Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn (Mythago Wood)

by Robert Holdstock

  ‘Wonderful!’ I shouted to my father in the wood. ‘You’re on to something wonderful! I’ve always known it. It’s always been here! I’ve never felt it so strongly, until now.’

  Not even as a child, I thought grimly.

  I flopped back in the snow, laughing loudly, giving in totally to this moment of release and exhilaration.

  ‘What have you found?’ I asked the image of my father. ‘What is going on?’

  And I sat up abruptly, remembering Kylhuk, slathan, cuts to my face … and my mother’s urine soaking from her shoes onto my shirt as I held her and tried to keep her back from that terrible valley.

  ‘And what have you done to me …?’

  Later, seated miserably in the cold enamel tub, washing in murky, lukewarm water, I heard the tentative movement of someone in the house. The bathroom looked out over the garden and I shivered and peered from the window, noticing a new set of tracks from the wood. Wrapped in a towel, I crept out onto the landing, peered over the banister, and was at once struck on the back of the head by a stone. As I slumped in confusion, I glimpsed and smelled the woman who darted from my father’s room. She crouched briefly on the turn of the stairs, staring at me as she breathed in that shallow way that denotes fear and flight, then was gone, leaving me to a slow recuperation of my senses.

  Dried and dressed again, I searched for her, found only traces of her presence. I added wood to the fading fire and crouched in its welcome warmth. Then I sat in the chair where years ago my mother had stared into her future through similar flames.

  The girl was still in the house. When I walked through the rooms I knew she was watching me, but she stayed out of sight, darting and slipping through the shadows, adding to my sensory confusion.

  I could smell her. I called to her. I tried everything. I tried to make myself non-threatening. I even sang a jaunty song and cooked a pot of broth, hoping that the smell of food would entice her from her shifting lair.

  She was biding her time, no doubt watching me, trying to work me out.

  She confronted me in the late afternoon, as the light was going and I had switched on the lamps in the sitting room. Movement in the kitchen caught my attention and I went to investigate. The kitchen was empty, the pot of barley and chicken broth gone, the back door open into the snow-shadowed dusk. My breath frosted as I called for her again, then closed the door. But when I returned to the blazing fire, there she was, sitting in my own chair, the pot held to her lips as she drank the cold soup. Her eyes watched me over the iron rim. A vicious-looking weapon, a leather sling tied around a stone, lay in her lap. She was clad in loose woollen trousers, vaguely patterned, and with a heavy cloak still tied around her shoulders. Her feet were bare, small, pale toes warming at the fire. When I smiled, she nodded, then lowered the pot; a yellow froth of soup lined her upper lip and she briefly frowned into the vessel before placing it to one side and letting the fingers of her left hand twine with the leather of the skull-cracker. She made no effort to move, simply stretched out her feet a little more, wriggling with clearly implied satisfaction.

  In all this time her gaze never left me, green-eyed, slightly frightened, very wary, her face a pale oval between long locks of fire-reflecting auburn hair.

  ‘I can make you a better supper,’ I said. ‘The soup was very thin.’

  ‘Huxley,’ she said, and I fancy there was a question in the word.

  ‘Yes. Huxley. Christian.’ I patted my chest. ‘Christian Huxley. My father is George. George Huxley …’

  ‘George,’ she echoed, her eyes narrowing, her grip tightening on the stone skull-cracker.

  I raised my hands in a gesture of pacification, but she had risen to her feet, every muscle tense, her gaze on mine, but her awareness wider, now: listening, sniffing, alert for betrayal.

  ‘He’s not here,’ I said to her. ‘I promise you. He followed you into Ryhope Wood …’ I was making dancing and walking motions with my fingers, simple gestures to emphasise and direct my words. ‘You’re quite safe with me.’

  What arrogance! What assumption!

  She smiled at me, bowed slightly, and started to walk past me, the soup pot in her hand, for all the world as if she were going to wash up her dirty pan. As I stepped to one side I saw the blur of her fist, heard the exhalation of her breath, felt my head cracked and my world go black.

