The Greene Man

Our old house was covered in wisteria, it had crawled up the place years ago, and decided to live there too- the arrangement being that it could have all the brickwork it wanted, as long as it left the windows alone. Even so, every summer without fail it would bravely drip its blooms over the head of every pane, and for a time purple aspect would be cast on each room when the sun rose or set. It was much like this- wood, plaster and skin painted as such – during my parents' separation. That I still remember more than anything, fragmented and foggy as my recollection is since I was only 10 or 11 at the time, but the odd sensation of being curled up, ears covered and cheeks all salt-burnt and wet so often, and just being able to stare and stare at the purple on the wall until I could no longer hear them, that's still indelible, still visible to me as the last impression of a kind of life short-lived on my part. For a long time after this, unless perhaps from somewhere within the blinking light of an answering machine, I would rarely see my father. His great mistake was, I think, the adoption of some idea, misconceived in the mist of mid-life perhaps, of 'going all the way'. He had always wanted to build a house, one that was truly for him, and so that was exactly what he did; as a preeminent architect he was a member of one of those few professions where you're afforded the luxury of standing in the shadow of your own creation- I believe he wished to bathe in it, and that Llyn-Rhyfedd was where he went to do so.

On the train out I had a little time to think. You don't get much of that travelling in England, which is why I have always been so appreciative of delays; journeys are important and on islands so small and tamed as these it can be difficult to find them. The age of the land was on my brain and gifted me one of those fleeting moments of ego death, half terrifying, half comforting, probably entirely brought on by my surroundings: the reed-bone cadaverous remains of the southern fenlands, sulking there outside my window, having sat sucked dry and sulked the same for centuries. Drained and made master of by Roman and Stuart alike, it is now a rather arid place, eerie and very clearly still in character, entirely inhospitable. Very seldom does a place part with its soul when man pitches up and decides to stay, to harvest and to build, and so for that very same reason, very seldom does one feel at home in the fens. Soon though, with at first slight, and then gradually more confident undulations in the landscape, my surroundings began remarking upon the arrival of the black country and all too soon after, the beauty of the Welsh border lands, who's appearance anchored my mind to a more pressing and terrestrial matter. The man that I was coming here to find.

My arrival brought on a sensation akin to a great sinking, I had disappeared beneath the earth and could see the soles of everyone's shoes. To be there and to see him and to let it all come back in suddenly seemed quite impossible.

The train pulled in. Llyn-Rhyfedd station was silent, and save for a single steward, smoking by the ticket machine it was empty. For a while I simply stood, staring into the thick of the birches which hung beckoning over a dilapidated old ticket office at the far end of the platform. The train pulled away, the steward's shock of thinned hair dancing as it went. 'A farce, all of it, family, ownership - how unnatural; how on earth is one supposed to be free of it, any of it?'. The birch looked back but was far too free to even see me. ‘There is... nothing to be done .’

The station entrance provided a commanding view of Llyn-Rhyfedd. A staircase, just about two man abreast cascaded down from the car park and into the valley below, the town a mere smattering of slate grey rooftops and winks of cobble amidst a violent flurry of greenery. Beyond that not-quite harmonious patchwork lay the lake, a great void, as black as it was swollen as it was empty. Not a single soul was to be seen adorning its cold stone shores, but one man; so distant was he, stood there unmoving on the far side of the lake that he would have surely been rendered insignificant in my field of vision. And yet not so. Whatever it was refused perspective and was somehow breathing in my face. I could see every inch of the thing defined in carbonic clarity, as if he were mere inches from me. A great bulk of swirling chromaticity he was, from head to toe covered in tattoos, a vast map of the world upon his distended gut, twisted branches and ivy leaves painted upon a pale bald skull. The blues and greens of lands and seas seemed to turn amorphous and run free atop his loose and yellow-leather skin. There then came a great rumbling from below. The thing's eyes, though buried deep were they neath a swollen brow, were surely fixated upon me; and there it was again, breath like the stench of decay assaulting my nostrils as the rumbling became louder and louder, racing to a crescendo, a rumble to a scream like a kettle on a forest-fire. And no sooner had it happened than he was gone, gliding off away from the lake, leaving me alone up there, mouth agape and with trembling hand.

