The Hollowing Read online

  Alex came bounding up to the front door and rang the bell. Richard folded the note and tucked it into his trousers pocket, then opened the door to the wet, excitable thirteen-year-old. The boy ran straight to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of orange juice, then crashed upstairs to get ready for the school play.

  On impulse, Richard followed his son to the “treasure house,” as he and Alice called Alexander’s room.

  “Do you want tea?” he asked from the door, watching the boy poring over some typewritten sheets.

  “No thanks. Had crisps and two Lion bars.”

  “Well, that sounds healthy enough.” Alex didn’t respond. “We’ll be leaving at six, if they want you there at six-thirty, so don’t lounge around reading for long.”

  “I’m not reading—I’m memorising. Mr. Evans and me wrote a new scene today.”

  “Mr. Evans and I…”

  Alex groaned tiredly.

  Richard looked around the room, reaching out to flick one of the many model planes that were suspended from the ceiling. Alexander’s costume—he was to play the red-bearded Lord Bertolac in the third year’s production of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—was draped around a tailor’s dummy. The red beard and hair had been fashioned from two very old wigs and looked hilarious upon the boy. Another pupil would be playing the Green Knight himself (who was, in fact, Lord Bertolac in otherworldly form) as the change of costuming was too difficult.

  There was something about Alex’s den that both embraced and unnerved Richard. It was a difficult feeling—there was so much obsession here, so much passion, from the paintings of knights, with odd insignia and helmet crests, to the drawings of dinosaurs and the carefully ordered trays of fossils and crystals, gathered from all over Britain, all labelled and all imbued with mystery. Chunks of iron marcasite from chalk pits were questioningly labelled “Spacecraft remains?” The intricate patterns of fossils were related to Star Creatures, lost in the chalk seas in primordial times. Models, in plastic and wood, were everywhere, and the boy could tell a story about each one.

  It was an imagination inherited from his grandfather (along with a love of toy soldiers), but a trait completely missing from Richard himself, although he tried hard to remember what had been his own childhood dream: he had walked, lazed in the sun, and swum in the freezing seas off the Welsh coast. He had very little to show for growing up.

  He realised that Alex was watching him anxiously. He asked, “What is it?”

  Alex said simply, “You can come in, if you want. You can test me.”

  Feeling awkward, for no reason he could identify, Richard turned to go downstairs. “I’ll test you in the car, shall I? I’d better get some tea going.”

  Leaving Alexander to memorise the final few lines of his part in the heavily adapted play, he went down to the kitchen, taking out the note and re-reading it. It had an odd, foreign quality to the language—Lytton reckons he knows how to locate the boy’s protogenomorph. It had an American twang to it. And what on earth was a protogenomorph?

  The rain drummed monotonously. He heard the sound of the family car, an old Rover that roared and spluttered as the engine was turned off. Alice struggled out onto the kerb and cursed the rain.

  He had hidden the note before she entered the house to begin her relentless domestic routine and preparing for the evening out. She had little time for idle chat. Richard prepared tea and wrote two letters, but he was distracted and disturbed—indeed, he was enjoying a welcome if vicarious experience.

  The note had surely been intended for someone else, not for Richard Bradley. But he couldn’t get over the odd and thrilling sensation that nine words in the woman’s hand gave him.

  I really hoped you’d be here. I miss you.

  * * *

  Alice was half-asleep in the passenger seat, her head rocking as the car bumped slowly over the uneven road, leading back to Shadoxhurst. The headlights cut a bright path through the rain. Houses appeared grey, windows reflecting dully; trees were dark, looming shapes that appeared and disappeared from vision in seconds. The road curved across the country; two foxes scampered across the path of the car, casting gleam-eyed glances, hesitating as the vehicle approached.

  Behind Richard, Alexander stared at the night land, awake, alert, excited. He was still dressed in his Lord Bertolac costume, all but the bushy beard. His performance had been warmly applauded.

  In fact, it had been a spectacular performance all round, from the mad chase around the stage for the Green Knight’s severed head, which took on an unintentional role of its own, to the sub–Gilbert and Sullivan words of the songs, all written by the children.

