The Hollow Tree

by James Brogden

  ‘No. Just no. I have to see her.’

  ‘But, Tom—’

  He stopped halfway up the stairs and turned on her. ‘You’re telling me that you’ve brought the spirit of a dead woman back from limbo and that she’s in our spare room? I’m seeing her for myself.’

  She caught him again at the door to the spare room. ‘You can’t just barge in there!’ she hissed. ‘She’s a guest!’

  ‘Guest?’ He stared at her, incredulous. ‘This isn’t a fucking hotel for ghosts!’

  ‘Well at least keep your bloody voice down!’

  He opened the door.

  Annabel was far from asleep. She was standing at the window, wrapped in a quilt, gazing out into the blackness of the garden and the rustling shadows of the bushes at the far end. Smoky had draped himself across her shoulders. She turned as the door opened, half-lit by the night, her dark hair framing her face and her steady eyes regarding them with a calmness that seemed to take the wind out of Tom’s sails.

  ‘Um,’ he said.

  ‘Hello, Tom,’ Annabel replied. Her voice was pitched low, and it even made Rachel’s heart skip a little. Lord knew what effect it was having on him. ‘I heard you and Rachel talking downstairs.’

  ‘Look—’

  ‘Everything she told you is true. I know it all sounds very complicated but it’s actually quite simple. With her help I have escaped from a terrible place, where I thought I’d be forever, and someone has come after me to take me back – someone who means to do me harm, and against whom I can appeal to no earthly authority. Helping me will put you in the path of that, but all the same, Thomas Cooper, will you help me or will you not?’

  For a ridiculous moment Rachel had an image of her husband dropping to one knee and offering a sword in Annabel’s service, but all he did was give a resigned, helpless shrug and say, ‘Okay.’

  Annabel smiled, and in the dark it was radiant. ‘Thank you. This place is as secure as I can make it,’ she added, shifting her attention to Rachel. ‘If neither of you mind, I’m very tired.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Rachel. ‘Come on, dear.’ She had to pull him out of the room. He was murmuring something that she couldn’t quite catch. ‘What was that?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said hastily.

  But it had sounded like, ‘Oh queen of air and darkness…’

  * * *

  Later, in their own bed, Tom turned to Rachel in the darkness and said, ‘What she said about someone coming to take her back – that’s where Smoky came from too, isn’t it?’

  Rachel nodded.

  ‘And the thing that came for him—’

  ‘We killed,’ she finished. ‘I smashed its brains out of its skull, and I’ll do the same to anyone or anything that comes after her too.’

  ‘She’s certainly not what I expected.’

  ‘Hmm, yeah, I noticed that.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Oh nothing.’ She snuggled up to him. ‘Really, it’s nothing. We’re both knackered. Like you said, we need to sleep on this.’

  She felt him drift off quickly, but lay awake in his loose embrace for some time afterwards, listening to the small noises of the house as they settled around the unaccustomed presence of another woman in her home.

  22

  NOZ

  CONNOR LEANED BACK AGAINST THE OBELISK, PUT the balloon to his lips and inhaled, tasting the noz, all cool and sweet and chemically. Jake said it was a colourless, odourless gas and he was imagining it, but Jake also said that you could get high if you licked enough pencils, which pretty much proved that Jake knew shit all.

  Around them the fir trees of Beacon Hill rose in long straight columns of shadow into the night sky. It was mild with only a slight breeze, making them sway and whisper to each other. Connor breathed in and out into the balloon, mixing the nitrous oxide with his own carbon dioxide so it started getting all warm and wet and funky and rubbery. They were pink birthday balloons with unicorns and princesses, which he’d nicked from his little sister Lucy’s stash of party treasures. Two more were inflated and ready to use, but kept safely away from a small fire of twigs and leaves that they’d lit, because you always had to have a fire.

  Jake turned to him. ‘Is it good?’

  The buzz was starting to fizzle out his nerve endings like slo-mo sparklers, spreading a tingling warmth through him. ‘Yeah,’ Connor grinned. ‘Safe as,’ and put his lips back to the balloon while Jake reached for the cracker tube and inserted a fresh noz cylinder. There was a crack and a hiss, and Jake inflated his own magic unicorn.