The experience verged on the psychedelic, beyond any frame of reference I possessed, and left me very nearly incapable of tackling the Escheresque steps down to the town below, all the while birches and buckthorns began to snap and leer and spoke in hushed tones as I descended, perhaps not nearly so free as I had thought. How the stairs went on, thinner and steeper all the way down, with it's smell still lingering thick in the air and the sun all but blotted out by the reprimanding fingers of branches in the canopy above.

'tyngodd eich tad ni i gyd, gadewch gyda'r gweddwon yn ffwl!'

I was shaken out of my fearful trance by a furiously babbling drunk, who was sat there at the foot of the stairs, slumped up against a wonky bollard covered in dribble and piss and vodka. His insults, managing somehow to artfully circumvent the language barrier between us, I felt carried their meaning with sublime clarity.

Behind him was the high street, which stretched on down straight as an arrow to the quayside and inevitably, the lake. As I hurried on down past him, it struck me just how quiet the town seemed to be, even by Welsh standards. His voice, it's owner still hurling ancient obscenities at me from behind, was bouncing from cobble and wattle and daub entirely unmolested by rival song. The town was silent, and as I ventured further along, I began to see why. The lick of the lake seemed to have touched the lot of it; a watermark about waist high could be seen running along the exterior of the houses most of the way up the high street, shops were all boarded up with damp plywood, 'How little they resemble the trees from which they were hewn' . Through the few open windows, you could see the extent of the town's ruination, sofas loose and saggy with yellowed leather, a few paintings on floors all colour-run and blurry. The place was utterly desolate.

I had been told by my father nothing more than that i'd 'know the place when I saw it', and so when I found myself upon the quay, the great blackness of the lake beyond, with not a soul in sight save for the drunkard uphill, and no house fit for habitation seemingly anywhere, I almost felt relieved. Sitting with some discomfort for a while upon the little mooring I thought of him, and what on earth might have become of him and his little experiment, 'his domain'. As I sat entranced for a while, the image of church bells ringing under the icy North Sea was warmly disappeared from my mind's eye by a tender and silken voice from beside me.

'My dear are you lost? I must ask what on earth you're doing here since I haven't seen another soul in this town for weeks now. Are you lost?'

I turned to face the woman, statuesque and pale with shoulder-length jet black hair and painted Persian eyes, the pupils of which shone dappled light, purest aquamarine and much more a lake than the great nothing next to which we found ourselves. As she spoke the wind shook the deep yellow shawl that sat upon her shoulders, commanding it with grace to dance behind her and in front of the streaming sunlight, so that she shimmered and was rendered a mirage. I felt suddenly peaceful, and do not believe I spoke for some time, merely watched her and the shawl in perpetual motion, absorbing its warmth.

'If you're looking for your father's house it's further up the shore, you can't see it from here for all of the trees, but you'll know the place when you see it.'

She spoke slowly, a thousand times and as loud as time, but her voice was somehow delicate and I could not help but be drawn in by her eyes, fixated as they were upon mine.

Her full lips gently curled up at the corners of her mouth into a smile, a most perfect smile that seemed for a moment to mean everything, as all of a sudden the wind stopped, her shawl dropped, and an inky blackness filled the sky. It was then the great rumbling came again and I knew what she was, and then her teeth, filthy grey stones all pointed and covered in moss, and the grey gums that clutched them, were all revealed to me from beneath those divine lips. As its skin began to loosen and discolour, I attempted to wrench myself from the thing's gaze, but to no avail, its eyes, growing darker and more impenetrable by the second still had a hold upon me and were searching me. As my heart's beat became erratic and my lungs began to ache, and the rumbling below became almost unbearably loud and sent my bones quaking...all became black for a second and I was gone.

