Six

I left Oxford, frustrated, filthy, and very tired. The journey home could not have been worse, with one train cancelled, and a traffic jam outside Witney that held my bus up for over half an hour. Mercifully, the rain passed away, though the sky was lowering, threatening, and distinctly wintry, something I did not wish to see in early summer.

It was six in the evening before I got back to Oak Lodge, and I knew at once that I had a visitor: the back door was wide open, and a light was on in the study. I hastened my step, but paused by the door, looking nervously around in case the trigger-happy cavalier, or a mythago of like violence, might be lurking nearby. But it had to be Guiwenneth. The door had been forced open, the paint around the handle scarred and pitted where the shaft of her spear had repeatedly struck. Inside there was a hint of the smell I associated with her, sharp, pungent. She would obviously need to bathe a lot more often.

I called her name, walking carefully from room to room. She was not in the study, but I left the light on. Movement upstairs startled me, and I walked to the hallway. “Guiwenneth?”

“You catch me snooping, I’m afraid,” came Harry Keeton’s voice, and he appeared at the top of the stairs, looking embarrassed, smiling to cover his guilt. “I’m so sorry. But the door was open.”

“I thought it was someone else,” I said. “There’s nothing much worth seeing.”

He came down the stairs and I led him back to the sitting-room. “Was there anybody here when you came in?”

“Someone, I’m not sure who. As I say, I came up the front way; no answer. Went round the back and found the door open, a funny smell inside, and this…” He waved his hand around the room, at the furniture all disarrayed, shelves swept clean, the books and objects cluttered on the floor. “Not the sort of thing I do by habit,” he said with a smile. “Someone ran out of the house as I went into the study, but I didn’t see who. I thought I’d hang on for you.”

We straightened the room, then sat down at the dining table. It was chilly, but I decided against laying a fire. Keeton relaxed; the burn mark on his lower face had flushed considerably with his embarrassment, but it became paler and less noticeable, although he nervously covered his jaw with his left hand as he spoke. He seemed tired, I thought, not as bright, or as perky as when we had met at Mucklestone Field. He was wearing civilian clothes, which were very creased. When he sat down at the table I could see that he wore a hip holster and pistol on his belt.

“I developed the photographs I took on that flight, a few days back.” He drew out a rolled package from his pocket, straightened it and opened the top, taking out several magazine-sized prints. I had almost forgotten that part of the process, the monitoring and photographing of the land below. “After that storm we seemed to encounter I didn’t expect anything to show up, but I was wrong.”

There was a haunted look to him, now, as he pushed the prints across to me. “I use a high precision, good spying camera. High grain Kodak film; I’ve been able to enlarge quite a bit.…”

He watched me as I stared at the foggy, occasionally blurred, and occasionally ultra-sharp scenes of the mythago wood.

Tree tops and clearings seemed to be the main view, but I could see why he was disturbed, perhaps excited. On the fourth print, taken as the plane had banked to the west, the camera had panned across the woodland, and slightly down, and it showed a clearing and a tall, decaying stone structure, parts of it rising to the foliage level itself.

“A building,” I said unnecessarily, and Harry Keeton added, “There’s an enlargement…”

Increasingly blurred, the next sheet showed a close-up of the building: an edifice and tower, rising from a break in the tree-structure of the forest, where a number of figures clustered. No detail was observable, beyond the fact of their humanness: white and grey shapes, suggestive of both male and female, caught in the act of walking about the tower; two shapes crouched, as if climbing the crumbling structure itself.

“Probably built in the middle ages,” Keeton said thoughtfully. “The wood grew across the access roadway, and the place got cut off.…”

Less romantic, but far more likely, was that the structure was a Victorian folly, something built more for whim than good reason. But follies had usually been constructed on high hills: tall structures, from whose upper reaches the eccentric, rich, or just plain bored owner could observe distances further than county borders.

If this place, the place we observed on the photograph, was a folly, then it was peculiarly inept.

I turned to the next print. This showed the image of a river winding through the densely packed trees; its course meandered, the tree line broken in an aerial reflection of the pathway. At two points, out of focus, the water gleamed, and the river looked wide. This was the stickle-brook? I could hardly believe what I was seeing. “I’ve enlarged the river parts as well,” Keeton said softly, and when I turned to those prints I realized that I could see more mythagos.

They were blurred again, but there were five of them, close together, wading across the fragment of river that had caught the attention of the camera. They were holding objects above their heads, perhaps weapons, perhaps just staffs. They were as dim and indistinct as a photograph of a lake monster I had once seen, just the suggestion of shape and movement.

Wading across the sticklebrook!

The final photograph was in its way the most dramatic of them all. It showed only woodland. Only? It showed something more, and I was unwilling, at the time, even to guess at the nature of the forces and structures I could see. What had happened, Keeton explained, was that the negative was underexposed. That simple mistake, caused for no reason he could understand, had captured the winding tendrils of energy arising from across the great span of the woodland. They were eerie, suggestive, tentative … I counted twenty of them, like tornadoes, but thinner, knotted and twisted as they probed up from the hidden land below. The nearer vortices were clearly reaching toward the plane, to encompass the unwelcome vehicle … to reject it.

