THE HOLLOW HILL

This is not the first story that I ever wrote. But it is the first one that I ever sent out for publication.

Before this I wrote a few short stories and most of a feature script and some articles for a self published fanzine. The stories that I wrote appeared in a writing group letter thing... I only ever did one. Never quite got the hang of it. But the feedback was enough to say 'Yes you can write.' And 'No, not everyone will like it.' But it seemed the criticism was largely based on taste. I wasn't very interested in explain where the weird things that appeared in my stories had come from, that wasn't the point. So some people responded and others did not. That was fine. More in that group seemed to like them than didn't. That was good enough for me and my ego.

THE HOLLOW HILL was probably the first longer form story that I wrote, and as I say it was the first one I sent out to try to get it published. It got rejected. Pretty much unanimously, except by INTERZONE. Dave Pringle sent me a hand written note (on form rejection paper) saying that he thought the story was good and worthy of being published, but that space considerations bumped it out (this was in the final days of his editorship. I wonder if he'd have hung onto the story for a future issue if he'd not been moving on?). He also told me he was sure that it would be published if I sent it elsewhere - he may have suggested some places that I try, I can't remember. I do remember that he seemd to suggest that needed the right home since it didn't sit comfortably into any obvious genre slots.

I promptly filed the story and the letter away and didn't send it anywhere.

Why? Probably hearing that affirmation from someone I valued as important was enough. Publication - since I wasn't expecting any money from it - was just a means of validation. A way of knowing that what I did was good enough, worth pursuing, that I wasn't wasting my time or deluding myself.

Foolish boy.

Looking back at the story now, I think it's okay. I still like the story, but I htink the prose is over done. I'm trying too hard. But it was an early work, so that's acceptable. I was finding myself, finding my voice. Now I use fewer elipses (thogugh I'm still guilty of using quite a few). And I'd be ruthless with the words. Probably I could go back and cut a lot, reshape it, polish the whole thing up. But I'm not the person that I was when it was written. And I sort of think it stands as what it is. An early work, something formative. I almost like it's slight awkwardness. Its sense of trying just a little bit too hard. I stand by it... although I slightly cringe at those first paragraphs.



THE HOLLOW HILL by Neil Snowdon.

‘Wake up…’

England was a different place then. I remember it well… all gleaming glass and plastic. It was like the industrial revolution all over again, but without the sympathetic cover of thick, black smog to hide the landscape of naked grey concrete that seemed to suck the colour from the land and the sky…

God, that sounds so ‘New Age’, I know. But I’m inclined to be these days… an adopted child of nature, as it were…

‘Wake up…’

I leaned down and kissed my son Kimberly on the forehead. Touched my lips to his wispy blond hair. He moaned slightly, but didn’t wake, and I watched him for a while, wondering what was being dreamed inside that tiny skull of his.

His mother had died two years ago when he was six, in a car crash that had put me in hospital for a week. Kim had stayed with his grandmother in that time. We were over the worst of it now, but we both still missed her. Sometimes I would see him drifting off in the midst of play, as if she were visiting him, or he her, in some other, more private playground.

While she was alive we had all lived together in an oversized caravan, on an acre of land we’d bought soon after our wedding day. After her death the place was too small and too full of her to live in. You couldn’t turn your head without seeing some tiny trace of her. A crack in the balsa ceiling where she’d bumped her head in a night of enthusiastic dancing. The crayon lines on the wall where we’d marked Kim’s height every six months… the marks way above those where we’d marked hers and mine.

It was too claustrophobic in there. Kim felt it as much as I did and, soon after, we sold it and moved in to a cottage down the road. Just far enough not to find Kathrins presence too cloying, still close enough to feel we hadn’t left home… not really.

In the days of the caravan we had moved it with the sun, so Kim always had its light in his window; it rose and it set in his bedroom. Less than a week after we moved in to the cottage, he asked me if I could turn the house so he could have the sun in his room again. It was a strange moment of growing up for both of us, when I explained to him I couldn’t.

I crouched by his bedside, and whispered in his ear.

“Kim… come on, wake up…” I shook his shoulder gently. “Wake up Kim, c’mon… it’s a full moon, we’re going out, remember?”

Kim rolled over towards me, cracking his eyes half open and wiping away sleep rocks with the backs of his hands.

“What time is it?”

“It’s after midnight. Nearly one in the morning.”

