Mythago Wood - 1 (4 page)

By the afternoon I had resigned myself to a period of solitary living, for
wherever Christian had gone (and I had a fairly good idea) he had said clearly
that he would be gone for some time. There was a lot to do about the house and
the yard, and there seemed no better way to spend my time than in beginning to
rebuild the personality of Oak Lodge. I made a list of essential repairs, and
the following day walked into the nearest town to order what materials I could,
mostly wood and paint, which I found in reasonable supply.

I renewed my acquaintance with the Ryhope family, and with many of the local
families with whom I had once been friendly. I terminated the services of the
part-time cook; I could look after myself quite well enough.

And at last I visited the cemetery; a single, brief visit, coldly
accomplished.

The month of August turned to September, and I noticed a definite crispness
in the air by evening, and early in the morning. It was a season I loved, the
turn from summer to autumn, although it bore with it associations of return to
school after the long holiday, a memory I didn't cherish.

I soon grew used to being on my own in the house, and although I took long
walks around the deep woodlands, watching the road and the railway track for
Christian's return, I had ceased to feel anxious about him by the end of my
first week home, and had settled comfortably into a daily routine of building in
the yard, painting the exterior woodwork of the house ready for the onslaught of
winter, and digging over the large, untended garden.

It was during the evening of my eleventh day at home that this domestic
routine was disturbed by a circumstance of such peculiarity that afterwards I
could not sleep for thinking about it.

I had been in the town of Hobbhurst for most of the afternoon, and after a
light evening meal was sitting reading the newspaper; towards nine o'clock, as I
began to feel ready for an evening stroll, I thought I heard a dog, not so much
barking as howling. My first thought was that Christian was coming back, my
second that there were no dogs in this immediate area at all.

I went out into the yard; it was after dusk, but still quite bright, although
the oakwoods were melded together into a grey-green blur. I called for
Christian, but there was no response. I was about to return to my paper when a
man stepped out of the distant woodland, and began to trot towards me. He was
holding on a short, leather leash the most enormous hound I have ever seen.

At the gate to our private grounds he stopped, and the dog began to growl; it
placed its forepaws on the fence, and in so doing rose almost to the height of
its master. I felt nervous at once, keeping my attention balanced between the
gaping, panting mouth of that dark beast, and the strange man who held it in
check.

It was difficult to make him out clearly, for his face was painted with dark
patterns and his moustaches drooped to well below his chin; his hair was
plastered thickly about his scalp; he wore a dark woollen shirt, with a leather
jerkin over the top, and tight, check-patterned breeches that reached to just
below his knees. When he stepped cautiously through the gate I could see his
rough and ready sandals. Across his shoulder he carried a crude-looking bow, and
a bundle of arrows, held together with a simple thong and tied to his belt. Like
Christian, he bore a staff.

The man spoke to me, and although I felt familiar with the words, they meant
nothing. I didn't know what to do, so I shook my head and said that I didn't
understand. The man hesitated just a moment before repeating what he had said,
this time with a distinct edge of anger in his voice. And he started to walk
towards me, tugging at the hound to prevent it straining at the leash. The light
was draining from the sky, and he seemed to grow in stature in the greyness as
he approached. The beast watched me, hungrily.

'What do you want?' I called, and tried to sound firm when I would rather
have run inside the house. The man was ten paces away from me. He stopped, spoke
again, and this time made eating motions with the hand that held his staff.
Now
I understood.

I nodded vigorously. 'Wait here,' I said, and went back to the house to fetch
the cold joint of pork that was to last me four more days. It was not large, but
it seemed an hospitable thing to do. I took the meat, half a granary loaf, and a
jug of bottled beer out into the yard. The stranger was crouched now, the hound
lying down beside him, rather reluctantly, it seemed to me. As I tried to
approach them, the dog growled, then barked in a way that set my heart racing
and nearly made me drop my gifts. The man shouted at the beast, and said
something to me. I placed the food where I stood and backed away. The gruesome
pair approached and again squatted down to eat.

As he picked up the joint I saw the scars on his arm, running down and across
the bunched muscles. I also smelled him, a raw, rancid odour, sweat and urine
mixed with the fetid aroma of rotting meat. I felt sick, but held my ground
watching as the stranger tore at the pork with his teeth, swallowing hard and
fast. The hound watched me.