“I know what sort of wood it is now,” he said, and I glanced at him, surprised at his words. He was watching me. The expression in his eyes was akin to triumph, but tinged, perhaps, with terror. The burn on his face was flushed, and his lip, in the corner that had been burned, seemed pinched, giving his face a lopsided look. He leaned forward, hands spread palm-flat on the table.

“I’ve been searching for such a place since the war ended,” he went on. “In a few days I’d have realized the nature of Ryhope Wood. I’d already heard stories of a haunted wood in the area … that’s why I’ve been looking in the county.”

“A haunted wood?”

“A ghost wood,” he said quickly. “There was one in France. It was where I was shot down. It didn’t have the same gloomy aspect, but it was the same.”

I prompted him to speak further. He seemed almost afraid to do so, sitting back in his chair, his gaze drifting away from me as he remembered.

“I’d blanked it out of my mind. I’ve blanked a lot out…”

“But you remember now.”

“Yes. We were close to the Belgian border. I flew on a lot of missions there, mostly dropping supplies to the resistance. I was flying one dusk when the plane was thrown about in the air. Like a tremendous thermal.” He glanced at me. “You know the sort of thing.”

I nodded my agreement. He went on, “I couldn’t fly over that wood, try as I might. It was quite small. I banked and tried again. The same effect of light on the wings, like the other day. Light streaming from the wings, over the cockpit. And again, tossed about like a leaf. There were faces down below. They looked as if they were floating in the foliage. Like ghosts, like clouds. Tenuous. You know what ghosts are supposed to be like. They looked like clouds, caught in the tree tops, blowing and shifting … but those faces!”

“So you weren’t shot down at all,” I said, but he nodded. “Oh yes. Certainly, the plane was hit. I always say a sniper because … well, it’s the only explanation I have.” He looked down at his hands. “One shot, one strike, and the plane went down into that woodland like a stone. I got out, so did John Shackleford. Out of the wreckage. We were damned lucky … for a while.…”

“And then?”

He glanced up sharply, suspiciously. “And then … blank. I got out of the wood. I was wandering around farmland when a German patrol got me. I spent the rest of the war behind barbed wire.”

“Did you see anything in the wood? While you were wandering.”

He hesitated before answering, and there was an edge of irritation to his voice. “As I said, old boy. Blank.”

I accepted that, for whatever reason, he didn’t want to talk about events after the crash. It must have been humiliating for him, a prisoner of war, hideously burned, shot down in bizarre circumstances. I said, “But this wood, Ryhope Wood, is the same…”

“There were faces too, but much closer—”

“I didn’t see them,” I said, surprised.

“They were there. If you’d looked. It’s a ghost wood. It’s the same. You’ve been haunted by it yourself. Tell me I’m right!”

“Do you need me to tell you what you already know?”

His gaze was intense; his wild, fair hair flopped over his brow and he looked very boyish; he seemed excited, yet also frightened, or perhaps apprehensive. “I would like to see inside that woodland,” he said, his voice almost a whisper.

“You won’t get very far,” I said. “I know. I’ve tried.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The wood turns you around. It defends itself … well, Good God, man, you know that from the other day. You walk for hours and come in a circle. My father found a way in. And so has Christian.”

“Your brother.”

“The very same. He’s been in there, now, for over nine months. He must have found the way through the vortices.…”

Before Keeton could query my terminology, a movement from the kitchen startled us both, and made us both react with elaborate gestures of silence. It had been a stealthy movement, given away by the shifting of the back door.

I pointed to Keeton’s belt. “May I suggest that you draw your pistol, and if the face that appears around the door doesn’t have a frame of red hair … then fire a warning shot into the top of the wall.”

As quickly as possible, without making undue noise, Keeton armed himself. It was a regular forces-issue Smith and Wesson .38 caliber, and he eased back the hammer, raising the cocked weapon in one hand, sighting along its barrel. I watched the entrance from the kitchen, and a moment later Guiwenneth stepped carefully, slowly into the room. She glanced at Keeton, then at me, and her face registered the question: Who’s he?

“Good God,” Keeton breathed, brightening up, losing his haunted look. He lowered his arm, slotted the pistol back into the holster without taking his gaze from the girl. Guiwenneth came over to me and placed a hand on my shoulder (almost protectively!), standing by me as she scrutinized the burned airman. She giggled and touched her face. She was studying the awful mark of Keeton’s accident. She said something in her alien tongue too fast for me to catch.

“You’re quite astonishingly beautiful,” Keeton said to her. “My name’s Harry Keeton. You’ve taken my breath away and I’ve quite forgotten my manners.” He stood, and stepped towards Guiwenneth, who moved away from him, the grip on my shoulder increasing. Keeton stared at me. “Foreign? No English at all?”

“English, no. The language of this country? Sort of. She doesn’t understand what you say.”

