The Hollow Tree

by James Brogden

  It seemed no different from the only other time he’d been there – with Rachel – fascinated by the fluttering collection of tattered remembrances that clustered the branches and roots of the trees surrounding the clearing. It had been quaint, he’d thought, a bit of harmless folk tradition. If Rachel were to be believed, the hollow oak was still there, in the umbra; if this were not all madness, it was where she had pulled Oak Mary back into the living world.

  And if he never saw his wife again, he supposed it would be as fit a memorial as any.

  ‘Rachel,’ he said to the empty air. ‘I don’t know if you’re anywhere that you can hear this, but I just want to let you know that I’m sorry. I should have trusted that you knew what you were doing. I shouldn’t have tried to pretend that none of it was happening. I made a deal with my death that I would go with him willingly at a time of his choosing if he helped you, but it must not have worked because you’re not here, and I don’t know what to do about that.’ Suddenly his pent-up fury at the unfairness of it all boiled out of him. ‘You fucker!’ he screamed. ‘I’m not the one who’s supposed to still be here!’ He sank to his knees in the middle of the clearing and wept. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he moaned. ‘Somebody please just tell me what to do.’

  But nothing happened. The woodland swallowed his apologies and his pleas alike into the mindless white noise of rustling leaves, leaving him with nothing. No answers. Nobody was listening. Nobody ever had. The prayers and offerings in the trees around him were no longer a quaint folk tradition; they were a cruel hoax perpetrated on the desperate by themselves, and suddenly their blind, complacent hope enraged him. Tom lurched to his feet like a drunkard and roamed around the clearing, grabbing the ribbons off the trees, tearing up the poems, stamping the toys underfoot and snapping the mobiles into kindling, sobbing as he did it. Finally, exhausted, he looked around at the wreckage he’d made and nodded, wiping his face. Good. Fuck it. Fuck it all.

  He turned to leave.

  * * *

  Tell me what to do.

  Voices.

  That one had sounded almost like Tom.

  But there had been so many voices: whispering, hectoring, shouting, begging, cursing. Most of them came from inside her own skull, but she suspected not all of them. She dipped in and out of consciousness like an oar rowing a boat over a black river, welcoming those moments of oblivion because living was torment. Her throat was swollen and raw with thirst; her head burning with a fever which had spread upwards from the roots of her infected fingers, hollowing her out, turning her into a husk. Sometimes she was as tall as an oak; sometimes, as small as the beetles that busied about her – in her ears, in her nose, at her mouth. She’d soiled herself at some point, and already stank like something dead. She was dead. It was just that her body hadn’t caught up yet.

  Please, Rachel, tell me what to do.

  An outside voice, that one.

  Tom’s voice.

  Her paper-dry lips mouthed the shape of his name: ‘Tom?’

  * * *

  Tom stopped at the edge of the clearing and looked back. He thought he’d heard Rachel’s voice, but there was nothing except the wind in the trees.

  ‘Face it, mate,’ he said. ‘You’re losing it. Time to go home.’

  This time he heard it distinctly, the rustling of leaves and branches in the wind assembling themselves into intelligible syllables which repeated, ‘Tom!’

  ‘Rachel!’ he yelled, and ran to the other side of the clearing, but there was nothing except more scattered ribbons and trampled toys. He ran back and found exactly the same thing, and then realised his mistake: her voice wasn’t coming from somewhere hidden amongst the trees, it was coming from the middle of the clearing, hidden behind the air itself.

  From where, out of the empty space about a foot above the ground, emerged his wife’s left hand – the one that shouldn’t exist.

  Tom threw himself full length on the earth, clutching at her hand before it could disappear. Her fingers clasped his weakly, and he saw that they were filthy and bloodied, the nails splintered and ragged. He pulled, not too hard, not wanting to hurt her, but either her own weight or some other force was resisting. He scooched backwards on his knees and elbows, and more of her left arm appeared, then her shoulder, then her lovely, haggard face blinking in the bright sun, and as if that were the point at which the ghost of the Mary Oak conceded defeat, the rest of Rachel fell out of the air and onto the grass. Her hand was nothing more than a stump again, but she clutched him tightly all the same, and he thought she’d never looked so beautiful.