  This time when I roused myself, I found the fire burned low, the carpet charred where embers had spilled from the blaze and not been extinguished, my head sore from the blow, and Oak Lodge filled with the sound of breaking glass. Weak and shaking, I hauled myself to my feet, and cautiously walked through the house to the sound of mayhem. Guiwenneth had found framed photographs of my mother and was systematically smashing them, screaming abuse at them as she did so, flinging the buckled, splintered remains across the study floor.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  At my feet was the crushed portrait of Jennifer Huxley that for all my life had adorned the mantelpiece of my parents’ bedroom. She was young here, smiling brightly, half turned to the camera, her cheeks highlighted from the studio lights. This was a woman perhaps no older than myself, her life ahead of her, her dreams filled with beauty, her hopes so legion that she had no hopes at all, simply expectations, anticipation, the exhilaration of looking forward.

  Now smashed, now ruined by this creature from my father’s furious, feral mind!

  ‘Stop this!’ I shouted. ‘These are precious!’

  The stone sling blurred towards me and I snatched it from the air, flung it to the floor where the handsome, youthful woman watched me from the creases in the photographic paper, through the jagged edges of the glass, the twisted metal frame.

  ‘Enough!’ I hissed.

  She crouched. She launched herself at me, her feet striking me, her nails raking me, her teeth gnawing me, her voice piercing. And then she was gone, out into the evening snow, floundering in the deep drifts, cold and lost and frightened, calling for something or someone, desperate in her loneliness, desperate in her fear, oblivious of my calls to her to come back, come back, that I really wouldn’t hurt her.

  She was a frail shadow against the crisp and moonlit field of snow, falling below it and flailing within it, like a fish leaping and splashing in an icy river. She stumbled and vanished and at once was quiet. It was too cold to follow, and I was too disturbed by the thought of the reception I might receive if I made to pursue her.

  I found enough kindling to make a crude torch, tied it together, lit it, placed it in the open kitchen door to the house. As the evening passed, I kept feeding the simple beacon, but soon the meagre supplies from the woodshed were exhausted; and I was exhausted too; and the night was black and bleak, and the snow became heavier.

  My father came home at dawn, and he was not a happy man.

  By the beard on his face, he had been away a week, I thought; he quickly checked the calendar, then – as if not quite believing me when I assured him of the day – he turned on the wireless and sat hunched beside it, listening to the voices, waiting for the first chimes of the new hour and reference to the day itself.

  ‘I was here only this morning.’

  ‘Yes. And she’s been and gone …’

  ‘Guiwenneth?’ he shouted, startled and angry.

  I picked up the loaded shotgun and faced him across the room. ‘Guiwenneth,’ I said. ‘She’s kicked the hell out of me, and fled.’

  The animal in his eyes was back and I snapped shut the breech of the shotgun, keeping it pointed away from him, but my fingers close to the trigger.

  ‘She was here looking for you, not me. She’s gone. She’s angry. Whatever is happening to you, please either sit down and talk about it, or go away and leave me alone. Do you see the bruise on my face?’

  His watery, wild gaze flickered to accommodate the yellowing and painful mark that was still aching and distracting me.

  ‘She did that?’

  ‘She’s a bit of a fresh one, Dad. More than a touc
h lively. You taught me not to walk behind a lathering mare after the hunt, in case she kicked; you forgot to mention trying to pacify one of your …’

  I hesitated, then used the word: ‘Mythagos …’

  ‘Mythaagoes,’ he corrected. ‘From “myth imagoes”.’

  ‘I’ve read what you’ve written,’ I said patiently. ‘I know the source. I don’t understand what they are, these mythagos, but I know the coinage. And I know that you think they come from the wildwood, beyond the house, and from our own unconscious minds.’

  ‘Primal woodland, Chris. Unchanged for twelve thousand years. The hiding place of living history …’

  ‘I don’t know much about that. But I can tell a woman who’s jealous of another … she’s smashed my mother’s photographs.’

  ‘Smashed them.’

  ‘Went berserk, in your study.’

  He seemed startled. ‘She’s smashed them all? All the photographs?’