His eyes opened all the way at that, and I smiled at him. For ages now, ever since the time he’d spent with his grandmother, he’d been obsessed by faeries. She’d told him the same tales that she had told me when I was his age, and I’d told him more. Some I’d learned, some I’d made up or dreamed as a child… some I remembered that she had forgotten. Most of all, Kim was excited by the hill a mile or so down the road.

Grandma had said it was a faerie mound, and ever since he had begged to go to it. We had been there in the daytime, but it wasn’t really the same, though he said he could feel them watching us. No, we had to be there at night to see the faerie folk themselves… visit at full moon if we wanted to watch them, and by lore it was best on certain dates of faerie import. But as Kim had learned to watch the wax and wane of the moon, in the almost two years since he’d learned of the mound, no full moon had fallen on quite the right dates… until now. So that night, as promised, we were to visit by the light of the moon.

He climbed out of bed and padded off to the bathroom to get washed. In the kitchen, I made coffee, milky and sweet, and poured it in to a thermos for us. I placed it carefully in the haversack I usually used for work, packing in an old ice-cream tub filled with sandwiches for breakfast. On top, wrapped in a jumper, I packed my camera; part out of deference to Kim and our intended venture, and part out of a desire to capture whatever magic the morning might hold for us. As much as anything though, I packed it out of habit, something Kathrin had instilled in me almost from the moment Kim was conceived.

He came into the kitchen pulling on a thick woollen jumper, his hair still tousled from sleep, his fringe still wet from washing. I laughed at him and tried to smooth down the tufts that stood on his head like exclamation marks. Kim scrunched up his face and made disgust sounds at my fussing until I stopped and let him be.

“Maybe we should just shave your head like mine, eh?”

I’d shaved my head when I was twenty-eight, the very day I noticed it was thinning. Kim looked at me solemnly and shook his head, his eyebrows raised, the corners of his mouth tilted low.

“Okay, maybe not then.”

The toaster popped and I grabbed butter and jam from the fridge, spread butter on mine and jam on his, and we sat in the kitchen eating in silence.

It was dark outside, quiet and black. I could feel it pressing against the house, against the windows. It felt strange and exciting to be up at this time. Everyone else in the village was wrapped up in bed, dreaming, while we wandered roads and fields, unseen and unheard by anyone, walking in the dark while the world slept… Who knew what we might see or run in to, going about its business at such secret times, our eyes open when they were usually shut so tight.

It was cold as we turned out the light and stepped outside, closing and locking the door behind us. Kim shivered and shrugged inside his oversized parker (he’d grow in to it). He looked like a tortoise, trying to withdraw in to the warmth of his scarf and coat. November 11th was Hollantide according to Kim, a night when the faeries were abroad; the time Hogmen and Hillmen and other fairfolk chose to move their abode, traversing the countryside along a cats cradle of well worn trails that ran from hill to hill, and forest to forest. A good night then, to finally see a faerie…

Kim had left the house well prepared. On his back was his school bag, a backpack style affair, stuffed with books and pens, the fun-sized Polaroid I’d bought him for his birthday, and the tiny charms of his own indelible magic.

The air was crisp, not yet tainted by any breath but our own, and the moon was full. The torch I carried in my bag, in case it was too dark or Kim should begin to get scared, remained there… unused, unneeded. By day these roads, the fields and forests that bordered them, were the yellow brown of dead bracken, the rich dark green of mould, the orange fire of leaves that still clung against the seasons winds. Under the moon you could still see the trees, bare and black; brittle skeletons against the crushed blue velvet of night… their branches gilded silver-white. But all other colour was gone. Everything was blue and black, and silver.

We left the main road, clambering over a stile that seemed slick with moss, the wood feeling almost soft to the touch. The footpath was rough hewn, a worn brown track by day. Blades of grass and weeds still fresh to the world, seemed to crunch and snap under our feet as we trod onwards, Kim with his camera at the ready, eyes and ears keen to the slightest sound or movement. We walked on, further from the road, further from the village… away from the amber glow of the streetlights that seemed to hover in the air like an orange fog. I had a pocket full of pebbles and small stones, and whenever Kim wasn’t looking I’d toss one in to the bushes with a flick of my wrist…

“What was that!?”

“Something moving in the bushes…”

Kim grinned. I could see his wide smile; white teeth glowing in the dark, excited eyes glistening moonlight.