  As Connor lay on a blanket of fir needles and the noz buzz kicked in, perspective flipped and he wasn’t lying down looking up any more but looking out at the rays of some hyperspace tunnel speeding past him to infinity, like he was Han Solo in the Thingy Whatsit Falcon, which made Jake Chewie and that was pretty fucking funny, and he started to giggle.

  Jake paused from dragging on his balloon. ‘What’s funny?’

  But the giggles had taken over and Connor couldn’t catch his breath to reply, which Jake took to be a sign that all was well and carried on inhaling, and soon the pair of them were hysterical with laughter, catching it from each other and giving it back as it subsided. Somewhere in the glowing nebula that used to be his brain, Connor thought that it was always better to do this with your mates. Sure, Jake was a dick, but he was all right.

  And then a man was there, standing over them, looking down. He looked like a hipster version of Wolverine, and this was just fucking hilarious, and Connor was off harder than before.

  But the more he looked, the less it resembled a man. It was hard to tell because whether it was the jumping shadows of the fire or the noz fucking with his brain, or both, the guy’s face seemed to keep changing shape, and the same with his clothes. Sometimes flickering, sometimes melting. Somewhere deep in Connor’s brain a voice was yelling to him that it was the feds – someone had shitted on them and the feds had found them and his mum was going to fucking kill him – and suddenly it wasn’t as funny any more. The nitrous oxide was wearing off, but there was still enough in his system that he couldn’t do much more than lie there shaking with the aftershocks of his giggling fit as it leaned close.

  ‘Who danced with Oak Mary?’ it growled, and its voice was just as bad as its face, sounding like too many throats were trying to control one mouth.

  ‘I… what? Oak… uh… wh-wh-who…?’ Connor stammered.

  ‘I did,’ it answered, grinning. ‘And I’m going to dance with you, too.’

  Then it stopped even trying to look human. It swooped down on Jake with its… hands? Dear Jesus God were those its hands?… and literally tore him apart before Connor’s eyes. At Christmas his mum had made a pulled pork roast, which was basically a packet of processed meat and juices, and when it was cooked she cut it open and shredded it with a pair of forks, and that was basically what the thing was doing to Jake, who shrieked and begged as he came apart in a spreading lake of his own juices.

  That was when Connor got his ass up and ran, but the gas made him clumsy and he got maybe a dozen yards before his foot caught on a root and he fell face first. Wet agony exploded in his head as his nose broke. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. This wasn’t remotely amusing any more. He rolled over onto his back and saw it coming for him, carrying a pink princess-and-unicorn balloon like an eager child who had just seen a big piece of cake that it wanted to eat.

  ‘Run, boy,’ it told him. ‘Run and tell them who you danced with.’

  Connor took to his heels and pegged it into the trees, only paying slightly more attention to where he was going this time, still careening off trunks, getting lashed by leaves and stabbed by branches, falling and picking himself up and stumbling onward, sobbing all the while, until he lost it again and cartwheeled down a steep slope to fetch up hard on tarmac, fracturing his skull in a white starburst and dislocating his shoulder.

  The shocked driver who found him lying in the midd
le of the Rose Hill road couldn’t make out what Connor was saying at first, but it sounded like he was babbling, ‘Pulled pork! Pulled pork! Pulled pork!’

  23

  STATIC

  ‘…MUTILATED BODY OF A FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY, found at the Lickey obelisk…’

  ‘Both of you shut up!’ Tom flapped at Rachel and Annabel, while turning up the volume of the kitchen radio. They stared at him, Rachel with a spoonful of muesli halfway to her mouth, Annabel in the process of buttering a piece of toast.

  ‘…by police following up reports from a local boy that he and his friend had been attacked. The investigating officer, Detective Inspector George Sanders, stated that this is by far one of the worst crimes of its kind that the West Midlands Police have seen in a long while.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Annabel mouthed to Rachel, who could only shrug, as perplexed as she was.

