I made you, Jack thought, and with that thought there came a moment’s affection.
Old man: lank hair, grey, rough-hewn cheeks and scarred chin, sagging eyes, clothes dreamed out of nightmare; and the pulse of blood in his temples, and the odour of moss and undergrowth on the breath.
I made you. I summoned you. And you came, equipped with memory. My father was right. You would come equipped with memory. And you have it, though you think of it as jigsaw.
Each time gaze met gaze, Jack felt his heart race. It was impossible to tell whether Huxley was seeing him or not; and yet, there was the distinct sense that the older man was aware of the presence of his half-human, half-Haunter descendant.
‘Yssobel,’ Jack finally said aloud. ‘Your granddaughter, my sister. Yssobel. She is the very image of a woman you once loved: my mother. Guiwenneth.’
At the sound of the name, Huxley frowned, though he did not look up. He paused for a moment before continuing to write.
‘Yes, Guiwenneth,’ Jack persisted from his sitting position, almost taunting the man now. ‘So beautiful. You loved her. You summoned her. You summoned love, because you wanted it, as I have summoned memory - memory of you, grandfather - because I need it. Guiwenneth!’
Huxley made a keening sound, his eyes closed, his body hunched, the hand that held the pencil now shaking. If he spoke words, Jack again could not hear them. And after a moment, the spasm of grief, or whatever was causing the distress, passed away.
‘Yssobel,’ Jack repeated now. ‘I know you can help me find out where she went. I saw you talking to her, at the edge of the villa, when I was younger. Was it you? Or a shade of you? How do I know? But Grandfather, you know of your granddaughter. You know of Yssobel.’
Yssobel, the shade of Huxley murmured, and Jack leaned forward.
‘Yes. You remember her.’
Huxley looked around as if seeing his surroundings for the first time. ‘Yssobel.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘Yssobel,’ breathed the ghost.
Jack spoke softly: ‘When I was a boy, I saw you. I saw you many times at the villa, where your Steven lives now. And a few seasons before she rode off, before she disappeared, I saw you talking to her. You came and went, just as you always do. You came out of the wood and you whispered to her. She remembered nothing of your visits, but I do: I saw you so many times. Whispering, whispering. You know, you alone know, where she went, and why she went, and what drove her away. Talk to me, George. Talk to me. About Yssobel!’
‘Yssobel,’ the man repeated quietly, sitting up straight, as if he had just seen something startling. ‘Oh no, oh no . . .’
The forlorn voice, the forlorn whisper, were the last words the mythago spoke.
Huxley pushed back from the desk and stumbled to the French windows, pushing them open and staring into the gloom of Ryhope. As Jack struggled to his feet, the old man lurched away. He could not possibly have walked so fast as to have vanished into the wood by the time Jack reached the garden. But Huxley had gone, absorbed yet again.
Jack called for him twice. Silence was his only reply.
He went back to the study and sat down at the desk, leaning close to the scrawl of words, deciphering them as best he could.
I have been dragged from the grave. The ghost-lit boy has dragged me here. He stinks of the wood, a stink I know so well.
Dragged from the grave, but also dragged out of time. I was lost. This haunting ‘boy’ has resurrected me, and I begin to remember the LIFE before.
So much reconstructs itself. The jigsaw shuffles, the pieces turn and twist and shape and fit. Bit by bit, shape by shape, echo by echo, memory by memory, all begins to congeal. I am . . . Huxley. I can shape my life.
I am reborn with the flesh and mind and recollection of my first incarnation. That is to say - as far as I can tell. I can shape it, both the flesh and the dream. In order to remember. And the ghost-lit boy will recognise me. But will I recognise the ghost-lit boy for what it is?
Is it attached to me? This boy? A version of myself? I have no way of knowing yet.
The genesis of ‘myth imago’ forms is more intricate than the Ur-Huxley, the original form of me, could possibly have understood.
I am more aware than him, though it is his struggle to understand that drives my own curiosity.
