Mythago Wood - 1 (7 page)

Quite suddenly the ground went out from under me. I fell heavily into a
depression in the ground, to be steadied, as I tumbled, by Christian, who moved
a bramble covering across us and put a finger to his lips. I could barely make
him out in this dark hidey hole, but I heard the sound of the Urscumug die away,
and queried what was happening.

'Has it moved off?'

'Almost certainly not,' said Christian. 'It's waiting, listening. It's been
pursuing me for two days, out of the deep zones of the forest. It won't let up
until I'm gone.'

'But why, Chris? Why is it trying to kill you?'

'It's the old man's mythago,' he said. 'He brought it into being in the heart
woods, but it was weak and trapped until I came along and gave it more power to
draw on. But it was the old man's mythago, and he shaped it slightly from his
own mind, his own ego. Oh God, Steve, how he must have hated, and hated
us,
to
have imposed such terror on to the thing.'

'And Guiwenneth . . .' I said.

'Yes . . . Guiwenneth . . .' Christian echoed, speaking softly now. 'He'll
revenge himself on me for that. If I give him half a chance.'

He stretched up to peer through the bramble covering. I could hear a distant,
restless movement, and thought I caught the sound of some animal grumbling deep
in its throat.

'I thought he'd failed to create the primary mythago.'

Christian said, 'He died believing that. What would he have done, I wonder,
if he'd seen how successful he'd been.' He crouched back down in the ditch.
'It's like a boar. Part boar, part man, elements of other beasts from the
wildwood. It walks upright, but can run like the wind. It paints its face white
in the semblance of a human face. Whatever age it lived in, one thing's for
sure, it lived a long time before man as
we
understand "man"
existed; this thing comes from a time when man and nature were so close that
they were indistinguishable.'

He touched me, then, on the arm; a hesitant touch, as if he were half afraid
to make this contact with one from whom he had grown so distant.

'When you run,' he said, 'run for the edge. Don't stop. And when you get out
of the wood, don't come back. There is no way out for me, now. I'm trapped in
this wood by something in my own mind as surely as if I were a mythago myself.
Don't come back here, Steve. Not for a long, long time.'

'Chris -' I began, but too late. He had thrown back the covering of the hole
and was running from me. Moments later the most enormous shape passed overhead,
one huge, black foot landing just inches from my frozen body. It passed by in a
split second. But as I scrambled from the hole and began to run I glanced back
and the creature, hearing me, glanced back too; and for that instant of mutual
contemplation, as we both moved apart in the forest, I saw the face that had
been painted across the blackened features of the boar.

The Urscumug opened its mouth to roar, and my father seemed to leer at me.

The Wild Hunters

One morning, in early spring, I found a brace of hare hanging from one of the
pothooks in the kitchen; below them, scratched in the yellow paintwork on the
wall, was the letter 'C'. The gift was repeated about two weeks later, but then
nothing, and the months passed.

I had not been back to the wood.

Over the long winter I had read my father's diary ten times if I had read it
once, steeping myself in the mystery of his life as much as he had steeped
himself in the mystery of his own unconscious links with the primeval woodland.
I found, in his erratic recordings, much that told of his sense of danger, of
what - just once - he called 'ego's mythological ideal', the involvement of the
creator's mind which he feared would influence the shape and behaviour of the
mythago forms. He had known of the danger, then, but I wonder if Christian had
fully comprehended this most subtle of the occult processes occurring in the
forest. From the darkness and pain of my father's mind a single thread had
emerged in the fashioning of a girl in a green tunic, dooming her to a
helplessness in the forest that was contrary to her natural form. But if she
were to emerge again, it would be with Christian's mind controlling her, and
Christian had no such preconceived ideas about a woman's strength or weakness.

It would not be the same encounter.

One incident, written briefly and in great haste, brought back a memory of a
long, summer's day when I had been nine or ten years old. It involved a wooden
ship, which Chris had fashioned from a piece of fallen beech, and which I had
painted. The ship, the stream we called the sticklebrook, and a raging passage
through the woodland below the garden. Innocent, childish fun, and all the time
my father had been a sombre, dark shape, observing us from the window of his
study.

The day had begun well, a bright, fresh dawn, and I had awoken to the sight
of Chris, crouched in the branches of the beech tree outside my room. I crawled
through the window in my pyjamas, and we sat there, in our secret camp, and
watched the distant activity of the farmer who managed the land hereabouts.
Somewhere else in the house there was movement, and I imagined that the cleaning
lady had arrived early, to benefit from this fine summer's day.

