I was sixteen years old, in highschool in the Pioneer Valley in Western Massachusetts. Something was happening to me. I would sneak out at night and walk across the university campus across from our house, watch the Moon ripple in the waters of the Upper Lake; in darkened sylvan amphitheatre, light-headed, heavy-footed, I would cast eyes to Heavens, and reel beneath their void expanse; I would rest my forehead upon the trunk of a particular Copper Beech, spread my hands on her bark, and feel her shivering with life.
I would sneak out at night and dream in the backs of cars driven by adolescent Rebel Angels, as the yearning desperate music of the time played loud on the radio, as we rode through the night, a tangle of long limbs and floppy hair and plaid, as we breathed and closed our eyes and shuddered.
We would ride the buses round to all the little grungey hippy college towns, and haunt the record stores and comic shops and café-bookshops where we would sip hazelnut coffees and wish we were already there. We gave each other poems. We stayed out all night in diners after rehearsals for our plays and with our bands. We started clubs for people like ourselves, for whom there were no clubs. We marvelled that people would one days realise that we all knew each other way back when, before we were famous. We were Seekers. Something was stirring. We were in love.
We started literary magazines.
The day before the deadline was a Sunday. It rained all day, and I sat inside in front of my father’s desktop computer. The screen was empty but for a blinking cursor. I had had three weeks to write something; nothing was coming. Except … Something WAS coming. I had been dreaming it. I could hear the flurry of wings as it approached. I had been dreaming it for years.
That day, for the first time, I sat there and plunged within, plunged my pen’s oar into the flow of that underground river, into the icy black calm wave.
I began to type.
Less of an experience of creativity as of channelling, of being a conduit for something. It flowed. Faster and faster it came, I could hardly keep up.
Tears flowed down my cheeks, tears of joy and pain, or something infinitely more complex: I trembled with unspeakable emotion. I wrote for a few hours, and when I looked up night had fallen. I hadn’t noticed. I was out of Time.
This was when it first happened. Something was Calling me.
When I handed it in, they were baffled by it. “I don’t understand what happens in it?” she said with the upward questioning lilt of voice they all had. “Like, we don’t know anything about who this is or why they’re doing what they’re doing? And like, the ending? What kind of an ending is that?”
The teacher we had for AP English, with the improbably name and the pencil legs and handle-bar moustache and half-moon spectacles and the brightly-coloured suspenders … The teacher who had had us read everything from Oedipus Rex to Nineteen Eighty Four that year; the teacher who would let us sit for five, ten, fifteen minutes in excruciating silence when he’d asked a question and no one would dare answer …
He came to my defense. He said: “There’s actually a lot of pretty interesting archetypal stuff going on here. Read it again.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant, not then. But I remembered.
The story haunted me. It wasn’t a story, not really. It was a piece of my Dream-Life dredged up from the Unconscious. It was an ancient artifact of unknown provenance dug up in an archaeological site somewhere in the desert interior of my soul’s country.
I still don’t really know what it’s worth. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. Maybe it is only a key, and I haven’t found the door it fits yet.
But years later, I dug up the Literary Journal we had made (it was called Still Looking … We sat on the floor outside the classroom, and he asked us if we had come up with a name. I said, “Still looking” … We looked at each other …). I found the story again, shoved between some old foolscap notebooks in a drawer. Double columns of tiny type. This was the only copy. I typed it all out again, to have it. And then I started to write what happens next. That turned into the seed for my first novel.
When I handed it in, the improbably-named and dashingly-mustachioed teacher asked me for a title. I told him it didn’t have one. He said “Yes it does. Here, near the end; that’s the title: The Hollow Behind the Hearthstone.”