Ur-Huxley? Jack stared at the word, bemused by it. ‘The original form of me.’ Did he mean the real man, the true man, the man who had been a child, had grown, had learned, had lived in the Lodge, had explored, sired two children; had pursued a strange dream; and died in the heartwoods?
So the memories and dreams of Ur-Huxley also rose in the mythago, just as the ragged clothes were re-formed, just as the flesh and bone, the blood and beat and pulse of the heart were shaped again.
But from whose memory? From the human side of Jack? From Steven? Or from Jack’s ‘haunter’ side, the aspect of him that was silently in tune with the timelessness of the wildwood.
Haunter was quiescent inside Jack, understanding nothing of this. Haunter was instinct.
Jack turned back the pages of the notebook to see what had been written during the night when the Amurngoth had visited and distracted him, while all the time his grandfather was upstairs in hiding, sketching his visions in words.
This scrawl was even harder to decipher, but underlined several times was his sister’s name. And under that bold statement, which signified either confusion or realisation, were the words: Yss. Her birth. Eagles.
The name Yssobel, or Issaubel, is whispered to me, and I have remembered a small story relating to the later life of Guiwenneth, though I cannot remember who told it to me, nor where it was that the story was spoken.
She was born in the early evening. Eagles flew around the fortress during her mother’s labour, and with her first cry of life they scattered, though one came back later and stayed. The child was in distress. At dawn, when she was taken to the spring to be drowned and reborn, the child reached and wailed, watching the solitary eagle through eyes that showed awareness, but no comfort, only anxiety. And yet - piercing through the misty, infant blue - curiosity!
Yssobel was the daughter of Guiwenneth, who was known as ‘the Green’ and was of noble birth, being the daughter of the Warlord Peredur and his wife Dierdrath.
In her childhood years, Yssobel and her mother were close and affectionate, and Yssobel learned much about her mother’s hardships, and the loss of her father under cruel circumstances. But in later years, the friendship between mother and daughter was broken.
Guiwenneth wounded the girl with her words, and the house became angry.
Although Yssobel continued to live in her parent’s house, hardly any words were spoken between them, and when they were, they were brief and usually harsh.
There came a day when Guiwenneth went out from the fort and never returned. All that is known of her is that she was heard singing the Song of the Islands of the Lost, which are reached by one of the five valleys that lead away from her father’s memorial stone at the edge of Lavondyss.
Distraught at the loss, her daughter went to search for her, and in doing so found a new world of her own. She, too, disappeared.
There is another story about her, almost as small, but more intriguing. It is unresolved. I must try to reimagine it.
At this point, the entry had been underlined and it ended; the journal was closed over the pencil. By the harsh light spilling into the room, Jack could see a handprint, made perhaps from sweat. He pressed his own hand against it, not truly knowing why he did so.
The account was a shadowy reflection of the true events - they had not occurred in a fort but in the Roman villa where the family had lived until its abandonment. And Jack was intrigued by certain things, particularly the reference to the memorial stone. And The Sons of the Islands of the Lost was a favourite song of his mother’s. But he needed more if he was to find his sister and, in that finding, understand what had happened to Guiwenneth.
He sat down and read the entry again and again, until his eyes closed and he drifted into dreaming sleep.
Elf-shot
During the night, the wood around the house was restless. The floor beneath Jack’s feet trembled and grumbled on occasion, then went quiet. The moon was a strange colour, ruddy; he had never seen such a moon. The wind was strong, coming from the west, but it didn’t hold the scent of a storm.
Despite his intentions to rise at first light and try and make his way to Shadoxhurst, exhaustion must have caught up with him. He fell into a deep sleep and woke from a vivid dream well into the morning. He washed, gathered his pack, and briskly left the house into what he expected to be a tangle of undergrowth.
Instead, he found himself staring out into open space, across the remains of a collapsed stone wall towards the fields that led to the ridge and the road to the town. The whole area contained within the wall was scattered with shards of terracotta pottery and coloured ceramics, almost certainly the remains of decorative pots.
And Julie was standing there, just beyond the wall, silent and absorbed in looking at the newly revealed façade of Oak Lodge.
