The Hollow Tree

by James Brogden

  Who Danced With Oak Mary?

  Evidently some attempt had been made to scrub them away in the distant past, but without much success, and the effect was that the message seemed translucent, hovering just above the surface, or below it, as if instead of stone it were the ice of a frozen lake.

  Abruptly, Mary began to giggle, and it made Rachel’s blood run cold. It was too high-pitched, like the sound of a rusty sign flapping in a gale.

  ‘I remember now, he did his knee in,’ Mary said, and something was wrong with her voice, too. Her accent had broadened, with a lilt that might have been Black Country or Irish. ‘We crawled under that gap there so he could do me standing up against the stone, but it were slippery and with his kecks around his ankles he bashed all the skin off his knee.’ She laughed, and turned to Rachel. ‘That Brian, he really were a proper twonk.’

  Her eyes, which had been a clear greyish-blue, were now a deep chocolate brown.

  ‘Mary—’ Rachel started.

  ‘I’m not Mary!’ the other woman laughed. ‘I’m Annabel. Annabel Clayton.’

  * * *

  The lesh was deep in the rootweb, its awareness threaded through the trees and copses of the surrounding woodland, dormant and drifting in a world of rustling green, when it felt the gypsy witch awaken in Oak Mary.

  ‘Annabel,’ it grinned. ‘My girl.’

  The Green Man emerged from the tangle of root and branch and set off at a wide-legged lope through the woods to claim its prize.

  * * *

  ‘This isn’t funny,’ said Rachel.

  ‘I know,’ Mary replied, just as suddenly sober as she’d been giggly the moment before. ‘Harry beat him terrible bad. Not as bad as what he done to me, of course. Ah, Lord,’ she grimaced, as if in physical pain. ‘I genuinely don’t know which is worse: the forgetting or the remembering.’

  ‘No,’ said Rachel. ‘I mean, this isn’t a joke. Mary—’

  ‘I’m telling you!’ Mary flashed at her. ‘I ain’t your sodding Mary! I’m—’

  That was when the lesh attacked.

  It came at them out of the dense shadows between the yew trees, quite silently, but unbelievably fast. Rachel caught an impression of wild hair and a beard, ragged clothing, and long reaching arms, before it grabbed her by the scruff of her jacket and flung her away.

  ‘Rachel!’ Mary screamed.

  Rachel pinwheeled and fell, wrenching her hip, but glanced back to see the man (that’s no man Jesus Christ look at his skin what’s it made of, wood?) had Mary (Annabel?) by the throat and was lifting her up, her feet kicking and dangling centimetres off the ground while her fists beat uselessly at the arm (it’s a branch it’s a fucking branch!) that held her aloft.

  The lesh wore Harry Clayton’s face, and it snarled into Annabel’s, its breath stinking of rotting wood, fungus, and stale beer. ‘You come back with me now, woman,’ it growled. ‘Back to the camp, where you belong.’

  Annabel spat in its face. Unmoved, it turned and headed back for the yews, moving more slowly as it dragged her along by the throat. She was making awful choking sounds.

  This is it, Rachel thought. This is the pushback, the punishment for interfering.

  She looked around for help, but this was a dead end of the country park seldom visited by day-trippers, and she hadn’t seen another human being since they’d arrived at the monument. Meanwhile the lesh had almost reached the treeline.

  ‘No!’ Rachel picked herself up and leapt at the creature, not at all sure what she was going to do, certain only that she couldn’t let whatever it was escape unchallenged. ‘Put her down, you bastard!’

  The lesh turned to meet her challenge, one long arm sweeping around to backhand her, and she instinctively tried to shield her face. Blindly, her non-existent left hand caught the creature’s arm at the wrist and stopped it in mid-swing.

  She stared at it, gaping idiotically.

  So did the lesh.

  To anybody watching, it would have looked like her attacker’s arm had paused, hovering six inches in the empty air above Rachel’s stump, but there was nothing empty about that air. The lesh turned fully to face her, and she felt its muscles straining in her dead grip but knew that she was stronger – finally stronger than whatever had been terrorising her for months. She held fast.

  It snarled at her in baffled fury. ‘Let. Me. Go.’

