THE HOLLOWING

Robert Holdstock

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‘Now certainly the place is deserted,’ said Gawain.
‘It is a hideous oratory, all overgrown,
And well graced for the gallant garbed in green
To deal out his devotions in the Devil’s fashion.
Now I feel in my five wits, it is the Fiend himself
That has tricked me into this tryst, to destroy me here.’

From Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

One of the deep silences fell on them, that seemed so much more natural than speech, a timeless silence in which there were at first many minds in the overhang; and then perhaps no mind at all.

William Golding: The Inheritors

PART ONE

From the Unknown Region

The Green Chapel: I

Each dawn, since the hollyjack had come to the cathedral bringing her strange dreams, the boy had started to think of waking as the opening of petals, or a form of budding. At this time the light was not green, it became green later, but he could never wait to wake, and in the same way that flowers opened to the sun, and leaves turned and unfurled, so he unfurled, so he opened. At first curled up on the inscribed marble floor, arms and legs gathered in for warmth during the night, now he began to straighten, then stretch, face to the open sky where the roof had been, mouth agape and damp with dew.

His eyes remained closed but he knew the cathedral was not yet green, it was still in stark light, and the world was not yet quick. And like the pores of the leaves, still closed, the water stayed inside him. He liked the feeling of the water. It pressed painfully against his belly, but he kept the water with him, waiting for green light. He rolled on the hard, cold marble, touching the grooves in the slab, the hidden names of the dead carved in the floor that guarded their bones. He listened to the cathedral stir, to the forest beyond begin to wake, to the hollyjack as she woke and moved restlessly, like a bird, in her nest of vegetation at the end of the aisle, against the great outer doors of the church.

The hollyjack had been here for days, now, weeks perhaps. She had changed his dreams. He could dream more widely, and feel his way over great distances of the forest, peering up from the roots, or glimpsing the ground as he flowed through the branches. She still frightened him, but until she had come he had been unable to see anything at all. With her arrival he had seen how like a leaf he was, unfurling with the new day. But last night, the dream last night had been startling. He didn’t want to let it go.

The sun moved over the line of the trees. The ragged edges of the cathedral’s fallen roof caught its warmth, its light. On the cold marble the brilliant edge of the green light spread, moving like a growing thing, an unfurling plant, towards the unfurled boy.

He felt it touch his legs. He woke fully and cried out as the light spread across him and birds fled from the nest where the hollyjack chattered. The bones of the dead below him shifted as roots prowled among them. The cathedral shuddered into life, from nave to chancel. The rotting wood of the pews began to steam, and he could smell this, and the carved dancing men drew deeper into the knots and rings of the old trees, their night of freedom and exuberance finished for a while.

He let the water go, now, adding his own moisture to the heavy dawn as his belly deflated. The water stank of nettles as it passed, and this mingled with wood sorrel and anemone in the rising steam of the chapel. He was relieved, out of pain, and felt at last that it was time to open fully. To open his eyes. To let green light shape him for the day.

The hollyjack had left her nest. He saw her moving up the ivy-covered wall towards the high arch of a window, where tree branches reached into the ruins of the cathedral and stone faces grinned down at him. She hesitated for a moment, glancing back at her nest, and at the boy, then had gone, outside into the forest.

He wanted to call to her, to tell her about his dream, but it was too late. He stood and stared through the leaning trunks of oaks at the rows of rotting wooden pews, some of them crushed, others raised above the floor as the forest grew from below them. The altar space was a distant grove among white-flowered thorns, the gold cross sparkling through the leaves. Saplings were sprouting everywhere, coming up from the crypt below. Only the marble slabs, with the names and dates of the dead, defied the forest as it struggled to emerge into the cathedral, keeping a clear channel to the high altar. Since the hollyjack had come to him, he had begun to imagine how the roots and branches in the crypt, and the bones themselves, were all entangled, all pushing at the floor, a great pressure ready to erupt upwards.

