Free The Bone Forest by Robert Holdstock

floor, the surfaces, the bed itself, were covered with bits of reed.
    He reached down and picked up several sheets of white paper with pencil drawings. They were the blueprints for the model: crude, but skillful, and he recognized Christian's imagination at work here. He was impressed. Plan view, side view, rear elevation, cross section…
    Of the ship itself there was no sign. It was an ambitious project. They usually contented themselves with smaller, wooden models.
    The room was quiet and he closed his eyes for a moment, summoning the imaginations at work here. He banished from his mind the smell of unwashed socks that instantly struck his consciousness. What he wanted was to feel the
fantasies
of the boys, their dreams, and in this room he might be able to touch the edge of those dreams.
    It was an odd thought, and yet: he was convinced that one of the boys had created the Ash mythago.
    He went through their drawers, where clothes were crushed and crumpled, apple-cores rotted, penny dreadfuls were concealed, and rock hard ends of sandwiches—made for midnight feasts—nestled side by side with pictures torn from magazines.
    Eventually he found the fragments of wood and bone that Ash had left. They were still in their leather container. Huxley placed them on the desk, rolled them over the surface, remembered the time last winter when Snow Woman had left these items at the gate.
    Then he went over to the bed and sat down, staring at the magic from across the room.
    Why did you leave these pieces? Why? Why did you come to Oak Lodge? Why did you destroy the chickens? Why did you ensure that Steven would see you?
    Why?
    Steven and his passion for presents, his need for gifts. Had he created a mythago that was designed to fulfill that need in him?
    Give me something. Bring me something. Bring me a gift. Give me something that makes me feel… wanted…
    Was she Steven's mythago, then? Gift-bringing Ash. But what sort of gift was implied in two fragments of thorn, and a piece of wild cat?
    Perhaps Steven was intended to wear them. Perhaps then he would journey, in the same way that Huxley had journeyed. These bits of wood represented a different forest, though.
    Why did you come out of the wood? Why did you leave these fragments? Why the chickens? What did you hope to achieve?
    He thought back to the time in the Horse Shrine. Ash had watched him closely and carefully for a long while, and perhaps there
had
been disappointment in her face? Was she expecting someone else?
    She had been waiting for someone. She had been at the Horse Shrine since the winter, if the evidence of the waste spoils was to be believed. She had been trying to make contact with the Huxleys, and yet all she had done was send George Huxley on a nightmarish trip to a freezing wood, long in the past…
    If she had wanted Steven, what had she wanted to do with him?
    And if Wynne-Jones
had
been present in the same ancient mythagorealm—and the gray-green man suggested that perhaps he had—what had Ash wanted with
him
?
    How had he come to play a part in the same ancient sequence?
    Why had he played any part at all, if Ash had wanted
Steven
… ?
    Huxley prowled the room, drinking in the disorder, tapping the imagination that reverberated here.
    Steven and Ash… a shocking visitation to the henhouse… a bed of dead hens…
just like in the story
…
    He went quickly to the window, staring down at the yard, the spring sunshine. He tried to replay the whole of that snow-deadened encounter, after Christmas.
    What had Steven said to his mother? "Got them all… just like in the story…"
    What story?
    Steven hadn't seen inside the shed, but Huxley had told him that all the hens had been killed. A fox had done it, he said, and Steven had seemed to accept that statement, despite the fact that Ash had clearly been to the henhouse herself.
    What story?
    Steven had said, "That old drummer fox…"
    Huxley had taken no notice, and Jennifer had simply responded to the