful time, and I can emerge more strongly. But no way of entering those moments when I am clearly myself.

  So controlled, the other entries. Cannot remember writing them.

  I am a ghost in my own body.

  Huxley looked at his own hands, smelled the fingers. There was no blood in evidence, not under the nails, no sign of charcoal. He examined his clothes. There was mud on the trouser legs, but nothing that suggested he had torn and wrenched at a half-cooked carcase. He ran his tongue around his teeth. He checked his pillow in the bedroom.

  If he had written this entry, if he himself had come into the study, in a moment of unconscious separation, eating the raw bone, he would surely have left some trace.

  The words were odd, had an odd feel. It was as if the writer genuinely believed that he was Huxley, and that Huxley’s own entries in the journal were being made during times of unconscious calm. Reality, for the bloody-fingered journalist, was a time of “lucidity”.

  But Huxley, keeping a rational and clear mind now, was certain that two different men were entering notes in the private journal.

  It astonished him, though, that the other writer knew about the key.

  He picked up his pen and wrote:

  Today I went in search of Wynne-Jones. I didn’t sleep, and I am convinced that I remained alert and aware for the full twenty hours that I was away. I am concerned for Wynne-Jones. I fear he is lost, and it grieves me deeply to anticipate the fact that he might never return. In my absence, someone else is making entries in this journal. The entry above was not written by me. But I believe that whoever has entered this place believes themself to be George Huxley. You are not. But whoever you are, you should tell me more about yourself. And if you wish to know more about me, then simply ask. It would be preferable for you to show yourself, perhaps at the edgewood. I am quite used to strange encounters. We have much that we need to talk about.

  EIGHT

  He had just finished writing when the car pulled into the drive. Doors slammed and he heard the sound of Jennifer’s voice, and Steven’s. Jennifer sounded angry.

  She came into the house and a few seconds later he heard Steven go into the garden and run down to the gate. He stood from his desk and watched the boy, and was disturbed by the way his son glanced suddenly towards him, frowned, seemed to stifle back a tear or two, then went to hide among the sheds.

  “Why do you neglect the boy so much? It wouldn’t hurt you to talk to him once in a while.”

  Huxley was startled by Jennifer’s calm, controlled, yet angry tones speaking to him from the entrance to his study. She was pale, her lips pinched, her eyes hollow with fatigue and irritation. She was dressed in a dark suit and had her hair tied back into a tight bun, exposing all of her narrow face.

  She e
ntered the room the moment he turned and crossed to the desk, opening the book that was there, touching the pens, shaking her head. When she saw the bone she grimaced and kicked at it.

  “Another little trophy, George? Something to frame?”

  “Why are you angry?”

  “I’m not angry,” she said wearily. “I’m upset. So’s Steven.”

  “I don’t understand why.”

  Her laugh was brief and sourly pointed. “Of course you don’t. Well, think back, George. You must have said something to him this morning. I’ve never known the boy in such a state. I took him to Shadoxhurst, to the toy shop and the tea shop. But what he really wants—” She bit her lip in exasperation, letting the statement lie uncompleted.

  Huxley sighed, scratching his face as he watched and listened to something that simply wasn’t possible.

  “What time was this?”

  “What time was what?”

  “That … that I said something to Steven, to upset the boy …”

  “Mid-morning.”

  “Did you come and see me? Afterward?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? Why didn’t you come and see me?”

  “You’d left the study. You’d gone back to the woods, no doubt. A-hunting and adventuring … down in dingly dell …” Again she looked at the grim and bloody souvenir. “I was going to suggest tea, but I see you’ve eaten …”

  Before he could speak further she had turned abruptly, taking off her suit jacket, and walked upstairs to freshen up.

  “I wasn’t here this morning,” Huxley said quietly, turning back to the garden, and stepping out into the dying sunlight. “I wasn’t here. So who was?”

  Steven was sitting, slumped forward on the wall that bounded the rockery. He was reading a book, but hastily closed it when he heard his father approaching.

  “Come to my study, Steve. There’s something I want to show you.”

  The boy followed in silence, tucking the book into his school blazer. Huxley thought it might have been a penny-dreadful western, but decided not to pursue the matter.

  “I went deep into Ryhope Wood this morning,” he said, sitting down behind the desk and picking up his small pack. Steven stood on the other side, back to the window, hands by his sides. His face was a sad combination of uncertainty and distress, and Huxley felt like saying, “Cheer up, lad,” but he refrained from doing so.

  Instead he tipped out the small collection of oddities he had found at the Horse Shrine, and beyond: an iron torque, a small wooden idol, its face blank, its arms and legs just the stumps of twigs that had once grown from the central branch; a fragment of torn, green linen, found on a hawthorn bush.

  Picking up the doll, Huxley said, “I’ve often seen these talisman dolls, but never touched them. They usually hang in the trees. This one was on the ground and I felt it fair game.”

  “Who hangs them in the trees?” Steven asked softly, his eyes, now, registering interest rather than sadness.

  Huxley came close to telling the boy a little about the mythogenetic processes occurring within the wood, and the life forms that existed there. Instead he fell back on the old standby. “Travelling folk. Tinkers. Romanies. Some of these bits and bobs might be years old, generations. All sorts of people have lived in and around the edge of our wood.”

  The boy stepped forward and tentatively picked up the wooden figure, holding it, turning it over, then grimly placing it down again.

  Huxley said, “Did I upset you this morning?”

  Oddly, the boy shook his head.

  “But you came to the study. You saw me … ?”

