Merlin's Wood (Mythago Wood)

by Robert Holdstock

  It would be Wynne-Jones’s task, this trip, to try to break through the thorn and photograph the river.

  Huxley would strike deeply into the wood from the Horse Shrine which both men had discovered two years before.

  They assessed their route, and listed provisions necessary.

  Then Huxley displayed the artefacts he had gathered over the winter months, while Wynne-Jones had been in Oxford.

  ‘Not a great haul. These are the most recent,’ he indicated the wood and bone from the gate, ‘left by the first mythago to actually enter the garden. She returned—’

  ‘She?’

  ‘The boys say it was a female figure. They called her Snow Woman. She slaughtered the chickens – in silence, I might add – stayed the night in the coop, then returned to the wood. I followed the trail: she had emerged and returned at the same point. I have no idea what her purpose was, unless it was to make a tentative contact.’

  ‘But nothing since?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Do you have any sense of her status as a “heroine”? What legend she represents?’

  ‘None at all.’

  Other finds included a head-piece of rusted, battered iron, a circlet wound round with briar, the thorns trimmed on the inside, and a gorgeous, luxuriantly coloured amulet, the stones not precious, the metal work merely filigreed with gold on a bronze plate. But it was unlike anything that Huxley could find listed or depicted in the pages of his books of previous finds and ancient treasures. It had been suspended from the branch of a beech, two hundred yards inwards, just before the first barrier in the wood where orientation was affected. Wynne-Jones handled the amulet appreciatively.

  ‘A talisman, I’d say. Magic.’

  ‘You think everything’s a talisman,’ Huxley laughed. ‘But on this occasion I’m inclined to agree. But who would have worn this, do you think?’

  He placed the cold, crushed circlet on his head. It fitted well, uncomfortably so, and he removed it at once.

  Wynne-Jones did not volunteer an opinion.

  ‘And figures?’ the younger man prompted after a while. ‘Encounters?’

  ‘Apart from Snow Woman, and I didn’t see her … just the Crow Ghost, as I call him … the feathers are mostly black, but I noticed this time that his face is painted and that he sings. I’m intrigued by that aspect of him. But he’s just as aggressive as before, and so fast in his movement through the wood. So, the Crow Ghost, Who else … let me think … oh yes, the wretched “Robin Hood” form, of course. This one seemed advanced, perhaps thirteenth century.’

  ‘Lincoln Green?’ Wynne-Jones said.

  ‘Mud brown, but with some fancy weavework on arms and breast. Slightly bearded. Very large in build. Took the usual shot at me, before merging—’

  He placed a broken arrow on the table. The head was a thin point of steel, flanged. The shaft was ash, the flights goose feather, no decoration. ‘The “Hoods” and “Green Jacks” worry me. They’ve already shot me once. One day one of them is going to strike me in the heart. And the way they just appear—’

  He used the word ‘merge’ deliberately. It was as if the forms of the Hunter – the Robin Hoods, or Jack o’ the Greens – oozed from the trees, then slipped back into them, merging with the bark and the hardwood and becoming invisible. Too frightened to investigate further, because of the threat to his life, Huxley had no idea whether he was dealing with a phenomenon of the supernatural, or superb camouflage.

  ‘And of the Urscumug?’

  Huxley laughed dryly. But it was less of a joke, these days, more a fixation, a belief, bordering on the obsessive. The first hero, the primal form, ancient, probably malevolent. Huxley had heard references to it, found signs of it, but he could not get deeply enough into Ryhope Wood to come close to it – to see it. He was convinced it was there, however. Urscumug. The almost incomprehensible hero of the first spoken legends, held in the common unconscious of all humankind and almost certainly being generated in Ryhope Wood, somewhere in the glades of this primal, unspoiled stretch of forest.

  The Urscumug. The beginning.

  But Huxley was beginning to think that he was fated never to engage with it.