  Even now, Richard found himself singing the “Wild Man’s” song:

  “I am a Mountain Wodwo,

  “I live on leaves and fish roe…”

  There had been no subtleties, of course, simply an adventure, with monsters and supernatural entities. The Green Knight’s beheading, his magical return to life and subsequent challenge to Gawain, to meet a year later at the Green Chapel (an ancient burial mound) for a return stroke, were powerfully played; the three attempts at seducing Sir Gawain by the enchantress Morgan le Fay, disguised as Lady Bertolac, were excruciating, as the boy playing Morgan couldn’t keep the pitch of his voice constantly high. Alex’s innovation to the story had been to make the pagan Green Knight the guardian of a fabulous talisman. At the end, Gawain, disguised as a hunting falcon, tricked the monstrous knight out of his chapel, entered the mound to the fairy Otherworld and stole the treasure.

  Alexander had been singled out for special applause. Richard and Alice had felt very proud of the lad and joined heartily in the encore, a refrain from the final song (“One bloody nick at the side of my neck—All for the sake of My Lady’s Green Girdle”).

  Headlights cut through the dark, swinging across trees, hedges, walls, briefly illuminating a land that was silent, saturated and sleeping.

  The man who suddenly staggered in front of the car was wearing only a dressing gown. He waved both hands helplessly as Richard swerved to avoid him. He was holding what looked like a round, white mask.

  For a second, in the headlamps, the man had been startled like a wild animal, frozen in the road. Then he flung himself aside to escape hurt. Richard saw only his white body, naked beneath the gaping gown. He had been thinly bearded, and everything about him had glistened like oil, the effect of light on rain-drenched skin.

  The car stopped heavily and Alice woke up abruptly.

  “What the hell is it?”

  “A man just ran into the road. I nearly knocked him down.”

  “You should drive more slowly,” Alice said predictably.

  Richard was already outside the car, peering into the darkness behind. He listened through the rain but could hear nothing.

  Alice said, “I’ll drive, shall I? That way we might get home safely.”

  “I didn’t hit him, Alice. And he did run into the road…” But Richard was disturbed by the man’s appearance. “I just thought for a minute…”

  He got back into the car and sat quietly. As Alice woke more fully from her drowsy state so her shock and her irritation passed away. “Let’s get home.”

  “I thought I recognised him. I only glimpsed him…”

  “Probably a farmer’s lad, drunk. As you said, you didn’t hit him, so let it alone. I’m cold.”

  “He was wearing a dressing gown. Gaping open. Did you see him, Alex?”

  Behind him the boy nodded palely. His eyes were wide and he looked upset.

  “Alex?”

  “It was Mr. Keeton,” the boy said quietly. He was shaking. Richard went cold as the man’s face became clearer to him. “It was Tallis’s father,” Alex repeated. “It was Mr. Keeton.”

  “Nonsense,” Alice said, but she frowned when she saw the look on her husband’s face. “Jim Keeton and Tallis disappeared over a year ago. You know that, Alex. He hasn’t come back, now. If it was Jim, then it’s his ghost.”

&n
bsp; Richard was trying to remember something from those distressing days, when the countryside had been searched and no sign of the two Keetons found. “When Jim vanished … wasn’t it in the morning? He’d run out of the house in his dressing gown. Don’t you remember what Margaret told the inquest?”

  Alice shrugged. “I remember. But they’ve been gone for over a year. You’re not telling me that a year later he’s still wearing his dressing gown…”

  Richard looked round in the darkness. On the small back seat of the car his Red Knight son was hunched, knees drawn up, eyes wide as he stared at his father. He was crying silently.

  * * *

  Five hours later, James Keeton came to their cottage. The rain had eased, but he made a miserable and bedraggled figure, standing at the bottom of the garden, staring at the dark window where Alexander watched, the mask held against his chest. He opened the gate and ran quickly to the back door, tapping on the glass. Alex struggled to see the man from his bedroom, but Keeton had moved through the rain to stand outside the dining room. Like a bird, tapping with its beak, Keeton kept tapping with his fingers, pressing his face against the glass, hand raised, tap-tap-tapping as he peered into the darkness of the cottage.