  The newsreader resumed: ‘A source within the police has revealed that the unnamed victim’s blood was used to write graffiti down the length of the twenty-metre obelisk, spelling out the message “I danced with Oak Mary”, though police are at a loss to explain how anyone could have scaled the obelisk to do so. The graffiti refers to the local urban myth of Oak Mary, the skeleton of a…’

  Tom switched the radio off. ‘I think we know the rest,’ he said bleakly.

  Rachel returned her spoon to the half-empty bowl. Her appetite seemed to have disappeared. A few miles away a young man lay murdered, his blood used as paint.

  Annabel munched her toast. ‘It’s a warning,’ she said.

  ‘Well I’m considering myself fucking warned!’ said Tom. ‘What do we do about it? I’m assuming we can’t call the police and leave an anonymous tip that a vengeful demon from limbo did it?’

  ‘Tom,’ said Rachel. ‘You need to calm down. This isn’t helping.’ She was already on her phone, checking out the Hollow Isle’s Twitter feed. ‘Jesus,’ she whispered, and turned the screen so that they could see.

  Someone had been to the scene early, before the police had cordoned off the area, and taken a photo. The angle was from right up against the guard railings, and the foreshortening effect made the obelisk loom even taller still. The very top of it was slightly hazy with the dawn mist that wreathed the Lickey Hills in late summer, but nothing could hide the starkness of what had been written down it in broad sweeping strokes as if painted on with a hand, the letters a foot high each, the blood dried to a rusty brown:

  I DANCED WITH OAK MARY

  The ‘I’ had been underlined three times, as if whoever had written it was keen to take the credit.

  The image had only been uploaded half an hour ago but already had over eighty re-tweets, and seventeen likes.

  ‘Sick fuckers,’ said Tom.

  ‘Who?’ asked Rachel. ‘The killer or the likers?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘It wants me to run,’ said Annabel. ‘It’s trying to scare me, letting me know that it’s coming for me, that it has a claim on me.’ She rinsed her plate under the kitchen tap. ‘I’m not going to.’

  ‘So what are you going to do instead?’ asked Tom. ‘Sit here and wait for that lesh thing to come and get you? That doesn’t strike me as much of an alternative.’

  Rachel was flicking through other photographs of the hills and the surrounding park area, thinking of the poor murdered kid and how there’d be no day-trippers there today. ‘We can’t stay here,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’ asked Annabel. ‘I’ve made this place as safe as I can.’

  ‘I don’t mean for our sake.’ Rachel turned to her husband. ‘Tom, it’s the playing field next to us. All the kids and families from the estate use it. We can’t draw that thing right into the middle of a bunch of innocent people. Who knows what it’ll do?’

  ‘Well where can we go then?’ he asked.

  ‘Doesn’t the business have anything we can use?’

  Tom thought. ‘Well, we do have the caravan and prefab on the works site.’ As the family business had grown, Spence and Charlotte had bought five acres of farmland a few miles away in Hagley to store materials and the larger pieces of machinery. They’d also bought a static caravan and an old post-war prefabricated house to accommodate itinerant Polish workers employed as cheap seasonal labour. ‘I don’t know if they’re empty,’ he said. ‘I don’t even know if they’re liveable. They’re nice and remote, though.’

  ‘Could you go and check them out?’

  ‘I think I probably could.’

  ‘It wants us to run,’ said Annabel.

  ‘So then we give it what it wants,’ said Rachel. ‘But we run somewhere of our choosing. And there’s got to be something more we can do. Something we can find out about it. Some way of hurting it.’

  ‘You’ve already hurt it once yourself,’ Annabel pointed out.

  Rachel looked at her stump, flexed her imaginary fingers and made a fist. ‘That was luck.’

  ‘Okay, well I’ll leave the Stranger Things side of all this to you two,’ said Tom, heading for the front door. ‘I’m going to sort a place to stay and some muscle for backup. If anything happens – anything – call me.’