  AFTER

  GIGI’S FUNERAL WAS HUGE. IT WASN’T JUST FAMILY members – although they were many, and quite a few came from unexpected corners of the world – but also retired coworkers from her time in the council housing department, members of the congregation of St Hilda’s which she had attended for as long as she was physically able, a group from a homeless charity where she’d volunteered, and even a minor government minister there to pay tribute to her work in the Women’s Volunteer Service during the war. But there were few mourners from Gigi’s own generation, as so few remained.

  Rachel sat with Tom and her mum, listened to the eulogies, sang the hymns, and mingled with the murmuring groups eating church sandwiches afterwards. She didn’t need the Sight to see the ribbon that Oliver Sewell had described threading all of them together. In some places its loops were so wide and loose that it might not have been there at all; in others, so tight that they could barely speak to each other for the pain of Gigi’s passing, but simply stood close and quiet together, taking what peace they could from each other’s presence. For the first time she thought that adding her own small loop to this beautiful, intricate pattern might not be such a bad thing.

  She and Tom slipped out of the wake in the church hall and found a quiet place in the cemetery away from the kids who were, inevitably, running around the gravestones.

  ‘She lived so long,’ said Rachel. ‘I never knew she was so many people.’

  He nodded. ‘I hope you’re not expecting me to say something profound here.’

  ‘Hmph. Chance’d be a fine thing.’

  They walked on amongst the graves. All the dead, she thought, and the only thing keeping them alive is us, the living. Somewhere in a quiet and shady corner nearby there was a new headstone which Rachel had paid for very quietly out of her own money – a plot without a grave because there was no body to bury, and a headstone which read simply:

  In Memory of Beatrice Rebecca Eaton

  1919–1943

  ‘I bet you can’t wait to be away from here,’ Tom said, startling her out of her reverie.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘It can’t be a fun place to be able to see into the hereafter with all these dead people around.’

  ‘It’s actually okay,’ Rachel replied. ‘Very quiet. The dead linger in the places that meant something to them when they were alive – the last place you’re going to see a ghost is in a graveyard.’

  ‘Now that’s what you call ironic.’

  They walked for a while more, through the dappled light underneath the trees.

  ‘I thought I wouldn’t have this long,’ Tom said suddenly.

  She waited for him to continue, knowing that if she pressed him he’d clam up out of embarrassment.

  ‘When I made that deal with the Highwayman,’ he added. ‘I expected him to take me right then, or soon afterwards. I was ready to go.’

  ‘Yes, well I wasn’t. I told him I didn’t care what kind of deal you made with him, if he ever showed his face around you again he and I would have words.’

  ‘My hero,’ Tom replied, with only the tiniest trace of irony.

  ‘Anyway,’ she added. ‘His kind don’t make the decisions. We do.’ She took a deep breath and his hand. ‘So,’ she said. ‘Want to make a baby?’

  A surprised grin lit up his face. Then he looked around in mock confusion. ‘What, here? Bit public, isn’t it?
’

  She shook her head. ‘You are such a dick.’

  ‘You say that like it’s a bad thing.’

  * * *

  The day Rachel brought baby Oliver home from the hospital, the umbra behind her home changed. Where once it had been the desolate echoes of factory units, there were now the dim but unmistakable shapes of the walls and doorways of her own house. To her Touch they were as insubstantial as memory itself, but she thought that over time they would become more solid, acquiring existence from the slow accretion of her new family’s past, like a pearl building itself layer by layer. She didn’t know what had happened to the shades of the dead that she had seen shambling there. It seemed unlikely that each had finally chosen to go with their own particular Redcap; more likely they had finally succumbed to the emptiness of their own existence and simply guttered out like candles.

  It was as she watched her son grow and learn – first how to smile, then crawl, walk, and utter his first babbling words – that more and more the words of the Highwayman came back to her: You have seen how pitiable and confused the dead are. You would be effective at guiding them onwards.

