The Hollow Tree

by James Brogden

  To her surprise, she quite enjoyed it. She wasn’t training for anything; it was just the steady, unhurried plodding along a well-worn route, which allowed her brain to idle for a while. The plodding grind also quite nicely masked the jittering ache in her healing nerves. For the duration of a 5k run she could focus on the burning in her legs, and it was nice to know that there was still something that worked the way it should.

  While running was her thing, working out at the local leisure centre was Tom’s – not that he needed to. Gardening work – sorry, the landscaping business – kept him more active than most men his age, but even before that, when they’d both been working for Highways, her friends had been openly envious that she’d managed to snag not only a genuinely decent guy but gorgeous into the bargain. Part of her had felt that she’d been too lucky for too long, and that sooner or later the universe would slap her down to redress the balance. Now it had. Now she was a deformed joke of her former self whom her perfect husband couldn’t bring himself to touch.

  ‘We’re quits, now, okay?’ she growled at the world as she ran.

  Her favourite route took her into Senneleys Park, a short distance from home; it was nothing spectacular, just a big open expanse of grass and bushes criss-crossed by paths, but it was easy to overlook despite its size and so usually wasn’t too busy, and there was a number of fitness stations for runners where she could do her physio exercises. These were mostly to build up the strength in her left bicep and shoulder since the right was taking more than its fair share of the load these days. One exercise was a kind of plank where she rested on her knees and forearms and lifted one arm to point straight ahead and then the other, so each shoulder took an equal go at bearing her weight. She felt a bit daft because it wasn’t a very picturesque position, but then none of the other runners or dog-walkers she saw were especially glowing endorsements of health.

  She was balanced on her knees and right forearm, extending her left as far as it would go and giving the tendons a good stretch, when a lightning flash of pins and needles crashed through it and she collapsed back onto her elbows with a gasp. Fortunately the sensation passed just as suddenly, but in the black space that it left she felt leaves beneath her dead fingers again. She was tempted to pull away, pretend nothing was out of the ordinary, but the blunt stump of her wrist reminded her that nothing was ordinary any more.

  This time she extended her imaginary fingers and explored.

  Feeling around, she encountered something woody, a tree root, possibly, and followed it as it broadened and thickened to join a second root in a V of moss, rotting leaves and soil. To her eyes, there was nothing but the rubberised mat of the exercise area.

  ‘Everything okay there?’ someone asked.

  Rachel looked around and saw a man – shaggy-haired, with a light beard that made him look oddly like Shakespeare, with a black Labrador panting happily beside him – looking at her in puzzlement and concern. She smiled politely, as if she wasn’t still on all fours and presenting her arse to the world in black leggings. ‘Dropped a contact,’ she explained.

  ‘Ah. Need any help?’

  ‘No thanks, I got this.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ If he’d noticed that she was missing a hand, he was too polite to draw attention to it. ‘Good luck.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  He lobbed a tennis ball into the distance and the dog shot off after it, while he followed, hands in his pockets as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

  Rachel groaned. Kill me now.

  Then something that felt like it had lots of legs skittered over her dead fingers and she jumped back with a yelp. She stared at the patch of empty ground where her arm had been. That had been no phantom pain.

  ‘What the fuck is going on?’ she whispered. The temptation to ignore it – to walk away as if nothing had happened – was strong, but ultimately overcome by the realisation that if she was going to take control of her situation she needed to deal with it. Even the bits that were impossible.

  She placed her forearm back on the ground, kept her dead hand still and waited. Normally, creepycrawlies had never bothered her much – she was the household spider eviction specialist – though the general rule was anything bigger than a pound coin could expect the business end of a rolled-up newspaper. The skittering thing came back and she resisted the urge to pull away again. Part of her couldn’t believe that she was actually doing this, but she reached across with her living hand anyway and, just like the leaves, plucked the creature out of empty air.

