The Bone Forest by Robert Holdstock
McCreedy was completely deflated. The rest of us could hardly hide our mirth, but that was so unfair. We had all lost.
When McCreedy had gone—back to his small office to recover from his disappointment—I asked the technician what Martin had said.
“For a while we were groping our way along as if it was in the deep of night, but eventually we sat down without saying a word, completely exhausted. Then we suddenly felt … frightened, wondering if we were going to die, there where we had fallen.”
I looked at Martin, who was still standing at the edge of the park, staring into nowhere. “Beautiful,” I said.
“Page 233,” she said. “Teach Yourself Japanese. Check it up.”
One day, when I arrived a little early for my shift, I found McCreedy seated in his small office, holding an alcohol swab to his lower left arm. An ampoule of Chronon lay empty on his desk. Immediately I understood why he had begun to look so old these last two years. Immediately the true dedication of the man to his own beliefs was apparent. Immediately his hypocrisy was crystal clear—expect nothing, he had said, and here he was, already modifying his own life on the basis of what he believed would occur—McCreedy, searching for a place in the kingdom of the gods, wearing his age without regret or apprehension. Was he oblivious of the fact that, having never been screened against disease, his destiny was a natural death in an unnatural period of time? I didn’t ask. His dreams were his reality now, and I couldn’t help but remember Josephine’s parting words to me.
McCreedy just stared at me and I stared back. I left his office without saying a word.
The changes began shortly afterward. An initial report of slight increase in girth of the crowns of their heads was followed rapidly by bizarre growth patterns in both subjects. Their heads grew to almost twice their original volumes, the increase being not in the brain but the amount of fluid in which the brain was cushioned. Their eyes became sunken and tiny. Martin’s arms lengthened and the fingers stretched from his hands like tendrils, flexing and touching all that they contacted, moving almost independently.
His height increased and he began to walk with an exaggerated stoop. He found Yvonne again.
The changes that Yvonne had experienced were not the same. Her gross flabbiness became packed with fat. She became huge, a mound of flesh, and her limbs, by contrast with Martin’s, shrank until they seemed mere protrusions from the bulk of her torso. Her hair fell out and the great shining dome of her head shook constantly. She remained on her bed, slightly propped up by pillows so that her tiny eyes could continue to watch the monitor. Martin fed her and cared for her, kept her covered with blankets now that she could wear no clothes.
They regained an element of their earlier sexual ability; there was a certain revulsion in watching the re-consummation of their life together, but equally there was a certain fascination about the event. We watched silently, and in great discomfort, and drew no immediate conclusions.
“We are seeing the beginning of the metamorphosis,” said McCreedy eventually. He was consumed by his dreams, and yet, as the days passed and the features of the subjects became more bizarre, and their copulation became more frequent and more incomprehensible, so we all began to wonder what was to be the end result.
The monitors filled our files with information, the rocketing, fluctuating chemical levels, the unprecedented hormonal changes, the degradation and rebuilding of body parts.
In February of ’02, just seven years after the experiment had begun, Martin and Yvonne copulated for the last time, Yvonne not moving from her position, almost flowing across her bed, bearing the weight of her husband. Her great head turned to stare at the monitor and then turned back and looked at the ceiling. Martin slipped off her and crouched by her, staring into the distance. They began to tremble.
The trembling, a violent shaking of their entire bodies, persisted through the day.
McCreedy was bright eyed and full of excitement. “It’s happening,” he said. “It may take days, but it’s happening, the change, the final metamorphosis.”
He made copious notes, and in the environment the trembling persisted, a continuous whole-body muscular spasm.
After a few hours their heartbeats began to slow and the electrical output from their brains began to lessen. By evening the hearts had stopped and the brains showed no activity at all.
The monitor screens became quiet, all except one small panel, a red panel that lighted up with black words on red background. “Subjects are dead.”
We entered the environment and approached the bodies. McCreedy stared down at the corpses for a moment. He was shaking his head. “I can’t believe this,” he said finally, thoughtfully. “Keep a brain activity watch … it may be that the whole metabolic rate has slowed to a phenomenally low level. We may be witnessing some sort of stasis prior to a major change.”
I said, “Ray—there will be no change. The subjects are dead. Completely dead.”
“Nonsense,” snapped McCreedy. “To take that attitude at this stage would be disastrous.” He began to examine the bodies, apparently oblivious of the fact that he might be contracting or spreading disease.
I left the environment and sat, for a while, among the silent technicians who watched McCreedy on the monitors. I felt the quietness, the emptiness of the place. I stared at the white walls and the meticulously clean equipment and benches. The atmosphere was heavy, dull. One corner of the laboratory was filled with neatly stacked printouts representing the last fifty years of the subjects’ lives, and staring at that pile of information I realised that nowhere in its bulk could I put my finger on a single statement of feeling, of awareness. Even the sheets on which were recorded the last living moments of Martin and Yvonne were bare, sterile accounts of failing physiology and murmurings and alpha waves; there would be no account of what they thought, what they felt as death unfurled its protective wings about them.