  Alex stood on the landing, shivering. His pyjama trousers came undone and he struggled to tie them more securely. He listened to the noise of the beak on the glass downstairs, and remembered his friend Tallis’s tales of birds, and bird creatures, and nights filled with wings. He slowly descended the stairs, and in the dining room approached the half-moon face of the man outside, coming closer until he could see the beard and the curve of pale flesh above, stepping right up to the window where the half-naked man tap-tap-tapped in slow desperation. Alex gently tap-tap-tapped back. Keeton’s nose was squashed against the glass. A trickle of rain ran down between eyes and windowpane. He held the odd piece of rotting wood in one hand, and Alex saw the crude face, the moon-like curves, the cuts for eyes. He recognised it as one of Tallis’s masks. It was Moondream. He pressed his hand against the glass where the mask watched, remembering his lost friend.

  The water on the pane, outside, mingled with the tears that Mr. Keeton shed.

  “Don’t run away,” Alex called, and the man closed his eyes. He seemed to slump against the glass and continued to tap with the mask, as if he were a weary Punch and Judy man, using the cold-eyed wood to entice the children’s fancy. Moondream tapped the window and Keeton sank down into a huddle; mask-face and man-face disappeared from view.

  Alex went outside with the Persian rug from the hallway and wrapped the heavy fabric around the freezing man. Mr. Keeton was silent, now, hugging the mask and watching the dark, damp night through eyes that were unpleasantly blank and watery. Alex tried to help him stand, but he wouldn’t move.

  “Don’t run away again. Promise? Stay here.”

  The man made a strange sound, then curled more tightly into his saturated dressing gown and the thick, dry rug, pulling the knotted ends around his neck.

  Alex went upstairs and woke his father.

  “Mr. Keeton’s come home. But he’s very sad. I think Tallis must be dead.”

  Moondreaming

  There was something very curious about James Keeton’s condition. When he had been bathed, shaved, and his hair brushed, only a desperate, haunted look in his eyes suggested any difference to the robust and over-nourished man who had disappeared, presumably to live rough and wild, one year and fifteen days ago. His wife Margaret was very distressed, hardly touching her husband, but staring at him as he was examined by a local doctor, and talked to and tested, but without responding in any way.

  Keeton’s skin was scratched in places, and his two big toes very bruised. The growth of beard, now removed, had been that of four or five days. His dressing gown, though the pockets were torn, once dry was as good as new—not the raggy robe that might have been expected from a year in the wild.

  Oddest of all, the elastoplast on his index finger covered an almost healed cut. The day before he had disappeared, Keeton had cut himself carving a shoulder of lamb for the family lunch.

  Had he been looked after somewhere during his absence, only to be returned to his original appearance (minus pyjamas!) a few days before, to run blindly along the country lanes around Shadoxhurst? Only James Keeton could answer that question, and Keeton was saying nothing. He rocked slightly in the armchair, and seemed, at times, to be looking into the far distance. He cried silently, and his lips moved, but no sound emerged.

  The doctor made a tentative diagnosis of shock, inducing a temporary catatonic state. He might emerge from it at any moment, or he might become dangerous, to himself if not to others. He should be taken to hospital for further and more expert examination, he advised.

  Throughout all of this, from two in the morning to the new day, Keeton held firmly onto the crude mask, his grip tightening like a child’s when Richard tentatively tried to take it.

  “Tallis was always making those things,” Margaret murmured from across the room. She was pale, exhausted with confusion. “Which one is it?”

  Alexander said, “It’s Moondream. She told me more about it, but I’ve forgotten.”

  At the sound of the boy’s voice, or perhaps at the mention of the mask’s name, Keeton’s unfocused gaze hardened and he sat up straighter, his lips smacking together for a moment. When Alex put his arm around the man’s shoulder, Keeton curled into the embrace, apparently relaxed.