  She kept an eye out for the Highwayman, ready to confront him if he chose to make good on his threat to come for Tom, but it wasn’t the psychopomp who found her in the end.

  On a bright morning in early November, while Tom was at work and Ollie was down for his mid-morning nap, Rachel was enjoying a rare moment of peace with a book in the living room when she heard a loud and persistent scratching at the front door. Her heart did a quick two-step at the memory of a weasel-faced monstrosity snarling and tearing its way through the back door, and then she realised what it was.

  ‘Smoky!’ she called. ‘You have a cat flap, you know!’

  The scratching continued.

  ‘Awkward sod,’ she muttered, getting up. ‘Don’t make me manicure you again.’

  In the hallway she found Smoky with both forepaws up against the inside of the front door. He turned to look at her, dropped to all fours, gave a hoarse meow which said ‘Finally!’ as clearly as if he’d uttered it in English, and then sauntered past her with his tail aloft.

  She stared after him. ‘So what was all that about?’

  It was then that she noticed the blurred shape of a human figure through the frosted glass of the door’s central panel. There was no reason to think that it was anyone other than someone selling double-glazing or religion, except that they were just standing there and hadn’t even knocked.

  You come near him again, she’d told the Highwayman, you and I are going to have words.

  She flexed the fingers of her dead hand and with her living one opened the door a crack.

  The man standing outside wasn’t a psychopomp – but the reason why he hadn’t been able to knock on the door was because he wasn’t alive either. At first she wasn’t entirely sure that he even was a he. Despite stubble crusting the lower half of a tanned and creased face in which dirt lined every furrow, the figure was dressed entirely in women’s clothes: Ugg boots, yoga pants, a denim jacket with a heavy fur collar, and rainbow fingerless gloves. The left side of his head was thickly matted with gore, testifying to the manner of his death.

  ‘Are you Rachel Cooper?’ His voice was the sound of broken reed husks.

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  The harlequin figure broke down sobbing, tears cutting through dirt and heavily smudged eyeliner. ‘Oh thank God!’ he wept. ‘They told me you were real but I didn’t want to believe it. They said you can help me. Can you help me? Please?’

  They?

  ‘Help you? Help you how?’

  ‘I’m so confused. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know where I am. I think… I think something terrible has happened to me. And—’ he glanced around fearfully. ‘I’m pretty sure someone’s after me. Please!’

  Rachel looked past him into the street – both in the living world and the umbra – but saw nothing. No Redcaps, not yet, but they wouldn’t be far behind. She thought of her son, vulnerable in his cot upstairs. And she looked at the shade again, at his terror and desperation. She remembered the pathetic spectres at Scoles Farm, and the pleading of Oliver Sewell – the man for whom she had named her baby. She didn’t know how rumours and gossip spread amongst the dead of the umbra, but she knew that this weeping soul wouldn’t be the last to come to her door begging for help.

  So she opened it wider.

  ‘Come on in,’ she said. ‘Let’s get the kettle on and you can tell me all about it.’

  AFTERWORD & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  OBVIOUSLY THE HOLLOW TREE IS A WORK OF FICTION, but I suspect like most writers I am a jackdaw for shiny pieces of other stories to steal, and so much of this novel is heavily inspired by an urban myth local to me – that of Bella in the Wych Elm.

  On 18 April 1943, four lads poaching in Hagley Wood south of Birmingham found the skeletal remains of a woman hidden in the hollow trunk of an ancient elm tree. The resulting police investigation created more questions than it answered, especially when graffiti appeared in Birmingham which read ‘Who put Bella down the Wych Elm?’ and she changed from being an anonymous corpse into a woman with a name, and hence a family and identity. That identity has never been established – let alone that of her killer or killers – a situation not helped by the loss of her remains during the war.

  Cue all manner of conspiracy theories.