  It was a small black beetle, about an inch long, with a pair of nasty-looking pincers on its head and a long segmented abdomen, which ended in two tiny white prongs which it raised and flourished at her as if it thought it was a scorpion.

  ‘My, aren’t you fierce,’ she whispered to the tiny thing. ‘Where did you come from, hey?’

  Something squirted from the white prongs on its back – it had an acrid stench like rotting apples.

  ‘Gross. Now that isn’t very polite, is it?’

  She took photographs of it with her phone and let it scurry off into the grass.

  She was finishing up her stretches, her mind swimming with unanswerable questions, when she noticed that the beetle had come back. There were two of them.

  ‘You’ve found a friend…’

  It was joined by a third, then several more, and as she looked around she saw that dozens, hundreds, possibly thousands of them had appeared out of the grass, all flexing their scorpion-like tails and their head pincers.

  All looking at her.

  ‘Wait…’ She backed away from them at a walk, determined not to give in to the unease she could feel building behind her breastbone.

  But they didn’t wait. They seethed towards her in a glistening black carpet.

  Rachel turned and calmly jogged away.

  She was easily able to outpace them, but more kept appearing out of the grass either side of the path, so she ran faster, but no matter how hard she pushed herself they were always a metre or so ahead as if they had been there all along, swarming, waiting to ambush her. At first she tried to avoid stepping on them, but that only slowed her, so she stamped them flat with a sudden savage glee that surprised her, except that some managed to get onto her trainers and crawl up onto her bare ankles, biting. She screamed and tried to slap them away even as she was running, terrified that she would fall and then they’d crawl into her ears and nose and mouth, and her hand came away sticky with their rotten-apple stink.

  She fell through the park gate and landed in gravel, putting both hands out to break her fall and forgetting in her panic that she only had one. The compression sock did nothing to protect the tender flesh of her stump from taking the full brunt. Agony lanced straight up her arm and into her shoulder, and she screamed again. The pain was so bad she could barely see.

  Concerned faces were around her, helping her up, asking if she was okay. She tore off the sock and examined her stump, half-expecting to see it split open, spraying blood everywhere, the ends of her bones gleaming pink and her nerve endings twitching like severed worms as her flesh sought blindly for the part that had been cut away. But there was just a bit of light grazing and a few pieces of grit stuck to the skin. Impossible that it could hurt so much.

  Someone gave her a drink of water. When she was able to talk again and thank them, she looked around but there were no beetles anywhere – if they had even been there in the first place.

  Hobbling home, she checked the photos on her phone. The beetle was there all right. The stinging abrasions on her stump and the bite marks on her ankles were still there too. Whatever this was, it was real.

  * * *

  Google told her that it was Ocypus olens, the Devil’s coach-horse beetle. Superstition held that it was cursed on account on having eaten the core of Eve’s apple, and using its tail to point the way for Judas when he was looking for Jesus to betray him in the garden of Gethsemane. Anyone who killed a Devil’s coach-horse would be forgive
n seven sins. Well that’s all right then, she thought. I must have cleared several lifetimes’ worth. There was, however, nothing on the subject of them swarming or attacking people.

  ‘That’s because those beetles weren’t real,’ she told herself in the bright silence of her kitchen. ‘You do know that, don’t you?’ It was the kind of concerned yet patronising, passive-aggressive tone that her mother adopted from time to time, usually when Rachel had pushed her too far. How can any of this possibly be real? You’ve lost a hand – that’s real. That’s about as real as it gets, my dear. Maybe it was all part of the post-traumatic stress she’d been warned about. If she’d hallucinated the insect, she’d probably hallucinated its photo on her phone too. There was one way she could find out about that, at least.

  She texted the photo to Tom, along with the message: Made a friend in the garden today!

  A few moments later he replied: Ugly bugger. Seriously, you need to get out more.

  So Tom had seen it, which made it real. Unless she was hallucinating Tom’s reaction too, but where did that line of reasoning end? That the whole world as she knew it was being fabricated by her traumatised brain while her body was strapped to a hospital bed in a psychiatric ward, drooling? If that was the case then she had nothing to lose.

