The Hollowing by Robert Holdstock
It was a cricket bat, six inches long. Richard was astonished. He accepted the gift, and was at once aware that the other man was pleased. His companions stood and drew back among the alders at the edge of the stream, pulling their capes about their slender frames. The hooded man beckoned to Richard, who followed him to the brook and along its dry bank.
A human shape, covered in leaves, lay on its side on a crude litter of poles and cross-woven twine. The body didn’t move. One of the caped figures brushed leaves from the face to expose greying-black hair over deathly white skin. A further brushing aside of leaves revealed an arm in splints and the curve of hips, unmistakably female.
When Richard looked more closely he could make out the dead body of Elizabeth Haylock.
Across the brook two further dark figures appeared among the trees, then ran quickly towards Ryhope Wood. The moustached man clapped his hands and said sharp words. Both language and gesture were clearly designed to communicate “She’s all yours now.”
Then he followed his friends, away from the stream and onto the grassy rise, where more hooded shapes rose from cover and joined the easy trot back to the wood. There were nine in all. Before he vanished from sight the leader turned, a silhouette against the brightening day. He raised both hands vertically, watching Richard and uttering a shrill, broken cry.
What had happened?
Richard pocketed the tiny cricket bat and leaned down over the woman’s corpse, nervous about touching it. The leaves on the litter by her face shifted, as if blown. A moment later she groaned and her eyes opened slightly, focusing painfully on the brook. Richard cleared the hair from her face and she turned to look at him. When she saw him she allowed herself a thin and pallid smile.
“Richard—am I out?” she whispered.
“Of the wood? Yes.”
“Thank God. Oh thank God…” She grimaced with pain. “I’m in a bad way. What happened to the Pathanan?”
Richard glanced at Ryhope Wood, thinking of the small figures. “Gone. Can you walk if I helped you?”
“Sorry—sprains in both ankles. Christ, I’m cold. Please get me warm. Please…”
She drifted into unconsciousness again, and mercifully remained so as Richard dragged the litter along the bridleway—he hadn’t wanted to leave her alone while he went for help—taking nearly an hour before he was able to unroll the damaged woman onto a blanket and haul her into the relative comfort of his sitting room. He called the doctor and made tea. Elizabeth revived again and allowed herself to be stripped and examined. Her ankles were bandaged and her arm placed in a better splint. She would go to the hospital for a proper cast the next day. Given painkillers, antibiotics, and strong tea, she began to feel human again.
The doctor, although curious about her clothing and general condition, did not question Richard too closely. And as soon as he had gone, Elizabeth appeared to relax. Richard helped her to the bath, where she soaked for an hour, unbothered by his presence as he sat on the toilet seat, helped wash her back, and waited for her to talk.
She was very thin—Richard remembered her as being quite robust—and her face was lined, her breasts badly bruised. She had shallow but extensive cuts on her legs, and Richard replaced the iodine that had now washed off. To compound her physical deterioration, she seemed mentally exhausted, distant and depressed, speaking in a slow, quite breathless whisper.
“What happened to you?” Richard asked after a while.
“The wrong sort of hero,” was all she would say. “It doesn’t matter. Don’t push me on it. The Pathanan found me and helped me, thank the Lord. I was just trying to get out—just trying to get away. I’ve had enough.” She lay back in the water, one hand gently touching the deepest bruising on her chest, her eyes closed.
“They were camped in Oak Lodge, coming right to the edge.” Hesitantly, she added, “I think they were looking for you. They were carrying a little cricket bat. It was a gift, either came from Helen or Alex—”
“They gave me the bat. Nothing else. Just the bat—and you. No message, no hint of anything else.”
Elizabeth sighed again. “Someone wants you back in the wood. But there’s nothing there now, nothing to go back to.”
Again Richard asked what had happened, and wearily the woman said, “It all went wrong. We lost too many, too much. Maybe if you’d come when we asked it wouldn’t have risen again. It overwhelmed us.” She opened her eyes slightly, frowning. “That wasn’t meant to sound like an accusation. Sorry. I can understand why you didn’t want to go back. The way I feel now—” She rubbed her face with her hands. “If this is how you felt, then it’s not surprising you hid from us.”
Confused, Richard leaned forward, his gaze on Elizabeth’s face as she breathed softly and soaked her aches away. Her words were coming out in a jumble—he didn’t understand “risen again,” or being “asked again.” Was she delirious?
“When was I asked back? I left the wood two months ago. I went back to London, couldn’t face the job I was in and came back to live here. I’ve not heard from any of you, from the Station, for two months.”
Elizabeth Haylock frowned from behind half-closed eyes. “Didn’t you get Helen’s note?”
“Helen’s note? No.”
“Damn. She said she left the note for you here. You were out.”
Even as she spoke, a memory of 1959 screamed at him, memory of a previous encounter with Helen on a rainy day, the woman running from the house, leaving behind a scrawled note, now lost.
“When was this?” Richard asked.