The thing had left me alone I did not know where. Upon a forested hill I found myself sat, perfectly sober, perfectly still, all this seemingly only an instant after my encounter with the thing. Managing with time to collect myself, all the while darting weary eyes about me for a sign of the awful creature, I attempted to find my bearings, and get on with getting out of wherever it was that I had found myself. A glint from somewhere within the foliage off at the foot of the hill suddenly caught my eye and, approaching as quickly as I dared, there I found a small break in the undergrowth, a little tunnel through the shrubbery, bracken vaulted by a bramble cage. Scrambling through I emerged upon the bank of the lake, that unmistakable blackness, yet was somehow out of sight of the town I’d just been plucked from.

All that I could see before me was this great hulking ribbon of chrome and glass, sat upon four great steel stilts, and half engulfed by the lake. The whole front of the house, especially the struts and underside, which were sat just inches above the water, were moss-ravaged, with great clumps and strands of the stuff spanning it's exterior, casting a green glow over the interior and giving it the appearance of being suspended above the lake upon a thick green mist. I knew the place as soon as I laid eyes on it; I could see my father deep within, masked by the shade of the place, his back turned to me, staring out at the lake.

Most of the stairs leading up to the great glass doors at the front of the house were submerged beneath the liquid mire, and in order to reach them I had to wade out several metres into the awful depths of it. As I did so I felt the ground beneath my feet begin to soften, and alarmingly the now tarry substance that surrounded me I could begin to feel clambering up my leg, a fossil gore which clung to me with a strength that soil holds I had believed only in nightmares. Like Sisyphus I clambered, black tar now covering my torso, retarding any movement almost completely and leaving me sprawled there in prostrate resignation upon the stairs, deep within the hulking shadow of the place.

'Can you not feel the warming winds, closer as they come?...

I saw to winter's closing, and it's early end,

I see that all things come and go, permanence pretend.'

The words were like syrup. I looked up from my heap, to find that there he was, regal in demeanour and bathed in light, reclined upon a throne of ivy, which was set back from the great table which filled my father's dining room. Behind him stood my father, still facing away from me, stock still with eyes still locked upon the lake, a beautiful shock of black upon his shoulder in the form of a great dark crow, which seemed to be taking a great interest in him, a long piece of string dangling from its beak. `

'Dad?'

The crow heard, turned and faced me, then did not move a muscle from upon it's flesh perch.

'You would be seated now.'

The lake let go, the black tar withering and retreating back into the water, leaving me free to move, and my clothes dry and unmarked. Slowly I stood, heeded the Greene Man's call and gingerly approached the great dining table, and then with what seemed at the time herculean strength, pulled out one of the ostentatious Corinthian pillar stools father had for seats from beneath it.

'Ah good, already you are proving yourself less troublesome than your father over there.'

He chuckled, revealing once more those vile root-stone teeth of his.

'That's the thing with children you see, they understand their place in all of this much better. Something is certainly lost with age.'

I stayed silent as he stood.

'What your father never understood my son, was the nature of the balances, delicate as they are, and just where his follies fit in with it all.'

His voice still spoke a thousand times all at once, all disembodied tounges lending one another a unified sense of meaning.

'I just wanted you to see before I sent you on your way, why it is that I should be doing away with your father, and to assure you myself that he was given ample warning not to build this monstrosity where he inevitably chose to.'

'wha-'

'Now go, this house is soon to sink, and with it too will disappear any memory of the hovel that once stood upon this most sacred of lakes.'

Up I leapt, dashing across the room towards my father as I felt the floor beneath me begin to warp and shift. I grabbed him by the jumper and spun him round, sending the crow flapping manically between the two of us and obscuring my vision. Black, red, black, red, black, red was all I could make out through squinted eyes. As if in slow motion, the crow's wings left my line of sight, revealing to me a blinded, ravaged face that was once, for a short time my father’s, with popcorn flesh still fluttering from deep within his open sockets. Catatonic but rigid in posture, he simply stood, as if he were staring right at me. Beyond, in the corner of the room, stood the Greene Man, smiling, for he was always glad to see hubris dealt with properly, which it always was.