  ‘Put her down,’ she repeated, first in a whisper, but then with more confidence. ‘Put her down!’

  ‘I will kill her.’ It squeezed Annabel’s throat with its other hand.

  ‘NO!’ Rachel twisted inward and down savagely, feeling first her enemy’s wrist dislocate, then its elbow, and finally its shoulder in a series of splintering crunches. The lesh howled in agony and dropped Annabel to tear at Rachel’s grip with both hands. She let it go and it reeled backwards, arm flopping. Crouching protectively over Annabel, who was coughing and retching into the grass, Rachel glared up at the lesh. ‘Touch her again,’ she warned, ‘and I’ll rip both your fucking arms off.’

  For a moment it looked like the lesh might attack her all the same. But distantly there came the sound of barking, and that seemed to clinch it. Throwing Rachel a last look of absolute hatred, it loped off into the trees, and seemed to dissolve into the foliage.

  As Rachel crouched, chest heaving for breath and trying to believe what had just happened, two large dogs tore past her and into the woods after the creature, barking and snarling. A few moments later a man ran up, out of breath.

  ‘Are you two all right?’ he panted. ‘What the hell was that?’

  Rachel helped Annabel to her feet. She was sobbing and clutching her neck, where bruises had already started to appear. ‘That was…’ Rachel started, but had no idea how to finish. ‘We were attacked,’ was the best she could manage.

  The dog owner was young and dressed in jogging gear, and his eyes were out on stalks. ‘But you…!’ he stammered. ‘His arm…!’

  Rachel ignored him and turned to Mary. ‘Are you okay?’

  Mary nodded. ‘Think so,’ she croaked.

  The dogs returned, two beautiful huskies capering with excitement, and the young jogger clipped leads on them. ‘I’m going to call the police,’ he said, taking out his phone.

  ‘No!’ said Rachel, a little too fiercely, then added, ‘No, please,’ more calmly. ‘I’ll do it, but I want to get my friend back to the car first. Please, it’s tricky.’ Then a sudden inspiration hit her. ‘It was her husband. He’s been stalking her since they split up. The police already know about him, but I’ll definitely call them from the car. There’s no need for you to get involved in it all. You’ve been more than enough help already. Thank you.’

  Plainly the notion of becoming involved in someone’s domestic troubles was too awkward for their Good Samaritan, because he put his phone away quickly, made some embarrassed-sounding apologies, and left with his dogs.

  ‘My hero,’ Rachel muttered after him, then turned back to the woman she wanted to call Mary, but who insisted that she was Annabel. ‘Let’s get you out of here.’

  19

  ANNABEL

  RACHEL MANAGED TO DRIVE THEM DOWN TO THE bottom of the hill and onto Rednal High Street before the adrenaline wash-out hit and the hand holding the steering wheel started to tremble. It was tricky enough driving one-handed without this. She also began to feel woozy, but didn’t realise that she’d actually greyed out until the car jerked, snapping her back to awareness of the fact that Annabel had reached over to grab the wheel.

  ‘Pull over,’ Annabel demanded. Her voice was raw and rasping. ‘Before you kill the pair of us.’

  Rachel did as she was told, then she sat back and just let everything go away for a while. When the world drifted back into focus, the woman in the passenger seat had polished off most of the bottle of water that Rachel kept by the handbrake, swearing at the pain in her throat in a language that most definitely was not English. She was Mary, but at the same time Annabel. Her face had the
same shape and her hair was still brown, but somehow both seemed fuller, more really there. Rachel also saw that they had parked quite neatly outside a pub called the Old Hare and Hounds.

  ‘Well will you look at that?’ she said. ‘Come on. If anyone ever deserved a drink it’s us.’ She got out of the car but Annabel hung back, hesitant. ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘We can’t go in there!’ Annabel croaked, then coughed, and took another mouthful of water.

  Rachel frowned. ‘I rather think we can.’

  ‘What?’ Annabel scoffed. ‘Just waltz on in and buy two pints of bitter like a couple of men?’

