The Hollow Tree

by James Brogden

‘As opposed to what, Billy Marriner? What am I now? No, don’t answer that. I don’t want to hear those words from you. Bad enough I had to hear them from my own father. Talk about leading somebody on; I thought you were better than that.’

  She turns to leave but he grabs her by the sleeve of her dress. ‘Don’t you dare turn your back on me!’ he shouts, and the material tears, along with what remains of her temper. Rationing is tight enough as it is, and she’s spent twelve of her clothing coupons on the dress to look pretty for him.

  ‘You ass!’ she shouts, and slaps him in the face.

  Afterwards, trapped in the tree, she is never quite sure whether he deliberately intends to punch her in retaliation, or whether some combination of anger and a fighting man’s reflexes take over and make his fist crash into the side of her head. Certainly the look of shock on his face seems genuine enough as she falls backwards down the hill. Her feet tangle in each other and her hands grab for something – a branch, a leaf, finding nothing – and the world pinwheels before her eyes, sky replacing trees, and the back of her skull hits a large rock with a sick, wet crunch and everything stops.

  * * *

  She is being lifted.

  There is sobbing.

  She cannot move.

  She is swung over, upside down, carried, hair dangling, arms dangling, legs dangling, unable to move or cry out that she is not dead not dead not dead.

  Maybe it would make no difference even if she could.

  He is sobbing.

  Fuck his sobbing.

  She is upended and falling, knees collapsing under her own weight but they jam against something hard and she is left in a half-squatting position in a narrow chimney-like space with her cheek resting against spongy, rotten wood. Something crawls across her neck, up her chin and over her lips. She cannot even flinch.

  What will happen to her baby?

  What will happen to Stephen?

  She wants to scream not dead not dead not dead! but instead everything stops again.

  * * *

  A face. Staring down, shocked.

  Not his – someone else. Someone who can get help.

  She summons every last scrap of life and strength left in her dying body and forms it into a word for the single most important thing to her in the entire world.

  ‘Stephen?’

  The face screams and disappears.

  No help comes – just things that crawl and bite.

  For the third and final time, everything stops.

  * * *

  Not dead! Not dead! Not dead!

  41

  THE HOLLOW TREE

  THE CREAKING OF WOOD AT RACHEL’S BACK EXTENDED into a deep crunching, splintering noise. A long black fissure opened up in the oak’s trunk, rising from the root to the very tip, and two pale hands appeared, one of which was wearing a cheap gold wedding ring, to grasp the edges on either side and pull, as if opening a pair of curtains.

  ‘No!’ shrieked the Small Man. ‘No! Don’t you dare, Daphne! Daphne! Get back in that fucking tree!’

  But the woman inside was beyond his control now. She tore the tree open with her bare hands and stepped out into the open air.

  ‘My name is not Daphne,’ she said. ‘It’s Beatrice. And you are not my death.’

  The Small Man let loose a howl of denial and ran at her with his knife upraised, but stopped halfway and collapsed to his knees as if stricken by some terrible agony. Then he began to unravel, coming apart in ribbons, which writhed in torment as they dissolved into the air, and for a fleeting instant Rachel saw the psychopomp naked: a smudged watercolour of a human figure, its limbs blurred strokes suggesting movement, its face nothing more than a group of screaming holes too crude even for a skull. This moment of having its identity stripped was like a physical flaying, and she watched without pity as it howled. But it also seemed to be drawing something through the air from Beatrice, coils and streamers of brightness to replace what was lost, and when the spasms subsided the figure got shakily to his feet like something newborn, and he’d changed.

  Beatrice approached him with a smile of welcome. ‘Hello, Billy,’ she said.

  The psychopomp looked at his new hands, then ran them over his new face and through his new hair. His bloody nose had healed, and he was wearing a soldier’s uniform.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ he whispered.

  ‘I know,’ she replied. ‘So make it right, now.’

  ‘You know I’m not him, don’t you? Your Billy had his own death, years after yours.’

