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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Epigraph1

  PART ONE: From the Unknown Region

  The Green Chapel: 1

  Out of the Dark

  Moondreaming

  PART TWO: In the Wildwood

  The Green Chapel: 2

  Out of the Pit

  Oak Lodge

  The Wildwood

  Ghosts

  The Green Chapel: 3

  Old Stone Hollow

  Lytton

  Echoes

  Genesis

  The Green Chapel: 4

  Jack

  Inside the Skin

  The Hunted

  White Castle

  The Green Chapel: 5

  PART THREE: Long Gone, Long to Come

  Spirit Rock

  Old Man, Old Lake

  To the Forgotten Shore

  Bosky

  Skin of Stone

  Glamour

  The Triumph of Time

  The Green Knight

  Appendix

  Also by Robert Holdstock from Tom Doherty Associates

  Copyright

  For Wendy, Brian, Alan, Marjya, and Robert, fellow travellers in the realm …

  and for Hilary Rubinstein, with much appreciation.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks, for a variety of reasons, to Chris Evans, Jane Johnson, Sarah Biggs, Malcolm Edwards, Andrew Stephenson (chats scientific), Dave Arthur (chats mythic), and Garry and Annette Kilworth. And of course, to the unknown author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the long-forgotten dreamer who inspired the tale.

  “Now certainly the place is deserted,” said Gawain.

  “It is a hideous oratory, all overgrown,

  And well graced for the gallant garbed in green

  To deal out his devotions in the Devil’s fashion.

  Now I feel in my five wits, it is the Fiend himself

  That has tricked me into this tryst, to destroy me here.”

  From Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

  One of the deep silences fell on them, that seemed so much more natural than speech, a timeless silence in which there were at first many minds in the overhang; and then perhaps no mind at all.

  William Golding, The Inheritors

  PART ONE

  From the Unknown Region

  The Green Chapel: 1

  Each dawn, since the hollyjack had come to the cathedral bringing her strange dreams, the boy had started to think of waking as the opening of petals, or a form of budding. At this time the light was not green, it became green later, but he could never wait to wake, and in the same way that flowers opened to the sun, and leaves turned and unfurled, so he unfurled, so he opened. At first curled up on the inscribed marble floor, arms and legs gathered in for warmth during the night, now he began to straighten, then stretch, face to the open sky where the roof had been, mouth agape and damp with dew.

  His eyes remained closed but he knew the cathedral was not yet green, it was still in stark light, and the world was not yet quick. And like the pores of the leaves, still closed, the water stayed inside him. He liked the feeling of the water. It pressed painfully against his belly, but he kept the water with him, waiting for green light. He rolled on the hard, cold marble, touching the grooves in the slab, the hidden names of the dead carved in the floor that guarded their bones. He listened to the cathedral stir, to the forest beyond begin to wake, to the hollyjack as she woke and moved restlessly, like a bird, in her nest of vegetation at the end of the aisle, against the great outer doors of the church.

  The hollyjack had been here for days, now, weeks perhaps. She had changed his dreams. He could dream more widely, and feel his way over great distances of the forest, peering up from the roots, or glimpsing the ground as he flowed through the branches. She still frightened him, but until she had come he had been unable to see anything at all. With her arrival he had seen how like a leaf he was, unfurling with the new day. But last night, the dream last night had been startling. He didn’t want to let it go.

  The sun moved over the line of the trees. The ragged edges of the cathedral’s fallen roof caught its warmth, its light. On the cold marble the brilliant edge of the green light spread, moving like a growing thing, an unfurling plant, towards the unfurled boy.

  He felt it touch his legs. He woke fully and cried out as the light spread across him and birds fled from the nest where the hollyjack chattered. The bones of the dead below him shifted as roots prowled among them. The cathedral shuddered into life, from nave to chancel. The rotting wood of the pews began to steam, and he could smell this, and the carved dancing men drew deeper into the knots and rings of the old trees, their night of freedom and exuberance finished for a while.

  He let the water go, now, adding his own moisture to the heavy dawn as his belly deflated. The water stank of nettles as it passed, and this mingled with wood sorrel and anemone in the rising steam of the chapel. He was relieved, out of pain, and felt at last that it was time to open fully. To open his eyes. To let green light shape him for the day.

  The hollyjack had left her nest. He saw her moving up the ivy-covered wall towards the high arch of a window, where tree branches reached into the ruins of the cathedral and stone faces grinned down at him. She hesitated for a moment, glancing back at her nest, and at the boy, then had gone, outside into the forest.

  He wanted to call to her, to tell her about his dream, but it was too late. He stood and stared through the leaning trunks of oaks at the rows of rotting wooden pews, some of them crushed, others raised above the floor as the forest grew from below them. The altar space was a distant grove among white-flowered thorns, the gold cross sparkling through the leaves. Saplings were sprouting everywhere, coming up from the crypt below. Only the marble slabs, with the names and dates of the dead, defied the forest as it struggled to emerge into the cathedral, keeping a clear channel to the high altar. Since the hollyjack had come to him, he had begun to imagine how the roots and branches in the crypt, and the bones themselves, were all entangled, all pushing at the floor, a great pressure ready to erupt upwards.