  Rachel realised what her concern was. ‘Oh no, look, seriously, it’s okay. It’s the twenty-first century. Women do this all the time. The times, they have-a-changed.’ She opened Annabel’s door and held out her hand, which was still trembling.

  ‘Well all right, if you say so.’

  As they went in, Annabel stared around at the polished woodwork, the recessed halogen lights and faux-retro furnishings, and Rachel became aware that it wasn’t just the fact that they were two unaccompanied women which she was finding hard to cope with.

  ‘Even the menfolk wouldn’t come in here,’ Annabel said. ‘They’d have been out on their arses before anybody could shout thieving gyppo scum.’

  Rachel collapsed into a chair, plucked the lunch menu off the table and tossed it at Annabel, who sat down opposite her. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Anything you like.’

  ‘Oh, you choose,’ said Annabel, in a manner that was just a little too offhandedly casual.

  ‘No, seriously. Anything. The cakier the better.’

  ‘Um.’ Annabel bit her lip. Her face had gone bright crimson, and with a sudden flush of embarrassment Rachel realised what the problem was.

  ‘Oh, honey, you can’t read, can you?’

  The other woman cursed low and hard, in a language that Rachel didn’t understand but had a funny feeling was probably Romani.

  ‘But I thought – back at the psych unit – we read that stuff about Oak Mary together…’

  ‘You and Mary read it,’ Annabel replied, with surprising venom. ‘I’m. Not. Her.’

  ‘Okay, okay, I’m sorry.’ Rachel ordered a pot of tea for two, and they sat in strained silence while it arrived. The normality of tea seemed to thaw the ice between them, but Rachel didn’t like the way her own hand trembled as she poured.

  ‘You all right?’ asked Annabel.

  ‘I don’t know. I feel like my skeleton’s turned to jelly. You seem to be taking this in your stride, though.’

  Annabel smiled. ‘I’ve had a scrap or two in my time.’

  ‘Really? How many times have you had a scrap with anything like… that thing?’

  Annabel’s face grew dark again. ‘It had Harry’s face,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t expecting that.’

  Recollections of the fight at the monument fought their way through Rachel’s wooziness, and she shuddered. ‘What was it?’

  ‘A lesh. A forest guardian from the old world. Mami Rudge called it up to deal with me.’ Annabel produced a ghastly grin. ‘On account of the fact that I wasn’t going to die easy. Not for that sod Harry. Still.’ She subsided. ‘I weren’t expecting it to come for me wearing his face, and that’s a fact.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Rachel whispered. ‘I think I nearly took its arm off.’

  Annabel barked a laugh. ‘That you did, my dear! I’ll bet that put the wind right up him!’

  ‘And you know all this because you’re…’ Rachel looked around and lowered her voice. ‘A witch?’

  Annabel grimaced. ‘Drabarni, please. It ain’t witchcraft, it’s knowledge. It gives you power over the way of things. Also I have the Sight, but that’s different. That’s something I was born with. Being drabarni is about learning the old ways, and passing that on.’ She reached out a hand to Rachel’s stump. ‘May I?’

  Rachel hesitated. After the surgery, nobody but Yomi and Tom had ever touched it. Still, she nodded, and Annabel laid her cupped palm over the end. It felt like an odd kind of intimacy.

  ‘You’ve got some power there too,’ Annabel said. ‘To do what you did. To pull me through, and to beat the lesh.’

  ‘Maybe the Touch instead of the Sight, though,’ Rachel joked, but Annabel remained deadly serious, nodding.

  ‘Yes, maybe so.’

  ‘So you’re really not Mary?’

  ‘I was, when there was nobody else to be, but you helped me remember. I’m Annabel Clayton. Pleased to meet you.’ She stood up from her chair and ducked her head, dipping one knee slightly.

  Rachel stared. ‘Did you just… curtsey to me?’

  ‘Would you rather I shook your hand like a man?’ Annabel replied, and began to laugh as if this was the most hilarious idea she’d ever heard. Rachel found the sound infectious and began to laugh with her, realising that it didn’t matter what the woman sitting opposite called herself. It might just have been the reaction to the fight, but both of them were still laughing like drains by the time their food arrived.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ asked Annabel. She’d polished off most of the tea, drinking it scalding, unsweetened and black, several scones and a piece of carrot cake with her fingers, and was busy licking cream cheese topping off them.