  ‘I know,’ said Beatrice. ‘But humour me for a little while, will you? Just until we get where we’re going. Please, take me to my boy.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re ready?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she sighed, and it was seventy years old, that sigh. ‘I’ve been ready for a long, long time. There’s just one last thing.’ She turned and approached Rachel. ‘Thank you doesn’t really cut it, I’m afraid. I’m sorry for the hell you’ve been through.’

  Rachel found herself tongue-tied. All three of them were there in the figure of her great-grandmother: Annabel’s majesty, Eline’s fierce beauty, and Daphne’s sorrow.

  Beatrice reached up and gently laid a hand on Rachel’s cheek. ‘I see him in you,’ she said. ‘I never saw him grow up or knew what kind of man he became, but if he fathered your father he must have been a good man.’

  ‘You can stay!’ Rachel blurted, finding her voice at last. ‘Come back with me, get to know us. You could live a full life this time!’

  Beatrice shook her head. ‘And fall in love and build a family and then at the end of everything die and have to say goodbye to it all, again? Thank you, but no. Once was enough, as brief as it was. Will you and Tom be all right?’

  ‘Honestly? I don’t know.’

  ‘Be patient with him. He’s only a man, after all.’

  ‘Come on then, bab,’ said Billy. He crooked his elbow out for her and she linked her arm with his, and they strolled together like lovers in a sunlit park until they reached the split-open trunk of the hollow tree, and disappeared into its shadow.

  * * *

  There was a grunt of approval from beside Rachel. She turned and saw the Highwayman had also been watching Beatrice’s departure. He nodded. ‘That’s a good job, there,’ he said. He looked the worse for wear, scuffed and bloodied, his hi-vis jacket with the orange shoulders in tatters.

  ‘I think I could say the same about you,’ she replied.

  ‘I am to say—’ he started, then cleared his throat as if embarrassed. ‘I am to offer you this. This,’ he repeated, indicating the tree, himself, and everything around them.

  It took a while for her to realise what he meant. ‘You mean to be like you?’ She stared in disbelief. ‘A Redcap?’

  ‘You have strength, and determination. Your heart is right. You are not swayed by pleading or flattery. You have seen how pitiable and confused the dead are. You would be… effective at guiding them onwards.’

  ‘You make it sound like a job promotion.’

  He considered this. ‘An elevation. There is much more to this than what you have seen.’

  She laughed, long and clear. It was a strange sound in this gloomy place, and the Highwayman looked around as if expecting it to have disturbed something. ‘After everything I’ve seen,’ she said, ‘you seriously think I want to be one of you?’

  ‘There are many who aspire to this kind of power,’ he replied, a little stiffly.

  ‘I’m sorry, did I hurt your feelings? No, my only aspirations are to be happy, to be loved, and to do right by the people who depend on me. That’s not too much to ask, is it?’

  The Highwayman made no reply to that, but simply turned to leave.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

  He turned back. ‘You’ve made your choice to go back. I can’t help you in that, only to go on. But I wish you well, all the same.’

  ‘But what am I supposed to do now?’

  His eyes narrowed at her in i
rritation. ‘You spurn something that only a handful of people have ever, ever, been offered, and then you demand help? Tell me, why should I? Why shouldn’t I simply let you wander here until you go insane and fade away into a desperate shade?’

  ‘Because of this.’ She flexed her left hand and made a defiant fist, raising it at him. ‘You’ve seen what I can do with this. If I’m trapped here with no alternative, God only knows what kind of damage I might do. Who knows what I might aspire to become? You’re going to show me the way out of here because it’s a lot less trouble for all of us.’

  For a long moment he scrutinised her, as if assessing her capability to make good on such a threat. What he saw must have worried him, because he nodded towards the tree.

  ‘There are places in the umbra where the dead scratch at the skin of the world to get back in,’ he said. ‘These places become… thin. You found one before, in the asylum. This is another. If you really are as strong as you think, you might be able to scratch all the way through.’

