The Witch Elm: A Novel

by Tana French

  That night. I thought she meant the gap, the hole in my mind between the pub and my living room. “I don’t know,” I said. My head felt like it was rocking dangerously on my neck. “I’ve been trying and trying. It’s gone.”

  She stared at me, swaying a little, gripping my arm for balance.

  “Why?” The paranoia was rising again. “Do you know? How do you—”

  “I went to your room.”

  This made no sense at all. “What?”

  “When I got that text from Dominic. It freaked me out. I didn’t understand what was going on. I wanted someone else. I went to Leon’s room, but he was out cold; when I tried to wake him up he just went ‘Fuck off’ and pulled the sheet over his head. So I went to your room. And you weren’t there.”

  “No,” I said. I had let go of Leon; he was snuffling somewhere. “What? That’s not what I meant.”

  “I sat on my bed for ages, listening for you to come back. Hours. I was scared, I thought maybe Dominic had done something to you and that was what the text was about . . . In the end I fell asleep. In the morning you were back.”

  “But,” I said. Her fingers were hurting me. “You said you just ignored that text. That’s what you said.”

  “I didn’t want to tell anyone. I didn’t want to sound like . . . I haven’t said it to the detectives. But where were you? How do you not remember?”

  “That’s not,” I said. “I meant the night I got hit. In my apartment. The night with Dominic, when Dominic, I was in bed.”

  “No.”

  “I was.”

  “No. I looked.”

  I stared at her. She stared back. Somewhere deep in the house, faint and faraway enough that it came to me more as a sensation than as a sound, a door closed.

  It seeped in slowly, drop by drop, through all the multiple layers of mess in my brain. Leon and Susanna IDing my hoodie, telling Rafferty I’d had problems with Dominic, giving him the photo: that wasn’t some Machiavellian plan to frame me. If they had been out to fuck me up, they could have done a lot better than that. They could have said anything they wanted—the story Susanna had just told, a made-up confession replete with lurid details; I with my smashed memory would have had no comeback. They had pointed Rafferty in my direction because they were scared that he was going to come after them, and—all those little jabs about me getting away with everything—they had no intention of taking the heat for me. They actually thought I had done it.

  Which was ludicrous, batshit insane. Me, cheerful oblivious Labrador of a guy, lolloping happily along with the flow: I hadn’t been a killer. Beating Dominic up, sure, if I had known the whole story I would have been on for teaming up with Sean to dish out a few smacks. But a garrote: not just no but oh hell no, nothing in me could ever have come up with that, and they should have known, they of all people should have known me better than to think that of me for a single instant—

  “Wait,” I said. “You think I . . . what?”

  “I don’t think anything. I don’t, Toby. I just want to know.”

  “Come on,” I said, quietly enough, I thought. “All this, this, this dancing around, fuck that. You two have something you want to say to me, you want to accuse me of something, then do it.”

  “We’re not,” Leon said, his voice high and wobbly. “Honestly, Toby, we’re—”

  “You little shit. You haven’t done enough to me?”

  I was reaching to grab him again, he was flinching back, when I heard it. A noise up on the roof: wild volley of scrabbling, something big on the slates, claws? talons?

  “What the hell?” I was off the terrace and backing into the garden before I knew it. Soft earth giving and slip-sliding under my feet, my voice almost a shout: “The hell was that?”

  “What?” Leon hurrying after me, flailing as his ankle turned on a rock— “Jesus, what?”

  “That noise. It’s on the roof.”

  “Bird,” Susanna said, catching up with us and turning to look. “Or a bat.”

  “No. Look. Look.”

  High on the roof peak, black, crouched against the chimney stack. It was shaped like nothing, feathery flicks like wings sprouting from its head, it was shifting, gathering itself, and from the deliberate focus of its movements I would have sworn it was human. Rafferty, spying on us, clinging and listening, anywhere and everywhere— “That’s not a fucking bird, look at the size of it—”

  “That’s its shadow, Jesus, Toby, calm down—”

  “Those, on its head, what are those? What kind of bird—”

  “Oh God,” Leon moaned, pitch rising. “Oh God—”

  The thing raised itself and spread against the sky, out and out, beyond any bounds of possibility. Then it flung itself into thin air, straight towards us.

