Free Mythago Wood - 1 by Robert Holdstock Page B

puzzles me. Why was he so afraid of it? What lies beyond?
    I finally discovered the 'frontal bridge' equipment that my father had used.
Christian had destroyed it as much as he could, breaking the curious mask and
bending the various electric gadgetry out of shape. It was a strangely malicious
thing for my brother to have done, and yet I felt I understood why. Christian
was jealous of entry into the realm in which he sought Guiwenneth, and wanted no
further experimentation with mythago generation.
    I closed the cupboard on the wreckage.
    To cheer myself up, to break the self-obsession, I reestablished contact with
the Ryhopes, up at the manor house. They were pleased enough with my company -
all, that is, except the two teenage daughters, who were aloof and affected, and
found me distinctly below their class. But Captain Ryhope - whose family had
occupied this land for many generations - gave me chickens with which to
repopulate my own coops, butter from his own farm supplies, and best of all,
several bottles of wine.
    I felt it was his way of expressing his sympathy for what must have seemed to
him to be a most tragic few years of my life.
    Concerning the woodland he knew nothing, not even that it was, for the most
part, unmanaged. The southern extent was coppiced, to supply farm poles, and
firewood. But the latest reference he could find in his family's accounts
to any sort of woodland management was 1722. It was a brief allusion:
The wood is not safe. That part which lies between Lower Grubbings and the
Pollards, as far as Dykely Field, is marsh-ridden and peopled by strange
common-folk, who are wise to woodland ways. To remove them would be too costly,
so I have issued orders to fence off this place and clear trees to the south and
southwest, and to coppice those woods. Traps have been set.
    For over two hundred years the family had continued to ignore that immense
acreage of wild-grown wood. It was a fact I found hard to believe and to
understand, but even today, Captain Ryhope had hardly given a second thought to
the area between those strangely named fields.
    It was just 'the wood', and people skirted it, or used the tracks round the
edge, but never thought about its interior. It was 'the wood'. It had always
been there. It was a fact of life. Life went on around it.
    He did show me a written entry in the manor's accounts for 1536, or 37, it
was not clear which. This was before his family's time, and he showed me the
entry more out of pride at its allusion to King Henry the Eighth than for the
reference to Ryhope Wood's strange qualities:
The King was pleased to hunt the woodlands, with four of his entourage and
two ladies. Four hawks were taken, and a canter across the wild fields. The King
expressed admiration for the dangerous hunt, riding without due care through the
underwood. Returned at dusk to the Manor. A stag had been killed by the King
himself. The King talked of ghosts, and was entertaining on the manner of being
haunted in the deeper glades by the figure of Robin Hood, which apparently
loosed an arrow at him. He has promised to hunt upon the estates in another
season.
    Shortly after Christmas, whilst I cooked in the kitchen, I detected movement
beside me. It was a shock to my system, a moment of fright that made me twist
around, adrenalin making my heart race.
    The kitchen was empty. The movement remained, a hesitant flickering at the
edge of vision. I raced through the house to the study, and sat behind the desk,
my hands on the polished wooden surface, my breathing laboured.
    The movement disappeared.
    But it was a growing presence that had to be faced. My own mind was now
interacting with the aura of the woodland, and at the edge of vision the first
pre-mythagos were forming, restless, ill-defined shapes that seemed to vie for
my attention.
    My father had needed the 'frontal bridge', the strange machine, paraphernalia
out of Frankenstein, to enable his own ageing mind to generate these 'stored'
mythic