The Bone Forest (Ryhope Wood)

by Robert Holdstock

  It was a beast at large, a creature formed from mind, myth and manhood, substance crowning the power of its thoughts, its needs, its desires, its baser hungers. And within that hunger lurked the higher mind that Huxley was proud to call his own, the awareness of love, the curiosity that formed the exploring nature of a man like Wynne-Jones, or young Christian Huxley, or George himself. Poor George. Poor old George.

  On the strangling leather, two pieces of wood and a sharp shard of bone showed up clearly by the scattered light of the scattered fire, and the grey-green man shrieked and drew back, swung on his own noose, caught by his own animalistic arrogance as Ash, one arm hanging quite limp, the other wrapped around the thong, dragged the shadow backward. The eerie sound of his cry was suddenly drowned by the violent flight of birds from all around, a massive flight that filled the glade of the Horse Shrine with leaves and feathers, and the darkening sky with a streaming blur of circling shapes.

  There were horses in the wood. They snorted, stamped and shook their manes, with a rustling of woodland and a rattle and clatter of crude stone and bone trappings, slung on hair twine and stretched and softened leather … They were everywhere, all around, and Huxley groped his way to his knees, watching the dark woods.

  Movement everywhere. And sound, like chanting: and the rapid beating of drums, the rhythmic rattle of bone and shell … It was all so familiar. He could hear the cries of tortured men, and the shrieking laughter that had so unnerved him in a recent encounter. All of this was taking place deeper in the wood, almost out of sight.

  Ash had let go of Grey-green man and now stood shakily at the edge of the glade, her good arm flexing as she used the wrist drum to beat out a frantic tattoo. And behind her, light … fire light …

  And passing quickly across that light, as it came nearer, a stooped, running shape, a man’s shape, swathed in cloak and hood. Which vanished into darkness.

  In the center of the glade the grey-green shadow rose from where it had fallen, tall, frightened, arms reaching out from its sides, head turning this way and that. Again, Huxley watched its sleek, virile form, the hard musculature, the animal litheness as it stepped swiftly to one side, then prowled, half crouched, back across the glade.

  The woods were on fire. Flame began to streak into the darkening night. The grey-green man rose from his cowering position, darted to Huxley, bent close.

  “Wrong …” he breathed.

  Huxley backed away, still frightened of the raw power that emanated from the creature. “What is wrong?”

  “I …”

  Huxley tried to understand, but his mind was befuddled by beating and fear. He said, “Don’t kill Ash …”

  But the creature seemed to ignore him. It said simply, “Return.”

  “What do you mean? What do you mean return? Who?” Huxley struggled to sit. “Who do you mean? Me? You?”

  “I …” said the grey-green man, and the hand that reached suddenly to the flinching Huxley merely touched a finger to his lips, closed Huxley’s mouth, lingered, then was gone.

  And with it, the grey-green shadow, fleeing towards the flame-horse, which burst into the glade, a mass of burning rushes, wrapped around the stiff corpse strapped to the horse’s back.

  The horse screamed. It was huge. It was higher at the back than a tall man, a giant of a beast, burning, to be sacrificed along with the flaming cadaver that rode it to hell and beyond.

  The grey-green shadow seemed to fall beneath its hooves, but then a blur of colour, of light and darkness, moved effortlessly up behind the flaming corpse, and reached around almost to hug the flames. The horse reared, scattering burning strands of rush, fire that filled the noisy glade. The animal turned, struggling through pain and panic, then kicked forward again, the body shifting and shaking on its back, streams of fire like flags, rising and waving in the night wind.

  And Grey-green man followed it, and went out of the Horse Shrine, riding to hell, riding home, riding through the breach in whatever fabric between the worlds had been rended in that earlier and near fatal encounter with the horses, and the time of sacrifice.

  I felt sure that my shadow had been taken back to its rightful body, that version of me that had unwittingly and unwillingly shed its darker aspect.

  With the departure of the shadow there was, in myself at least, a sense of inordinate relief. I saw Ash across the glade, a bruised and battered woman, the wrist drum in her hand being flexed with almost urgent need.