Chris had the piece of wood, already shaped into the hull of a small boat. We
discussed our plans for the epic journey by river, then scampered back into the
house, dressed, snatched breakfast from the hands of the sleepy figure of our
mother, and went out into the workshed. A mast was soon shaped and drilled into
the hull. I layered red paint on to the planking, and daubed our initials, one
set on either side of the mast. A paper sail, some token rigging, and the great
vessel was ready.

We ran from the yard, skirting the dense, silent woodland, until we found the
stream where the launching of the vessel would take place.

It was late July, I remember, hot and still. The brook was low, the banks
steep and dry, and littered with sheep droppings. The water was slightly green
where algal life was growing from the stones and mud below. But the flow was
strong, still, and the brook wound across the fields, between lightning-blasted
trees, into denser undergrowth, and finally below a ruined gate. This gate was
much overgrown with weed, bramble and shrubby tree life. It had been placed
across the stream by the farmer Alphonse Jeffries to stop 'urchins' such as
Chris and myself from floundering into the deeper waters of the pool beyond,
where the brook widened and became more aggressive.

But the gate was rotten, and there was a clear gap below it, where the ship
of our dreams would pass quite easily.

With great ceremony, Chris placed the model on the waters. 'God speed to all
who sail in her!' he said solemnly, and I added, 'May you come through your
great adventure safely. God speed the HMS
Voyager!'
(Our name, suitably
dramatic, was pinched from our favourite boy's comic of the day.)

Chris let the vessel go. It bobbed, spun and whirled away from us, looking
uncomfortable on the water. I felt disappointed that the boat didn't sail like
the real thing, leaning slightly to the side, rising and falling on the swell.
But it was exciting to watch the tiny ship go spinning towards the woodland. And
at last, before vanishing beyond the gate, it
did
sit true upon the
ocean, and the mast seemed to duck as it passed the barrier and was swept from
our sight.

Beyond this farmland we came to the northern edge of the oak wood, and there
the sticklebrook emerged, a wider shallower stream.

We sat down to await our ship, to welcome it home.

In my imagination, during that long afternoon as we played in the sun and
earnestly scanned the darkness of the woods for some sign of our vessel, the
tiny ship encountered all manner of strange beasts, rapids, and whirlpools. I
could see it fighting valiantly against stormy seas, outrunning otters and water
rats that loomed high above its gunwales. The mind's journey was what that
voyage was all about, the images of drama that the simple boat-trip inspired.

How I would have loved to see it come bobbing out along the sticklebrook.
What discussions we might have had about its course, its journey, its narrow
escapes!

But the ship did not appear. We had to face the hard reality that somewhere
in the dark, dense woodland, the model had snagged on a branch and become stuck,
there to remain, rotting into the earth again.

Disappointed, we made our way home at dusk. The school holidays had begun
with a disaster, but the ship was soon forgotten.

Then, six weeks later, shortly before the long car and train journey back to
school, Christian and I returned to the northern spread of the woods, this time
walking our Aunt's two Springer spaniels. Aunt Edie was such a trial that we
would welcome any excuse to leave the house, even when the day was as overcast
and damp as that Friday in September.

We raced along the bank of the stream, the dogs yapping ferociously,
delighted with this sudden sprint. At last Christian gained on the spinning
vessel and reached out across the water, snaring our tiny model.

He shook off the water and held it high, his face bright with pleasure.
Panting, I arrived beside him and took the model from him. The sail was intact,
the initials still there. The little object of our dreams looked exactly as when
we had launched it.

'Stuck, I guess, and released when the waters rose,' said Chris, and what
other explanation could there have been?

And yet, that very night, my father had written this in his diary:

Even in the more peripheral zones of the forest, time is distorted to a
degree. It is as I suspected. The aura produced by the primal woodland has a
pronounced effect upon the nature of dimensions. In a way, the boys have
conducted an experiment for me, by releasing their model ship on to the brook
that flows - or so I believe - around the edge of the woodland. It has taken six
weeks to traverse the outer zones, a distance, in real terms, of no more than a
mile. Six weeks! Deeper in the wood, if the expansion of time and space
increases - which Wynne-Jones suspects - who can tell what bizarre landscapes
are to be found?