  Leon and I were both yelling, hoarse strangled screams. I heard the rush of the thing coming at me as I ducked and stumbled, onto my hands and knees in the dirt. I felt the wind of it lift my hair, I smelled it wild and earthy and piney, I flinched from its talons swooping with perfect, merciless accuracy for the back of my neck—

  I don’t know how long it took me to realize that it was gone. I had stopped screaming; Leon had subsided to a wild, choked panting. Beyond that, the garden was immensely silent.

  I pulled myself up to sitting—not easy, I was shaking. The roofline was bare, nothing in the trees— Susanna was on her knees beside me, doubled over and gasping, and I grabbed at her in a panic, looking for blood. “Su. Look at me. Are you OK?”

  “I’m fine.” It was a second before I figured out she was laughing.

  “What the fuck—”

  “Oh my God—” Leon was crouched in the dirt, a hand pressed to his chest. “I can’t breathe—”

  “Jesus Christ. What was that?”

  “That,” Susanna gasped, “that was a long-eared owl. You pair of fools.”

  “No,” I said. “No way. The size of it, the—”

  “Have you never seen one before? They’re big bastards.”

  “It went for us.”

  “It must’ve thought you were starting. All that noise you made—”

  “Leon. That wasn’t an owl. Right?”

  The whites of Leon’s eyes, in the moonlight. “My chest. I think I’m having a heart attack—guys, please, it hurts—”

  “You’re having a panic attack,” Susanna said, wiping her eyes with a knuckle and getting her giggles under control. “Take long slow breaths.”

  “I can’t breathe.”

  “That,” I said, “was not a fucking owl.”

  Susanna stared at me for another moment. Her knuckle had left her face streaked with dirt like warpaint. Then she toppled slowly backwards to the ground, hair in the earth, gazing up at the blank sky. Leon sounded like he might be crying.

  There was grainy dirt in my shoes and all over my hands; I was sweating and shaking and way, way too stoned. The ugly moonscape all around me looked nothing like the Ivy House that was woven through my life. It hit me, with a freeze of utter horror, that that was because it wasn’t the same place at all: this was a fake, a dark mist-formed parallel, some skewed but lethally plausible facsimile that Rafferty had created and tricked us all into, and now we were here there was absolutely no way to get back. It felt like something I’d known all along, deep down, if only I’d had the sense to recognize it. I almost screamed, but I knew Rafferty had to be listening and that tipping him off would lead to some unimaginable disaster.

  High whistles of night birds, over the trees. Above us, in my bedroom window, the light had gone out.

  “What the fuck,” I said. My voice sounded scraped and hollow. “Is wrong with you guys. What the fuck.”

  Neither of them answered. Leon was sobbing, not bothering to hide it any more.

  “You shits. You know that? Fuck you.”

  “I
want to go home,” Leon said, through tears, wiping his face with his palms. In the faint light he looked grotesque, hair swept into lunatic scribbles, face contorted and dirt smeared everywhere.

  “Yeah,” Susanna said. She struggled up to sitting and then to standing, wobbly-legged. “That’s probably a good idea. Come on.”

  She held out her hands to Leon. He caught hold, and after some fumbling and staggering they managed to get him vertical. They stumbled off together across the uneven earth, arms wrapped around each other, Susanna’s ankles bending at impossible angles. Neither of them looked back at me.

  I stayed where I was. Inside the lit kitchen, Susanna slumped against a counter, poking at her phone with glassy, slow-motion concentration; Leon, at the sink, palmed water onto his face and neck, ran himself a mugful and gulped it down. Susanna said something, and he nodded without turning. The air around me was restless and moth-ridden, tiny things fluttering at the back of my neck and crawling on my arms, cold striking up from the earth through my clothes.

  After a while Susanna glanced at her phone and said something else: taxi. They groped for coats and dropped them and slung them over their shoulders, and wove their way out towards the hall.