  I understood that she had helped me. And I suppose she helped me because she had recognised that I had helped her, that the two forms of Huxley with which she had come into contact were not the same at all, and that I was a friend, whereas the violent anima was not.

  All was not finished. I had underestimated (I probably always shall) the subtle power of this mythago form, this Ash, this shaman, this worker of magic within the frame of weirdness that is Ryhope Wood.

  She had not sent me to the time of horses. She had—perhaps through gratitude—brought the time of horses to the shrine … She had located the event further away from the shrine itself, so that as I wrestled with the primogenetic manifestation of the grey-green man so I was also watching the sacrifice at some way distant. That hooded shape, passing before the flames … myself, perhaps, of the earlier encounter. The flame-horse had ridden on to recapture the errant part of the personality that had played truant from my alternative presence in the wood …

  It makes me shudder to think of it, but surely I was the corpse in the flames; in that other world, from which Grey-green man had come, Ash’s banishment of me to the past had ended in cruel murder.

  Grey-green man had written: I was riding the horse when it collided with the hooded man. I remember falling. The horse was bolting. It had two bodies on its back. One alive (me) beginning to burn badly. One dead. The hooded man was struck. I fell, the horse ran on.

  But there had been only one body, flaming, and only the animal survival of the dying, screaming man within the rushes allowed one part of its anima to escape, to cling to me, to haunt me.

  Poor George. Poor old George.

  These sinister thoughts fled rapidly when, with a feeling of joy almost childlike in its power and its simplicity, I saw Wynne-Jones again …

  Three giant horses, their riders strapped to their backs, encased in an armour made from nature: already rush and reed, flaming, had fled the glade. Now the chalk-white corpse rode around the stone shrine, white rider on a black steed, limbs pinned and positioned by the frame of wood that held the victim upright on the crude cloth saddle. Then came the rider all decked out in thorns, a weave, a suit of branches and berries that allowed only the face to show, a face as dead, as barren as the chalk escarpments of the downs.

  But the fourth of the horses carried the man of animal rags, the skins and limbs and heads of the creatures of field, forest, and wood, the gaping heads of fox, cat and pig, the hides of grey, brown and winter-white creatures, all draped, bloodily and savagely, around the wild rider.

  Crucified in the saddle, but alert and alive, the ragman was ridden around the glade on the back of a stallion whose face showed its pain, its torture, and whose snorting scream told of its fury. It stamped as it waited, pawed the ground, kicked back against the stones of the shrine, and eyed the wood, listening to the whooping calls of the herders, the men who chased the sacrifices through the woodland.

  Around its neck dangled a necklace of wood and bone—three pieces!

  “Edward! Dear God, Edward!”

  The eyes of the man swathed in the rags of creatures widened, but no sound escaped the lips of the face that suddenly flexed with recognition and hope.

  As the horse bolted towards Huxley, intending to again penetrate the forest, Huxley flung himself in front of the creature, watched it rear and stamp against him. He backed away, then darted to its side, reached up and tore the crucifix from the great beast’s back, bringing the wood down upon him, Wynne-Jones and the stink and slime of freshly cut pelts with
it, so that the two men tumbled in blood and rot, while the horse entered the wood and was lost.

  Huxley unbound his friend. Ash hastened to them, grabbed at Huxley’s sleeve and drew them swiftly away into cover. She also tugged the necklet from his chest, indicating that Wynne-Jones should do the same.

  When Huxley glanced backward he saw the tall herders enter the glade, dark shapes in the dying fire, beating at the space with flint tipped weapons, calling for their mares and stallions. But rapidly, as if fading into a sudden distance, the sound of chanting and drumming drifted away, became a mere hint of sound, then was gone completely.

  At some time during the night, as Huxley huddled in half sleep against the shivering body of his friend, Ash slipped away into the darkness, abandoning the men. She took with her the necklet of wood and bone that had earlier transported Huxley to the ancient version of the Horse Shrine. But she left the small wrist drum, and Huxley reached for it and twirled it, watching the small stones strike the taut hide on each side of the decorated box.