  It had been such a dream. It had been his first real dream since he had come to the forest. He said the words aloud into the decaying church. Real dream. For so long his dreams had been of endless snow, and endless forest, and endless running, and endless water, an endless flight across unchanging lands. All that had broken with the first dream of the unfurling leaf. And now this one. He had begun to remember so much again.

  “They danced!” he shouted, staring into the brightening sky, through the crossing branches of the trees, through the green light. As if to answer his cry, one of the carved wooden faces on a pew moved slightly, then stretched forward from the end of the stall, poking out into the aisle. It turned and peered at the shouting boy, who watched back through the sunlit mist that hung heavily in the great space. It looked like the hollyjack, branches extending from its mouth, leaves around its face. As quickly as it had stretched to look at him, it withdrew and was silent again. The boy blinked, then laughed. He was
still dreaming. Last night that same figure and twenty others had come all the way out of the wooden benches, small, gnarled shapes with willow-thin arms and legs. They had led a wild dance up the stone walls and into the branches, among the stone faces in the high eaves, which had laughed and twisted too, stretching out from the pillars and cornices of the cathedral, peering at the wild activity below them and around their vaulted positions.

  In the stillness of the new day, the boy went to the hollyjack’s nest and peered through the small hole into the stinking mass of rotten wood and foliage, grass, bracken, and dead birds that the creature had compacted against the tall cathedral doors. Above those doors, half of a stained glass window began to glow purple and red as it was struck by first light. He liked the shape of the knight with his lance and silver armour, but now—another question! He was so full of questions these days—now he wondered what the knight was fighting—he could just see the creature’s legs—what was missing from the shattered area of the window.

  Away from the nest, he went into the gloom of the sacristy and looked at his disjointed reflection in the cracked mirror. His hair was long and filthy now, falling in a lank, black mass around his pale, smooth face. A new thought occurred to him (he smiled at the pleasure of it) that he looked like the picture of an Apache Indian boy he had seen in a book at school. The boy in the picture had worn animal skins. The boy in the mirror was naked. The picture of the Apache now blurred and shifted in his mind, then faded. The chapel boy’s teeth were still white when he grinned, shifting his head across a distorting fracture in the glass.

  The deep scratches on his chest and right arm were healed, now no more than bright red lines. They no longer hurt. The skin around them was still yellowed with bruising. He could hardly remember the attack, now, it had been so fast, and at dusk. He hadn’t even seen the creature, just heard its awful laugh. He thought of it as the giggler.

  He was grimy with dirt and remembered that he should wash, so he thought of the well, but the well was at the edge of the clearing outside, and the wood was dangerous there. When the giggler had snatched at him and ripped him, it had hurt him badly, and when the hollyjack had tried to help him it had torn her leaves before retreating into the deep bosk of the wood. She mightn’t help him again.

  The moment of apprehension faded as fast as the memory of the Indian boy from the book. He was suddenly on the ivy “ladder,” hauling himself up the stonework to the open roof, over an empty gallery, then across a broad sill that was carved with intricate rose and leaf patterns. He held the long neck of an ugly stone animal, and peered back down into the body of the church, swinging gently in the vast space and watching the wooden seats below, but they were quite lifeless now. Then he had clambered over the gargoyle and out onto a branch, crawling into the daylight and slipping down the twisted beech tree and onto the slate roof of the porch. The clearing stretched around him, ending at the wood. A few granite headstones poked from mounds in the tall grass and nettles. The stone well was half in shadow. The crowding wood was dark, crushing, and he felt a tingle of apprehension again. The giggler came and went, usually at dusk, but he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t there now, watching him from the shadows. He needed to drink, though.

  Without really thinking, he reached the well and drew up the bucket, splashing water into his mouth and over his body, liking the cold touch on his bruises. Some impulse, faintly remembered, made him rub water between his toes.

  Something moved suddenly in the dark wood, startling him, and he scampered back to the open door of the porch, yelping at the stings he received from the dense nettlebed. It was only the holly-jack, in fact. She hovered in the gloom, then stepped quickly past the well, crouching against a headstone. He knew that her eyes would tell him of fear, but her eyes said nothing. They gleamed from deep in the holly leaves that wreathed her face. The thin twigs that stretched from each side of her round mouth were wet. She had been feeding, then. She was fat, these days, and her body often moved as if she was being kicked from inside.

  In her hands she held a selection of colourful fungi. She offered these, and he came forward and picked carefully, knowing that some would make him dizzy and sick. The rest he ate gratefully as the holly-jack quickly examined those he had rejected. She was trying to learn.