  * * *

  At his own request, Alex drove with the Keetons to the infirmary, fifteen miles away, near a secluded village on the county border. Richard and others from Shadoxhurst spent the next three days searching the countryside for any sign of Tallis, but for a second time they found nothing. The owners of the Ryhope Estate scoured the edges of Ryhope Wood and the area adjacent to the mill-pond, but reported that they, too, had found no traces. Twice, Richard went across the fields to the wired-off road, and stood where the old road entered the gloom, to the ruins of Oak Lodge where his son, and other children, had once played. High, barbed-wire fencing and notices of the prosecution of trespassers were unfriendly reminders of the detached and hostile attitude to the local community that now resided in the Manor House: the two children (now in their thirties) had inherited the property after the death of their father.

  Alex was a regular visitor to James Keeton over the next four weeks, and Richard and Alice both became concerned at what appeared to be the boy’s insatiable curiosity about the silent man. Keeton sat immobile and silent, staring into space, the Moondream mask either clutched to his chest or propped up on the mantelpiece of his small, private room, overlooking the woods. But although Richard talked to his son, tried to discourage him from the obsessive visiting, Alex would not be persuaded. He could cycle the fifteen miles to the hospital in just over two hours. His homework suffered. He was always glad if Richard drove him to the secluded place, and seemed unbothered by his father being in the room.

  What Alex did was to whisper stories to the frozen man. As he spoke, he stroked Keeton’s hands. Sometimes he held the mask up for him, and invariably Keeton leaned forward to peer through its eyes. It was the only voluntary movement he made. Everything that Alex did sounded reassuring. He told jokes, wild adventures, he talked of Tallis.

  “Come back, Mr. Keeton. Come back home,” Richard heard him saying once. “I know you’re still wandering. You can come back now. Everything is safe.”

  In the car, driving back to Shadoxhurst, Richard asked his son what he had meant by those words.

  “It’s just a feeling,” the boy said. “His body’s here, but I think his spirit is still wandering, still searching for Tallis.”

  “This sounds like a fairy story.”

  Alex shrugged. “Sometimes he whispers things that make me think he can see other lands.”

  “Like the land of the Green Knight, eh?” Richard said, and then the implication of what Alex had said struck him. “He whispers things. He talks to you?”

&nb
sp; “Not to me,” the boy said, shifting in the car seat and staring out at the darkening landscape. “But he talks … Not very much, and always in whispers. It doesn’t make much sense, but I think he’s wandering somewhere, searching hard.”

  A month to the day after his committal to the infirmary, Keeton recovered consciousness dramatically. By the time Richard and Alex arrived at the hospital he was in a state of high excitement. He didn’t appear to recognise Richard, but began to talk almost incoherently to the boy, even as he peered through the face of the mask on the mantel-ledge.

  “I can see her, Alex. I’ve caught up at last! She’s on the other side of the mask. I’m not sure if she knows it’s me, and she can’t hear me, but she’s there, among big trees, with several riders. She seems well. But she’s so grown up.”

  Richard watched and listened as the older man poured out his vision to the thirteen-year-old.

  “Her face is scarred. She’s become so tall. I think she must be a hunter of some sort. They’re in a deep wood, near a river, among stone ruins. An old man is with her, and he keeps crying. There’s something very strange in the trees—like a creature…”

  “May I look?” Alex asked.

  Keeton passed the boy the mask and Alex held it to his face, peering in through the eyes, turning slightly as if adjusting his view. From his expression it was clear that he had seen nothing but the room. Keeton took the mask back and placed it on the mantelpiece, touching the smeared moon-shapes, the crudely gouged eyes. His white shirt was saturated with sweat, his grey flannels creased and drooping. His hair had turned completely white in the last month, a startling change that occurred overnight, as if a ghost had touched him and he had been unable to respond.

  He sat down now and sighed deeply. “Alex?”

  “Yes?”

  “It was her. It was my little girl all grown up. Wasn’t it?”