The Bone Forest Read Free

you think?"
    He placed the cold, crushed circlet on his head. It fitted well, uncomfortably so, and he removed it at once.
    Wynne-Jones did not volunteer an opinion.
    "And figures?" the younger man prompted after a while. "Encounters?"
    "Apart from Snow Woman, and I didn't see her… just the Crow Ghost, as I call him… the feathers are mostly black, but I noticed this time that his face is painted and that he
sings
. I'm intrigued by that aspect of him. But he's just as aggressive as before, and so
fast
in his movement through the wood. So, the Crow Ghost. Who else… let me think… oh yes, the wretched 'Robin Hood' form, of course. This one seemed advanced, perhaps thirteenth century."
    "Lincoln Green?" Wynne-Jones said.
    "Mud brown, but with some fancy weavework on arms and breast. Slightly bearded. Very large in build. Took the usual shot at me, before merging—"
    He placed a broken arrow on the table. The head was a thin point of steel, flanged. The shaft was ash, the flights goosefeather, no decoration. "The 'Hoods' and 'Green Jacks' worry me. They've already shot me once. One day one of them is going to strike me in the heart. And the way they just appear—"
    He used the word "merge" deliberately. It was as if the forms of the Hunter—the Robin Hoods, or Jack o' the Greens—
oozed
from the trees, then slipped back into them, merging with the bark and the hardwood and becoming invisible. Too frightened to investigate further, because of the threat to his life, Huxley had no idea whether he was dealing with a phenomenon of the supernatural, or superb camouflage.
    "And of the Urscumug?"
    Huxley laughed dryly. But it was less of a joke, these days, more a fixation, a belief, bordering on the obsessive. The first hero, the primal form, ancient, probably malevolent. Huxley had heard
references
to it, found
signs
of it, but he could not get deeply enough into Ryhope Wood to come close to it—to see it. He was convinced it was there, however.
Urscumug
. The almost incomprehensible hero of the first spoken legends, held in the common unconscious of all humankind and almost certainly being generated in Ryhope Wood, somewhere in the glades of this primal, unspoiled stretch of forest.
    The Urscumug
. The beginning.
    But Huxley was beginning to think that he was fated
never
to engage with it.
    Standing by the open windows, watching the woodland across the neat garden, with its trimmed cherry trees and clipped hedges, he felt suddenly very old. It was a sensation that had begun to concern him: all his adult life he had felt like a man in his thirties, but it had been a vigorous feeling; now that he was in his middle forties he felt stooped, sagging, a fatigue that he had expected to encounter in his sixties, not for many many years. And it was a feeling of being too old to
see
, to see the wood for what it was, to see out of the corner of his eyes—those frustrating, tantalizing glimpses of movement, of creatures, of color, of the
ancient
that hovered at peripheral vision, and which vanished when he turned toward them.
    The boys, though. They seemed to see
everything
.
    "Have you brought the bridges?"
    Wynne-Jones unpacked the odd electrical equipment, the headsets with their terminals, wires and odd face-pieces that formed electric linkages across the brain. The voltage was low, but effective. After an hour of electrical stimulation, "peripheral view awareness" perked up remarkably. And it was in the peripheral vision that glimpses of mythagos were mainly to be experienced: Huxley called them the "pre-mythago" form, and imagined these to be gradually emerging memories of the past, the passage of memory from mind to wood.
    Huxley picked up the apparatus. "We are old, Father Edward, we are too old. Oh God for youth again, for that far sight… The boys see so much. And so often with full fore-vision."
    "What could they see if we enhanced them, I wonder?" Wynne-Jones said softly.
    Huxley was alarmed. This was the second time