  A gift for Steven, he wondered? Or something for himself, something with a hidden power? He decided not to beat the drum, not in these woods.

  They found a stream during their walk in the raw dawn, and Wynne-Jones washed the blood and filth from his body, drawing on Huxley’s spare clothes gratefully.

  “I’ve lost my pipe,” he murmured sadly, as they began the long trek back to Oak Lodge.

  “Someone, or something, will use it as a talisman,” Huxley said. Wynne-Jones laughed.

  CODA

  Steven came running across the thistle meadow, kicking with skinny legs through the high grass. One flap of his white school shirt was hanging loose over the belt of his short grey-flannel trousers. He looked upset, hair unkempt, shirt buttons undone.

  He was calling for his father.

  Huxley crouched down, huddled back behind the ruined gate that almost blocked the access at the woodland edge to the muddy stream that wound so deeply into Ryhope Wood. He hunched up, hugging the undergrowth in the dark, slippery area where the stream widened and dropped a few inches to weave its way inward. The trees here were like sentries, reaching inward, outward, towering over the ramshackle gate, their roots a twisting snake-like mass that made entry all the more difficult.

  Brightness entered this gloomy gateway to hell from the summer’s afternoon beyond, and Steven at last came to the high bank that dropped to the stream. Here he called for his father yet again.

  Behind him, Wynne-Jones and Jennifer were crossing the field more slowly. Huxley rose slightly, peered at them, and beyond them at the house …

  Wrong! There was something wrong …

  “Dear God in Heaven … What has happened?”

  “Daddy!”

  The boy was in earnest. Huxley looked at him again, out on the open land. All he could see, now, was Steven’s silhouette. It disturbed him. Steven was standing on the rise of ground just beyond the brambles, the thorns, and the old gate that had been tied across the channel to stop animals entering this dangerous stretch of wood. The boy’s body was bent to one side as he peered into the impenetrable gloom of the forest. Huxley watched him, sensing his concern, and the anguish. Steven’s whole posture was that of a sad and earnest young man, desperate to make contact with his father.

  Motionless. Peering anxiously into the realm that perhaps he suddenly feared.

  “Daddy?”

  “Steve. I’m here. Wait there, I’m coming out.”

  The boy hugged him delightedly. The house in the distance was a dark shape, bare of ivy. The great beech outside the boys’ bedroom was as he remembered it. The field, the overgrown field, was four weeks advanced from when he had left it.

  Something was wrong.

  “How long have I been gone, Steven?”

  The boy was only too glad to talk. “Two days. We were worried. Mummy’s been crying a lot.”

  “I’m home now, lad.”

  “Mummy says it wasn’t you who shouted at me …”

  “No. It wasn’t. It was a ghost.”

  “A ghost!”

  (Said with delight.)

  “A ghost. But the ghost has gone back to hell, now. And I’m home too.”

  Jennifer was calling to him. From his crouching position Huxley watched her as she walked quickly towards him, her face pale, but her lips smiling. Edward Wynne-Jones staggered along behind her, a man exhausted by his ordeal, and confused by Huxley’s sudden terror as he had reached the edgewoods and refused to emerge into open land.

  There was so little time, Huxley thought, and took Steven by the shoulders. The boy gaped at his father, then shut his mouth as he realised that he was about to be addressed in earnest.

  “Steven … don’t go into the woods. Do you promise me?”

  “Why?”

  “No questions, lad! Promise me … for God’s sake … promise me, Steven … don’t go into Ryhope Wood. Not now, not ever, not even when I’m dead. Do you understand me?”

  Of course he understood his father. What he couldn’t understand was the why. He gulped and nodded, glancing nervously at the dense wood.

  Huxley shook him. “For your own sake, Steve … I beg you … don’t ever again play in the woods. Never!”

  “I promise,” the boy said meekly, frightened.

  “I don’t want to lose you—”

  From close by Jennifer called, “George. Are you all right?”

  Steven was crying, tears on his cheeks, his face fixed in a brave look, not sobbing or breaking up: just crying.

