Read Avilion (Mythago Wood 7) for Free Online Page A

guide inwards. Both she and her son had suggested that she was intrigued by Ryhope, and that she had an insight into its inner realm. Jack had had little experience of women during his later formative years in the villa and the wild lands around it, but he had enough instinct to recognise interest in him.
    The encounters with Julie had been shy, yet revealingly intimate. When he allowed these thoughts to wander aimlessly as he scanned the town, so what he saw was the look in her eyes, the way she had looked at him rather than the way she herself looked.
    Jack took a deep breath, unbuckled the cloak and packed it away, glanced down at his saturated shirt, shivered with the cold, then took the next step. Literally, the next step. He walked past the trough towards the church. He waited for the clutch at his bowels and head, the wood-scream that would turn him round and draw him back. He kept walking.
    The scream didn’t come. He reached the centre of the green, and leaned against one of the oaks there.
     
    It had started to rain heavily again; the group of children dispersed quickly, and the streets emptied suddenly. Jack was startled by the sound of a car starting up and driving off, its tyres screeching. Voices shouted, followed by laughter. Doors slammed and three people, hidden below wide rain-shades, ran quickly to a building where a sign showing the crude image of a Green Jack was hung. A moment later Julie appeared from the same building, running in the same direction. He started to call to her, but found he couldn’t speak the name. Even so, she glanced back, quickly, querulously, before entering the same building, which Jack knew was where food was served and where the sour drink that had been offered to him two days before was sold.
    I can walk there. I can make it there. I can join her, talk to her. I can extend the edge of my world . . .
    He repeated this thought many times, but all the time he stayed where he was, in the half-shelter of the oaks, almost as rooted as the old trees themselves. He was brought back to consciousness by a quiet voice, a man’s voice, saying, ‘You look very wet and very lost. Can I help you at all?’
    For a moment as he looked around, Jack saw nothing but the green, the oaks, the distant hills, the hints of forest. He had looked through the man several times before the figure came into focus. He was standing very close, wearing a long coat and a black leather hat, from which rain was dripping. His face was grey with a stubbly beard, his eyes dark-rimmed, narrowed, possibly curious, certainly tired; but not old.
    ‘Can you see me?’ the apparition asked.
    ‘Yes. Yes, I can.’
    ‘It took you a while, though. Quite a while.’
    ‘I didn’t see you at first. That’s true.’
    ‘I know what you are,’ the grey man said. ‘I know your nature. They rarely come here. I usually find them in the fields, or out by the railway tracks. Sometimes in the river. You are the first that has tried to come into the town. There must be something special about you.’
    ‘The first? The first what?’
    ‘You know exactly what I mean. Eddie hasn’t exactly been discreet about you. You remember Eddie?’
    ‘The fair-haired boy. Yes, I met him. He was good to me, brought me some food. His mother brought me clothes.’
    The other man glanced up and down at Jack and smiled. ‘The rain makes them fit, at least. They don’t really suit you. It wasn’t so much the clothes you wore, you know - the other day, when the vermin in this place treated you so badly; it wasn’t the clothes. It was the smell. But the rain has helped with that.’
    ‘And soap,’ Jack added. ‘You said: “the first”. I asked, “The first what?” ’
    ‘Wood haunter. You’re a wood haunter.’
    ‘That’s what Eddie called me.’
    ‘It’s what you’re all known as. Generally.’
    All of us?
    ‘My father has a different name for it,’ Jack said. ‘But how much of that name I am, I don’t know. I just know