  ‘We get you back to the hospital and tell them that you’ve recovered your memory,’ said Rachel. ‘And your appetite, apparently. We probably leave out the bits about witches and forest demons – somehow I don’t think that’s going to help your case.’

  Annabel looked alarmed. ‘I can’t go back there!’

  ‘They’re only trying to help—’

  ‘No!’ She shook her head vehemently. ‘They put chemicals into you that make your blood slow and cold so that you can’t fight them, and to make you forget who you are and what you come from. They’d take away my Sight. They’d call it madness and they’d put electricity through my brain to burn it out of me, and I’d end up no better than some gadji housewife never seeing the outside of her own four walls. And anyway, the lesh is still out there. It’s going to keep coming for me and I don’t want to put innocent people in its way.’

  ‘But you can’t just run away.’

  ‘Oh yes I suvvin’ well can! You should be waving me on my way; you didn’t ask for any of this.’

  ‘Neither did you. And you’re being stupid. Where are you planning to go? What are you going to do? It’s great that you’ve started to remember who you are, but you’ve got no identity that you can use in the modern world, no money or credit cards; for God’s sake, you probably don’t know what a credit card even is. We can help you. Tom’s family business can give you a job, we can fix you up with somewhere to live, and you can be Annabel – but not if I’m in jail for harbouring an escaped psychiatric patient. What do you think the doctors and the police are going to do when you fail to turn up at dinnertime? Who do you think they’re going to blame?’ She pointed at herself. ‘Muggins here. I’m the one supposed to be responsible for you. Plus, in case you hadn’t noticed, I already beat seven bells out of that lesh thing once, even though I still don’t have the faintest idea how. If you really want to help me you can start with that.’

  ‘Start with what?’

  ‘So far you’re the closest I’ve got to anybody who might have a clue about how this whole coming-back-from-the-dead thing works. I don’t mind admitting I’m in over my head here. I could really do with some advice, or at least a second opinion. Please?’

  ‘Fine then,’ Annabel sighed. ‘I’ll go back, and tell them I had a lovely day shopping. But you better be waiting in your car for me somewhere tonight because I’ll be letting myself out of there by morning.’

  Rachel paid the bill and they went out to the car, but before they reached it Annabel’s shoulders slumped and her hands came up to her face, and Rachel realised she was crying.

  ‘Hey, what? I’m sorry, what did I say?’

  Annabel’s voice escaped from between the cage of her fin
gers, muffled. ‘My boys. What you said about where was I going to go. I just realised that they’ll be old men, if they’re even alive at all.’ She pulled her hands away. ‘Mami called the lesh on me because I cursed them. I cursed my own family. My own children. What kind of a person does that? And you think I can help you?’

  Rachel put her arms around her, felt her stiffen and then give in. ‘Someone who is very angry and scared and in a lot of pain,’ she said. Tom’s expression of confused hurt when she’d gone to sleep in the spare room floated clear in her memory. ‘It’s not just you, trust me. I’m the last person to ask anything about kids. Come on. We can’t stand about in the car park hugging all day.’

  * * *

  The three deaths reconvened at the clearing of Mary’s Oak. The Green Man looked considerably the worse for wear; his left arm dangled and was bent in several directions that it shouldn’t.

  The Small Man was picking his fingernails with his knife. ‘Well that answers one question, at least,’ he observed. ‘We should have guessed that she had help. Nobody escapes without help. She was too weak to remember even her own name, never mind regain flesh. No.’ He picked and picked. ‘A wayward soul is one thing. To aid and abet that, to wilfully tamper with the boundary between life and the umbra – that’s nothing short of criminal. It requires punishing.’

  ‘That is beyond our remit,’ warned the Dark Man. ‘We are only here for Mary.’

  The Small Man paused in his picking, having drawn blood, and examined a crimson bead, which trickled from underneath his fingernail and over the soft pad of his thumb. ‘I don’t know about you,’ he said, ‘but I like the flesh. I like the freedom it gives, for example, to redefine one’s remits.’