  ‘Not beyond repair.’

  ‘Not beyond repair,’ he echoed, a curious smile on the unkempt face, in the sad, tired eyes. ‘No. Of course not. Not beyond repair. Pictures and statues, the earth itself … all can be damaged. But not beyond repair. Not like us …’ He sat down behind the desk, slumped forward, head in hands. ‘I’m weary, Chris. And hungry. And cold. Is there anything to eat?’

  ‘Not much. I’ll fix you something. A hot drink.’

  ‘Wine,’ he said. ‘Bring me anything red. Don’t bother about letting it breathe. Just pour it.’

  ‘Barbarian,’ I said as I left the room to follow his instructions.

  The wine was a mistake. He got drunk and aggressive and at two in the morning was raging at me in the darkness of my room, where I lay in bed. ‘What did she say to you? Tell me everything she said! What are the two of you doing behind my back? I told you, Chris … leave us alone! I’ve waited too long for her. She doesn’t belong to you.’

  Frightened that he might have the shotgun with him, I stayed quite calm, watching him carefully. He was holding a blackthorn walking stick, a deadly enough weapon if used deliberately, and I gently prompted him to put it down. He did so but came towards me, leaning down and hissing like a cat through near-clenched teeth, his lips drawn back. ‘Don’t touch her. I won’t let you touch her. I know your game! I’ve always seen it in your eyes. You know what I did. You saw me—’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean, Dad. All I know is, you’re drunk …’ His breath reeked of wine. I suspected he’d opened a second bottle.

  ‘You saw me,’ he repeated nervously, his words of yesterday. ‘That frightens me.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean. Go back to bed—’

  But before I could say another word, he had leapt at me again. His hands closed on my throat briefly and I threw him back, flinging off the counterpane to defend myself more effectively. But again, like a cat, he had slipped from the room, an angry shadow, taking the stairs two at a time, banging below me through the house and finally trudging out into the snow. From my bedroom window I watched him go, a sad, lonely man, a hunched shape, head bowed, using the staff he always carried to help him through the deep snow of the field, back to the wood, back to his dream.

  The snow kept falling and I decamped to Shadoxhurst again, to a room above the Red Lion Inn. Whether or not Huxley returned to Oak Lodge in that time I do not know, and at the time couldn’t have cared. When I went back myself, on the last day of the month, the snow was on the melt. I laid a new fire. The photographs of my mother were still where they had been smashed. The wine cellar had not been further raided and I removed several bottles and locked it up again.

  In the evening I heard the sound of carrion birds and went out into the garden. A small flock of crows was circling a part of the field, where a dark shape was half exposed as the snow melted around it. Shocked and apprehensive, I ran across to it, waving my arms to scatter the noisy birds. I had expected to see my father’s grim, dishevelled features staring from the ice, but it was the girl who lay there, her pale face white as the snow around her, the skin drawn in to expose the skull, the eyes dull below half-opened lids. The crows had not yet started to feed, and though they mobbed me, screeching, I kept them off and covered the corpse while I returned to the house for a blanket.

  I hauled the fragile body into the woollen shroud and was surprised that it was as light as a doll. Indeed, she might have been made of hollow wood, her skin as brittle as an autumn leaf. I stored the sad remains in the empty coop, wondering what to do about reporting it. If my father was right, this woman did not exist in our own world. If he came back and found her dead, he would assume the deed to have been of my own doing. Better to bury her, perhaps, leave her in peace, and forget that she had ever existed.

  And this I did, where the chickens once had run, where the earth was deep, where she would rot down well away from the house itself, forgotten bones in a forgotten corner of the garden.

  Four

  It should have been easy to forget her. Who had she been, after all, other than some strange woman from a strange place, hostile, uncommunicative, beautiful, yes, but an entity nonetheless that had in no way impinged upon my senses?

  So why, then, did she haunt my waking hours, and whisper to me in my dreams? Sometimes I woke crying; my mother seemed to drift away, a shadow in the room, her words fading into obscurity, but my muscles and stomach still clenched with the pain of the loss. Other times, it was Guiwenneth who called to me, and there was something in the look, something in the smile I should have recognised but for the moment could not.

