The Hollow Tree

by James Brogden

  ‘Good for you,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk about it when I get home. I’d better get on. Love you.’

  ‘Love you too.’

  * * *

  The tree trunk in which Oak Mary’s remains were found had been hacked open and burnt long since, but the woodland had never grown back properly, as if shunning the spot. Still, within a few months day-trippers had been wandering through that part of the Lickey Hills again as if a dead woman hadn’t rotted to bones there, but a few remembered and left gifts and offerings.

  Now, where the oak had once been, there was a new crater. It was several metres across and waist deep, raw-edged and funnelling dirt and leaf litter back down into itself as if it had only just been made – as if a great hand had reached down from the sky and scooped a massive handful out of the ground, or a long-dead tree had been pulled up in its entirety, roots and all. Or as if something had crawled out of the bowels of the earth.

  Three human figures stood equidistant around the hole, blinking in confusion at their surroundings and each other. One was a small man, perfectly ordinary in appearance: balding, tubby, bespectacled, dressed in a jacket, gloves, a checked scarf and shiny black shoes. The second was taller, leaner, and darker, despite his shock of white-blond hair and the ice-blue eyes that swept the clearing suspiciously. His long black coat made it seem as if he were perpetually wreathed in shadow, and he was missing half an ear. The third man was a ragged, hulking thing dressed in foresters’ green plaid, caked with filth and glaring belligerently with hazel-coloured eyes that glinted through a wild tangle of hair. While the others stood, he squatted, running his fingers through the soil, raking it with fingernails that weren’t flesh but wood.

  The Small Man mopped his brow, uttering a phew!, and started to unwind his scarf. At this, the Dark Man pulled a handgun from the pocket of his greatcoat and levelled it at him.

  ‘Easy there!’ exclaimed the Small Man in alarm, palms out. ‘No need for that, chum. I’m just a bit warm, that’s all.’ He continued to remove his scarf, then his jacket, and placed them carefully on the ground. He had braces holding up his trousers and sweat patches under his armpits. ‘Neither of you feel a tad warm?’ he asked.

  ‘Why would we feel this?’ replied the Dark Man. His English was accented, though not strongly. The Green Man simply grunted, which could have meant anything.

  The Small Man gestured around. ‘Feels like summer to me. Look how green it is. Doesn’t it feel like summer to you?’ he asked the Green Man and gave a little laugh. ‘You look like you’d know, if anyone.’

  The Green Man unfolded himself and rose to his full height, which was impressive, easily a head taller than the Dark Man. He wore heavy woodsman’s boots. A beard spread over his barrel chest like undergrowth, bristling with twigs and crawling with black beetles. ‘What do you think you know about me?’ he growled.

  The Small Man’s eyes narrowed. ‘Lesh,’ he said, and his tone was cold. ‘The gypsy witch’s death. And you,’ his glance darted back to the Dark Man, whose gun so far had not wavered an inch. ‘The spy’s death.’

  ‘You cannot know this,’ sneered the Dark Man.

  ‘Oh, one always knows one’s brothers.’

  The Green Man spat. ‘No kin of yours.’

  ‘And which of her deaths are you?’ asked the Dark Man, looking the Small Man up and down with disdain. ‘Something sordid and pathetic, by the look.’

  The Small Man yawned. ‘Sticks and stones, mein herr, sticks and stones.’ He took his spectacles off, gave them a quick polish on his shirt, and when he replaced them his façade of bonhomie had returned. ‘So here we all are!’ he smiled. ‘All come to look for our wayward damsel. The Three Stooges of Death. You’re Moe, obviously,’ he added, winking at the Dark Man. ‘The really interesting question, though, is how she managed to escape in the first place.’

  The Green Man shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter. It happens. Rarely, but it happens.’

  The Dark Man pointed at the three of them in turn with his gun. ‘Nothing like this has ever happened: for one soul, three deaths? Never.’

  ‘Can either of you two feel her?’ asked the Small Man.

  Silence settled over the clearing for a moment. The Dark Man frowned, as if listening. The Green Man sniffed the air.

  ‘No, thought not.’

  ‘Impossible,’ growled the Green Man.

  ‘How can this be?’ demanded the Dark Man. ‘How can none of us feel her soul? She must belong to one of us!’

  ‘You know,’ mused the Small Man, ‘I actually don’t think she does.’ He was investigating the trees at the edge of the clearing, with their clutter of ribbons and trinkets. ‘Observe,’ he said. ‘These appear to be offerings. This isn’t a normal grave. Doesn’t it look rather more like a shrine?’

  The Green Man spat his contempt.

  ‘A shrine!’ scoffed the Dark Man. ‘She is no saint.’

  The Small Man picked up a grimy teddy from the leaf mulch and sniffed at it. ‘Yes, you can smell the belief. It’s faint, but it’s there.’ He produced a knife from his trouser pocket, opened the blade, and then opened the teddy. With a little chuckle of satisfaction, he dropped the shredded remains to the ground, put the knife away and dusted off his hands. ‘It complicates things.’

