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friend. Each day he ventured as far into the wood as the Horse Shrine, seeking a sign of the man, seeking, too, for Ash, but she had disappeared. Four days after returning home Huxley trekked more deeply, through a mile or so of intensely silent oakwood, emerging in unfamiliar terrain, not at the Wolf Glen at all.
    Panicked, feeling himself to be losing touch with his own frail perception of the wood, he returned to Oak Lodge. He had been gone nearly twenty hours by his own reckoning, but only five hours had passed in the house, and Jennifer and the boys were not at home. His wife, no doubt, was in Grimley, or had perhaps taken the car to Gloucester for the day.
    So it startled him to enter his study through the locked main door and to see his french windows opened wide, and the cat nestling in his leather chair. He shooed the animal away from the room, and examined the doors. There was no sign of them having been forced. No footprints. No sign of disturbance in the room. The study door had been locked from the outside.
    When he opened his desk drawer he recoiled with shock from the bloody, fresh bone that lay there, on top of his papers. The bone was in part charred, a joint of some medium-sized animal, perhaps a pig, that had been partially cooked, so that raw and bleeding flesh remained at the bone itself. It was chewed, cracked and worried, as if a dog had been at it.
    Gingerly, Huxley removed the offending item and placed it on a sheet of paper on the floor. The key to his private journal was not in its place, and shakily he fetched the opened book from its hole behind the shelves.
    Bloody fingerprints accompanied the scrawled entry. This one was hastier than before, but unmistakably a copy of his own hand.
    *
A form of dreaming. Moments of lucidity, but am functioning in unconscious.
    No sign of WJ. Time has interfered.
    These entries seem so controlled, the others. No recollection of writing them. I have so little time, and feel tug of woodland. Have linked somehow with sylvan time, and everything is inverted.
    So hungry. So little chance to eat. I am covered with the blood of a fawn, hunted by a mythago. I grabbed part of carcass. Ate with ferocious need.
    Pangs strong. Flesh! Satiation! Blood is on fire, and night is a peaceful time, and I can emerge more strongly. But no way of entering those moments when I am clearly myself.
    So controlled, the other entries. Cannot remember writing them.
    I am a ghost in my own body.
    Huxley looked at his own hands, smelled the fingers. There was no blood in evidence, not under the nails, no sign of charcoal. He examined his clothes. There was mud on the trouser legs, but nothing that suggested he had torn and wrenched at a half-cooked carcass. He ran his tongue around his teeth. He checked his pillow in the bedroom.
    If
he
had written this entry, if he himself had come into the study, in a moment of unconscious separation, eating the raw bone, he would surely have left some trace.
    The words were odd, had an odd feel. It was as if the writer genuinely believed that he
was
Huxley, and that Huxley's own entries in the journal were being made during times of unconscious calm. Reality, for the bloody-fingered journalist, was a time of "lucidity."
    But Huxley, keeping a rational and clear mind now, was certain that two different men were entering notes in the private journal.
    It astonished him, though, that the other writer knew about the key.
    He picked up his pen and wrote:
Today I went in search of Wynne-Jones. I didn't sleep, and I am convinced that I remained alert and aware for the full twenty hours that I was away. I am concerned for Wynne-Jones. I fear he is lost, and it grieves me deeply to anticipate the fact that he might never return. In my absence, someone else is making entries in this journal. The entry above was not written by me. But I believe that whoever has entered this place believes themself to be George Huxley. You are not. But whoever you are, you should tell