  These edge-of-the-mind intrusions became increasingly distracting. I realised, some time in the spring, that I had become as obsessed with Guiwenneth as my father had been, and this prompted me to read his journals through again, to commit to memory great tracts of what he had written, to think more deeply about the things he had seen, the lands he had visited, beyond the gate and the brook, in this tiny patch of English woodland.

  I tried to find the entrance to the wood, but nothing ‘opened’ in the way that Huxley had described. Nevertheless, if my father had been right, there ought to be some gap, some opening in the wood’s defences. Huxley himself had used various strange, hand-held devices which he had called ‘residual aura detectors’ or ‘vortex focusing sensors’ or other such nonsense. I found two of these in his desk drawer and tried to use them, but though they responded, I had no idea what they were signalling to me.

  I decided to sleep on it, and explore the edge of the wood first thing in the morning, with or without the strange detectors.

  I am glad I waited.

  A sound like the bellowing of a metal bull woke me from a spirit-haunted sleep, disorientated and cold. When the sound came again – a short, rising call – I went to the window to peer out through the crisp dawn at the dew-covered trees of Ryhope Wood. And at that moment I had my first glimpse of visitors from the deep for more than two months.

  Pale light reflected off gleaming metal, a strange and hideous animal’s head, open-mouthed, swaying in the tree line at the end of a long, curved neck. This metal grotesque pulled back into the underbrush almost instantly. A man’s face, pallid and beardless, replaced it for a moment, peering at me hard, then that too was gone.

  I had never seen an instrument like this vertical horn before, though I had heard them several times in my childhood. I imagined they had been used in war to frighten the enemy; they certainly made the pulse race.

  The two blasts had been a summons to someone in the house, but not for me. I sensed rather than heard the doors to the garden open and a few seconds later a woman ran lightly from my father’s study towards the gate. Her long, red hair had been tied into a single braid; she wore a leather tunic of the Roman kind, and sandals. When she glanced back at the house I could see she was in her ‘war paint’, purple spirals on her cheeks, a band of black across her eyes. Even so, she was both beautiful and recognizable.

  I had buried the bones of a form of this woman las
t winter. Here she was again, the same and different, and altogether less feral.

  The girl again, from the wood …

  And this time she was mine.

  As she caught my eye, she hesitated at the gate; the smile that touched her lips was both enigmatic and impish. She seemed to have taken something from the study, but what she raised to me in acknowledgement was a riding crop, feathered and brightly painted, similar to that which she had used to ‘count coup’ on me as a boy.

  For the first time I realised that the white-haired girl rider of my childhood and ‘Guiwenneth of the Green’ were the same, separated only by the span of years of adolescence.

  I felt both stunned and elated. There had been something in the look of this Guiwenneth that was more than familiar – it had been knowing. The girl rider had come back. And she was signalling to me to follow.

  She had gone then, running fast over the field and into the wood, and though I waited a few seconds, hoping for a further glimpse, I knew there was not a moment to lose. If my father was right, mythagos left trails through the dense and convoluted defences of Ryhope Wood, openings into the deep that would grant me an access so often denied. Even now, this new doorway, like a wound in flesh, would be slowly closing up.

  Grass and decaying leaves were strewn across the floor of my bedroom. The heady scent in the room was alarming and arousing – more than just flowers, then. Dust danced and swirled through a thin shaft of light from between the curtains.

  The woman had been in here, I realised, and had charmed me in some way, sending me deeply to sleep. Waking me just at the moment of her departure. Had she wanted me to see her as she made her escape from the dawn raid upon Oak Lodge? Of course she had. Why else wave at me? She had spent time exploring while I slept. Now I was being called inwards.

  An hour later, Huxley’s strange detectors in my pack, I reached the glade where previously I had been turned about. This time there was no such attack upon my perception and I pressed on, deeper into what was now a forest of great and ancient growth. If I was following a track, I was not conscious of it, but my path seemed clear, and my journey, if claustrophobic, seemed directed.