  The hollyjack was disturbed. Her mouth flexed and she made bird noises. Her long fingers stroked her body leaves restlessly, almost nervously. He wanted to go back into the chapel, to safety and security, away from the strange men and creatures who so often prowled among the trees. But he sensed that the hollyjack needed him, so he stayed in the shadow, listening to furtive movement in the woodland and the fluttering of wings in his friend’s body.

  He realised quite suddenly that she was inviting him to dream again, and his heart surged.

  He had had a dream last night, in the cathedral … as he ate the last of the mushrooms he struggled to recall the details. There had been wild dancing. The green men in the church stalls had slipped out of the wood and run amok. He was like a leaf, unfurling at dawn. The giggler had stepped from the wood and walked into his dreams, hiding there …

  But as he tried to remember these things, so they faded, leaving him blank again, empty and restless, lonely and isolated. The details had gone.

  A bigger dream was on offer, now. The way the hollyjack crouched and trembled, watching him and chitter-chattering in her funny way, all of this told him that she had heard something. Big Dream, he wondered as he chewed, or Little Dream?

  When he was full he left the porch and went over to the hollyjack, curling up in her twiggy arms. The prick of holly leaves made him shudder, but after a while the mixing of blood and sap soothed him, and although the inside of her body shifted and fluttered restlessly, he felt himself slip out into the wood, flowing softly, spreading widely, connected to the forest around him through her roots, now embedded in the earth of the graveyard, and touching the tendrils of wilder trees.

  She was sending him on the Little Dream, and he heard his father’s voice again, for only the second time since the hollyjack had come. His father was in the wood. His father was coming closer. He was looking desperately for his son. There was someone with him, a man like a bear, dark-featured and fierce. There was excitement, running, they were afraid. The wood shifted around them, tripped them, snagged them, sucked them deeper. The giggler was watching them, but they weren’t aware of it.

  Then he touched his father’s dreams again, his memories, and he shouted with pain at the anguish he felt, the sadness. The hollyjack wrapped her arms more tightly around him, soothed him, rustled and twittered at him with her voice. Blood and sap mingled more deeply. He lay back in the hollybush and started to cry. But he dreamed his father’s dream for a while, feeding on it, bringing himself close again to a man he remembered only as a picture. He moved out of the cathedral and into the wood, a wraith, anxious to touch the man who was searching for him.

  Out of the Dark

  It was to be an evening of rain and strange encounters. There would be a return from the dead, and the beginning of the ending of a life.

  Richard Bradley hastened along the road to his house, at the edge of Shadoxhurst, hatless and drenched by the torrential and freezing late September downpour. The whole town had become dark. The few shops had their lights on, and at four in the afternoon this made a depressingly wintry scene. Richard was wearing only his suit, the collar of his jacket drawn tightly around his neck in a vain attempt to stop the rain coursing down his back. Bedraggled and fed up, he broke into a run as he neared his cottage, then slowed abruptly as he saw the woman dart away from the back gate towards the fields.

  She was wearing strange clothes. She too was saturated, he could see, her dark hair plastered to her scalp. He didn’t see her face, only the army trousers, tucked into muddy, black boots, and a full and heavy-looking green anorak drawn tightly around her neck. She had something slung across her shoulder, and although it was hard to be sure, Richard thought it was
a short bow and full quiver.

  He quickened his step, puzzled by the fact that she had been at his back door, but by the time he reached the gate she was a bulky and distant shape, running through the downpour towards the stream that led to Ryhope Wood, on the estate. The rain made the wood seem grim, as always.

  He opened the back door and peered inside the house, noticing the wet footprints that led across the kitchen and into the small parlour. The footprints were small. He assumed at once that they were those of the woman, but what on earth was she doing here? Nothing looked disturbed. The cash box, clearly labelled as such (it contained only coppers), was still on its shelf.

  Richard followed the footprints. They ascended the stairs and showed clearly, though slightly faded, how the intruder had looked into each room. The carpet had dried the wetness from her boots by mid-landing of the return, but downstairs, on the bureau, he found a note, which he read with astonishment.

  Why aren’t you here? Everything’s OK with Old Stone Hollow. I really hoped you’d be here. I miss you. It’s been too long.

  IMPORTANT: Lytton reckons he knows how to locate the boy’s protogenomorph, but we need YOU there. Come to the Station. I’m going back into the wood by the old brook, taking path through Huxley’s Lodge. Follow me the moment you get back. This may be our only chance to find the true cathedral! Just do it! I miss you.

  The note was unsigned. The paper was wet where she had held it, the pen, a cheap biro, flung on the table. She had rested a hand on the polished wood and he placed his own hand upon the vague outline, noting its smallness, the details of her fingerprints, three of which were crossed with scars.

  A thought had occurred to him, that he should fetch the police, but he stood there unwilling to do so. He just looked at the handprint, and the note, savouring its strangeness and its incomprehensibility. And remembering the image of the woman, wet, dark-haired, bulky with clothes, but fast, running along the bridleway towards the wood that had so fascinated Alexander’s young friend Tallis Keeton, before she and her father had so tragically and mysteriously disappeared, over a year ago, now.