  In some she is a British double agent – a cabaret-singerturned-spy betrayed by her wartime contacts and murdered to stop her revealing their secrets, her remains having been destroyed by MI5. In others she is a prostitute, killed by a ‘client’. The discovery of bones from one of her hands in nearby leaf-litter was clear evidence of gypsy witchcraft, proof that she had been sacrificed and her hand severed in an attempt to create a ‘hand of glory’. All of this is despite the fact that there is no evidence of gypsies or witches ever being active in the area, and the one cabaret singer who might have fitted her description was still recording songs several years after Bella’s body was found. Given the chaos of wartime, the police did their best to find any ‘Bellas’, or variations on that name, who had been reported missing, but came up with nothing. To this day Bella’s death remains unexplained. The case is closed, officially unsolved.

  The danger in writing her story was, as I saw it, of falling into the trap of trying to uncover the ‘truth’ of her death and ending up with a historical murder-mystery. If that’s what you’re interested in there are any number of excellent books on the subject, picking apart the evidence for and against the various theories. Steve Punt made a particularly thorough documentary for Radio 4, and a recent independently produced short film by Thomas Lee Rutter is well worth a watch. My reason for playing fast and loose with the historical details was in an attempt to get at something deeper than a simple ‘solution’ to the mystery – something about the different people that each of us is in life and what that might mean for us in the afterlife, if there is one.

  So Bella became Mary, the elm became an oak, and Hagley Wood became the Lickey Hills, near my home.

  The real Bella graffiti also appeared on the base of a large obelisk in a field near the woods where her remains were found. The monument was erected by Sir Richard Lyttelton, owner of nearby Hagley Hall, as part of the then-fashionable vogue for manufacturing picturesque landscapes. The lettering is refreshed from time to time, always anonymously, and is something of a macabre navigation point if you’re rambling the fields around Hagley. There is also a much larger obelisk in the Lickeys – this one raised in the 1800s to the memory of the 6th Earl of Plymouth who went by the improbable-sounding name of Other Archer Windsor, which suited as a replacement for the purposes of the story. We do love our tall, phallic monuments.

  There are no rag trees in the Lickeys – at least not to my knowledge – but there is a clootie well a few miles away in St Kenelm’s Pass, which runs between the Clent Hills. Folklore has it that Kenelm, a Mercian prince, was murder
ed by an ambitious relative and his body hidden there, and that when it was discovered and disinterred a freshwater spring burst out of his grave. That spring is now in the grounds of St Kenelm’s Church, and the trees around it are decorated with ribbons, shoelaces and scraps of paper.

  The Old Hare and Hounds where Rachel and Annabel have their drink after battling the lesh is real, as is the fact that next to the pub was once a cottage where a certain Mr Tolkien lived for part of his childhood. This has nothing to do with The Hollow Tree except that I enjoy these kinds of coincidences. They happen much more frequently in real life than a writer can ever get away with in fiction.

  In shamelessly plundering this hoard of local folklore I am indebted to Dan Williams, who knows far more about the area than I suspect he is letting on, and who marked my first draft for spelling, punctuation and grammar. Any geographical or historical inaccuracies are entirely my own. I’m also indebted to the staff at the archives of the Hive in Worcester where, if you choose, you can find the original police records of the Bella case, pretty much as I’ve described them.

  I owe huge thanks to my agent, Ian Drury, for finding this tale a home, and my editors Miranda Jewess and Cat Camacho at Titan for making sure that it was properly housetrained when it was finally allowed in; to Odile Thomas for help with French cursing, and the Balti Boys (Pete, Mike, Stan, John and Adrian) for restorative curries. As ever, and eternally, to TC, and my daughters Hopey and Eden.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JAMES BROGDEN IS A PART-TIME AUSTRALIAN WHO grew up in Tasmania and now lives with his wife and two daughters in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, where he teaches English. He spends as much time in the mountains as he is able, and more time playing with Lego than he should. He is the author of Hekla’s Children, The Narrows, Tourmaline, The Realt and Evocations, and his horror and fantasy stories have appeared in various periodicals and anthologies ranging from The Big Issue to the British Fantasy Society Award-winning Alchemy Press. Blogging occurs infrequently at jamesbrogden.blogspot.co.uk, and tweeting at @skippybe.