  Standing by the open windows, watching the woodland across the neat garden, with its trimmed cherry trees and clipped hedges, he felt suddenly very old. It was a sensation that had begun to concern him: all his adult life he had felt like a man in his thirties, but it had been a vigorous feeling; now that he was in his middle forties he felt stooped, sagging, a fatigue that he had expected to encounter in his sixties, not for many many years. And it was a feeling of being too old to see, to see the wood for what it was, to see out of the corner of his eyes – those frustrating, tantalising glimpses of movement, of creatures, of colour, of the ancient that hovered at peripheral vision, and which vanished when he turned towards them.

  The boys, though. They seemed to see everything.

  ‘Have you brought the bridges?’

  Wynne-Jones unpacked the odd electrical equipment, the headsets with their terminals, wires and odd face-pieces that formed electric linkages across the brain. The voltage was low, but effective. After an hour of electrical stimulation, ‘peripheral view awareness’ perked up remarkably. And it was in the peripheral vision that glimpses of mythagos were mainly to be experienced: Huxley called them the ‘pre-mythago’ form, and imagined these to be gradually emerging memories of the past, the passage of memory from mind to wood.

  Huxley picked up the apparatus. ‘We are old, Father Edward, we are too old. Oh God for youth again, for that far sight … The boys see so much. And so often with full fore-vision.’

  ‘What could they see if we enhanced them, I wonder?’ Wynne-Jones said softly.

  Huxley was alarmed. This was the second time that the Oxford man had suggested experimenting on Steven and Christian, and whilst the idea tantalised Huxley, he felt a strong, moral repellence at the notion. ‘No. It wouldn’t be fair.’

  ‘With their consent?’

  ‘We may be damaging ourselves, Edward. I couldn’t inflict that risk on my boys. Besides, Jennifer would have something to say about it. She’d forbid it outright.’

  ‘But with the boys’ consent? Steven especially. You said he was a dreamer. You said he could call the wood.’

  ‘He doesn’t know he’s doing it. He dreams, yes. Neither boy knows what we know. They just know we go exploring, not that time runs differently, not that we encounter dangers. They don’t even know about the mythagos. They think they see “gypsies”. Tramps.’

  But Wynne-Jones wrestled with the idea of enhancing Steven’s perception of the wood. ‘One experiment. One low voltage, high colour stimulation. It surely would do no harm …’

  Huxley shook his head, staring hard at the other man. ‘It would be wrong. It’s wrong to even think about it. Fascinating though the results would be, Edward – I must say no. Please don’t insist any more. Set the equipment up for ourselves. We’ll enter the wood the first moment after dawn.’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘One other thing,’ Huxley added, as the scientist busied himself. ‘In case anything should ever happen to me – and I’m disturbed by being shot at by the Merry Man, the Hood figure – in case something unfortunate should occur, I keep a second journal. It’s in a wall safe behind these books. You are the only other person who knows about it, and I shall trust you to secure it, should it become necessary, and to use it without revealing it. I don’t want Jennifer to know what it contains.’

  ‘And what does it contain?’

  ‘Things I can’t account for. Dreams, feelings, experiences that seem less related to me than they do to …’ he searched for appropriate words. ‘To the animal realm.’

  Huxley knew that he was frowning hard, and that his mood had become dark. Wynne-Jones sat quietly, watching his friend, clearly not comprehending the depth of despair and fear that Huxley was trying to impart without detail. He said only, ‘In the wood … in parts o
f the wood … I have been very disturbed – As if a more primordial aspect of my behaviour had been let out, dusted off, and set loose.’

  ‘Good God, man, you sound like that character of Stevenson’s.’

  ‘Mr Hyde and Mr Jekyll?’ Huxley laughed.

  ‘Dr Jekyll, I believe.’

  ‘Whatever. I remember reading that whimsy at school. It hadn’t occurred to me to see any connection, but yes, my dreams certainly reflect a more violent and instinctual creature man I’m accustomed to greeting every morning in the shaving mirror.’

  ‘And these observations and records are in the second journal?’