  She looked at the lightless fissure torn into the trunk of the hollow oak. Beatrice and her guide had gone that way, presumably to whatever came after for her – but before that she’d been trapped there for over seventy years. What made Rachel think she could do any better? Because I’m alive, she thought. Beatrice hadn’t had anybody’s remembrance to give her strength except for the haphazard and contradictory offerings at the Mary Oak – toys, scraps of ribbon and poems. Rachel had… who did Rachel have?

  ‘Mum, Tom,’ she said, and then with a little laugh: ‘Smoky. That’s who.’ She turned back to the Highwayman, but he’d disappeared. ‘Huh. Typical.’

  She faced the darkness of the hollow tree, flexed the fingers of her left hand, squared her shoulders, and stepped inside.

  * * *

  She knew instantly that this was a mistake. For a start, ground level was a lot lower inside the trunk, and concave, as she should have remembered from looking at the photographs of Beatrice’s remains. Like finding an extra, unexpected step on a staircase in the dark, she stumbled, disorientated, pitching forward, arms outstretched to arrest her fall, palms hitting wood, and she fell to one knee in damp soil and leaf mould. Regaining her balance, she looked back, but couldn’t see the crack she’d just fallen through. She stood up and felt back in the direction from which she thought she’d come, but encountered only more dead wood in the absolute blackness.

  No, not absolute. Above her – far, far above where the oak opened out – there was a bruise of violet light. It was so far on the edge of the visible spectrum that it hardly seemed to come from the outside world at all, more like the afterimage of a bright light on her retinas. So far away; but maybe not so far away that it was impossible to climb.

  Trying to gauge the circumference of the space, she stretched out her arms, but found that there was barely room for her to unbend her elbows before her hands encountered cold, dead wood in both directions.

  ‘Wait, this isn’t right,’ she murmured. It had been a lot wider than this a moment ago. Now, she could just about turn in a circle on the spot, but even then her shoulders brushed the sides. ‘No…’

  That bastard Highwayman had lied to her: there was no way out of here. This was no thin place.

  Or maybe you’re just not as strong as you think you are.

  She felt panic begin to clutch at her like dead hands, and forced herself to take long, even breaths. ‘You’ve beaten worse than this,’ she told herself. ‘Don’t lose it now, you stupid cow. You’re the Queen of Air and Darkness.’

  Yeah, but she died, remember? Beatrice’s body rotted where it stood and the bones collapsed into themselves right where you’re standing…

  Rachel punched the wood and the flare of pain in her knuckles silenced that voice.

  ‘Shut the fuck up and think.’

  She looked up again. Maybe she could use the fact that the hollow tree had narrowed to her advantage. She’d never done any rock-climbing but she knew about the principle of chimneying: she could brace her back and hands against one wall and her feet against the other, and inch herself upwards. From the outside the trunk had looked to be only a few metres high.

  It looks a lot further than that from in here, don’t you think? What if it got taller the same way it got narrower? What if it’s…

  She punched the panic silent again, and before it could start up its whining she braced her back and feet, and pushed.

  It was a lot easier imagined than accomplished. She actually managed to shove herself upwards about half a metre, which by her reckoning brought her to ground level outside, but by then her leg muscles were quivering with the strain and the palms of her hands were sweaty and slipping on the dead wood beneath them, which was smooth and offered almost no grip. Then her right hand skidded away and she tumbled diagonally, cracking the side of her head so hard that she saw stars. She would have fallen if there’d been room, but now she couldn’t even kneel – her knees would only bend halfway before her bum got stuck on the opposite side.

  The hollow tree was getting narrower.

  She let the panic come, then.

  * * *

  When Rachel came back to herself, her throat was sore from screaming. She’d screamed for Tom, her mother, her father, Beatrice, the Highwayman – anybody or anything which might have been listening – and after that she’d just screamed. Her fingers stung, too, from where she’d scratched at the dead wood, and several of them were sticky with blood.

  This was how Beatrice had died. Except Beatrice had suffered a blow to the skull, which had at least given her the comfort of unconsciousness. Rachel was going to be fully aware as she expired.

  Then the skin of her left ankle was tickled by something tiny with lots of legs. She knew what it was without having to look. It was a Devil’s coach-horse beetle, and soon it would be joined by lots of its friends.