“About a year ago. Station time, that is. This will probably come as a shock, but you’ve been gone from Old Stone Hollow for nearly three years…”
He felt more alarmed than shocked. Three years to his two months—so much had happened, then, while he had been suffocating in isolation.
The note—could it have been the same one? He asked if Elizabeth knew what message Helen had brought him, and his mind raced as she said, “It was something Lytton had worked out—how to find the protogenomorph. Alex’s, of course. It’s most likely to react to you, so it would have been good to have you in the wood. Also—forgive me for gossiping—but Helen was missing you. You made quite a hit.” She became aware that Richard was very pale, very shocked, and sat up in the bath, using her good arm to draw a towel around her shoulders and over her breasts, perhaps self-conscious for the first time.
“Are you OK?” she asked.
“Yes. No! I don’t know what to say. Is Lytton alive? I saw him killed by a Jack.”
“I heard about that. It spat him out. He did some good work. Helen came to tell you about it…”
Confused, almost dizzy, Richard held his head in his hands and said, “I think I did get the note. It sounds like the same one. Only I got it eight years ago! My time. 1959, to be precise. Helen had short hair, right?”
“In 1959? No idea.”
“I meant when she brought the note, a year ago…”
“That’s right. She’d cropped it back after getting a tick infestation.”
Too much, too fast …
Lytton alive! An odd fury crept into Richard’s heart. He had spent weeks trying to forget the moment, the wonderful moment when he had seen what he believed to be his son. And the same painful memory was linked to the sight of Lytton’s murderous rage—the man had started to kill Alex before he’d realised the trick. He had wanted Alex out of the wood with such a passion that it had never been his intention to rescue the boy.
But when he said this to Elizabeth she simply shrugged. “Helen told it differently. He was killing the Jack, not Alex.”
Helen had made her own slow way back to the Station, and McCarthy and Lytton had turned up later. Although they had been tricked by the Jack, they had been close to where Alex was hiding, and it was when McCarthy had been submerged in the shadow world of the wood, unconscious and half-eaten by the wood, drifting in the flow of stored memory, quite bosky, that he had seen the inner shadow of Alex, th
“Help me up, please.”
Richard lent an arm and Elizabeth eased herself out of the bath. As he wrapped his towelling robe around her battered body, she said, “Eight years! Christ! She said she felt something was wrong. She must have gone through one hell of a hollowing—but then how the hell … how did she transit back? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Everything about that evening was strange, that much I remember. Strange all round. An odd note from a cropped-haired woman. An odd play at school. And it was the night James Keeton came back from the dead.”
“I’ve had enough,” Elizabeth Haylock said, her voice almost forlorn. “I need to sleep. I need to repair. Then I need to go. There’s nothing left in the wood for me, now. Everything I once loved I saw killed…” She glanced at Richard. “It’s not the same for you, though. Maybe you should go back.”
“I’ve made up a bed for you.”
Richard supported her as she walked painfully to the sitting room and sat heavily on the couch. He was burning with curiosity. “Where’s Helen now? What happened at the Station?”
“I don’t know where Helen is. She vanished. Wakeman’s dead, McCarthy too. Lytton was taken, probably dead. Nobody has seen Lacan since he left through the cave, the time you were with us. Heikonen drowned, we think, trying to retrieve a Finnish talisman from the lake, and Sinisalo went crazy and went deep. It all fell apart. Something came through out of Old Stone Hollow. It affected everyone, and it all just fell apart. I think I’m the only one who got out.”
She slept. Richard sat in an armchair and listened to her breathing, the words she murmured in her sleep, and her cries of pain, coming not from her broken body but from her broken memories.
At midnight he abandoned the vigil and went to bed. He lay awake for ages, staring at the moon, thinking of Helen and his son and the broad, good-humoured Frenchman.
Three years!
Lacan had expected to be gone on his own journey for six months, so he was far too long overdue. The thought of his loss brought tears to Richard’s eyes. Should he have stayed with them? Should he have waited for Alex to come back? If he had stayed, would Alex have returned? Perhaps he should have believed in his son more. And yet, in a way he had. How could he have known about the trickster figure of the Jack, drawing his own needs from his mind, making them real…? He should have believed in his son. The voice had been there, warning him. Not everything had been deception.
He drifted into sleep. His last thought was that he would invite Elizabeth Haylock to stay for a few days, after taking her to the hospital. He would piece things together with her.
He woke, in the dark, to the sound of horses and murmuring voices. Light flickered in the garden and he went to the window, looking down at the torch, held by a cloaked rider on a grey mount. The man saw him and called out a warning. There was a sudden flurry of movement in the house below and Richard ran downstairs to where Elizabeth Haylock had been sleeping. The couch was empty. At the back door he watched helplessly as the band of riders cantered back towards Hunter’s Brook, the flame from the torch streaming behind the leader, Elizabeth held in the arms of one of the riders, slumped or curled against him, asleep perhaps, or unconscious—perhaps content?—he would never know.