  ‘Yes. And accounts, too, of what the boys are experiencing. I really don’t want them to know that I’ve been watching them. But if our ideas about the mythago-genesis of heroes in the wood are right, then all of us in this house, even you, Edward, are having an effect upon the process. At any one time, the phenomena we witness might be the product of one of five minds. And then there are the farm hands, and the people at the Manor. Our moods, our personalities, shape the manifestations—’

  ‘You’ve begun to agree with me, then. I made this point a year ago.’

  ‘I do agree with you. That Hood form … it was strange. It echoed a mind different to my own. Yes. I do agree with you. And this is an area we should study more assiduously, and more vigorously. So let’s prepare.’

  ‘I shall say nothing about the second journal.’

  ‘I trust you.’

  ‘I still think we should talk about Steven, and enhancing his perception.’

  ‘If we talk about it, let’s talk about it after this excursion.’

  ‘I agree.’

  Relieved, Huxley reached into his desk drawer for his watch, a small, brass-encased mechanism that showed date as well as time of day. ‘Let’s get ourselves ready,’ he said, and Wynne-Jones grunted his agreement.

  3

  ‘Your son is watching you,’ Wynne-Jones said quietly, as they walked away from the house, still shivering in the crisp and fresh dawn. All around them the world was coming alive. The light was sharp to the east, and the wood was dark, shadowy, yet becoming distinct with that peculiar clarity which accompanies the first light of a new day.

  Huxley stopped and shrugged his pack from his shoulders, turning to look back at the house.

  Sure enough, Steven was pressed against the window of his bedroom, a small, anxious shape, mouthing words and waving.

  Huxley stepped a few paces back, and cupped his ear. Chickens clattered close by, and the old dog growled and worried in the hedges. Rooks called loudly, and their flight, in and among the branches of Ryhope Wood, made the day seem somehow more desolate and silent than it was.

  Steven pulled the sash window up.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he called down, and Huxley said, ‘Exploring.’

  ‘Can I come?’

  ‘Scientific research, Steve. We’ll only be gone today.’

  ‘Take me with you?’

  ‘I can’t. I’m sorry, lad. I’ll be back tonight and tell you all about it.’

  ‘Can’t I come?’

  The dawn seemed to lengthen, and the early spring cold made his breath frost as he stood and stared at the anxious, pale-faced boy in the window, high in the house. ‘I’ll be back tonight. We have some readings to take, some mapping, some samples to take … I’ll tell you all about it later.’

  ‘You went away for three days last time. We were worried …’

  ‘One day only, Steve. Now be a good boy.’

  As he hefted his pack onto his back again, he saw Jennifer standing in the doorway, her face glistening with tears. ‘I’ll be back tonight,’ he said to her.

  ‘No you won’t,’ she whispered, and turned into the house, closing the kitchen door behind her.

  4

  … poor Jennifer is already deeply depressed by my behaviour. Cannot explain it to her, though I dearly want to. Do not want the children involved in this, and it worries me that they have now twice seen a mythago. I have invented magic forest creatures – stories for them. Hope they will associate what they see with products of their own imaginations. But must be careful.

  There is a time before wakening, an instant only, when the real and the unreal play games with the sleeper, when everything is right, yet nothing is real. In this moment of surfacing from the sleep of days, Huxley sensed the flow of water, and the passing of riders, the shouts and curses of a troop on the move, and the anguish and excitement of pursuit.

  Something bigger than a man was moving through the wood, following the pack of men that ran before its lumbering assault.

  And there was a woman, too, who came to the river, and touched her hand to the face of the sleeping/waking man. She dropped a twig and a bone on him, then left with a laugh and swirl of perfumed body, the sweat of her skin and her soul, sour and sexual in the nostrils of the recumbent form that slowly …

  Came to waking …

  Came alive, again.

  Huxley sat up and began to choke. He was frozen, and icy water ran from his face.

  He was deafened by the sound of the river, and his sense of smell was offended by the stink of his own faeces, cool and firm, accumulated in the loose cotton of his underclothes.

  ‘Dear God! What’s happened to me …?’