  Panic and screaming took her again – utterly and completely.

  42

  CATS FOR YOU

  WHEN THE HOUSE PHONE RANG, TOM LEAPT TO ANSWER it before it stopped its first shrill. In his mind two equal certainties fought for space: it was Rachel, calling to tell him she was okay; at the same time it was the police, calling to tell him that they’d found her body. Caught between the two, all he could manage was a thick-sounding grunt of ‘Hello?’

  He hadn’t slept, eaten or changed his clothes in the two days that she had been gone. Despite his last conversation with her and his bargain with the ghostly Highways Agency man, he’d driven to everywhere and anywhere he could imagine she might conceivably have gone, knowing that she wouldn’t be there, but knowing equally that he had to do something or else go insane. That had ended in a near miss with a cyclist and a mouthful of abuse which told him that he was doing more harm than good, and he had come home to spend the hours channelling his stress and fretfulness into fiddling pointlessly with half a dozen DIY jobs that didn’t really need doing.

  ‘Is this Mr Cooper?’ asked a female voice on the other end. Not Rachel.

  ‘Yes. What? Have you found her?’

  ‘Her?’ the woman asked. ‘Don’t you mean him?’

  ‘What? Him? Him who? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Your cat, Mr Cooper,’ she continued, a little frosty. ‘Smoky. I’m phoning from Rednal Veterinary Surgery. He was brought to us this morning by one of the rangers at the Lickey Hills. We scanned his chip and found your details.’

  ‘Smoky.’

  ‘That’s right. He’s perfectly fine – would you like to come and pick him up?’

  Tom rubbed his palm over his face, rubbing his itchy eyes and feeling several days’ worth of stubble. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The cat. They’d found the fucking cat. He hadn’t even noticed that Smoky had disappeared too. Part of him wanted to say, ‘No of course I don’t want to come and pick him up, it’s my wife that’s missing; put the bastard thing to sleep for all I care,’ but Smoky was Rachel’s, and there was a good chance that the scrawny
animal might be all he had to remember her by, so he said, ‘Of course. Thank you.’ Then he hung up and went to find a clean shirt.

  * * *

  Rednal Veterinary Surgery was a clean, bland facility staffed by people who were probably lovely and friendly if you weren’t half out of your mind with worry for your missing wife, and Tom took Smoky away in a heavy-gauge wire mesh cat carrier after signing some paperwork that he didn’t bother to read. He was tightening the passenger seat belt around the carrier when something that had been said to him earlier broke through the fog in his brain and flashed at him. He went back inside to the receptionist.

  ‘I’m sorry – where did you say they’d found him, again?’

  ‘The Lickeys. A ranger found him. We’re the nearest practice.’

  ‘Did they say exactly where in the hills?’

  ‘Something about trees covered in ribbons? Apparently he was found playing with them. But then that’s cats for you, isn’t it?’ She smiled helpfully.

  ‘Yes. Yes it is. Thanks.’

  He went back out to the van, got into his seat and looked across at Smoky, who was sitting in his cage, legs neatly tucked away, perfectly content.

  ‘What were you doing all the way out there, hmm?’ asked Tom. ‘You can barely get your lazy arse downstairs for feeding time. You got something to tell me?’

  Smoky just narrowed his green eyes at Tom and kept his own counsel.

  * * *

  It was a long shot, Tom thought, quite ridiculous, but then in the grand scheme of things no more ridiculous than bargaining with death on the hard shoulder of the M5, so what did he have to lose?

  He stopped at the Beacon Hill car park, leaving Smoky in the van, and set off across the grass. It was a blustery September afternoon and children were back at school, so the only other people up there were older couples and dog-walkers. Normally he would have stopped to enjoy the view over the green suburbs of southern Birmingham and the bristling towers of the city centre, but there didn’t seem much point without Rachel to enjoy it beside him – and he knew that somewhere down there, hidden within the neatly plotted estates, were the ruins of an asylum that had nearly claimed her life. So he struck off through the woods to the clearing of the Mary Oak.