  If she assumed that it was all real, she reasoned, then it was replicable, and maybe even controllable. So, in the safety and sanity of her kitchen, where everything was in its place and Yomi’s advice was written up on a chalkboard next to the fridge to remind her, she tried to stop worrying too much about whether or not she was going crazy and simply explored the scope of what her dead fingers could feel.

  Where her eyes saw gleaming melamine cupboards and countertops, her fingers felt nothing, but when she moved closer to the walls she encountered flaking plaster and splintered wood. It was as if her dead fingers were ignoring the superficial skin of the world and probing deeper into the older, more essential fabric of the building itself. She picked a scab of plaster away and with her right hand brought it – across? through? – into reality. It crumbled to chalky powder between her thumb and forefinger, and as it did so a small crack opened in the wall before her eyes – the real wall.

  Just like the begonia that had died when she’d brought the dead leaves through. Not random, then.

  She bent to the floor, feeling around on rough floorboards where there should have been ceramic tiles, found a shard of broken glass, and watched the corner of an expensive piece of Italian floor slate spontaneously crack away in its place.

  Plainly, the act of bringing something through from whatever world her hand inhabited caused a proportionate amount of damage to this one.

  She was going to have to be very careful.

  7

  PROSTHESIS

  FOR HER NEXT APPOINTMENT WITH YOMI, RACHEL took the bus. It was a much longer and more awkward trip, but it didn’t have to rely on Tom’s goodwill, which in any case was in scant supply. She’d waited for him to make the first move in bed, and when that hadn’t happened she’d given it one last shot, ambushing him in the shower. It hadn’t gone well, ending with a broken towel rail and harsh words on both sides. So she stopped trying. He’d been grumpy and withdrawn, throwing himself into the family landscaping business and using the long summer days as an excuse to return late at night – sweaty, exhausted, and good for only food and sleep. This was fine by Rachel, because she had more than enough to worry about with what was happening to her hand.

  She had become used to the phantom pains, except they weren’t really pains as such any more. She would regularly experience flashes of cold and warmth, and a sensation that could only be described as that of an icy breeze moving across her non-existent skin, but since the incident in the park nothing dramatic had happened.

  Until, on the bus to Selly Oak, it began to rain on her dead hand.

  What started as a familiar cold flush soon became a maddeningly specific pattering, and she knew that wherever her hand was (because she had by now come to the inescapable conclusion that it had to be somewhere, no matter that it was also ash), it was outside in the rain. But it didn’t frighten her. At most, it was simply annoying because she couldn’t wipe it. All she could do was shake the non-existent water off, and she knew how this must have looked to the other passengers: the crazy one-handed woman swatting the empty air with her stump. She reached across with her right hand, and even though neither could touch the other, the fingers of her living hand came away wet.

  I bet my nails look atrocious, she thought, and laughed. Now she was a crazy one-handed-waving-at-nothing-laughing-to-herself woman on the bus, and she found that she didn’t give a shit.

  As she watched, rust bloomed on the metal rail of the seat in front of her. It started as a coin-sized patch but spread quickly, like frost forming in time-lapse, until a ruler’s length of the bar was corroded and its powder-enamel coating was cracked and falling off in scabs.

  She glanced around guiltily in case anybody else had seen – though what they could have accused her of was unclear – and then casually moved to another seat.

  * * *

  At the rehab centre, Yomi had a present for her. ‘I thought we’d give this a bit of a go, my lovely,’ she said, and held up the harness of a prosthetic claw.

  Rachel shrugged. ‘Why not? Things couldn’t possibly get any weirder.’

  Yomi helped her with the harness. It was less complicated than it looked, with a strap that went from a loop over her good shoulder, behind her neck and down to where the socket with its hook fitted on to her wrist. As Yomi was helping her fit the silicone cup she noticed the grazed skin on Rachel’s stump. ‘Looks painful,’ she observed. ‘How did you do that?’