She had been removed from him, and from her own world, and this time she would not return.
He ran frantically along the bridleway, shouting at the raiders, not thinking of the possible consequences of his action, but by the time he reached the edge of the wood the torch had long since vanished into darkness. He eavesdropped the silence. He brushed through the undergrowth, a night shadow between two worlds, listening for horses, or voices, hearing only the breeze.
At first light he went back to his house and cried, partly for the woman, whose terrible journey to freedom had so suddenly been frustrated, partly for himself, for the loss of a contact with both Alex and Helen that he realised, now, he had needed desperately.
* * *
From Richard’s notebook:
—many signs of activity in the ruins of Oak Lodge. A large pit, filled with charred wood and bones—axe and knife marks on trees, dried excrement (both human and animal) and discarded raggy clothing, all suggest that the place has been in regular use recently.
No sign of Lacan’s machinery, although there are traces of the wires he used to create the boundaries. Usual feeling of being watched, but feels like a girl … No sign of her.
—round and round in circles again, but suddenly came to the horse shrine. The monolithic stone was overgrown with ground ivy, which I cleared to expose the carved image of the horse. Found a feathered arrow, point missing, and two rusting cans, the remains of Lacan’s encampment. From here I can at least begin to follow the right path to Old Stone Hollow.
—back to the shrine again, but this time climbed a tree and saw a high cliff in the distance, and am hopeful that this is the Station. Have made a friend of a Roman legionary carrying a treasure and shared his food. He’s a splendidly tanned man, black hair cut short, face weathered and full of good humour. His helmet is lost, but he carries a bronze-bladed spear carved with running animals, and a well-used and battered short sword, plus an equipment pack complete with tin and copper kitchen gear. His “treasure” is the Eagle standard of the Twentieth Legion. He himself is Catalonian, of a local royal birth, banished by his father. He joined the Legion in a town called Burdigala, which I think is Bordeaux, and was separated from his troop after a terrible skirmish. He carries the standard as a rallying point for the scattered men of his army.
—he shared crusty bread, made very palatable by dripping olive oil onto it, strips of very tasty dried meat and spiced sausage, and used leaves from his pack and water from the brook to make a sharp drink that tasted remarkably like spiced wine. All the time we ate he talked and gestured, made maps in the air, quizzed me and laughed. I learned this little about him, but not his name. His name he will not reveal.
—the Roman accompanied me along the river and probably just as well. Bone-armoured man, heavily painted, wild grasses attached to arms, shoulders and legs like bunches of quills, dropped on us from the heavy bough of an old willow. Murder clearly in mind, and the Catalonian dispatched him with great ferocity and determination, a massive strike from his spear, and then a series of punitive stabs, demolishing the stone axe of the opponent and splitting his bone corselet as easily as a butcher cuts through the breast cartilage of a chicken. One grass-bedecked head left hanging from the branch, turning in the wind. The Catalonian made a charm of one of the bits of our assailant’s protective bone, I thought for himself, but he presented it to me, an animal’s tarsal, now scratched with the sign of Mars.
—the cliff again, seen from a high bank through tall beeches, closer now. To my surprise, the Catalonian knows the place and is frightened of it. He calls it Spirit Rock, or Ghost Rock, and describes it as the scene of a terrible massacre, perhaps referring to the remains of mythagos at its perimeter. When I tried to question him more closely he became agitated, quite irritable, then whispered (using small signs too) that he believed in the Gods, but had never thought of magicians as anything but market-place charlatans. But many magicians had lived below the rock, and had been destroyed by their own evil charms. The ghosts of that magic remained, like a honey trap for a bear. He advised me against going there, but smiled and seemed philosophical when I shook my head. “You are part magician yourself,” he said, and prodded me in the chest. “Make a charm for me!”
—the Catalonian pointed me along a trail to Spirit Rock and I have finally broken the circular defences of this watching, thinking wood.
—going deeper. Claustrophobia is my constant companion, and faces in the undergrowth, so many of which seem familiar. I call for Alex and Helen, and am answered by shrieks, the beating of wings, or silence. Mosquitos and other insects are a permanent and excruciating nuisance. The Roman was good company. I wish he hadn’t gone. Where is Lacan? I hope he’s not too deep. Where the bugs have bitten me, the skin is raw. I try all leaves, and mosses, to soothe.
—three years and I have dreamed for days only …
Where is Helen? I feel confused. The buzzing and the biting in this moist heat is infuriating. I am watched from inside my dreams.
Hungry—I have been six days. Very tired and faces everywhere. Someone is calling me from inside my eyes. My arms and hands are weak.
—to write down. The cold.
Lacan has the hare, skin round his ears, and fire, and elegant forepaws. Fire is dancing. The bats. Is elemental of course, and quite corrupt, like bone marrow, and Alexander as the knight.
Cold is coming. Slopes up and down. Is this it? The dying place, the dust, the cold, and the lake and down, swimming. To the castle where the pike rules the lake.