“Do you think they’re watching us?” I’d say to him…

“Of course they’re watching!” That was a given apparently. I could feel his incredulous eyes on me. His excitement was making him annoyed at my stupidity.

“Sorry… sorry…” I whispered, feeling guilty and scolded.

There was a moment’s silence while he seemed to look me up and down, as if sizing me up.

“Did you really ever see a faerie?”

“Of course I did,” I lied. “Why would I tell you I had, if I hadn’t?!”

I hoped I sounded convincing. I’d never seen a faerie really. But as a child my dreams had been filled with them both night and day, and I’d played at the mound as often as I could sneak off there. More than once I’d played there alone but for the creatures I conjured up to keep me company, to adventure and explore with. But puberty had wiped that slate clean…

Kim was still staring at me in the dark, in that intense way that he had that so unnerved me and made me feel transparent.

“Well, you’re a grown up…” He shrugged. “Mrs. Frith does it all the time.”

I’d met the battleaxe of a woman at Kim’s last parent-teacher evening. She was the entire cause of our depression in the lead up to the previous Christmas. She had told the class that Santa was coming to visit the children on the last day of term. Of course this was a cause of much excitement at home for Kim… naturally. But he’s a bright kid and observant. And frankly, the school caretaker in a bad wig and beard combo was never going to fool his discerning eye. He’d come home in a rage of tears and shattered dreams, shouting in his youthful idiom that grown-ups were all liars… and that meant me too.

It took me over an hour to finally get the story out of him, and another two to argue logically, that it really wasn’t feasible that the real Santa could possibly visit every school in the world on their last day, but that in order to still make things special for everyone, Saint Nick would train up an army of helpers to stand in for him, making appearances at schools and shopping centres, and checking in the eyes of all the children to see just which ones had been naughty and nice this year, and who would then get presents.

After long consideration, and a top to bottom search of the house to make sure I wasn’t hiding his Christmas presents anywhere (thank god I’d left them at his grandmothers that year), Kim eventually bought the logic of this thinking, with only one question…

“Does that mean that Mark Taylor’s parents buy all his presents for him then? ‘Cos he’s stolen sweets twice off me this year…”

“Of course.” I told him. “Parents still buy things for their children, even if they have been naughty, because they love them, and they don’t want them to be upset on Christmas morning…”

“So their presents aren’t as special then?”

“No.”

This he seemed to find agreeable. And though after a time, I think he began to doubt it again, he never said another word on the subject.

He was doubting me again now… and I hated it.

He gave me another few seconds under his heavy gaze…

“Okay then”.

The tension dissipated. Inside I heaved a sigh.

“Sorry,” he said. “But they have to trust us, or they won’t let us see them.”

Shit. When we didn’t see anything, would he blame me and say I must have lied? Would it shatter his trust in me forever? There was nothing I could do but let it play.

“It’s okay… c’mon. You got your camera ready?”

He nodded vigorously, and held it up for me to see.

“It’s here. I’ve got in my front pocket… it’s easier on the draw.”

I couldn’t help but smile. Just that week I’d taped a few old westerns from the TV and we’d watched them together. He’d preferred the Leone stuff to the John Wayne, and I’d wondered at how he seemed so much more sophisticated than when I was a kid. I couldn’t figure it, but he gained my respect and pride for his preference nonetheless.

Re-holstering the Polaroid, he moved stealthily onwards, and I followed right behind him, cracking jokes about it always being the man at the back who gets picked off first.

The footpath, hemmed in on both sides by bushes and woodland, opened out on to a small field. And in it, lay the hill… the mound, rising up before us, a darker blot against the dark of the night sky.

We stopped, together, without saying a word, and stared at it. In all my years, and through my childhood obsessions, I’d never once been here at night. Never had the guts to sneak out of bed and creep out of the house to come here… in the night… in the dark. It was an unsettling presence that I fed on in daylight, when all that was evil was banished and had no shadow to lurk in. But at night, the woods, and the mound were a dangerous place… something inside just told me, warned me; it was not a wise thing to do. Perhaps something in me was in fact afraid to confirm or defiantly shatter my own dream life obsession, the imagination with which I populated this place and other quiet spots of woodland, secret places of draped cobweb and hiding… my places, where I would come to read and draw and dream my childhood days away. Perhaps I sensed their fragile magic, and did not want nor dared to break it…

The grass looked silver grey in the moonlight. It was mottled with patches of clover that showed like stains under nights gentle shading. I remembered the hours I’d spent searching those patches for a four leafed clover and never finding one. But the time I’d spent looking, and hoping… and wishing…

We stood at the base of the mound and stared. I could see nothing unusual about it. Could neither hear nor feel anything in the air. It was dead. Quiet but for the sound of our breathing, and the pulse that was beating in my ears. My scalp tightened. I could feel Kim tensing up.