I
THE HOLLOW BEHIND THE HEARTHSTONE
I shiver violently and it snaps me out of the half-sleep I was in. Before I even have time to think, I’m on my feet and my head flicks left right. No one there. Yet, at least. I shiver again and look more slowly. The air is chill and smells of damp and heavy earth, and it seems almost as if I can see the way it smells as all about me is dense and roiling fog, billowing along the ground, clinging to it, writhing between the trees. The trees are bare and black, stark still pillars leaning this way and that up into the nothingness. The ground is covered with a muddy, pulpy layer of dead leaves. The mud and wetness covers me as well. I try to slow my breathing, and stand a moment, my eyes closed. Looking inward, it seems the fog is inside me as well. There is nothing, save mocking echoes that I can’t quite make out. I shake my head to clear them, thinking it’s maybe better not to know. Starting to walk a skewed path down the slope, I see there there is no underbrush here save only thick and twisted patches of brambles, secret and hideaway in the dark-filled hollows. A flurry of motion just to my right and a flapping blur of feathers bursts up from the ground and is as quickly lost into the nothing fog, with just a sad tearing cry, that was like the echo of another sound, to mark its leaving. And then it begins again.
A shudder ripples through my body, taking my breath for a second, and I know, before I could possibly know, that they’re here. All my muscles whip taut and I crouch, ready, head held up for sound or smell. Not long in coming this time, I hear the first call, a shrieking, howling roar, still very far away. Still awful though, it makes my face, my fists clench, nails draw near to blood, near through the skin. The frees me suddenly and I run. Down. A mad dash, feet slipping, as I run my mind seems floating near my body, trees fly past me, left right close. The ground pounds up and down as feet plunge legs push faster faster faster. Now I cease to feel and my eyes are all they fly through the fog ever downward, AHH!! Grounddropsoutfromunderseemlikefloatingsplitsecond-foreverfreefalling … THUMP! ground and up and running quicker than I can or should and over tree-root stumble keep on going splash through … far above, my mind, that’s floating calmly and detached, can hear the wincing, echoing cries that follow. Now an echo, now what seems an answering call, and then another. Now the sudden harsh, flat blare of a horn, still very far away, so far indeed that it could almost be a memory that echoes off the fog and … legs were hurting now just numbing jumping running over stream and ditch or hollow hill has stopped now ground is flat and coming into … a great clearing, down a drop of about ten feet, in which fog lies like a ghostly lake, crowded all around the brim with the stark still skeletal trees. I can’t see the other side as it is lost into blank cold white. Quick! Don’t stop but scramble hurriedly down the side grabbing onto tree roots protruding out of the damp, thick earth. Now on the floor of the clearing, and how strange the dead leaves on the ground, each one is dusted infinitely delicately with morning’s frost, and each one gleams as I look in the grey and feeble light … Stop dreaming! I run across the flat floor of the clearing, each step crisply crunching as I go and on until I stop short seeing ahead of me, looming out of the fog, a mighty oak tree, wide and deep-rooted, rising into nothing, standing watch in the centre of the clearing. The fog swirls slightly round it – still, unmoving – lending it solidity, immobility, realness, in a sea of phantoms. I run to it, no longer fleeing, with a childish eagerness. As I near the tree, I see that there is an almost-hidden cleft in the great trunk. I walk straight to it, and into it, and up. The cleftway leads me into the heart of the oak, up a narrow chute and into a little chamber, almost spherical, floored with dry dead leaves and lit by pale thin shafts of light through little chinks higher up. In the centre, the oak has made a little raised bowl-shape, which is full of clear water, cold as I sit and dip my fingers in it. Then I lower my head and drink deeply. The water flows through my entire body, calming me. I ease gently down among the dry and whispering leaves and drop into forgetful sleep.
I wake and stretch, and for a moment there is no thought, there is no fear, there is simply a beautiful peace, and then, like a black tide, the smothering dread rushes in and over me. I sit up and realise that the fog has filtered into the tree-hollow, and lies draped around me like a grave-cold lover. I shudder and move swiftly, slipping on the slick-smooth wood of the cleftway, making a bruised way down from my breached safety. As soon as I step out into the clearing, the smell hits me, a rotting, putrid, gut-twisting stench, that lingers with the fog. It calls to mind carrion, and maggot-eaten death, and cold blood running from between jagged, jutting teeth in a grinning mouth. Dropping to my knees, I fight and fight the retching that is rising in my guts, until finally I win, and stumble to my feet. The footprints I left in the frost-dusted clearing are no longer alone. A tangled mess of other prints are all about, some frightening of shape, and the black remains of a fire, sunk a little into the ground. None of the prints, however, goes within twenty feet of the tree. So they were right, I catch myself thinking. Wait? Who? Who were right about what? The thought eludes me like a fleeting dream.
