The Pale Companion by Philip Gooden Page A

that queer crouching posture which I’d observed on first meeting him and beckoned me on with a curved hand. There was something dog-like about his attitude. By the clearer light of day I saw that he was covered not so much with whole animal pelts as with fragments of fur and hide crudely stitched together. Parts of his body which in the evening gloom had looked clad, like his arms and knees, were in fact bare but all weathered and besmirched. Leaves clung to his beard and a single jay’s feather protruded, by design or accident, from the thatch of his head.
    Robin again beckoned me with his hooked hand before turning and moving off into a denser part of the wood. I glanced back at the reassuring bulk of Instede House through the outer fringe of trees. Someone called out in the distance, the shout resonating in the quiet of the early afternoon. I followed Robin. He wove his way among the undergrowth and pursued a route that was apparent to him alone. At one point we came to a boggy patch and then a stream. Robin’s feet were unshod – though a cursory glance downwards might have deceived you into thinking he was wearing shoes, so filthy-black and hardened were his feet to look at. I would normally have trodden carefully, in my townee’s way, but was forced to follow my leader through the squelch and wet. I made some involuntary noise as the water rose over my shoes but Robin was silent. From time to time he glanced back to see that I was still with him.
    We must have been moving for five minutes or so. I’d spent most of the time looking down, trying to avoid the damp places and the tiny pits and falls which Nature scatters everywhere for the unwary. When I glanced up again, Robin’s brown-grey shape had vanished.
    I sighed inwardly. I was getting used to being lost in the woods.
    “Hist!”
    The sound came from by my feet. I looked down and eventually discerned a darker shape on the forest floor. The feather still stuck straight up from his head. Then the head was withdrawn to be replaced by that beckoning, curved hand. Wherever he was going he evidently expected me to follow.
    I crouched down. There was a large ragged hole torn out of a bank of earth and fallen leaves. Patches of sunlight fringed its edges but within it was earthy-dark. Just as the vixen has her earth, and the conies their warrens, so does Robin the wood-man have his home in the ground. Well, what had I expected? A fine mansion perched among the treetops with a perspective in every direction? Some cosy cottage with Mistress Robin, a dimpled dame, in attendance? Only in a story.
    What I faced instead was a hole. And a decision. Do I follow this strange man into his lair? What if he is in the habit of luring young players and other passengers into his den, there to club them to death and roast their mortal remains over a fire for his supper? What if he imbalms them, and keeps them for his winter provender?
    Only in a story, I told myself. A story fit to frighten children on a winter’s night.
    I remembered what Davy the servant had told me too. Robin was harmless enough. Some said he brought good luck on the house.
    I eased myself into the hole, sometimes crouching, sometimes on hands and knees, feeling my way forward down a tight tunnel. Damp penetrated my leggings. There was a slight gleam of light a few yards ahead. The passage stank, though whether this was its natural smell or the smell of its occupant I wasn’t sure.
    “Hist, Master Revill,” came from up ahead.
    I scrabbled along the passage, suddenly frightened that the mud-ceiling was going to come down and bury me. I emerged into a tiny hollowed-out area which – as I realized when my eyes gradually grew accustomed to the light (or lack of it) – had been formed under and to one side of the clustered roots of several great trees. The earth must have washed away naturally or been scooped out by Robin so as to form this hide. The spaces between the twisting, diving roots had been filled