It had been such a dream. It had been his first real dream since he had come to the forest. He said the words aloud into the decaying church. Real dream. For so long his dreams had been of endless snow, and endless forest, and endless running, and endless water, an endless flight across unchanging lands. All that had broken with the first dream of the unfurling leaf. And now this one. He had begun to remember so much again.

‘They danced!’ he shouted, staring into the brightening sky, through the crossing branches of the trees, through the green light. As if to answer his cry, one of the carved wooden faces on a pew moved slightly, then stretched forward from the end of the stall, poking out into the aisle. It turned and peered at the shouting boy, who watched back through the sunlit mist that hung heavily in the great space. It looked like the hollyjack, branches extending from its mouth, leaves around its face. As quickly as it had stretched to look at him, it withdrew and was silent again. The boy blinked, then laughed. He was still dreaming. Last night that same figure and twenty others had come all the way out of the wooden benches, small, gnarled shapes with willow-thin arms and legs. They had led a wild dance up the stone walls and into the branches, among the stone faces in the high eaves, which had laughed and twisted too, stretching out from the pillars and cornices of the cathedral, peering at the wild activity below them and around their vaulted positions.

In the stillness of the new day, the boy went to the hollyjack’s nest and peered through the small hole into the stinking mass of rotten wood and foliage, grass, bracken and dead birds that the creature had compacted against the tall cathedral doors. Above those doors, half of a stained glass window began to glow purple and red as it was struck by first light. He liked the shape of the knight with his lance and silver armour, but now – another question! He was so full of questions these days – now he wondered what the knight was fighting – he could just see the creature’s legs – what was missing from the shattered area of the window.

Away from the nest, he went into the gloom of the sacristy and looked at his disjointed reflection in the cracked mirror. His hair was long and filthy now, falling in a lank, black mass around his pale, smooth face. A new thought occurred to him (he smiled at the pleasure of it) that he looked like the picture of an Apache Indian boy he had seen in a book at school. The boy in the picture had worn animal skins. The boy in the mirror was naked. The picture of the Apache now blurred and shifted in his mind, then faded. The chapel boy’s teeth were still white when he grinned, shifting his head across a distorting fracture in the glass.

The deep scratches on his chest and right arm were healed, now no more than bright red lines. They no longer hurt. The skin around them was still yellowed with bruising. He could hardly remember the attack, now, it had been so fast, and at dusk. He hadn’t even seen the creature, just heard its awful laugh. He thought of it as the giggler.

He was grimy with dirt and remembered that he should wash, so he thought of the well, but the well was at the edge of the clearing outside, and the wood was dangerous there. When the giggler had snatched at him and ripped him, it had hurt him badly, and when the hollyjack had tried to help him it had torn her leaves before retreating into the deep bosk of the wood. She mightn’t help him again.

The moment of apprehension faded as fast as the memory of the Indian boy from the book. He was suddenly on the ivy ‘ladder’, hauling himself up the stonework to the open roof, over an empty gallery, then across a broad sill that was carved with intricate rose and leaf patterns. He held the long neck of an ugly stone animal, and peered back down into the body of the church, swinging gently in the vast space and watching the wooden seats below, but they were quite lifeless now. Then he had clambered over the gargoyle and out onto a branch, crawling into the daylight and slipping down the twisted beech tree and onto the slate roof of the porch. The clearing stretched around him, ending at the wood. A few granite headstones poked from mounds in the tall grass and nettles. The stone well was half in shadow. The crowding wood was dark, crushing, and he felt a tingle of apprehension again. The giggler came and went, usually at dusk, but he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t there now, watching him from the shadows. He needed to drink, though.

Without really thinking, he reached the well and drew up the bucket, splashing water into his mouth and over his body, liking the cold touch on his bruises. Some impulse, faintly remembered, made him rub water between his toes.