I must go on. There is no sense of time, the fog lies and swirls and cheats the eyes just as it did, the light is faint and hopeless. But the sparkling clearing floor is marred, and torn, and holds no beauty anymore. I must go on. I lean forward and fall into a walk, each foot stumping forward just in time to stop me falling, and a wail of eerie terror deep in the pit of my stomach. I scramble up the other side of the clearing, tugging earth-clotted roots that give alarmingly and almost let me fall. After a little hill, the forest sweeps downward once again, and I am helpless to go anywhere but with the slope. At first, it is not even a sound, but only a texture to the silence, but it grows, a rushing sibilance, into the unmistakeable gush of water, not a trickling stream, but the hiss-roar of a river. And somehow I know that I must find it. Not a hard thing to do, all I need is to follow the slope of the ground and the sound of the water that grows as I slowly descend.
Not long after, I reach the river’s edge and I stand on the bank with tree-roots tangling out and down into the water below. The river is wide and looks deceptively slow, as if on purpose, to trick poor travellers. The opposite bank is almost lost in the mist which seeps between the shadow trees. I cannot cross here, it looks too deep and cold and hungry for my tired, quivering muscles to take on. I begin to walk to the right, downstream along the bank, for who knows, maybe there’s a ford or a bridge further down. And then, faintly, faintly, muffled by the fog, there comes a haunting cry, that prickles my spine, and flutters my heart into pulsing faster and faster, there it is again, and that means they’re on my trail again, and images flash across my mind’s eye of dark shapes bounding through the mist and trees, growling and slavering, now letting free a terrible howl from tooth-filled maw, and clumps of dark earth flying from their galloping steps. And now they’re closer, and a hoarse shout which may or may not have contained words, but rang with hate, and oh I stand and twist and turn, and agony of indecision, and the fog echoes and I can’t tell which way the roaring comes from, but what to do now, what can I do I hear the crashing coming closer and I almost see I turn and run and … jump. The water hits me, sucks me under, the cold like a great steel blade that slides between my ribs, and for an eternal moment, underwater, there is silence, breathless, noiseless, but for the pressing rushing in my ears, and I seem to slow, and is that the water rushing or is it my own blood or maybe the sand in an hourglass somewhere, slower, slower, might I just drift? … No! I burst above the water once again and sounds and whirling sights rush in with the air into my freeze-burning lungs, and a little water as I’m pulled under just a little as I thrash my arms and legs to keep afloat. The water pulls me quickly from the shore where I feel rather than see their frustrated presence falling away behind me. The water holds me up and, for a while, I am content to let it take me where it will, because I know it is away. I kick feebly to keep my head above and my arms are stretched out, as if to fly.
After a time, I begin to try to make my way towards the opposite bank, with small motions and turns of my body. The river is widening even more here and getting shallower, rushing between upthrust rocks, and over shoals of clacking pebbles, until I can stand up, covered to the waist, and wade wearily to shore. The air chills my wet body to the bone, my torn shirt clinging to my shivering torso as I slosh through the shallows, the water dragging at my feet, running from my beard. As I begin again through the mist-draped forest, I clasp my arms futilely about my chest and my teeth chatter loudly and uncontrollably. I stumble along what seems, yes, wait, without even realising it, I’ve been walking along a narrow cleared path, almost parallel with the river, but getting somewhat further from it all the time; The path is only such in the sense that it is devoid of trees and almost straight; like all else, it is carpeted with mud and dead leaves. The trees arch over the path, and all that can be seen behind me and in front of me is the path narrowing and disappearing into nothing. It could be that the path only exists for a certain length before and behind me, then dissolves again into mist. And now the silence begins to press on me, the river’s sound has fallen off to my right, and the view is much the same in front and behind, to either side only close-serried trees. The silence drowns out my already-muffled footsteps, and I feel as if, were I to scream, my mouth would open, spilling nothing into nothing. The silence has me in its grip, an old and time worn hold, and in this dreamy strangeness it seems likely that the silence has reigned here for years upon years, choking those who cleared the