We had concerned ourselves with two lives and had studied everything but life itself. It had all been wasted. In the end, bizarre hormonal changes had captured our attention with their effects upon the physical forms of the two subjects, and we had sunk without trace into chemical formulae and physical law. Perhaps the inevitability of such a conclusion should have been a personal vindication, but I felt a deep sense of guilt as I left the Institute, a powerful sense of failure.
I returned five days later to collect my few belongings. I visited the laboratory and was surprised to find everything still in operation, although there was no one there.
The sealed door to the environment was open and I called through. There was a peculiar smell in the air.
“Who’s there?”
It was McCreedy’s voice. I walked to a monitor screen and stared at him. He stared towards the camera, obviously not seeing me. “Who’s that? Lipman?”
“Yes.”
“You couldn’t see it through, eh? Well … I can’t say I blame you. But I don’t give up so easily.”
He returned to the subjects, both of which were now in a bad state of decomposition. Yvonne’s body had liquefied quite phenomenally and the distended, distorted bones protruded through stretched skin.
“Something will happen,” he shouted. “This is the most abnormal decomposition I have ever seen.”
His sleeves were rolled up and a thick, green slime coated his arms—he was feeling around among the bloated viscera of the dead woman, and the body seemed to writhe beneath his touch.
I turned away. Behind me McCreedy shouted, “Look—Lipman, look!”
I closed the door against his madness.
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Also By Robert Holds
Mythago Wood
1. Mythago Wood (1984)
2. Lavondyss (1988)
3. The Bone Forest (1991)
4. The Hollowing (1992)
5. Merlin's Wood (1994)
6. Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn (1997)
7. Avilion (2008)
The Merlin Codex
1. Celtika (2001)
2. The Iron Grail (2002)
3. The Broken Kings (2006)
Novels
Eye Among the Blind (1976)
Earthwind (1977)
Necromancer (1978)
Where Time Winds Blow (1981)
The Emerald Forest (1985)
Ancient Echoes (1986)
The Fetch (1991)
Night Hunter (writing as Robert Faulcon)
The Stalking (1983)
The Talisman (1983)
The Ghost Dance (1983)
The Shrine (1984)
The Hexing (1984)
The Labyrinth (1987)
Raven (as Richard Kirk, with Angus Wells)
Swordsmistress of Chaos (1978)
A Time of Ghosts (1978)
The Frozen God (1978)
Lords of the Shadows (1979)
A Time of Dying (1979)
Writing As Robert Black
Legend of the Werewolf (1976)
The Satanists (1977)
Berserker Trilogy (writing as Chris Carlsen)
1. Shadow of the Wolf (1977)
2. The Bull Chief (1977)
3. The Horned Warrior (1979)
Collections
In the Valley of the Statues: And Other Stories (1982)
Robert Holdstock (1948 – 2009)
Robert Paul Holdstock was born in a remote corner of Kent, sharing his childhood years between the bleak Romney Marsh and the dense woodlands of the Kentish heartlands. He received an MSc in medical zoology and spent several years in the early 1970s in medical research before becoming a full-time writer in 1976. His first published story appeared in the New Worlds magazine in 1968 and for the early part of his career he wrote science fiction. However, it is with fantasy that he is most closely associated.
1984 saw the publication of Mythago Wood, winner of the BSFA and World Fantasy Awards for Best Novel, and widely regarded as one of the key texts of modern fantasy. It and the subsequent ‘mythago’ novels (including Lavondyss, which won the BSFA Award for Best Novel in 1988) cemented his reputation as the definitive portrayer of the wild wood. His interest in Celtic and Nordic mythology was a consistent theme throughout his fantasy and is most prominently reflected in the acclaimed Merlin Codex trilogy, consisting of Celtika, The Iron Grail and The Broken Kings, published between 2001 and 2007.
Among many other works, Holdstock co-wrote Tour of the Universe with Malcolm Edwards, for which rights were sold for a space shuttle simulation ride at the CN Tower in Toronto, and The Emerald Forest, based on John Boorman’s film of the same name. His story, ‘The Ragthorn’, written with friend and fellow author Garry Kilworth, won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella and the BSFA Award for Short Fiction.
Robert Holdstock died in November 2009, just four months after the publication of Avilion, the long-awaited, and sadly final, return to Ryhope Wood.
www.robertholdstock.com
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Robert Holdstock 1991
All rights reserved.
The right of Robert Holdstock to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11881 2
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.orionbooks.co.uk
Robert Holdstock, The Bone Forest