Lavondyss

by Robert Holdstock

  He said nothing, of course. It wasn’t his place to question the secret world of the child …

  Child? He smiled to himself as he glanced at the sophisticated young girl, her body so bony and gangly, childlike, but her face, her mental bearing so grown-up. There was a look in her eyes that reminded him not of a child but of an old, old woman. He could see the adult in her as easily as he could see the straw-coloured hair on her head. He felt, with a shiver, that he could see the corpse in the child when she went so pale on telling a story. The bones of her cheeks protruded, and her lips thinned. It was a terrible and frightening sight, and that it was possession was something he did not, now, doubt.

  A spirit? An angel? A demon? What did these things really mean? As he followed Tallis across the field he remembered only her words from yesterday: someone told me the story … just now … just a moment ago.

  Someone in her mind? A silent voice in her head … herself, of course, some form of unconscious communication within the confines of her youthful skull. But the effect was dramatic.

  There was more in the girl’s head than just Tallis Keeton.

  He stood in the baking sun, now, and was informed by Tallis that he was standing in a cave. The girl, highly amused by his puzzled look, was quite insistent that she could feel a deep, dank cave, leading into an invisible hill. There was nothing he could do or say at this juncture and he saw the disappointment in her eyes. She was desperately trying to show him something of her own experience, and failing. Perhaps he was not close enough to the land here.

  Don’t try so hard, child, he thought to himself. Your stories are the things that make me believe you.

  She had created her own fantasy world in the streams, fields, hills and woods around the farm. Now, something ancestral spoke to her, peopled those woods, journeyed across those fields. And the fallen ogham stones, upon which they had sat the previous day, showed clearly that this place went back a long way. There had been people here for thousands of years. Tallis was their spiritual descendant, if not their blood one. Perhaps they were speaking through her.

  Music filled his head as he walked. The images of the past, the sense of a dark and storm-laden landscape, or riders by night, of surging rivers … they were music, and he could hear the voice-music of a lament, and the stirring of wind, and the chanting of people huddled in tents. It was eerie music and he wished he had his notebook with him to sketch down the essential themes, to note the link between the sounds of nature and the sound of voices.

  He wondered if in this way, creating his own story, he might have been coming closer to Tallis’s vision of the strange world than he realized.

  To each his entrance to the realm. To each his gate.

  There was a memory in the land. It was all around him. He was walking through it. It whispered to him as he walked, as it whispered to Tallis, but speaking a different language, engaging a different passion …

  Something happened here …

  These thoughts remained unspoken. Soon they had reached a tree called Old Friend. Its trunk had been split by lightning, forming an uncomfortable seat which he tried to occupy.

  ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ Tallis asked.

  ‘No,’ he said loudly, and was amused when the girl said, ‘Good. Then I’ll begin.’

  When she began the tale she used the oldest opening to a story imaginable. He teased her about it, interrupting her and taking a mischievous pleasure in her growing irritation. He felt the stirring of a woodland breeze on his skin. Behind him, in the dense undergrowth, there was a heavy, almost tangible silence. Tallis was facing the forest, but for a while she seemed unaware of it, berating her companion for failing to take her story seriously.

  And then it happened.

  It was as if something stepped past him, a terrible shivering presence. Tallis’s whole bearing changed and her face grew gaunt. Now, for the first time, he silenced himself and leaned forward, watching the possession.

  The girl’s language changed. He had read the Mabinogion, those half remembered tales from the surviving fragments of Celtic story-cycles. He noted how close her language came to the style of those stories. She spoke quickly; dialogue ran into dialogue; she used a formal, almost awkward construction of phrases, a sort of archaic style, much as modern writers used when they were trying to evoke a sense of the past, all inversions and tumbled adjectives.

  But it had power, he thought. By Heaven, it had power, and he sat entranced, her words creating a world in his mind:

  A world in which a King had decided to bury himself in his own Castle, filling the rooms with earth, an enormous burial mound, the ruins below.

  A world in which a Queen used magic to haunt her dead husband in the Otherworld, all the Otherworlds, all the different realms of death to which her husband’s spirit ran: the Bright Plain, the Many Coloured Land, the Isles of Youth.

  A world in which three brothers strutted and stalked for supremacy. The youngest was called Scathach, the name Tallis had given to the ghost in Stretley Stones meadow. Denied his birthright of a Castle in the land, Scathach passed into the Otherworld itself, into Old Forbidden Place, and there found a fortress made of urstone, stone which was not stone, some magic substance. He had performed that deed which must have excited the minds of the ordinary folk of old: he had ridden, whilst still alive, into the realm of the dead. He had shut himself off from the dead, and from the living, a place with no name, with no warmth, with no heart. A dead place, a prison, hidden from the eyes of both real world and afterworld.

  And he wanted to come home.

  And his sister loved him …

  And mad things ran from the crevices of his mad mind.

  It was an odd feeling for the man who listened. All of the ingredients of the story were familiar to him, and yet this story was unfamiliar. It was unlike anything he had ever heard, and this was perhaps as much to do with the manner and nature of its presentation. At its heart it was just a fairy tale; but Tallis had invested it with something from herself which was so intriguing that it marked the journey as something quite different. There was so much that was implied by the story. Whole years, whole sequences of action had been covered by the girl’s mysterious words: Many years passed. Years without vision.