  He cleaned himself quickly, crouching in the river, gasping with the cold. From previous experience he knew to bring a change of clothing and he searched gratefully in his pack, now, finding the gardening trousers and a thick, cotton shirt.

  He fumbled with shaking fingers for his watch and closed his eyes as he saw that it had been four days since he had reached this place, dazed and confused, and lain down on the shore with his head on his arms.

  Four days asleep!

  ‘Edward! Edward …?’

  His voice, a loud, urgent cry, was lost in the rush and swirl of this river; he was about to shout again, when the first piece of memory returned, and he realised that Wynne-Jones was long gone. They had parted days before, the Oxford man to find, if he could, the river beyond the thornwoods, Huxley himself to document the edges of the zones that were Ryhope Wood’s first true level of defence.

  How perverse, then, that Huxley should find himself by the expanded flow of the tiny sticklebrook. Had Wynne-Jones been here too? He could see no sign of the other man.

  There were the ashes of a small fire, away from the water, in the shelter of a grey sarsen, whose mossy green stump seemed almost to thrust from the tangle of root and ragged earth. Huxley had seen enough failed fires, built by Wynne-Jones, to notice that this was not of the other man’s making.

  He gathered his things together. Starving, he wolfed down a bar of chocolate from his pack.

  Memory raced back, and the disorientation resulting from his sudden waking after another of the long dreams began to fade.

  He stared hard at the patch of thorn through which he had entered this place. He fixed, in his mind, the image of the woman who had caressed him as he slept in a half slumber, semi-aware of her presence, but unable to rise beyond the semi-conscious state. Not young, not old, filthy, sexual, warm … she had pressed her mouth to his and her tongue had been a sharp, wet presence against his own. Her laughter was low. Had he put a hand on her leg? He had the sensation of less than firm flesh, the broad smoothness of a thigh below his fingers and palm, but this might have been his dream.

  Who, then, had the riders been? And that creature that had stalked them across the river?

  ‘Urscumug,’ he murmured as he checked for spoor. There were no tracks, beyond the shallow imprint of an unshod horse.

  ‘Urscumug …?’

  He was not sure. He remembered a previous encounter.

  The Urscumug has formed in my mind in the clearest form I have ever seen him … face smeared with white clay … hair a mass of stiff and spiky points … so old, this primary image, that he is fading from the human mind … Wynne-Jones thinks Urscumug may pre-date even the neolithi
c …

  He wanted his journal. He scrawled notes in the rough pad he carried with him, but the pad was wet, and writing was difficult. Around him the wood was vibrant, shifting, watching. He felt intensely ill at ease, and after a few minutes shrugged on the pack and began to retrace his steps, away from the river.

  Half a day later he had reached the Wolf Glen, the shallow valley, with its open sky, where he and Wynne-Jones had separated several days before. This was an eerie place, with its smell of sharp pine, its constant, cool breeze, and the sound of wolves in the darkness. Huxley had seen the creatures several times, fleet shadows in the dense underbrush, rising onto their hind limbs to peer around, their faces half human, of course, for these creatures were no ordinary wolves.

  They moved in threes, not in packs; and never – as far as he could see – in solitary. Their barking resolved into language, though of course the language was incomprehensible to the Englishman. Huxley carried a pistol, and two flares, well wrapped in oilskin, but ready to be lit if the wolves came too close.

  But in the three visits he had made to the Wolf Glen, the beasts had shown curiosity, irritation, and then a lack of interest. They had approached, gabbled at him, then slunk away, running half on hind limbs, to hunt beyond the edge of the conifer forest, beyond the low defining ridge of the Wolf Glen itself.

  If Wynne-Jones had returned here he would have left the prearranged mark on one of the tall stones at the top of the Glen. No such mark was in evidence. Huxley used chalk to create his own message, gathered the necessary wood for a fire, later in the day, and went exploring.

  At dusk, still Wynne-Jones had not returned. Huxley called for him, his voice echoing in the Glen, carrying on the wind. No hail or hello came back, and a night passed.