  “I heard you shouting by the wood. I was frightened.”

  “Why were you frightened?”

  “I thought … I thought someone was attacking you …”

  “Was someone attacking me?”

  The boy’s gaze dropped. He fidgeted, biting his lip, then looked up again, and there was fear in his eyes.

  “It’s all right, Steven. Just tell me what you saw …”

  “You were all grey and green. You were very angry …”

  “What do you mean, I was all grey and green?”

  “Funny colours, like light on water. I couldn’t see you properly. You were so fast. You were shouting. There was an awful smell of blood, like when Fonce kills the chickens.”

  Alphonsus Jeffries, the farm manager for the Manor. Steven had been taken around the farm several times, and had witnessed the natural life of the domestic animals, and their unnatural death with knife and cleaver.

  “Where were you when you saw this, did you say?”

  “By the woods …” Steven whispered. His lips trembled and tears filled his eyes. Huxley remained seated, leaning forward, holding his son’s gaze hard and firm. “Grow up, boy. You’ve seen something very strange. I’m asking you about it. You want to be a scientist, don’t you?”

  Steven hesitated, then nodded.

  “Then tell me everything. You were by the woods …”

  “I thought you called me.”

  “From the woods …”

  “You called me.”

  “And then?”

  “I went over the field and you were all grey and green. You ran past me. I was frightened. I could hardly see you. Just a little bit. You were all grey and green. I was frightened …”

  “How fast did I pass you?”

  “Daddy … ? I’m frightened …”

  “Be quiet, Steven. Stand still. Stop crying. How fast did I pass you?”

  “Very fast. I couldn’t see you.”

  “Faster than our car?”

  “I think so. You ran up to here. I followed you and heard you shouting.”

  “What was I shouting?”

  “Rude things.” The boy squirmed beneath his father’s gaze. “Rude things. About Mummy.”

  Stunned and sickened, Huxley bit back the question he longed to ask, stood up from his desk and walked past the wan-faced lad, into the garden.

  Rude things about Mummy …

  “How do you know the man you saw was me?” he murmured.

  Steven ran past him, distressed and suddenly angry. The boy turned sharply, eyes blazing, but said nothing.

  Huxley said, “Steven. The man you saw … whoever it was … it only looked like me. Do you understand that? It wasn’t me at all. It only looked like me.”

  The answer was a growl, a shaking, feverish, feral growl, in which the words were dimly discernible from the furious face, the dark face of the boy as he backed slowly away, sinking into himself, lowering his body, eyes on his father. Angry.

  “It … was … you … It … was … you …”

  And then Steven had fled, running to the gate. He left the garden and crossed the field almost frantically, plunging into the nearby woods.

  Huxley hesitated for a moment, half thinking that it would be better for the boy to calm down first before pursuing the matter further. But he was too intrigued by Steven’s glimpse of the ghost.

  He picked up one of Wynne-Jones’s frontal-lobe bridges and trotted after his son.

  NINE

  As I had imagined he would, the boy became intrigued when I told him about the frontal-lobe bridges (I called them “electrical crowns”). He was hovering in the edgewoods, shaking, by the time I reached him. I have never seen Steven so distressed, not even after he and Christian glimpsed the Twigling, and were given a great fright. I said that WJ and I had been experimenting on seeing ghosts more clearly. Would he like to try one on? Oh the delight! I felt smaller than the smallest creature in so tricking Steven, but by now there was an overwhelming compulsion in me to know who or what this “grey-green figure” had been.

  As we returned to the house Steven glanced backward and frowned. Was it the figure? I could see wind stirring the trees and scrubby bush that borders the denser zones of the wood, but no sign of human life. Can you see anything, I asked the boy, but after a moment he shook his head.

  We returned to the study a
nd after a few minutes I tentatively placed a crown on Steven’s head. He was trembling with excitement, poor little lad. I should have remembered WJ’s instructions of two years ago, when first he had started to tinker with this electrical device. Always use with a calm mind. We had had our greatest successes under such conditions, perking up the peripheral vision, sharpening the focus of the pre-mythago forms that could be glimpsed when within the swell and grasp of the sylvan net. It was wrong of me to go ahead with Steven without first checking the notebooks. I have no excuse, just shame. The effect on the boy was devastating. I have learned a severe and sobering lesson.

  TEN

  Steven remembers nothing of the incident with the frontal bridge. It is as if the electrical surge that sent him into such hysteria has blanked the last five days from him. His most recent memory is of school, on Tuesday. He remembers eating his lunch, and walking to a class, and then nothing. He is happy again, and the fever has died down. He didn’t wake last night, and has no memory of the grey-green man. I walked with him by the edge of the wood, then ventured in through the gate, down by the thin stream with its slippery banks. Inside the wood I sensed the pre-mythagos at once and asked Steven what he could see.

  His answer: Funny things.

  He smiled as he said this. I questioned him further, but that is all he would say. “Funny things.” He looked quite blank when I asked him to look for the grey-green man.

  I have destroyed something in him. I have warped him in some way. I am frightened by this since I do not understand even remotely what I have done. Wynne-Jones might know better, but he remains lost. And I cannot bring myself to explain in full just what I did to Steven. This act of cowardice will destroy me. But until I understand what has happened, who is writing in my journal, I must keep as free as possible of domestic difficulty. I am denying something in myself for the sake of a sanity that will collapse as soon as I am free of mystery. This is limbo!

  Jennifer treats me harshly. I am spending as much time as I can with the two boys. But I must find Wynne-Jones. I must find out what has happened to bring this haunting upon myself.