  And Mr Williams knew the child well enough, now, to understand that she was waiting for those visions to come, to fill in the gaps … to show her where Harry might be hiding, and how she might find him.

  She had cut the story short. It was not by her own choice but rather as if a shutter had come down, cutting off the flow of words. So that it was a lie when she answered ‘no’ to Mr Williams’s question about the completeness of the tale.

  It took Tallis some moments to recover from the intensity of the images that had packed her mind, from the smells and sounds, and from the heat of that fire. She could still see the fire in the hall of the great Castle. It burned fiercely before her eyes, an enormous flame, reaching high above the feasting tables and the cold floor. She could still see the harsh glare, and the dark shadows that it formed, on the pale, angry faces of the young men who stood before her. They were disgraced and on the fire-side of the table, their hair like burnished copper, their clothes brightly coloured, but their faces like grim death.

  It was an image which was so vivid that she knew it must have happened exactly like this. She was frightened to think of herself so close to the real events in Scathach’s life. Scathach, too, frightened her because in her mind’s eye he was much harder than the vision of him in the meadow. His scars were terrible. His hair was lank, his fists dark with bruises and healed wounds. Of all the brothers he glowered the most, and each cut of his dagger on the plate before him was a stab at his father’s heart and a stab, too, at Tallis, who seemed to sit beside the father, staring across the table at the angry sons.

  Who was she in this story? Why did Scathach look at her so fiercely?

  The Queen was there, on the other side of her. She smelled of damp linen and a sweet
, sickly perfume. Her hands were like birds, hovering over the table, long pale fingers picking like beaks at the bread and the cheese. The worst smell coming from her was the smell of death. Alive in body, she was already close to the Bright Plain, where her screaming shade would haunt the cruel King.

  Most vivid and disturbing of all: the view of the place that haunted Tallis herself, the realm across the wide, deep gorge. When she told the story she almost toppled, so dizzying was her height above the river. The wind caught her and threatened to throw her into the gorge. The river below was a silver thread, and yet she knew that it rushed and roared across the rocks, a terrible flow. How Scathach had ever crossed that chasm she didn’t know. She looked into the distance, to the mists of the world that was Old Forbidden Place, to its icy edge. The forest seethed and grasped the land, roots like giant claws, an immense and stifling cloak of death and confusion. Rising from its tangled grip, the ruins of a grey and ancient castle …

  All of this she saw without wishing it. She felt her tongue move, felt power to speak, but felt controlled by whoever had reached for her, to communicate the tale. And she had cut the story short; Tallis was fleetingly puzzled by that. There had been an image of Scathach, and a girl glimpsed by moonlight. And an odd thought: he took the name of the tree.

  It did not fit with the story she had told to Mr Williams.

  When the spirit left Tallis she felt as if a great weight had been lifted from her lungs. Her body almost floated. Mr Williams asked his questions and she answered them impatiently and sadly, because she knew he would soon be going.

  At least they walked back towards the bridleway to Shadoxhurst, away from the unnamed field that guarded Ryhope.

  ‘Do you have to go?’

  ‘I have to go. I’m sorry. I have music to write. I don’t have much time. It’s the blight of growing old.’

  ‘I shall miss you,’ Tallis said.

  ‘I shall miss you also,’ he said to her. ‘But I’ll come back next year, if I can. To this very place on this very day. And that’s a promise.’

  ‘And a promise made,’ she reminded him, ‘is a debt to be paid.’

  ‘Indeed it is.’

  He walked off along the bridleway towards the village where, no doubt, he was to be met by the car.

  Tallis called to him, ‘Write some good songs.’

  ‘I shall! Tell some good stories.’

  ‘I shall.’

  ‘And by the way,’ he called.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That field around the wood. I think I know its name. It’s Find Me Again Field. Try it. Then you can visit your glade without fear.’

  He had gone, but Tallis didn’t notice. She was staring at the distant wood, and her eyes were wide with astonishment and excitement.

  Find Me Again Field.

  [MORNDUN]

  Geistzones

  (i)

  That evening she fashioned Find Me Again Doll. She used a piece of hawthorn, the wood of the first doll she had ever made. The name made her think of returning to first friends, or first visions. The doll itself would be buried at the edge of Find Me Again Field, close to Hunter’s Brook.

  During the night she went to the alley between the sheds and knelt there, masked by the Hollower. She felt the immediate closeness of Old Forbidden Place and watched without alarm as space opened between the worlds, the thin strip reaching from the ground to a point above her head. Snow swirled from the gateway and wind gusted and tugged at her hair. The lamenting woman was there, the struggling horse, the noisy child. The drum that sometimes sounded began to beat all at once, its odd tattoo becoming more menacing as the minutes went by.

