Mythago Wood - 1 (14 page)

As quietly as possible I walked through the rest of the house, peering into
each room in turn, trying to intuit whether or not Wynne-Jones might have
fashioned himself a hidey-hole away from his study. No such feeling struck me,
nothing but the smell of must, damp sheets, decaying paperback books, and that
awful generalized atmosphere of a property that is unused and uncared for.

I went downstairs again. Anne Hayden smiled thinly. 'Any luck?'

'I'm afraid not.'

She nodded her head thoughtfully, then added, 'What exactly were you looking
for? A journal?'

'Your father must have kept one. A desk diary, each year. I can't see them.'

'I don't think I've ever seen such a thing,' she said soberly, still
thoughtful. 'Which is odd, I grant you.'

'Did he ever talk about his work to you?' I sat on the edge of an armchair.
Anne Hayden crossed her legs and placed her magazine down beside her. 'Some
nonsense about extinct animals living in deeper woodlands. Boars, wolves, wild
bear . . .' She smiled again. 'I think he believed it.'

'So did my father,' I pointed out. 'But my father's journal has been torn.
Whole pages missing. I just wondered if they might have been concealed here.
What happened to any letters that were sent after your father's disappearance?'

The cupboard was as packed as the cupboard upstairs, with journals still in
their envelopes, and faculty newspapers still rolled tight and bound with tape.
'I keep them. God knows why. Perhaps I'll take them to the college later this
week. There seems little point. These are the letters

Beside the journals was a stack nearly a yard high of private correspondence,
all the letters neatly opened, and read, no doubt, by the grieving daughter.
'There may be something from your father there. I really can't remember.' She
reached in and eased out the pile of mail, thrust it into my arms. I staggered
back to the sitting-room and for an hour checked the handwriting of each letter.
There was nothing. My back ached with sitting still for so long, and the smell
of dust and mould was making me feel sick.

There was nothing I could do. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked loudly in
the heavy silence of that room, and I began to feel I was overstaying my
welcome. I passed Anne Hayden a sheet of writing, of inconsequential nature,
from an earlier diary of my father's. 'The handwriting is reasonably
distinctive. If you should discover any loose sheets, or journals ... I would be
very much obliged.'

'I should be glad to oblige, Mister Huxley.' She took me to the front door.
It was still raining outside, and she helped me on with my heavy mackintosh.
Then she hesitated, staring at me peculiarly. 'Did you ever meet my father when
he visited?'

'I was very young. I remember him more from the mid-thirties, but he never
spoke to me, or my brother. He and my father would meet, and immediately go out
into the woodland, seeking those mythical beasts . . .'

'It was the same for me,' I said gently. 'My mother died of heartbreak; my
brother and I were cut off from his world. My own father's world, I mean.'

'So perhaps we have both been losers.'

I smiled. 'You more than I, I think. If you would like to visit Oak
Lodge,
and see the journal, the place -'

She shook her head quickly. 'I'm not sure I dare, Mr Huxley. Thank you all
the same. It's just that ... I wonder, from what you say . . .'

She could hardly speak. In the gloom of the hallway, with the rain a
monotonous beat against the stippled window, high above the door, she seemed to
burn with anxiety, her eyes wide, now, behind the glasses.

'It's just what?' I prompted, and almost without thinking, without pause, she
said, 'Is he in the wood?'

Taken aback for a moment, I realized what she meant. 'It's possible,' I said.
What could I tell her? What should I say about my belief that within the
woodland edge, in the heartwoods themselves, was a place whose immensity was
beyond simple credence? 'Anything is possible.'

I left Oxford, frustrated, filthy, and very tired. The journey home could not
have been worse, with one train cancelled, and a traffic jam outside Witney that
held my bus up for over half an hour. Mercifully, the rain passed away, though
the sky was lowering, threatening, and distinctly wintry, something I did not
wish to see in early summer.

It was six in the evening before I got back to Oak Lodge, and I knew at once
that I had a visitor: the back door was wide open, and a light was on in the
study. I hastened my step, but paused by the door, looking nervously around in
case the trigger-happy cavalier, or a mythago of like violence, might be lurking
nearby. But it had to be Guiwenneth. The door had been forced open, the paint
around the handle scarred and pitted where the shaft of her spear had repeatedly
struck. Inside there was a hint of the smell I associated with her, sharp,
pungent. She would obviously need to bath a lot more often.

I called her name, walking carefully from room to room. She was not in the
study, but I left the light on. Movement upstairs startled me, and I walked to
the hallway. 'Guiwenneth?'

'You catch me snooping, I'm afraid,' came Harry Keeton's voice, and he
appeared at the top of the stairs, looking embarrassed, smiling to cover his
guilt. 'I'm so sorry. But the door
was
open.'

'I thought it was someone else,' I said. 'There's nothing much worth seeing.'

He came down the stairs and I led him back to the sitting-room. 'Was there
anybody here when you came in?'