“You alright?”

“Mm hmm.”

His voice was quiet, reverent, the way one might sound in a church or library.

“So what now?” I asked.

“Um, I’m not sure…”

“Do you think they’re here?”

“Yeeees… but, um… I don’t know…”

“Maybe they won’t come out if they know we’re watching…”

“Um… maybe.”

“Okay…”

I made a big show of grabbing Kim’s hand and turning us around, and proclaiming loudly that there obviously weren’t any faerie folk here, and it was all just a silly story, so now we’d best be off home to bed and forget such nonsense. We tromped off loudly and clumsily a few yards down the road, and then doubled back, looping in a wide arc, to the cover of the bushes on one side of the mound. We settled down to watch, sitting cross-legged side by side, ours eyes focussed intently before us.

I unscrewed the cup-lid on the thermos and poured coffee to warm us, to keep us awake and alert, fine-tuned to every frequency. And there we sat…

Occasionally something moved in the distance… a bird, a fox, perhaps a rabbit. It was strange there in the dark. But much as I twitched at every noise, and cursed my romantic imagination for convincing me to take my son on such an adventure as was never given to me, I never once really believed the sounds were anything other than animal. And yet, much as I knew there was nothing dangerous in these woods, I have to admit I was more than a little scared. Darkness does that to a person… I think it’s in the blood somewhere. Something in the make-up of man knows that he does not belong in the dark… nor outside, in the night. He is vulnerable, and fearful, not least of his own imagination. The night is a rich canvas to paint on, and the imagination a limitless palette. I think deep down we fear what is there, fear what we might see come out of us in that dark mirror. The shadows are an unknown territory to us, somewhere deep inside we know we are trespassing there… at least, that is how I felt that night at the foot of the mound, sitting in the dark with my son, watching and waiting for faeries…

We sat there a long time us two… passing the thermos flask of coffee and eating all the food I had brought with us… and growing colder.

I cupped my hands and blew in to them, feeling the moist warmth of my breath loosen the joints in my fingers. Whilst there was still a tingling edge to my senses, I was getting bored. I looked to Kim.

He had his back-pack unzipped in front of him, and was staring at the pages of a book with a penlight torch, studying them intently. I marvelled at how quiet and stealthy he could be… I hadn’t noticed him taking the pack off his back, let alone unzipping it and taking out a book and a torch to read by. I wondered if he was bored too and had given up. I wondered if perhaps I’d nodded off, slept while sitting upright. I’d heard it was possible…

I leaned close and whispered in his ear.

“What are you doing?”

“Reading my notes.”

“You’re notes?”

I looked closer and noticed that the book was a spiral bound exercise book, the kind you might expect to get in school. I wondered for a second if he might have stolen it… but quickly forgot to ask as he flicked through, showing me what was inside.

It was a kind of scrapbook, the pages covered in cut and paste snippets from books and magazines… and other sections carefully, lovingly copied in Kim’s own shaky handwriting. And everything in it was about Faerie. Stories, myths, legends, pictures… the places and peoples, lore and superstition… everything he could lay his hands on, Kim had done. I had to admit he’d done the old man proud. If he was doing it for school, it was a guaranteed A+ for sure. If not, then it sure as hell beat the shit out of sticker collecting.

“I’m looking for my notes on faerie dwell-ings.” He pronounced every syllable carefully. “I think I read something about how to make them open up”.

“Like, ‘Open Sesame’ ?”

He didn’t even look up.

“No dad, that’s just a stooooreee”.

“Sorry…”

I remember mumbling it more to myself than anything else…and I remember how dumb and stupid and utterly out of my depth I suddenly felt in his presence.

“Here…”

He pointed to a page in his notebook, and I took it from him to look more closely. I could have been wrong but it looked as if it had been secretly torn from a library book… we’d have words when we got home: item number one being on the concept of photocopiers.