  When Tallis sang the song, echoing the woman’s lament, she felt the power of the music and sensed the awesome effect her own voice was having in that frozen, that other, place. She knew, now, that her journey would take her to the same remote mountainside. It had to. She had dreamed of that place. She had told stories of it. Her brother Harry was wandering there. Perhaps Mr Williams’s forgotten song was being sung there too. It was the place where lives ended and lost things could be found. It was a place forbidden to ordinary folk, but Tallis Keeton was not ordinary. Thinking this was as natural to her as thinking that before too long she would need to relieve herself of the evening’s burden of cherryade. That was a comfort in just knowing, in just accepting. She was aware of how close the mask-makers were, but also of the fact that their job was done … Gaunt had said it to her a long time ago: someone was showing her how to make the dolls. And today, Mr Williams had said it too, when he had questioned her about the story she had told, and she had said that someone had just told it to her, someone alive yet not alive.

  ‘What do you want from me?’ she whispered to the ghosts in Old Forbidden Place. ‘What can I do? I couldn’t even save Scathach. I got it all wrong. I tried to save him from you. He almost didn’t get to his funeral because of me. What can you possible want me for?’

  As she whispered the words, an image of Scathach in the castle came to mind, the fierce, scarred-faced young man, stabbing his dagger into the wooden platter on the table, each blow a meaningful strike of anger, his gaze torn between his father, whom he hated, and Tallis … Tallis sitting next to the King … Tallis at the high table in the castle … but who was she? What role did she play there? Who was it, in her story of the King and Old Place, whom she could not see, but whose consciousness she shared?

  ‘Mr Williams was wrong,’ she said softly. ‘It all belongs to me, yes. But it has been passed on to me by someone. It’s a small inheritance. Someone else owned the stories first. I mustn’t try to tamper with them. They’re only partly mine, and in any case they are only mine for a while. But who am I? Who am I?’

  Sitting by the King … sitting close to the Queen … Watching the three angry brothers … Watching the fire …

  ‘I’m the daughter, then. I must be. That’s all I can be. The King’s daughter. The Queen’s daughter. Then why do I feel so old? And why do I feel so old in the dream story?’

  She remembered Mr Williams’s teasing words to her, as she had tried to tell the story:

  But at least we know there was a sister … and her brothers loved her in different ways … her story is a different story than this one … loved in different ways …

  The gateway to the winter world had long since faded. Tallis, staring at the glimmer of light on the dingy glass of the greenhouse, realized that it was a sign of the new day. She began to hear activity everywhere. It was as if she were coming out of a dream. The sounds of dawn intruded into her conscious mind and at once made her feel cold.

  She picked up her new doll and went into the garden, scudding her feet through the dewy grass to make patterns in the moisture. The dog was prowling in the garden, sniffing out the signs of night’s visitors. Distantly, rooks called and flapped restlessly in their high nests.

  There was another sound, though, and this one set her pulse racing. It was like a low roar, very animal, very weird. She ran to the gate and stared into the distance. A heavy mist hung over the stream at the bottom of the field. But as she watched she heard the sound again and saw the furtive yet confident movement of a tall animal in the hollow.

  Its antlers pierced the surface of the fog, moving like hard fingers in the clearer day.

  Suddenly the beast broke cover. It was on the far side of the water and after a glimpse of its broad body, Tallis lost sight of Broken Boy among the oak and elm hedge that lined Sad Song Meadow.

  ‘Wait for me!’ she shouted and clambered over the gate. The dog chased after her, barking loudly. It didn’t jump the gate and by the time Tallis was at the stile it had become silent again. The girl entered the mist by the stream, picked her way across the stepping stones and emerged on the stag’s spoor, tracking it precisely along the hedge.

  After a few minutes she arrived, breathless, at Hunter’s Brook.

  Without ceremony, but moving very carefully, she took four steps into Find Me Again Fi
eld. She was being watched from the far wood, but when she looked there she could see no movement, nor guess where the watcher was hiding. It was Broken Boy, though, she was sure of that. He had waited for her all these years. He had been thought dead, killed by poachers, and perhaps, indeed, he had suffered just that fate. But there was far more to Broken Boy than just old meat on tall bones.

  And he wanted Tallis!

  She bent down, now, and pushed the hawthorn doll into the hard ground, working it vigorously to break the sun-dried turf, then twisting it into the clay earth beneath. When the head was below the grass she closed the wound with her fingers, spat on the cut and placed her hand upon it. ‘I know you now,’ she said aloud. ‘I know your name. You can’t trap me.’

  A few minutes later she reached the broken road which had once led to the lodge. She stood in the high grass, listening to the sounds of movement in the dense woodland. Then she approached the fence, with its faded notice, and quickly clambered over the loose wire. Immediately she could see the yellow light of the glade by the ruined house.

  She picked her way carefully along the hard path underfoot and came, for only the second time in her life, into the garden of the place which the wood had claimed. She was shocked by what she saw.

  The great black totem had fallen, split along its length and now a mass of beetles crawled in the hollowed-out inside; it was sinking into the clinging grass that had once been a lawn. Its leering smile was turned into the earth. Draped on trees around the clearing were skins and fragments of hide; deer, fox, and rabbit. The deep pit in the lawn, which a few years ago had been dry and dead, was smouldering now. Tallis approached it cautiously, glancing frequently at the crowding trees with their rotting rags of animal skin.