In the night hours, the wood had pulled back from the old house as far as its front wall. The ivy-covered grey brick peered from the undergrowth, face-like and haunting. The windows were dark; the tall chimney stacks could be seen through the branches. For a while Jack took in the sight, comparing it with the model he had made when he’d been a child, noticing the details he had got correct, the details both correct and missed, all based on his father’s description.
What had it been like, he wondered, when the house stood tall, square, alone in its grounds, reached by the single track from the main road that ran beyond the hill, between the villages and the bigger cities, and people had come here in their cars or on horseback, and sat in the grounds, in the sun, talking and discussing mysteries? It struck him that the building must have been remote and isolated, silent in the landscape, almost a lonely place.
And he remembered what his father had told him: the house had been a silent place except, towards the end, for the shouting and the anger. Its visitors were mostly stiff and surly men of science, who shut themselves away behind the study door and conversed in low voices with his father. ‘It was not a house where laughter was a commonplace, unlike our own home, Jack.’
Though, sadly, neither had there been much laughter in the villa, in the wildwood, in the years before Jack had left.
‘This is so weird,’ said Julie from behind him. ‘If I wasn’t seeing it, I wouldn’t believe it.’
He walked up to her, then glanced back again. ‘When my father lived here, many years ago, when he was alone here, one night the house was swallowed. You can still see the traces of it inside. There’s a room where a tree grew right through the house. But that’s gone now.’
‘What a strange place. Much stranger than I’d realised. It’s really quite frightening. And I let my son come fishing here.’
‘I wouldn’t do that for a while,’ Jack cautioned, but didn’t feel this was the moment to go into detail about the Iaelven.
‘So weird,’ Julie repeated. Then, looking at Jack, ‘I think you can expect some sightseers. People will be curious.’
‘Don’t tell them for a while. If you don’t mind.’
‘No. Of course not.’
She was carrying a bag, and suddenly remembered why she’d come. ‘I brought you some books. I thought you might be interested to see what the world out here looks like. They’re . . . picture books.’ She seemed uncomfortable. ‘I expect there are a lot of books in the house.’
‘Very many. Very leathery, and full of words. Not many pictures. I’d like to see yours.’
She had brought a book showing famous sites in Britain and Europe, and another with views of the Americas. There was also a book of planets and stars, which astonished Jack as he leafed through it. Saturn? Jupiter? And that’s Mars? This is what they look like close up?
Julie explained how the pictures had been taken and his mind reeled.
‘And more milk and bread, and some meat in tins that are easier to open. You don’t have to stab them with a knife,’ she added with a smile.
‘Thank you. Again.’ Jack caught her eye, that slightly intense and interested stare that made him slightly nervous. ‘Is everyone in this world as generous?’
‘No. They’re not. By no means.’
‘Neither in mine.’
‘But this is not generosity, this is just a little help for an interesting - if weird - woodland man.’
‘Some of the help tastes good,’ he said. ‘Some is - weird.’ He smiled as he repeated her word.
He realised that Julie was shaking. He’d noticed it when she passed him the books. She was also very pale. Perhaps she saw his question before he could ask it, and she said, ‘I’m quite frightened of what’s happening. There is such a strange feeling about this place. Everyone talks about Ryhope Wood as being dangerous; lots of old mine shafts and boggy patches where you can sink down into the mud. And the kids talk of “wood haunters”, but are they real or not? Probably just itinerants.’
He frowned at the word.
‘Travellers. People who roam the country, no fixed home.’
‘That’s certainly me,’ Jack said. ‘Though I have a fixed home a year’s struggle away.’ He was guessing at the time he’d taken to get here - it had certainly been long.
‘I should be going mad with what I’m seeing,’ Julie added. ‘But I’m not. There is something very otherworldly about you, but something very calm. It’s as if . . .’ She struggled to find the way to put her confused thought. ‘As if you’re a gate, a safe gate, into the . . .’
‘Weird?’
‘Yes. Into the weird.’