The page looked to have come from a more scholarly text than the typical sort of thing found in the children’s section of the local library, or what they had at school. For one, there were only a few illustrations and they were of an almost anatomical nature. No cutesy cartoon figures, but rather serious studies of figure and appearance in context to supposed lifestyle. I read the page quickly, concentrating on the paragraphs that Kim had carefully underlined in red biro.

Handing the book back to him, I nodded. I was getting eager to be done with all this and go home. The novelty and the excitement had worn off for me… the prospect of making a slight fool of myself seemed a small price to pay for hurrying things along.

So we broke cover, and with Kim leading, we walked around the mound nine times under the light of the full moon.

There was no chanting involved, no strange dancing. We just did what the torn page said. We walked calmly… somewhat dejectedly, around the base of the mound nine times. The book didn’t say in which direction, so for dramatic purposes, and in deference to the feeling that Faerie most likely runs counter to the ‘mortal’ world, we walked anti-clockwise.

Nine times…

Around the base of the mound…

It was marshy in places and I almost lost a shoe. Regardless, it was getting close to dawn now, and the dew forming on the grass soaked through our shoes and socks so that we squelched with every step.

One…

Two…

Three…

Four…

Five…

Six…

Seven…

Eight…

Nine…

And we stopped.

And we stared at the mound.

And nothing…

I yawned.

And then I heard the music.

It was distant… dull, like loud music in a car when it passes you by. I could hear voices too, shouting and singing, and laughter… and I could feel it. I could feel it coming through the soles of my feet…

I looked at Kim. He glanced at me then bolted to the mound, sprinting part way up its slope, dropping to his hands and knees and putting his ear to the grass.

“You can hear it! It’s coming from inside! Come on, listen!”

My heart was caroming off the inside walls of my chest as I walked over and put my ear to the ground. The grass was wet and tickled inside my ear. But he was right. The music, the voices, were coming from inside the mound. You could feel it more strongly from here, like putting your hand to the wall of a nightclub and feeling it vibrate from the intensity of the sound. A drum was beating, strings were being plucked and stroked, and other sounds I did not recognise were oozing from the ground beneath us like worms in a rainstorm.

Kim was lying flat on the ground now, giggling as he let the gentle vibrations in the ground tickle through him.

My mouth was dry. I got shakily back to my feet, stumbled back a step or two, and then froze, rooted to the spot.

And that’s when I felt it.

A rumbling and a tearing sound… it was the kind of sound you’d expect to hear as someone’s scalp is pulled away from their skull. It’s the sound you hear if you take a handful of turf and pull at it… blades of grass breaking, roots tearing from the soil… Dig your fingers under; pull harder… you hear it? That’s the sound. But imagine it bigger, filling you and the air around you… imagine that you’re standing on the piece of turf that you’re pulling and can feel the shifting in your feet, vibrating up your legs, through knees that feel like water… that was the sound of the hill that night…

I felt the blood screaming in my veins. My lips felt numb, thick and heavy… my face felt cold, the blood rushing to my heart as it cried out to keep beating… And as I watched, the whole top of the mound began to lift, to rise on pillars of mouldy rock, blackened with soil and time, its cap of grass and weeds trailing a fringe of torn roots… and in the hollow under the cap, inside the hill, I could see the glimmer and twinkle of firelight… candles… growing brighter. Figures began to appear, and then spill forth in a cavalcade of strange and grotesque beauty, all dancing and writhing, lithe and playful, as the music found clarity and sang on the air while the voices that accompanied rode upon it.

A young boy danced before me then stopped. Perfectly still. Then slowly, gracefully, he leaned to one side and cocked his head at me in curiosity. He was naked, his ears pointed high and long, his hair growing in wild clumps and tufts on his head… he stood staring, with eyes shaped like almonds but made entirely of pupil, wet and black, their only colour the glinting light of the moon. His body was hairless and smooth, thin to the point of emaciated, but beneath the skin I could see contours of taught muscle and sinew… not the atrophied flesh of my own kind; raised in concrete battery farms… his only clothing was the dirt and soil on his skin, the black green powder of tree bark you’d come home covered in as a child, after a long hard day in the trees… in a twisting skip, he was gone…

Others were spilling forth, dressed in moss and leaves… in fine silken threads that might have been cobweb, their skins pale white or tinted green… one or two with a rocky kind of slate to their features, others with the reddish veinery of granite… There was a feral cast to their eyes, all of them… and still they poured forth… some now dressed in finery, but of styles and shades no person had ever worn in my world, not on sidewalk or catwalk…

They were dancing around Kim now… around and around, as he laughed in delight and clicked madly with his Polaroid… leaping, writhing figures caught frozen in the strobe of the flash.