Guiwenneth reached down and kissed the top of my head. Again, I felt it was a possessive, protective gesture, and I couldn’t comprehend the reason for it. But I liked it. I believe I flushed as brightly as Keeton had a tendency to do. I reached up and placed my fingers gently on the girl’s, and for a brief moment our hands interlocked, a communication that was quite unmistakable. “Good night, Steven,” she said, her accent strong and strange, the words an astonishing utterance. I looked up at her. Her brown eyes shone, partly with pride, partly with amusement. “Good evening, Guiwenneth,” I corrected, and she made a moue, turned to Keeton and said, “Good evening…” She giggled as she trailed off; she’d forgotten the name. Keeton reminded her and she said it aloud, raising her right hand, palm towards him, then placing the palm across her bosom. Keeton repeated the gesture and bowed, and they both laughed.

Guiwenneth turned her attention back to me, then. She crouched beside me, the spear rising from between her legs as she held it, incongruous, almost obscene. Her tunic was too short, her body too conspicuously young and lithe for an inexperienced man like me to remain cool. She touched my nose with the top of one slender finger, smiling as she recognized the thoughts behind my crimson features. “Cuningabach,” she said, warningly. Then: “Food. Cook. Guiwenneth. Food.”

“Food,” I repeated. “You want food?” I tapped my chest as I spoke, and Guiwenneth shook her head quickly, tapped her own pert bosom and said, “Food!”

“Ah! Food!” I repeated, stabbing a finger towards her. She wanted to cook. I understood now.

“Food!” she agreed with a smile. Keeton licked his lips.

“Food,” I said uncertainly, wondering what Guiwenneth’s idea of a meal might be. But … what did it matter? I was nothing if not experimental. I shrugged and agreed. “Why not.”

“May I stay … just for that part?” Keeton prompted and I said, “Of course.”

Guiwenneth stood up and touched a finger to the side of her nose. (You have a treat in store, she seemed to be saying.) She went into the kitchen and knocked and banged about among the pots and utensils. I heard, quite quickly, the ominous sound of chopping, and the unwelcome, distasteful sound of bones being snapped.

“Awfully impertinent of me,” Keeton said, as he sat in an armchair, still wearing his overcoat. “Inviting myself like that. But farms always have such lovely supplies. I’ll pay, if you like…”

I laughed as I watched him. “I may be paying you … not to talk about it. I hate to tell you this, but our cook for the evening doesn’t believe, or even know, about traditional liver and bacon. It’s as likely that she’s going to spit-roast a wild boar.”

Keeton frowned, of course. “Boar? Extinct, surely.”

“Not in Ryhope Wood. Nor bear. How would you like haunch of bear stuffed with wolves’ sweetbreads?”

“Not a lot,” the airman said. “Is this a joke?”

“The other day I cooked her an ordinary vegetable stew. She thought it was disgusting. I dread to think what she would find passable…”

But when I crept to the kitchen door and peered round, she was clearly preparing something a little less ambitious than brown bear. The kitchen table was awash with blood, as were her fingers, which she sucked as easily as I might have sucked honey or gravy. The carcass was long and thin. A rabbit, or a hare. She was boiling water. She had chopped vegetables roughly and was examining the can of Saxa salt as she licked the body fluids from her hands. In the event, the meal was quite tasty, if somewhat revolting in appearance. She served the carcass whole, head and all, but had split the skull so that the brains would cook. These she nicked out with her knife and sliced carefully into three parts. Keeton’s refusal of this morsel was an hysterically funny exhibition of courtesy and panic, warring for expression.

Guiwenneth ate with her fingers, using her short knife to stab and cut from the surprisingly meaty rabbit. She dismissed forks as “R’vannith,” but tried one and clearly recognized its potential.

*   *   *

“How are you getting back to the airfield?” I asked Keeton, later. Guiwenneth had laid a small birchwood fire, the evening being cool. The dining-room seemed cosy, enclosed. She sat cross-legged before the open grate, watching the flames. Keeton remained at the table, dividing his attention between the photographs and the back of the strange girl. I sat on the floor, my back against an armchair, my legs stretched out behind Guiwenneth.

After a while she leaned back on her elbows, across my knees, and reached out with her right hand gently to touch my ankle. The fire made her hair and skin glow. She was deep in thought, and seemed melancholy.

My question to Keeton abruptly broke the contemplative, silent mood. Guiwenneth sat up and looked at me, her face solemn, her eyes almost sad. Keeton stood up and tugged his coat from the back of his chair. “Yes, it is getting late…”

I felt embarrassed. “That wasn’t a hint to go. You’re welcome to stay. There’s plenty of room.”

He smiled peculiarly, glancing at the girl. “Next time I might take you up on that offer. But I have an early start tomorrow.”

“How will you get back?”

“Same way I came. Motorcycle. I parked it in your woodshed, out of the rain.”

I saw him to the door. His parting words, addressed to me as he stared at the edgewoods, were, “I’ll be back. I hope you won’t mind … but I’ll have to come back.”

“Any time,” I said. A few minutes later the roar of his motorcycle made Guiwenneth jump and question me with her look, alarmed, puzzled. I smiled and told her that it was merely Keeton’s chariot. After a few seconds the drone of the cycle had gone, and Guiwenneth relaxed.