  My high was starting to wear off, but the garden still had that terrible alien feel, itself and not itself. The thought of standing up and walking across it, exposed, made my back prickle—who knew what this place had waiting in its secret corners, mantraps, tangling vines, feral dogs and searchlights. But I was shivering, my arse was damp, and even if that thing had been just an owl I didn’t like being out here alone with it. In the end I hauled myself to my feet, fought down the head rush and scuttled up the garden like a mouse under a shadow.

  It took me a very long time to grope my way up the stairs. Smell of dust, soft even snores from Hugo’s room, floorboard creaks making my heart ricochet. I couldn’t decide whether to wake Melissa; on the one hand she needed a good night’s sleep but on the other hand I needed her to hear this, this bullshit that had pushed us into our one and only fight ever, I couldn’t leave it till morning. “Baby,” I said quietly, or as quietly as I could, into our dark bedroom. “Are you awake?”

  As I said it I knew. The air of the room was chilly and sterile, no breathing, no scent of her, no tinge of body warmth.

  I found the light switch. The bed was still made; the wardrobe was open, bare hangers dangling.

  I sat down heavily on the bed. My ears were roaring. I found my phone and rang Melissa: it rang out to voicemail. Tried again: same thing. Again: she had switched it off.

  I never thought you did, she had said, looking me straight in the eye, and I had believed her because I wanted to. No wonder she had been preoccupied, the last while; no wonder she had been desperate to drag me out of there—middle of the night, drunk, stoned, leave everything behind and run with just the clothes on our backs. She had been trying to protect me. She had been afraid that, if I kept asking questions, I was going to find out what I had done.

  Somehow what hurt wasn’t the fact that she believed I could be a killer—she hadn’t even met me back then, teenagers are scrambled and confused and half off the rails, I could have been anything for all she knew. What made me want to drop my head in my hands and weep was that I had really believed Melissa knew who I was now, knew it so closely and truly that she would be able to hold me together while I didn’t even know myself any more, and I had been wrong. I wasn’t some callous shithead, some psychopath who could push a murder into a corner of my mind and bounce blithely on with my life as if it didn’t exist— And there I was again, here we go round the mulberry bush and come full circle, what made me so sure what type of person I was, what I could and couldn’t have done?

  Melissa, Leon, Susanna, Rafferty, Kerr. Hugo, for all I knew—in the car that day, I’d really like to know the story behind him ending up in that tree, I do feel as if I’ve got a bit of a right to know what happened . . . In hindsight it was obvious that he’d been carefully, delicately inviting me to come clean. Who else? Which of the guys on the alumni Facebook group? Dec, Sean? My own father? My own mother?

  Whirls of crimson flowers spread out on a slate countertop, neat rhythmic flash of a knife through sunlight. Susanna’s voice, wry and amused: Oh, you. Anything you feel bad about just falls straight out of your head.

  And with that, finally, it all fell into place. It had taken me a gobsmacking amount of time to notice the one dazzlingly obvious reason why all these people might think I’d killed Dominic: because I had.

  The house was utterly quiet, not a creak or a tick of settling wood, not a snore from Hugo. It had the same terrible feel as the garden, a monstrous impostor burgeoning with incomprehensible, unstoppable transformations, wooden floors squelching like moss underfoot and brick walls billowing like curtains with the force of whatever was growing behind them.

  That night. Where did you go?

  I tried to tell myself that I would remember that. A whack to the head could knock out the word for colander or the last time I’d seen Phil, but not something like this. I had no idea whether that was true.

  Faye said you’d been kind of pissed off with Dominic, that summer.

  By the time Dominic died, we had all been finished with school, about to head off in our various directions to the rest of our lives. It wasn’t like Leon had been facing into another year of Dominic’s locker-room shenanigans; all that had been history. Why would he have needed to kill him?

  I’d bet money that you only meant to give Dominic a scare. You were only planning on shaking him up a bit, nothing serious.