Peoples of plant and wood as much as flesh and bone, people as much bird and animal, lizard and insect as blood and teeth and skin, kith and kin to every species that had ever walked in every realm of the earth…

Some held torches and large candles in their hands, with flames of orange and violet and green… others carried an incandescent light entirely of their own, as they fluttered and flitted and danced in the air. A tiny boy and girl both dressed in rags and weeds took Kim by the hands and began to lift him off the ground. He laughed and gasped, as they twisted and swooped and dived and twirled above me. I reached out a hand and got a bare fingertip to the tail of his coat, but closed my fingers on nothing. My mind raced with fearful desperate thoughts of Peter Pan… and as Kim flew, I promised deep inside my soul that I would always leave his bedroom window open, just a chink, no matter what.

“Kim…? Kim, come down… Pleeaase Kim, come back down to me…”

I was wailing. My voice sounded cracked and desperate… tiny and pathetic in a way that it hadn’t since primary school, when I’d cried in the face of bigger boys tortures and derision at my dreams.

If Kim heard me he didn’t acknowledge it. He was above me… around me… swooping and dancing in the dark, hand in hand with the tiny faerie boy and girl, laughing and giggling together and crying out defiantly to the earth below them.

All around me now, the faerie revellers had ceased moving and were lined from the open mouth of the mound, to its base just a few yards ahead of me, all eyes in my direction. I could feel hot tears on my cheeks, panic and dread alive and beating in my chest. My breath was coming in shivering, sobbing gasps. All about me were still and silent. The only sounds the crackling of the flaming torches, the wet sobbing of my breath, and the distant cries of my child in the sky.

From the throngs before me, in their infinite variety, their rapturous shapes and colours, a figure stepped forward. A girl, a woman… about my age in the face, but her body was slimmer, lithe… her hips and breasts underdeveloped, more like a child, her groin was an androgyne smoothness, bereft of hair, cleft and organ. Her long hair was a deep dark red. Her huge round eyes, black as coal, glistened wetly. Her cheeks were high and sharp. Her skin was mottled blue and purple, in a way that suggested less the healing flesh of a bruise, and more the markings of flower petals, the staining of berries and fruit. Her legs were speckled to the thighs with mud, dried and cracking. I felt my guts shift, fearful in the face of a childhood dream born real.

“Twas no dream fair boy… we met indeed, in times when you were wiser.”

Finally my feet uprooted themselves, and I took a careful step away from her. Instantly she stopped moving, and stared at me, indignant.

“Are you so feared of me Alan Barton? There was a time when we played together, you and I…”

Blood was screaming in my veins, pounding in my ears… a fist of adrenalin was squeezing my heart and brain…

“How-do-you-know-my-name?” The words came out in a half garbled rush, butting up against each other in their haste to leave my throat before they choked me.

“You saved me once Alan, when both of us were young.

An elder mortal's animal gone savage had cornered me near here. You fought it off and hid me. We promised never to forget each other…

Yet here you are, and you remember me not. And you treat our memory as if to shit upon it.”

Her voice was strange; I could not place it… at once melodious and banal… unknown yet familiar… I recognised not a single word she spoke, but understood everything she said.

“No. No… that never happened.”

She raised her eyebrows at me and cocked her head to one side, much like Kim would do when he didn’t believe a word I was telling him…

“No?”

I began to doubt my sanity. Had the grief been delayed? Had my mind snapped long ago? Was it only now was I seeing it? Seeing just how far up the yellow brick road my mind had travelled?

“No. I remember you… but… you were never real. You were a person I made up… I was a lonely child, and I played here alone… I played here alone, and I’d imagine faeries, and adventures and friends who were not like me, and that I wasn’t really me, that I wasn’t really from here, and that you would come to claim me back to where I belonged… but it was never real. None of it… I made it all up… you, you’re a figment of my imagination. You’re the friend I played with and shared my first kiss with because I didn’t have anyone to really share that with… but it never really happened, and I grew up and I got a grip, and I got on with my fucking life…”

I ran out of whining breaths and half-truths that I only believed in a quarter … my mouth was still working, soundlessly trying to find and form words.

The woman watched me a while longer… watched me flailing for words and stamping up and down on the muddy ground of my sanity, checking that it was solid.