We straightened the room, then sat down at the dining table. It was chilly,
but I decided against laying a fire. Keeton relaxed; the burn mark on his lower
face had flushed considerably with his embarrassment, but it became paler and
less noticeable, although he nervously covered his jaw with his left hand as he
spoke. He seemed tired, I thought, not as bright, or as perky as when we had met
at Mucklestone Field. He was wearing civilian clothes, which were very creased.
When he sat down at the table I could see that he wore a hip holster and pistol
on his belt.

'I developed the photographs I took on that flight, a few days back.' He drew
out a rolled package from his pocket, straightened it and opened the top, taking
out several magazine-sized prints. I had almost forgotten that part of the
process, the monitoring and photographing of the land below. 'After that storm
we seemed to encounter I didn't expect anything to show up, but I was wrong.'

There was a haunted look to him, now, as he pushed the prints across to me.
'I use a high precision, good spying camera. High grain Kodak film; I've been
able to enlarge quite a bit . . .'

He watched me as I stared at the foggy, occasionally blurred, and
occasionally ultra-sharp scenes of the mythago wood.

'A building,' I said unnecessarily, and Harry Keeton added, 'There's an
enlargement . . .'

Increasingly blurred, the next sheet showed a close-up of the building: an
edifice and tower, rising from a break in the tree-structure of the forest,
where a number of figures clustered. No detail was observable, beyond the fact
of their humanness: white and grey shapes, suggestive of both male and female,
caught in the act of walking about the tower; two shapes crouched, as if
climbing the crumbling structure itself.

'Probably built in the middle ages,' Keeton said thoughtfully. 'The wood grew
across the access roadway, and the place got cut off . . .'

Less romantic, but far more likely, was that the structure was a Victorian
folly, something built more for whim than good reason. But follies had usually
been constructed on high hills: tall structures, from whose upper reaches the
eccentric, rich, or just plain bored owner could observe distances further than
county borders.

If this place, the place we observed on the photograph,
was
a folly,
then it was peculiarly inept.

I turned to the next print. This showed the image of a river winding through
the densely packed trees; its course meandered, the tree line broken in an
aerial reflection of the pathway. At two points, out of focus, the water
gleamed, and the river looked wide. This was the
stickle-brookl
I could
hardly believe what I was seeing. 'I've enlarged the river parts as well,'
Keeton said softly, and when I turned to those prints I realized that I could
see more mythagos.

Wading across the sticklebrook!

The final photograph was in its way the most dramatic of them all. It showed
only woodland. Only? It showed something more, and I was unwilling, at the time,
even to guess at the nature of the forces and structures I could see. What had
happened, Keeton explained, was that the negative was underexposed. That simple
mistake, caused for no reason he could understand, had captured the winding
tendrils of energy arising from across the great span of the woodland. They were
eerie, suggestive, tentative' ... I counted twenty of them, like tornadoes, but
thinner, knotted and twisted as they probed up from the hidden land below. The
nearer vortices were clearly reaching toward the plane, to encompass the
unwelcome vehicle ... to reject it.

'I know what sort of wood it is now,' he said, and I glanced at him,
surprised at his words. He was watching me. The expression in his eyes was akin
to triumph, but tinged, perhaps, with terror. The burn on his face was flushed,
and his lip, in the corner that had been burned, seemed pinched, giving his face
a lopsided look. He leaned forward, hands spread palm-flat on the table.

'I've been searching for such a place since the war ended,' he went on. 'In a
few days I'd have realized the nature of Ryhope Wood. I'd already heard stories
of a haunted wood in the area . . . that's why I've been looking in the county.'

'A haunted wood?'

'A ghost wood,' he said quickly. 'There was one in France. It was where I was
shot down. It didn't have the same gloomy aspect, but it was the same.'

'I'd blanked it out of my mind. I've blanked a lot out . . ."

'But you remember now.'

'Yes. We were close to the Belgian border. I flew on a lot of missions there,
mostly dropping supplies to the resistance. I was flying one dusk when the plane
was thrown about in the air. Like a tremendous thermal.' He glanced at me. 'You
know the sort of thing.'

I nodded my agreement. He went on, 'I couldn't fly over that wood, try as I
might. It was quite small. I banked and tried again. The same effect of light on
the wings, like the other day. Light streaming from the wings, over the cockpit.
And again, tossed about like a leaf. There were faces down below. They looked as
if they were floating in the foliage. Like ghosts, like clouds. Tenuous. You
know what ghosts are supposed to be like. They looked like clouds, caught in the
tree tops, blowing and shifting . . . but those faces!'

'So you weren't shot down at all,' I said, but he nodded. 'Oh yes. Certainly,
the plane was hit. I always say a sniper because . . . well, it's the only
explanation I have.' He looked down at his hands. 'One shot, one strike, and the
plane went down into that woodland like a stone. I got out, so did John
Shackleford. Out of the wreckage. We were damned lucky ... for a while . . .'

'And then?'

He glanced up sharply, suspiciously. 'And then . . . blank. I got out of the
wood. I was wandering around farmland when a German patrol got me. I spent the
rest of the war behind barbed wire.'

'Did you see anything in the wood? While you were wandering.'

He hesitated before answering, and there was an edge of irritation to his
voice. 'As I said, old boy. Blank.'