Something moved suddenly in the dark wood, startling him, and he scampered back to the open door of the porch, yelping at the stings he received from the dense nettlebed. It was only the hollyjack, in fact. She hovered in the gloom, then stepped quickly past the well, crouching against a headstone. He knew that her eyes would tell him of fear, but her eyes said nothing. They gleamed from deep in the holly leaves that wreathed her face. The thin twigs that stretched from each side of her round mouth were wet. She had been feeding, then. She was fat, these days, and her body often moved as if she was being kicked from inside.

In her hands she held a selection of colourful fungi. She offered these, and he came forward and picked carefully, knowing that some would make him dizzy and sick. The rest he ate gratefully as the hollyjack quickly examined those he had rejected. She was trying to learn.

The hollyjack was disturbed. Her mouth flexed and she made bird noises. Her long fingers stroked her body leaves restlessly, almost nervously. He wanted to go back into the chapel, to safety and security, away from the strange men and creatures who so often prowled among the trees. But he sensed that the hollyjack needed him, so he stayed in the shadow, listening to furtive movement in the woodland and the fluttering of wings in his friend’s body.

He realised quite suddenly that she was inviting him to dream again, and his heart surged.

He had had a dream last night, in the cathedral … as he ate the last of the mushrooms he struggled to recall the details. There had been wild dancing. The green men in the church stalls had slipped out of the wood and run amok. He was like a leaf, unfurling at dawn. The giggler had stepped from the wood and walked into his dreams, hiding there …

But as he tried to remember these things, so they faded, leaving him blank again, empty and restless, lonely and isolated. The details had gone.

A bigger dream was on offer, now. The way the hollyjack crouched and trembled, watching him and chitter-chattering in her funny way, all of this told him that she had heard something. Big Dream, he wondered as he chewed, or Little Dream?

When he was full he left the porch and went over to the hollyjack, curling up in her twiggy arms. The prick of holly leaves made him shudder, but after a while the mixing of blood and sap soothed him, and although the inside of her body shifted and fluttered restlessly, he felt himself slip out into the wood, flowing softly, spreading widely, connected to the forest around him through her roots, now embedded in the earth of the graveyard, and touching the tendrils of wilder trees.

She was sending him on the Little Dream, and he heard his father’s voice again, for only the second time since the hollyjack had come. His father was in the wood. His father was coming closer. He was looking desperately for his son. There was someone with him, a man like a bear, dark-featured and fierce. There was excitement, running, they were afraid. The wood shifted around them, tripped them, snagged them, sucked them deeper. The giggler was watching them, but they weren’t aware of it.

Then he touched his father’s dreams again, his memories, and he shouted with pain at the anguish he felt, the sadness. The hollyjack wrapped her arms more tightly around him, soothed him, rustled and twittered at him with her voice. Blood and sap mingled more deeply. He lay back in the hollybush and started to cry. But he dreamed his father’s dream for a while, feeding on it, bringing himself close again to a man he remembered only as a picture. He moved out of the cathedral and into the wood, a wraith, anxious to touch the man who was searching for him.

Out of the Dark

It was to be an evening of rain and strange encounters. There would be a return from the dead, and the beginning of the ending of a life.

Richard Bradley hastened along the road to his house, at the edge of Shadoxhurst, hatless and drenched by the torrential and freezing late September downpour. The whole town had become dark. The few shops had their lights on, and at four in the afternoon this made a depressingly wintry scene. Richard was wearing only his suit, the collar of his jacket drawn tightly around his neck in a vain attempt to stop the rain coursing down his back. Bedraggled and fed up, he broke into a run as he neared his cottage, then slowed abruptly as he saw the woman dart away from the back gate towards the fields.

She was wearing strange clothes. She too was saturated, he could see, her dark hair plastered to her scalp. He didn’t see her face, only the army trousers, tucked into muddy, black boots, and a full and heavy-looking green anorak drawn tightly around her neck. She had something slung across her shoulder, and although it was hard to be sure, Richard thought it was a short bow and full quiver.

