Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle) by Robert Holdstock Read Free Book Online

called Oak Lodge. Gaunt assured me that there was. At the end of the rough track, he said.’
    He paced along the weathered road, then turned back to look at the thick woodland. ‘It’s where Harry came. It’s where my father came before the war. To visit those historians … Huxley. And the other one … Wynne-Jones.’
    ‘Before my time,’ Margaret said.
    They stared at the broken road, where it vanished into the dense growth. Tall oaks, crowding together, cast an unwelcoming darkness on the tangle of haw and blackthorn and rose briar below. The high grass growing among the edgewood waved in a gentle breeze. The notice rattled on its perch and the rusting wire shook.
    A strange expression touched James Keeton’s face and Tallis realized that her father had suddenly become very frightened. He was pale, his eyes wide. And his breathing was quick, nervous.
    Tallis stepped right up to the wire and stood there, staring through the gloom. As she watched that earthy darkness so she began to see a gleam of light, sunlight in a clearing a long way beyond the outer line of trees.
    ‘There’s a glade in there,’ she said, but her father chose to ignore her. He was walking away from the wood. He stood on the earth bank lining the road and stared into the distance. Her mother had spread out the picnic cloth below a solitary elm and was unpacking the hamper.
    ‘There’s a glade in there,’ Tallis repeated loudly. ‘The house might be in the glade.’
    Her father watched her for a moment, then stepped off the bank, ignoring his daughter. He walked towards the elm, saying ‘Gaunt must have been mistaken. You’re right. But I can’t believe it …’
    ‘Daddy! There’s a
glade
in the wood,’ Tallis called.
    ‘Don’t go too far away,’ he called back, and Tallis, her body tense with excitement, sagged a little.
    He was not listening to her. He was so wrapped up in his own thoughts, his own concerns, that the fact that the house might be abandoned in the wood was refusing to register.
    There had been a house here, and now it was gone. Tallis stared at the road, at the way its rough concrete surface was sheared off, as if by a knife, as if it had been consumed by the wood, eaten whole. Perhaps that same bite had swallowed the lodge, an entire house overwhelmed by trees.
    Where this strange thought came from she didn’t know, but the image was there, as clear in her mind as the images from the fairy-tales she had read all her life.
    Dark forests, and remote castles … and in the yellow, sunlit glades, there were always strange treasures to be found.
    She trod on the lower wire and cautiously lifted the barbs above it, ducking through as best she could. She looked back at her parents, who were sitting on the rug, sipping tea and talking.
    Turning, she started to walk through the undergrowth towards the patch of brightness ahead of her.
    She could still feel the cracked and fragmented road, hard beneath her thin shoes. Roots sprawled across the concrete and low branches had to be brushed aside as she stepped cautiously forward in the gloom. She came closer to the glade and was able to see that it was a small clearing, enclosed by enormous, dark-trunked oaks. Dead branches, cracked and twisted by winter winds, rose starkly above the foliage.
    She could also see the sheer rise of a brick wall. There were two windows on that wall, the glass in them longsince gone. Branches of the overwhelming wood hung from them, like dead limbs.
    She took another step, pushing aside a sprawling web of red-berried thorn. Now she could see that in the centre of the clearing, in front of the house, was a tall, wooden pillar. Its top was carved in the vague semblance of a human face, simple slanted eyes, a gaping mouth, the slash of a nose. The wood looked rain-blackened and rotten, split vertically and crumbling. Tallis felt deeply uncomfortable as she stared at it …
    Edging her way around this hideous totem pole, she stepped into the garden