After a few minutes the man stopped eating, looked at me, and with his gaze
fixed on mine, almost challenging me to react, passed the rest of the meat to
the dog, which growled loudly and snapped at the joint. The hound chewed,
cracked and gulped the entire piece of pork in less than four minutes, while the
stranger cautiously - and without much apparent pleasure - drank beer, and
chewed on a large mouthful of bread.

Finally this bizarre feast was over. The man rose to his feet and jerked the
hound away from where it was licking the ground noisily. He said a word I
intuitively recognized as 'thank you'. He was about to turn when the hound
scented something; it uttered first a high-pitched keen, and then a raucous
bark, and snatched itself away from its master's restraining grip, racing across
the yard to a spot between the ramshackle chicken houses. Here it sniffed and
scratched until the man reached it, grabbed the leather leash, and shouted
angrily and lengthily at his charge. The hound moved with him, padding silently
and monstrously into the gloom beyond the yard. They ran at full speed around
the edge of the woodland, towards the farmlands around the village of Grimley,
and that was the last I saw of them.

In the morning the place where the man and beast had rested
still
smelled
rank. I skirted the area quickly as I walked to the woods and found the place
where my strange visitors had emerged from the trees; it was trampled and
broken, and I followed the line of their passage for some yards into the shade
before stopping and turning back.

Where on earth had they come from? Had the war had such an effect on men in
England that some had returned to the wild, using bow and arrow and hunting dog
for survival?

Not until midday did I think to look between the chicken huts, at the ground
so deeply scored by that brief moment's digging. What had the beast scented, I
wondered, and a sudden chill clawed at my heart. I left the place at a run,
unwilling, for the moment, to confirm my worst fears.

How I knew I cannot say: intuition, or perhaps something that my subconscious
had detected in Christian's words and mannerisms the week or so before, during
our brief encounter. In any event, late in the afternoon that same day I took a
spade to the chicken huts, and within a few minutes of digging had proved my
instinct right.

It took me half an hour of sitting on the back doorstep of the house, staring
across the yard at the grave, to find the courage to uncover the woman's body
totally. I was dizzy, slightly sick, but most of all I was shaking; an
uncontrollable, unwelcome shaking of arms and legs, so pronounced that I could
hardly pull on a pair of gloves. But eventually I knelt by the hole and brushed
the rest of the dirt from the corpse.

Christian had buried her three feet deep, face down; her hair was long and
red; her body was still clad in a strange green garment, a patterned tunic that
was laced at the sides and, though it was crushed up almost to her waist now,
would have reached to her calves. A staff was buried with her. I turned the
head, holding my breath against the almost intolerable smell of putrefaction,
and with a little effort could gaze upon the withering face. I saw then how she
had died, for the head and stump of the arrow were still embedded in her eye.
Had Christian tried to withdraw the weapon and succeeded only in breaking it?
There was enough of the shaft left for me to notice that it had the same carved
markings as the arrow in my father's study.

Poor Guiwenneth, I thought, and let the corpse drop back to its resting
place. I filled in the dirt again. When I reached the house I was cold with
sweat, and in no doubt that I was about to be violently sick.

Two days later, when I came down in the morning, I found the kitchen littered
with Christian's clothes and effects, the floor covered with mud and leaf
litter. I crept upstairs to his room and stared at his semi-naked body: he was
belly down on the bed, face turned towards me, sleeping soundly and noisily, and
I imagined that he was sleeping enough for a week. The state of his body,
though, gave me cause for concern. He was scratched and scarred from neck to
ankle, filthy, and malodorous to an extreme. His hair was matted. And yet, about
him there was something hardened and strong, a tangible physical change from the
hollow-faced, rather skeletal young man who had greeted me nearly two weeks
before.

He slept for most of the day, emerging at six in the evening wearing a
loose-fitting grey shirt and flannels, torn off just above the knee. He had
half-heartedly washed his face, but still reeked of sweat and vegetation, as if
he had spent the days away buried in compost.

I fed him, and he drank the entire contents of a pot of tea as I sat watching
him; he kept darting glances at me, suspicious little looks as if he were
nervous of some sudden move or surprise attack upon him. The muscles of his arms
and wrists were pronounced. This was almost a different man.