  ‘Cut myself shaving.’

  The look that Yomi gave her suggested that facetiousness was not considered a constructive part of the therapeutic process.

  ‘Okay,’ Rachel admitted. ‘I fell over running. Landed right on it.’

  ‘I imagine that hurt.’

  ‘Like an absolute bitch.’

  Yomi inspected it. ‘Any swelling or lingering pain?’

  ‘Only to my pride.’

  ‘Good then. Don’t worry if this fitting is a bit uncomfortable. Whatever you decide to have will be custom fitted to you. I had to guess your size.’

  Size. As if this was no more extraordinary than popping out to Marks and Spencer for a bit of clothes shopping. ‘Do they come in different colours and patterns too?’ she joked.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Yomi. ‘Why wouldn’t they?’

  A cable ran from the hook, up and around to her other shoulder, so that when she reached forward the tension on the cable made the claw open, while relaxing her reach made it close.

  ‘Hey, that’s actually quite easy.’ Arm went forward, claw opened. Arm went back, claw closed. Almost as easy as bringing bits of debris through from wherever.

  ‘I’m glad you think so. How has everything else been?’

  ‘Oh you know, the usual.’

  Yomi sniffed, unimpressed. ‘Really. Lost a lot of hands, have you?’

  ‘No, I meant, you know, nothing out of the ordinary. The pain’s almost gone entirely. Now it’s mostly just pins and needles, flashes of hot and cold.’ And magic leaves and impossible rain and crazy dreams of hollow trees and my husband is too disgusted by my stump to sleep with me. Nothing major. ‘I’ve been doing my exercises and rubbing it for the sensitivity thing. Most days I don’t even need the sock at all.’

  ‘Hubby not with you today?’ Yomi asked, adjusting one of the straps.

  ‘No, he has a lot of work on.’

  ‘Bet you’ll be glad to get back to work yourself. There, that’ll do it.’ Yomi straightened up, smoothed down the front of her blue tunic and looked at Rachel closely. ‘You’re going absolutely doolally being stuck at home, aren’t you?’

  Rachel’s shoulders slumped in surrender. ‘Christ, yes. My mother keeps “just popping round” with some new thing she’s found
on the Internet to help me cope better, like electric tin openers and weird little plastic clip things to hold books open, and in the meantime I’m sitting on my arse getting fatter and stupider every day. It’s funny, all this happened on the holiday that was my idea because Tom and I were working so hard that we hardly saw each other, and now all I want is for you to sign off on my OT report so that work will let me back and I can sit in front of a computer screen all day essentially watching cars drive up and down. That sounds stupid, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Not in the slightest. Come here.’

  Yomi led her to the suite of training rooms that included a small mocked-up office complete with filing cabinets, photocopier and computer. She pointed to a pot of pens sitting on the desk. ‘Pass me one of those, would you please?’

  Rachel reached out with her right hand.

  Yomi gave her a look.

  Rachel sighed and reached out with her claw.

  By the end of that hour her shoulders were aching from the strain of pulling against the cable, she’d dropped that bloody pen God knew how many times and was more convinced than ever that she was going to avoid using a prosthetic as far as humanly possible. It wasn’t that it was especially awkward, but it involved building up a whole new set of muscle memories – like having to pat one’s head and rub one’s stomach at the same time, but without being able to feel what one hand was doing. Worse, for the whole of the time she’d been wearing it, there had been no phantom sensations at all – there actually did seem to be nothing but dead, empty space from three-quarters of the way down her forearm, and even though the rational adult part of her mind said, Good, that’s how it’s meant to be. It’s gone and you better start getting used to that if you want your life back, she hadn’t realised until now just how frequent, and even welcome, those sensations had been. Wearing the claw felt like a bizarre kind of betrayal. When Yomi asked if she wanted to book a session to have a cast made of her stump for the Prosthetics Department, Rachel said she needed more time to think about it.