path and rolling over their graves, then thwarting their purpose out of spite, by making the path lead from nowhere to nowhere except to quiet madness for those who walk … Stop! shake my head, clear these thoughts, these strange imaginings, I must not let that happen, but it does seem as if I have been walking among these tight-packed galleries of trees forever, always stepping regularly, rhythmically, step step step step step step step … Stop it! I stand still, and close my eyes, breathe deep, and start to run. As if to run were the only way to break from this endless, soundless walk. But then I look back once and see, see a dark shape plunge out of the mist far behind and they’re here, here, go! Run faster nowmyheartispoundingliketobreakmychestIfeelthefurnace-hotbreathlickingheelsbutstillNosound!andrightbehindme-stumblinggoonrightthererightbehindmerunrunrunrunBURST out into a clearing, and I turn and see it leap at me its roar now suddenly released, I tear a pendant from my neck, it’s all so slow, and I hold it up and shout a word that reaches my ears as if through water, the flashing pendant hurls the creature back into the deeper misty shadows of the path, where it lurks, its eyes burning like the dying embers of a fire, its rumbling growl rising. I stand completely still, not sure what has happened, the pendant I didn’t know I had held up to ward the dark thing off. It glints in a tiny needle ray of sunlight, from somewhere. The thing that crouches, barely visible in the mouth of the path, melts away back from the opening and disappears. I turn, safe for now, and see, in the little clearing, what remains of a small crude cottage. This long-abandoned dwelling has become so overgrown now that it looks like it is sunk into the ground. Thick ivy clogs the walls and what remains of a thatched roof, in which grow clusters of some purple wild flower. All that can be seen to identify it as a house is the moss-covered stone around the tiny, overhung doorway, and an almost grass-filled hole that might once have been a window. I approach it slowly, and I know that I’ve seen it before, the tingle of impossible memories stroking the back of my neck, the feeling of tiny chiming music somewhere inside me growing strong. Through the low doorway, the hanging grass strokes my hair, and my eyes adjust to the dimness within. Looking around, I see a small table, covered in a cloth so faded that it is impossible to discern its former colour. The rafters are heavy-laden with rusted pots and pans, desiccated bundles of indeterminate herbs, jars and bottles and vials – the labels faded beyond legibility – and earthenware jugs hanging from metal hooks. The fireplace is stone cold, containing only a fine powdery dust that is the memory of ashes. A small chair is there, turned towards the fire, for its long-departed heat. I sit, suddenly weary, oh so tired. My bones ache, and there is cold in me that nothing can banish. Outside, the fog seems thicker, and all I can see through the once-window and missing door is blankness, whiteness. I stroke the grain of the wooden chair, and my mind spins, unable to hold a thought. I drift, half-aware, for who knows how long, and sometimes it seems as though, from the corner of my eye, I can see a fire blazing in the grate, but when I look straight at it, it is gone. And I hear an echoed laugh, or snatch of song, and turn quickly to see … nothing. Now I rise, and reach into the hollow behind the hearthstone, that I knew, howdidIknow, was there. My hand touches an old crackling leather bag, and I draw it slowly, oh so slowly, out, and reach inside. As my fingers touch the glass surface of the globe, a thrill of fear and delight shivers me. I take it out and place it on the table before me … I hear a twigsnapcrack outside … it is perfectly round, perfectly sized to fill your hand … a low, shuddering growl, then another, and another … its surface is cold to the touch, completely smooth … the growling noises get closer, closer, closer … inside the globe, the fog swirls slowly, making maddeningly familiar ghostshapes that run into each other … the dank fog seeps in through the once-window and empty doorway, through the chinks and the cracks in the crude stone walls … the beautiful orb draws me closer, shuts out all else, the fog in the orb, the fog in the forest, the fog inside me … the fog brings with it the rank and rotting smell that sends bloody images chasing each other through your mind … I open my left hand, until now clasped so tight around the pendant that I didn’t know I had, that it left its impression on my palm in blood … a harsh and metal shout resounds around the clearing outside, and roars and charging towards me, rushing inward … I lift my hand, and smash it down, onto the globe which breaks and shatters … everything.
Mark Devlin
Mythopoetic Cultural Anthropologist Bard
Tour Guide, Translator, Father of Two