He quickened his step, puzzled by the fact that she had been at his back door, but by the time he reached the gate she was a bulky and distant shape, running through the downpour towards the stream that led to Ryhope Wood, on the estate. The rain made the wood seem grim, as always.

He opened the back door and peered inside the house, noticing the wet footprints that led across the kitchen and into the small parlour. The footprints were small. He assumed at once that they were those of the woman, but what on earth was she doing here? Nothing looked disturbed. The cash box, clearly labelled as such (it contained only coppers), was still on its shelf.

Richard followed the footprints. They ascended the stairs and showed clearly, though slightly faded, how the intruder had looked into each room. The carpet had dried the wetness from her boots by mid-landing of the return, but downstairs, on the bureau, he found a note, which he read with astonishment.

Why aren’t you here? Everything’s OK with Old Stone Hollow. I really hoped you’d be here. I miss you. It’s been too long.
IMPORTANT: Lytton reckons he knows how to locate the boy’s protogenomorph, but we need YOU there. Come to the Station. I’m going back into the wood by the old brook, taking path through Huxley’s Lodge. Follow me the moment you get back. This may be our only chance to find the true Cathedral! Just do it! I miss you.

The note was unsigned. The paper was wet where she had held it, the pen, a cheap biro, flung on the table. She had rested a hand on the polished wood and he placed his own hand upon the vague outline, noting its smallness, the details of her fingerprints, three of which were crossed with scars.

A thought had occurred to him, that he should fetch the police, but he stood there unwilling to do so. He just looked at the handprint, and the note, savouring its strangeness and its incomprehensibility. And remembering the image of the woman, wet, dark-haired, bulky with clothes, but fast, running along the bridleway towards the wood that had so fascinated Alexander’s young friend Tallis Keeton, before she and her father had so tragically and mysteriously disappeared, over a year ago, now.

Alex came bounding up to the front door and rang the bell. Richard folded the note and tucked it into his trousers pocket, then opened the door to the wet, excitable thirteen-year-old. The boy ran straight to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of orange juice, then crashed upstairs to get ready for the school play.

On impulse, Richard followed his son to the ‘treasure house’, as he and Alice called Alexander’s room.

‘Do you want tea?’ he asked from the door, watching the boy poring over some typewritten sheets.

‘No thanks. Had crisps and two Lion bars.’

‘Well, that sounds healthy enough.’ Alex didn’t respond. ‘We’ll be leaving at six, if they want you there at six-thirty, so don’t lounge around reading for long.’

‘I’m not reading – I’m memorising. Mr Evans and me wrote a new scene today.’

‘Mr Evans and I …’

Alex groaned tiredly.

Richard looked around the room, reaching out to flick one of the many model planes that were suspended from the ceiling. Alexander’s costume – he was to play the red-bearded Lord Bertolac in the third year’s production of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – was draped around a tailor’s dummy. The red beard and hair had been fashioned from two very old wigs and looked hilarious upon the boy. Another pupil would be playing the Green Knight himself (who was, in fact, Lord Bertolac in otherworldly form) as the change of costuming was too difficult.

There was something about Alex’s den that both embraced and unnerved Richard. It was a difficult feeling – there was so much obsession here, so much passion, from the paintings of knights, with odd insignia and helmet crests, to the drawings of dinosaurs and the carefully ordered trays of fossils and crystals, gathered from all over Britain, all labelled and all imbued with mystery. Chunks of iron marcasite from chalk pits were questioningly labelled ‘Spacecraft remains?’ The intricate patterns of fossils were related to Star Creatures, lost in the chalk seas in primordial times. Models, in plastic and wood, were everywhere, and the boy could tell a story about each one.

It was an imagination inherited from his grandfather (along with a love of toy soldiers), but a trait completely missing from Richard himself, although he tried hard to remember what had been his own childhood dream: he had walked, lazed in the sun and swum in the freezing seas off the Welsh coast. He had very little to show for growing up.

He realised that Alex was watching him anxiously. He asked, ‘What is it?’