'Where have you been, Chris?' I asked after a while, and was not at all
surprised when he answered, 'In the woods. Deep in the woods.' He stuffed more
meat into his mouth and chewed noisily. As he swallowed he found a moment to
say, 'I'm quite fit. Bruised and scratched by the damned brambles, but quite
fit.'

In the woods. Deep in the woods. What in heaven's name could he have been
doing there? As I watched him wolf down his food I saw again the stranger,
crouching like an animal in my yard, chewing on meat as if he were some wild
beast. Christian reminded me of that man. There was the same air of the
primitive about him.

'You need a bath rather badly,' I said, and he grinned and made a sound of
affirmation. I went on, 'What have you been doing? In the woods. Have you been
camping?'

He swallowed noisily, and drank half a cup of tea before shaking his head. 'I
have a camp there, but I've been searching, walking as deep as I could get. But
I still can't get beyond . . .' He broke off and glanced at me, a questioning
look in his eyes. 'Did you read the old man's notebook?'

I said that I hadn't. In truth, I had been so surprised by his abrupt
departure, and so committed to getting the house back into some sort of shape,
that I had forgotten all about father's notes on his work. And even as I said
this I wondered if the truth of the matter was that I had put father, his work
and his notes, as far from my mind as possible, as if they were spectres whose
haunting would reduce my resolve to go forward.

Christian wiped his hand across his mouth and stared at his empty plate. He
suddenly sniffed at himself and laughed.

'By God, I do stink. You'd better boil me up some water, Steve. I'll wash
right now.'

But I didn't move. Instead I stared across the wooden table at him; he caught
my gaze and frowned. 'What is it? What's on your mind?'

'I found her, Chris. I found her body. Guiwenneth. I found where you buried
her.'

Suddenly I realized that Christian was crying, his gaze not wavering from my
own, but moistened now by the tears that coursed through the remaining grime on
his face. And yet he made no sound, and his face never changed its expression
from that of bland, almost blind contemplation.

'Who shot her, Chris?' I asked quietly. 'Did you?'

'Not me,' he said, and with the words his tears stopped, and his gaze dropped
to the table. 'She was shot by a mythago. There was nothing I could do about
it.'

Mythago? The meaning was alien to me, although I recognized the word from the
scrap of my father's notebook that I carried. I queried it and Chris rose from
the table, but rested his hands upon it as he watched me. 'A mythago,' he
repeated. 'It's still in the woods . . . they all are. That's where I've been,
seeking among them. I tried to save her, Steve. She was alive when I found her,
and she might have stayed alive, but I brought her out of the woods . . .in a
way, I did kill her. I took her away from the vortex, and she died quite
quickly. I panicked, then. I didn't know what to do. I buried her because it
seemed the easiest way out . . .'

'Did you tell the police? Did you report her death?'

Christian smiled, but it was not with any morbid humour. It was a knowing
smile, a response to some secret that he had not so far shared; and yet the
gesture was merely a defence, for it faded rapidly. 'Not necessary, Steve ...
the police would not have been interested.'

I rose angrily from the table. It seemed to me that Christian was behaving,
and had behaved, with appalling irresponsibility. 'Her family, Chris . . . her
parents! They have a right to know.'

And Christian laughed.

I felt the blood rise in my face. 'I don't see anything to laugh at.'

He sobered instantly, looked at me almost abashed. 'You're right. I'm sorry.
You don't understand, and it's time you did. Steve, she had no parents because
she had no life, no real life. She's lived a thousand times, and she's never
lived at all. But I still fell in love with her . . . and I shall find her again
in the woods; she's in there somewhere . . .'

Had he gone mad? His words were the unreasoned babblings of one insane, and
yet something about his eyes, something about his demeanour, told me that it was
not so much insanity as obsession. But obsession with what?

'You
must
read the old man's notes, Steve. Don't put it off any
longer. They will tell you about the wood, about what's going on in there. I
mean it. I'm neither mad nor callous. I'm just trapped, and before I go away
again, I'd like you to know why, and how, and where I'm going. Perhaps you'll be
able to help me. Who knows? Read the book. And then we'll talk. And when you
know what our dear departed father managed to do, then I'm afraid I shall have
to take my leave of you again.'