  But surely, I thought (walls rippling queasily, dark pulses at the edges of my vision), surely if that had happened it would have colored every day of my life since, nightmares, flashbacks, panic attacks whenever I saw a cop or went into Hugo’s garden, a head injury couldn’t rewrite all that—

  We were so ashamed of ourselves we stayed upstairs for the rest of the evening, Susanna had said. I swear by the next week you’d forgotten it ever happened. That had had nothing to do with brain damage. My mind—unbroken, back then, wholly and purely itself—had done that.

  I felt rotten, not just booze-sick or hash-sick but the all-pervading rottenness of food poisoning or infection, clammy and watery-weak, my whole system revolting. I realized that I couldn’t see very much and after a while that I was on my knees and elbows, forehead pressed to the floor. I breathed slowly and shallowly, waiting to see if I was going to throw up or faint. Some tiny lucid part of me managed to be glad that Melissa wasn’t here to see me like this.

  My eyes wouldn’t open. I couldn’t tell whether I was falling asleep or passing out; either one seemed like a blessed mercy. Somehow I managed to grope and clamber my way onto the bed, fingers tangling in the duvet, stomach swinging, before the blackness closed in from every side and I was gone.

  Ten

  I woke up because the sun was hitting me in the face. I managed to open my eyes a slit: light was pouring in around the edges of the curtains, it was late and it was a gorgeous autumn day. Every individual part of me felt like shit in a different way. I rolled over and groaned into my pillow.

  The night before came back piece by piece. All I wanted in the world was to go back to sleep, preferably for weeks or months or forever, but the movement had been too much for me. I made it to the bathroom just in time.

  The retching went on long after my stomach was empty. Finally I felt safe enough to stand up, swill out my mouth and splash cold water on my face. My hands were trembling; in the mirror I had the same dopey, blotchy look I had had in the hospital.

  I was terrified. Being suspected of murder had been one thing when I believed I was innocent: this wasn’t some cheesy Hollywood drama, I was hardly going to wind up in prison for something I hadn’t done. It was an entirely different thing now that I might be guilty. Rafferty was sharp and experienced and cunning in ways I couldn’
t begin to imagine; if I had left any evidence—and how could I not have? eighteen, clueless—he would find it. He could talk circles round me, think circles round me, and I didn’t even know what to try and hide; I had no idea what had happened, why in God’s name I would have done this. It seemed incredible that I could have got away with it for as long as I apparently—possibly? probably?—had.

  I desperately needed to think, but my head was pounding much too viciously. I dug through my stuff for my painkillers and swallowed two; I thought about chasing them with a Xanax, but I needed my mind clear, or as clear as I could get it. Then—ignoring the fact that I was still in my snazzy shirt and linen trousers from last night, now smeared with dirt and reeking of sweat and hash—I went downstairs, taking every step gingerly, in search of coffee.

  The kitchen was head-splittingly bright; the wall clock said it was past noon. Hugo was at the cooker, in his dressing gown and slippers, keeping an eye on the coffeemaker as it spat cheerily. “Ah,” he said, turning with a smile. He was clearly having a good day, in fact he was clearly in a lot better shape than I was. “The dead arise. So it was a good night, yes?”

  I sat down at the table and covered my face with my hands. Coffee had been a bad idea; just the smell was making me feel like I might throw up again.

  Hugo laughed. “I was right not to wake you, then. I thought you might need the lie-in. As soon as I heard you moving about, I put the coffee on.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “And I’ve got a surprise for you, once you’re awake enough. Would you eat something? Toast? Scrambled eggs, maybe?”

  “Oh God.”

  He laughed again. “In a bit, then.” He peered into the coffeemaker, turned off the gas ring and poured me a very large espresso. “There”—shuffling over to me, leaning on his stick, my brain didn’t come up with the idea of going to him until it was too late. “Would Melissa have some? Is she still in bed? Or did she make it to work?”

  “She’s gone,” I said.

  “My goodness. I’m impressed.” He poured himself the rest of the coffee, carefully, wrist wobbling. “What time did you get to bed?”