Alex said simply, ‘You can come in, if you want. You can test me.’

Feeling awkward, for no reason he could identify, Richard turned to go downstairs. ‘I’ll test you in the car, shall I? I’d better get some tea going.’

Leaving Alexander to memorise the final few lines of his part in the heavily adapted play, he went down to the kitchen, taking out the note and re-reading it. It had an odd, foreign quality to the language – Lytton reckons he knows how to locate the boy’s protogenomorph. It had an American twang to it. And what on earth was a protogenomorph?

The rain drummed monotonously. He heard the sound of the family car, an old Rover that roared and spluttered as the engine was turned off. Alice struggled out onto the kerb and cursed the rain.

He had hidden the note before she entered the house to begin her relentless domestic routine and preparing for the evening out. She had little time for idle chat. Richard prepared tea and wrote two letters, but he was distracted and disturbed – indeed, he was enjoying a welcome if vicarious experience.

The note had surely been intended for someone else, not for Richard Bradley. But he couldn’t get over the odd and thrilling sensation that nine words in the woman’s hand gave him.

I really hoped you’d be here. I miss you.

Alice was half asleep in the passenger seat, her head rocking as the car bumped slowly over the uneven road, leading back to Shadoxhurst. The headlights cut a bright path through the rain. Houses appeared grey, windows reflecting dully; trees were dark, looming shapes that appeared and disappeared from vision in seconds. The road curved across the country; two foxes scampered across the path of the car, casting gleam-eyed glances, hesitating as the vehicle approached.

Behind Richard, Alexander stared at the night land, awake, alert, excited. He was still dressed in his Lord Bertolac costume, all but the bushy beard. His performance had been warmly applauded.

In fact, it had been a spectacular performance all round, from the mad chase around the stage for the Green Knight’s severed head, which took on an unintentional role of its own, to the sub-Gilbert and Sullivan words of the songs, all written by the children.

Even now, Richard found himself singing the ‘Wild Man’s’ Song:

‘I am a Mountain Wodwo,

‘I live on leaves and fish roe …’

There had been no subtleties, of course, simply an adventure, with monsters and supernatural entities. The Green Knight’s beheading, his magical return to life and subsequent challenge to Gawain, to meet a year later at the Green Chapel (an ancient burial mound) for a return stroke, were powerfully played; the three attempts at seducing Sir Gawain by the enchantress Morgan le Fay, disguised as Lady Bertolac, were excruciating, as the boy playing Morgan couldn’t keep the pitch of his voice constantly high. Alex’s innovation to the story had been to make the pagan Green Knight the guardian of a fabulous talisman. At the end, Gawain, disguised as a hunting falcon, tricked the monstrous knight out of his chapel, entered the mound to the fairy Otherworld and stole the treasure.

Alexander had been singled out for special applause. Richard and Alice had felt very proud of the lad and joined heartily in the encore, a refrain from the final song (‘One bloody nick at the side of my neck – All for the sake of My Lady’s Green Girdle’).

Headlights cut through the dark, swinging across trees, hedges, walls, briefly illuminating a land that was silent, saturated and sleeping.

The man who suddenly staggered in front of the car was wearing only a dressing gown. He waved both hands helplessly as Richard swerved to avoid him. He was holding what looked like a round, white mask.

For a second, in the headlamps, the man had been startled like a wild animal, frozen in the road. Then he flung himself aside to escape hurt. Richard saw only his white body, naked beneath the gaping gown. He had been thinly bearded, and everything about him had glistened like oil, the effect of light on rain-drenched skin.

The car stopped heavily and Alice woke up abruptly.

‘What the hell is it?’

‘A man just ran into the road. I nearly knocked him down.’

‘You should drive more slowly,’ Alice said predictably.

Richard was already outside the car, peering into the darkness behind. He listened through the rain but could hear nothing.

Alice said, ‘I’ll drive, shall I? That way we might get home safely.’