Her furrowed brow smoothed itself, and she stepped closer to me. She reached out a hand, stroked dirt-encrusted fingernails across my cheek, before sliding them to the back of my neck, drawing me close and whispering in my ear.

I felt her naked body pressing gently against me, felt the warmth of her breath on my skin, the light brush of her lips against my ear as she spoke, in words of a tongue that I thought perhaps I’d heard once in a dream; the language of the voice inside my skull…

Then she stepped back over. Her coal black eyes still glistened, with something that might have been pity… might have been anger… and I felt my insides begin to harden…

My heart clutched, and became still… but I lived… I could feel it happen…

Then my guts, solidifying from the slippery casserole inside me to some carved wooden relief… I felt the blood in my veins and arteries slow and thicken, felt my toes burst through the fabric of my shoes and begin to burrow in to the ground, worming their way through the topsoil and then down, down… deeper and deeper… I stared at my hands and arms as my skin began to darken, harden, go brittle and brown, rough and fibrous, then began to thicken and bend, the joints snapping and dislocating as my arms stretched back over and upwards, my fingers outwards … my nipples hardened to knots… my lips, my tongue, my mouth… stiffening, twisting to a hideous bark cartoon that would perhaps frighten children in time to come… ‘Look Daddy, that tree has got a face…’

My eyelashes thickened to twigs, the stubble of my hair to branches that began sprouting with new found vigour after my arms, out of my shoulders and neck and face. I felt my eyes begin to shrink and close as skin begat bark and shut them forever, and I remember the last thing I saw…

The faeries all stood there, from the top of the mound to the bottom, Kim at the front, watching from the crowd with a curious frown, and snapping with his tiny Polaroid camera…

That was four months ago…

Or five.

Time seems stranger now… slower… heavier… I can feel it more now.

Yesterday the girl with the hair of a deep dark red pissed on me; squatted at my base and then danced about me, singing all the while. Her faerie water tasted good to my roots, and already I can feel a tingling at the outmost tips of my branches as buds begin to blossom… so I suppose it must be spring…

For a while I was alone here… guardian, in all my twisted foreboding. But not for long…

I see others come the way I came with Kim. Parents and children. Secretive lovers walking hand in hand... I try to warn them sometimes, shake my branches and creak at them eerily…but they take no heed. They gather themselves closer, clutch hands tighter, sensing magic in the air; the smiles on their faces say it all. They know nothing…they fear nothing…

There is a forest growing here now, spreading out from the base of the hollow hill… I hear the faeries talking in their strangely lilting voices, and I hear their plans, for they tell them to me often, and discuss them in my shelter. And I hear the whispering, the groaning voices of the other trees that once were mothers and fathers just like me… in our roots, we know it is our own fault really, but no-one wants to admit that here…

Forests are springing up all over England. With our young the Faerie are injecting fresh blood in their dwindling race… with our bodies they are reclaiming their land…

Our children play in our branches, and as we cradle them in our giant hands of wood, we hope that perhaps somehow they still love us, and remember. We don’t doubt that we serve purpose, or that our fate is merely punishment. The Oaks are home to many here, the Hazels wise and the Rowan, like I, are protectors and guardian against any evils that should approach the hill at the centre of this forest.

But still I can feel the singing of the birds in my branches, the warm acid of their shit on my bark. I can feel the thoughts of the bats that live in the crevice of wood where once I had a mouth. I can feel worms writhing and burrowing between my deepest roots… those roots that anchor me ever more solidly to the earth, while my branches reach ever more steadily for the sky…

Kim is here… sitting in my uppermost branches with a faerie girl of about his age. They are watching the spiders that spin their webs there, and talking to them in that melodic faerie tongue which I hear him speaking all the time now, though he tends to still swear in English…

They sit there and I can hear them talking, feel their voices resonating through my trunk and down in to my roots. They are giggling and I can feel love seeping in to me with the warmth from their bodies. And then they are silent a moment…but I can hear the birds and the spiders whispering to each other…

They are kissing.

Holding hands tightly, and kissing each other…

My bark groans gently as I smile inside…and then I can feel them cutting me…cutting and gouging with a tiny blade, carving their names, high in my body, where the marks will remain and grow forever upwards and someday, perhaps, to the stars…

And then they are gone…

Their laughter still lingering in the air…

Their warmth still lingering in my branches…

My sap weeping gently from the heart between their names…