  “I don’t want to lose you,” Huxley whispered, and gathered the boy to him, holding him so very tightly. Steven’s hands remained draped by his sides.

  “When did the farmer last mow this meadow?” he asked his son, and he felt Steven’s shrug.

  “I don’t know. About a month ago? We came and gathered hay. Like we always do.”

  “Yes. Like we always do.”

  Jennifer ran up to him and quickly hugged him, a foil embrace. “George! Thank God you’re safe. Come back to the house and get washed and freshened up. I’ll make us all some food …”

  He stood and let Jennifer take him home.

  Edward has read the entire account of the Bone Forest and is much exercised by its detail and implications. He was puzzled by my reference to having “destroyed mythagos in the Wolf Glen”, a statement I made when warning the grey-green man away from Jennifer. He seemed bemused when I explained that this had merely been a bluff to win the fight: after all, Grey-green man—myself of an alternative reality—was fully aware that our experiences in the mythago-realm of Ryhope were subtly different, so how could he be sure that at a time when he—Huxley—had failed to destroy an aggressive mythago, I—Huxley—had not succeeded? It was a sufficient bluff, I believe. Grey-green man was discouraged from the house and held to the wood, although in retrospect my decision came close to being fatal for Ash.

  WJ agrees with me that Ash—the original mythic tale of Ash—is closely related to horses, perhaps to the Horse Shrine itself, and that in her original form she was a female shaman who exercised particular power over the untamed horses of the valley of her origin.

  My regret is that I did not communicate with her on the subject of the primal myth, the core legend: I wonder if she might have had—

  “Daddy?”

  Huxley looked up sharply from his desk, the words in his mind flowing and becoming confused.

  “What the devil is it?”

  He turned in his chair, furious at the interruption to his train of thought. Steven stood in the doorway, in his dressing gown, looking shocked, nervous. He was holding a mug of hot chocolate.

  “What is it, boy? I’m working!”

  “Will you tell me the story?”

  “What story?”

  Huxley glanced back at his journal, laid his finger on the last line, trying to summon the words that were fading from mind so fast.

  Steven had faltered. He was torn, it seemed, between
running upstairs, or standing his ground. His eyes were wide, but there was a frown on his face. “You said as soon as you came back you’d tell me a story about Romans.”

  “I said no such thing!”

  “But you did …”

  “Don’t argue with me, Steven. Get to bed with you!”

  Meekly, Steven stepped away. His mouth was tight as he whispered, “Goodnight.”

  Huxley turned back to the journal, scratched his head, inked his pen and continued. He had written—concerning Ash—that she might have had:

  some awareness of what I believe was called the Urscumug? But probably she dates from a time considerably later than this primal myth.

  The mythago that is Ash can manipulate time. This is an incredible discovery, should it be confirmed by later study. So Ryhope Wood is not just a repository of legendary creatures created in the present day … its defensive nature, its warping of time, its playing with time and space … these physical conditions can be imparted to the mythago forms themselves: Ash’s magic—perhaps legendary in her own time—seems to become real in this wood. WJ and myself have travelled through time. We were sent, separately, to an event that had occurred in the cold, ancient past, an event of such power (for the minds of the day) that it has drawn to it not just our space and time, but others too, similar times, alternatives, the stuff of fantasy, the stuff of wilder dreams.

  For one brief instant, the wood was opened to dimensions inconceivable. Grey-green man came through, returned. And for my part, my memory was affected, a dream, perhaps, like many dreams … I had thought the meadow to be newly cropped, but clearly this had been a dream, and I had mis-remembered.

  Ryhope Wood plays tricks more subtle than I had previously imagined.

  I am safely home, however, and WJ too. He talks of “gates”, pathways and passages to mythic forms of hell. He is becoming obsessed with this idea, and claims to have found such a gateway in the wood itself.

  So: two old men (no! I don’t feel old. Just a little tired!), two tired men, each with an obsession. And a wealth of wonder to explore, given time, energy, and the freedom from those concerns that can so interfere with the process of intellectualising such a wondrous place as exists beyond the edgewoods.