Wylding Hall

Structured as an oral history, the novella unfolds through retrospective interviews with the surviving members of Windhollow Faire, a 1970s English folk-rock band, along with their manager, a journalist, a psychic, and a photographer. Their testimonies reconstruct one fateful summer at a remote Hampshire manor house and the unexplained disappearance of the band's lead guitarist, Julian Blake.

Tom Haring, the band's manager and producer, arranges for the group to spend the summer at Wylding Hall, a crumbling manor house in Hampshire, to record their second album. Privately, his real motive is to extract Julian from his depressing flat in London, where Julian has been consumed by guilt since the death of Arianna, his former singing partner. Arianna fell from a third-floor window of Julian's flat after an argument; the death was ruled either suicide or accidental, and Julian never forgave himself. Tom has already recruited Lesley Stansall, a seventeen-year-old singer-songwriter whose raw talent far surpasses Arianna's. He wants the five young musicians isolated so they can write and rehearse. Tom calls Julian "the Summer King" and ominously notes, "we all know what happens to the Summer King," linking Julian's fate to ancient rituals of sacrifice.

The band members each recall arriving at Wylding Hall, a sprawling structure built over centuries with Tudor and Elizabethan sections. A whitewashed central hall becomes the rehearsal room. Early days are idyllic: Each morning Julian arrives with new songs and begins to play, the others joining one by one, playing for hours in golden sunlight. Will Fogerty, the band's rhythm guitarist, fiddle player, and folk music scholar, describes the experience as halcyon. Julian's eccentric guitar tunings produce sounds no one can replicate.

Yet the house harbors unsettling details. The old piano is perfectly tuned despite decades of neglect. The air smells of fresh wood smoke though no fires burn. Ashton Moorehouse, the bassist, stumbles into a small back room filled with hundreds of dead wrens, many missing their beaks. A beak pierces his foot through his sock, leaving a permanent scar. He tells no one.

Lesley and Julian begin a brief romance. He gives her Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane and excitedly explains the concept of sacred versus profane time: Ordinary life operates in profane time, while rituals and shared creative experiences open a space of sacred time folded inside the normal world. Will visits The Wren, the village pub, and discovers old photographs depicting a wren hunt, an ancient ritual in which villagers kill a wren on St. Stephen's Day (the day after Christmas) and parade its body door to door. The photos are dated 1947. When Will returns to examine them, they have been removed.

About a month into the stay, Nancy O'Neill, Will's girlfriend and a self-described psychic, visits. Upon arriving, she experiences a sudden, paralyzing cold; her body feels like frozen metal, and she cannot move, breathe, or speak. That night, the group lies on the floor in the dark holding hands. An eerie, high-pitched singing begins, like birdsong crossed with a boy soprano. Nancy hears fluttering above her, as if a bird is trapped in the rafters. Julian holds her still, his breathing quickening. Later, Lesley overhears Julian whisper to Nancy, "I saw it too," and Nancy reply, "I know." Whatever passed between them ends Lesley and Julian's relationship.

Julian's behavior grows stranger. Lesley finds him standing in his room with eyes closed, muttering, unresponsive to touch. He spends increasing time in the old Tudor wing's library, a room with paneling carved to resemble thousands of overlapping feathers. He studies grimoires, old books of magic, and sets a Thomas Campion poem, "Thrice Tosse These Oaken Ashes," to his own eerie melody, treating it as a spell. Will attempts to find the library following Julian's directions but becomes hopelessly lost in corridors that seem to multiply, where windows show stars despite it being daytime. From below he hears the same eerie singing, growing closer, accompanied by a slithering sound and a putrid smell. He barely escapes.

The morning after Nancy's visit, she and Julian walk to a long barrow, a prehistoric burial mound, in the woods. From its summit they experience an impossible panoramic view: miles of countryside, standing stones, and Wylding Hall's towers, all visible despite the mound's modest height. Bluebells bloom out of season; wrens dart everywhere. Nancy, reflecting years later, recognizes Julian was dabbling in something dangerous.

Tom arrives with a mobile recording unit, and the band records outdoors in the overgrown garden in a single live session. Billy Thomas, the teenage grandson of a local farmer, helps carry equipment and takes photographs with a cheap Instamatic camera. Patricia Kenyon, a journalist for the New Musical Express (NME), also visits that summer. Left alone in the Tudor library, she encounters a slight girl with silver-white hair and strange tawny eyes. Before Patricia can speak, Julian appears, and the girl vanishes.

About a week after the recording, the band plays The Wren. Julian debuts "Thrice Tosse These Oaken Ashes" and the room falls dead silent. Jon Redheim, the band's drummer, spots a girl in the corner: very slim, white-blonde hair, barefoot with feathers stuck to her feet, wearing a sheer white dress, her skin so pale the veins show through. Julian leaps up and grabs her hand, the first person anyone has seen him willingly touch. He takes her back to Wylding Hall.

Two days later, Lesley enters Julian's room to find it empty. His clothes and guitar remain, but he and the girl are gone. The walls and ceiling are spattered with tiny droplets of blood. A dead wren lies on the windowsill. Julian never returns. The police dismiss the band's concerns. A man at the pub remarks, "That's what you get hunting birds out of season." The golden summer collapses into cold rain, and the band members leave one by one.

Months later, Billy develops his photographs. In the last three frames, a sixth figure appears: a girl in a white dress, staring directly at the camera. In successive photos taken fractions of a second apart, she has moved impossibly fast toward Julian. Close examination reveals her eyes are entirely black; her mouth gapes open, showing more than one row of teeth. No one saw her that day. After heated debate, the band votes to release the rough recordings as their second album, using the least disturbing photograph as cover art. Tom burns the final two prints.

The album, released on November 25, receives strong reviews but modest sales. Without Julian, the band cannot tour. The record fades into obscurity before bootleg copies circulate years later, igniting a cult following around Julian Blake and the mysterious girl on the cover.

Decades later, renovation at Wylding Hall uncovers a Neolithic passage grave beneath the oldest wing. Among prehistoric grave goods, including stone bird figurines and a bone flute, archaeologists find a modern man's wristwatch with no sign of disturbance that could explain its presence among artifacts thousands of years old. Jon closes the testimonies with a revelation: Eight years before the interviews, on holiday in Corfu during a crowded festival, he saw Julian and the girl moving through the throng. Julian looked exactly as he had over forty years earlier; he had not aged a day. Jon shouted his name, but Julian stared through him without recognition, and both figures vanished.