‘I didn’t hit him, Alice. And he did run into the road …’ But Richard was disturbed by the man’s appearance. ‘I just thought for a minute …’

He got back into the car and sat quietly. As Alice woke more fully from her drowsy state so her shock and her irritation passed away. ‘Let’s get home.’

‘I thought I recognised him. I only glimpsed him …’

‘Probably a farmer’s lad, drunk. As you said, you didn’t hit him, so let it alone. I’m cold.’

‘He was wearing a dressing gown. Gaping open. Did you see him, Alex?’

Behind him the boy nodded palely. His eyes were wide and he looked upset.

‘Alex?’

‘It was Mr Keeton,’ the boy said quietly. He was shaking. Richard went cold as the man’s face became clearer to him. ‘It was Tallis’s father,’ Alex repeated. ‘It was Mr Keeton.’

‘Nonsense,’ Alice said, but she frowned when she saw the look on her husband’s face. ‘Jim Keeton and Tallis disappeared over a year ago. You know that, Alex. He hasn’t come back, now. If it was Jim, then it’s his ghost.’

Richard was trying to remember something from those distressing days, when the countryside had been searched and no sign of the two Keetons found. ‘When Jim vanished … wasn’t it in the morning? He’d run out of the house in his dressing gown. Don’t you remember what Margaret told the inquest?’

Alice shrugged. ‘I remember. But they’ve been gone for over a year. You’re not telling me that a year later he’s still wearing his dressing gown …’

Richard looked round in the darkness. On the small back seat of the car his Red Knight son was hunched, knees drawn up, eyes wide as he stared at his father. He was crying silently.

Five hours later, James Keeton came to their cottage. The rain had eased, but he made a miserable and bedraggled figure, standing at the bottom of the garden, staring at the dark window where Alexander watched, the mask held against his chest. He opened the gate and ran quickly to the back door, tapping on the glass. Alex struggled to see the man from his bedroom, but Keeton had moved through the rain to stand outside the dining room. Like a bird, tapping with its beak, Keeton kept tapping with his fingers, pressing his face against the glass, hand raised, tap-tap-tapping as he peered into the darkness of the cottage.

Alex stood on the landing, shivering. His pyjama trousers came undone and he struggled to tie them more securely. He listened to the noise of the beak on the glass downstairs, and remembered his friend Tallis’s tales of birds, and bird creatures, and nights filled with wings. He slowly descended the stairs, and in the dining room approached the half-moon face of the man outside, coming closer until he could see the beard and the curve of pale flesh above, stepping right up to the window where the half-naked man tap-tap-tapped in slow desperation. Alex gently tap-tap-tapped back. Keeton’s nose was squashed against the glass. A trickle of rain ran down between eyes and windowpane. He held the odd piece of rotting wood in one hand, and Alex saw the crude face, the moon-like curves, the cuts for eyes. He recognised it as one of Tallis’s masks. It was Moondream. He pressed his hand against the glass where the mask watched, remembering his lost friend.

The water on the pane, outside, mingled with the tears that Mr Keeton shed.

‘Don’t run away,’ Alex called, and the man closed his eyes. He seemed to slump against the glass and continued to tap with the mask, as if he were a weary Punch and Judy man, using the cold-eyed wood to entice the children’s fancy. Moondream tapped the window and Keeton sank down into a huddle; mask-face and man-face disappeared from view.

Alex went outside with the Persian rug from the hallway and wrapped the heavy fabric around the freezing man. Mr Keeton was silent, now, hugging the mask and watching the dark, damp night through eyes that were unpleasantly blank and watery. Alex tried to help him stand, but he wouldn’t move.

‘Don’t run away again. Promise? Stay here.’

The man made a strange sound, then curled more tightly into his saturated dressing gown and the thick, dry rug, pulling the knotted ends around his neck.

Alex went upstairs and woke his father.

‘Mr Keeton’s come home. But he’s very sad. I think Tallis must be dead.’