Merlin's Wood (Mythago Wood) by Robert Holdstock Page B

about was a week or more before. You weren’t with us that night. And your fingers were all torn at the ends, as if you’d been scratching at rough bark, which is what Conrad claims he saw.’
    She was silent for a long time, looking at Martin, yet somehow through him, fiddling with her hair, then shaking her head. ‘I scraped them sliding down a trunk after watching the two of you on the path.’ She too was speaking quietly, almost sadly. And suddenly her eyes closed and her face grimaced with pain.
    ‘My God. Oh my God.’ She looked at him again. ‘You do think I killed Seb. You think it was me. Don’t you? Why don’t you speak? Don’t just stare at me. Oh Christ,I feel sick. I’m going to be sick. How could you? How could you think such a thing? I loved Seb. I loved him. I wouldn’t have hurt him.’
    She stood slowly and left the kitchen, closing the door slowly behind her.
    Later, Martin heard her moving around upstairs. He thought she might be packing her things to leave, but eventually he heard the bed-springs, and then silence.
    ‘I’ve lost her,’ Martin said to the silence after she’d gone, experiencing an aching despair as this fear became a reality. But later he woke suddenly, cramped up on the small sofa, a blanket over his clothed body. Moonlight streamed into the sitting room, illuminating Rebecca, who sat on the sofa’s edge, her eyes sparkling as she watched the waking man.
    ‘Beck?’
    ‘After Seb died,’ she said softly, ‘I had a recurring dream. It was very strange, quite frightening, and I never told it to anybody. After what you said this evening, I can’t get it out of my mind; I think it came back again, I probably woke in the middle of it.’
    Martin sat up and made more room for her, reaching out to touch her arm. She sat motionless, unresponsive. He said, ‘Beck – forgive me. I’m confused. It’s this place, the old fears. And the old man confused me …’
    ‘Be quiet – please – be quiet. Let me tell you the dream.’
    She turned away from him, arms across her chest.
    ‘I’m in a clearing, a glade in an old forest. I’m runninground the glade with a torch, and everything is burning, the flames sweeping high, the smoke billowing, and cloth and skins and parchment are being consumed by the fire, burning brightly, shedding charred fragments into the air. There’s the tall, thick shaft of an old thorn lying on the ground. I’ve hacked its branches down to stubs, then decorated it with bracelets in bronze, and torques and brooches, and there are bones around it, and clay pots filled with stinking liquid and coloured powders. All of them are melting in the heat. And I’m dancing around a swirling column of earth that rises above me. A man is screaming. The more I dance the faster the rising tower of earth spins, the louder the cries, and the more I laugh!
    ‘Then I’m dancing with a man, spinning round among the flames, only it isn’t a man it’s a stone statue, a horrible effigy, the ears cut off, the eyes gouged out, the nose slit, the mouth gaping tongueless, no fingers on the hands, no toes on the feet, the sex has been broken from the groin. I twirl this gruesome statue across the glade, and around the rising earth, singing all the time, even kissing the cold stone lips. There is a feeling of terror. A cairn of stones holds the centre of the glade and I fling the dancing stone across it.
    ‘I run from the burning grove, swim hard through dragging, sucking waters, shaking myself dry on the shore, then running through the forest, swerving and ducking, but dancing all the time. Only I’m not a woman, now … I’m on all fours, my tongue lolling. I howl and scream at the sky as I run, I bay at the moon,I bark at shadows, I scratch at bark. It is a run of great triumph, and great delight.
    ‘But suddenly a man is there, naked and blind, blocking my path. He is the man of the statue, stripped of senses, sex and touch; but his presence ahead of me –