  * * *

  During the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001, Colin Elmdon watched his dairy herd of 110 Friesian cows be tested, slaughtered and burned in the space of six hours. Undaunted, he borrowed from the bank and started again, because he had a wife and two sons to support. Over the following fifteen years he built a prize herd of pedigree Guernseys, in the face of tightening legislation from the European Union and supermarkets cutting their prices a little at a time, until he was losing money on every pint of milk and the only way he could keep his herd alive was on government hand-outs. Neither of his boys stayed on at the farm, having seen what it did to their father, but he carried on after they went to their city jobs because he was a dairy farmer and there was nothing else he could do. Then a new government blood test – a cheaper one, of course – said that his Guernseys all had bovine tuberculosis, and would have to be killed. He pleaded with the ministry to test his animals again with the standard skin test, but they refused because it was too expensive and the new test was just as reliable, or so they said. So he watched his prize herd being slaughtered, including the dry milkers who were in calf, and the sight of the unborn animals struggling inside their dead mothers broke his heart. The compensation money was barely a tenth of the hundreds of thousands of pounds that his slaughtered herd was worth, and subsequent skin tests on the dead animals revealed that the cheaper blood test had been wildly inaccurate – all but eleven of the dead Guernseys had been healthy. So, on a blustery April morning Colin Elmdon took a shotgun and sat under a large spreading yew tree with a view over his empty fields and blew his brains out, because there was nothing left for him to do.

  His sons auctioned off the farmland to pay their father’s massive debts. Most was absorbed by neighbouring farms and housing developers. The farmhouse was bought by an eighties pop star who turned the outbuildings into a recording studio, and a five-acre slice was bought by Cooper & Sons Landscaping.

  Rachel had never involved herself with Tom’s family business and so had never visited the yard before. There were rows of wooden pallets piled with trade-sized bags of compost, bark chippings, and decorative aggregate; bricks, cement, and stacks of paving slabs for patios; fence posts and panels lined up like huge racks of toast.

  As Tom’s van pulled into the yard two men looked around from where they stood by a tower of unused wooden pallets. They were pinning a large paper target to it.

  ‘That’s Callum and Jeev,’ said Tom. ‘Come on, I’ll introduce you.’

  Jeev was short for Jeevan, but it was the only thing short about him. He was Bangladeshi, well over six feet tall, and he ducked his head respectfully as Tom introduced Rachel and Annabel. Callum was short, wiry and Scottish, with a close-cropped head of red hair and a wild bush of beard as if to balance it out, and dressed in a camouflage jacket and hiking trousers. He also had a crossbow
slung over his back.

  ‘Callum is the one I was telling you about before,’ Tom said. ‘You know, with the thing with Smoky.’

  Rachel eyed the crossbow warily. ‘I really hope you’re not planning to use that,’ she said to Callum.

  ‘Course not!’ he grinned. ‘I’m just here, on private land with permission of the owner, doing a bit of perfectly legal target shooting with perfectly legal target points fired from a perfectly legal weapon. Wouldn’t hurt a fly, me. Unless that fly was feckin’ stupid enough to break into my boss’s yard and attack his wife and her pretty friend.’ He winked, and Rachel couldn’t tell whether he was being conspiratorial or cheeky. Bit of both, she decided.

  ‘The courts can be surprisingly lenient,’ added Jeev. Callum nodded sagely.

  ‘These two are going to help keep an eye on things,’ Tom explained. ‘I know you said that you didn’t want to put anybody else in harm’s way but trust me, Callum and Jeev can look after themselves.’

  ‘I hope so, Tom. I really do.’

  She wasn’t at all sure that Tom bringing his friends into this business was a good idea, and had told him as much. Callum and Jeev were clueless about the lesh but if she’d tried to tell them they wouldn’t have believed it. She wasn’t even sure that Tom believed it; he accepted that she and Annabel had been attacked, but he hadn’t seen the thing that had done it and obviously didn’t appreciate how dangerous it was. He probably thought it was just some maniac in a monster suit, though he’d never say that to her face. Regardless, he point blank refused to go ahead with the plan without some extra muscle. All Rachel could do was hope that she got to the lesh before it could hurt any of them.

  An old shipping container was both yard office and garage to a forklift and a pair of quad bikes – the latter having nothing to do with the business, Tom told her, but great for just bombing around the unused remainder of the property, which was overgrown with nettles and dock.

  On the edge of the property up against a patch of woodland were the static caravan and the single-storey prefab house he’d mentioned. Both were ancient; the caravan was a dirty green, the prefab made of corrugated asbestos sheeting bolted together under a tin roof.