  The Dark Man ripped a handful of ribbons from the branch nearest him and flung them away in disgust. ‘But how are we to find her if we cannot feel her?’

  ‘Oh, she’ll come back,’ said the Small Man. ‘Sooner or later they always come back. They can’t resist the pull of the place where they died. All we have to do is remain calm and patient.’ He dug in his pockets for a packet of cigarettes, lit one, and stood smoking and admiring the dappled light through the leaves as if he were out for nothing more than a leisurely morning stroll. ‘Summer,’ he repeated and laughed softly to himself.

  The Dark Man tilted his head at him. ‘Your laziness and complacency sickens me,’ he sneered, and put away his revolver.

  ‘As well it might,’ the Small Man responded, and blew a serene cloud of smoke at him. ‘I am you, after all. And vice versa.’

  ‘I will not sit around idly and just hope that she takes it into her head to wander in my direction.’

  The Small Man waved his fingertips as the Dark Man stalked off between the trees like a funereal heron. ‘Toodleoo then, old bean.’

  Voices and the barking of a dog came faintly through the trees. The Green Man scowled, and without seeming to move, the shadows, hues and contours of his body blended more and more closely with the background until he had disappeared altogether.

  18

  THE MONUMENT

  KINGFISHER HOUSE ACUTE PSYCHIATRIC CARE UNIT was part of the sprawling Queen Elizabeth Hospital complex in leafy Edgbaston, and felt to Rachel what she imagined a first-class airport departure lounge would be like, rather than a facility for the mentally ill. Mostly, she decided, it was the light. It streamed in through skylights and glowed through glass block walls, gleaming from polished veneer floors as they followed the sweep of white, curved walls. It softened the air and muted the noise just as effectively as the carpets, the sofas and armchairs, all of which were in plain, uncomplicated colours. This was not a place for shadows to linger in sharp corners. Pot plants softened the edges, and the artworks on the walls were gauzy abstracts.

  Patients either sat in the open common area and chatted, played games and did crafts, or were else in smaller rooms off the main corridor, reading, blogging, meeting their case-workers or relatives. The unit was generous with its visiting hours, and Rachel was able to spend a lot of time with Mary, helping her get to grips with the era in which she found herself, and trying to jog her memory.

  But their discoveries were few and made for grim reading.

  Some things are so alien and beyond the capacity of the human mind to process and fit into a sane picture of the world that the brain simply throws its hands in the air in surrender and accepts that what is in front of it is true. It seemed that
for Mary, Rachel’s tablet was one of those things. For Rachel, it was Mary herself, standing just behind her, leaning forward slightly to read the screen, the living weight and breath of her warm next to Rachel’s shoulder. She’d expected Mary to be full of questions about what a computer was and how it worked, and dreaded having to display her own ignorance, but she was spared that because Mary seemed to take it in her stride. She was much more interested in what was scrolling up the screen. If ‘interested’ was the right word. ‘Appalled’ might have been closer, and Rachel couldn’t blame her.

  The website they were on was called ‘The Hollow Isle’, a forum dedicated to the paranormal, hauntings, esoteric locations, UFOs, crop circles, disappearances and unsolved murders. The section on Oak Mary ran to hundreds of separate conversational threads and dozens of pages. There were the inevitable slanging matches, but also scores of official documents, witness accounts from the soldiers who had found the body, and seemingly endless amounts of conjecture, hypothesising, claims and counter claims. Here was laid out the details of the urban legends that Fiona the park ranger had mentioned, and Rachel and Mary read them together with deepening unease.

  ‘I’ve dreamt this,’ Rachel said, and told Mary about the nightmares. Mary listened with her eyes wide and spilling tears of horror.

  ‘I don’t remember any of that,’ she whispered.

  ‘But how can that be?’ Rachel protested. ‘How can I have dreamt these stories so exactly?’ She pointed at the screen. ‘They’re the same! How can I know that and you not? How can you be her?’

  ‘I just remember the tree,’ Mary replied. ‘I’m inside it, that’s all. Except…’ she swallowed. ‘Except that it’s aware of me, the tree. It wants me and it will never let me go.’

  ‘But you’re here,’ Rachel insisted, and pulled up an artist’s sketch of how Oak Mary might have looked in life. ‘Those are your clothes!’ She’d been drawn wearing the dress and cardigan found on the body; the same items that were now folded in the chest of drawers in Mary’s small room. ‘How can you not remember, seriously?’

  ‘I don’t know! What does it matter, anyway? I’m here! I’m alive! Who cares how I got here?’

  ‘Because it’s in my head!’ Rachel tapped her forefinger against her temple, like she was trying to drive in a nail. ‘You’re in my head! All of it! All of that… that horrible…’ She couldn’t bring herself to finish, and instead held up her stump. ‘And because of this! If you really were…’ but she faltered again.

  ‘Go on, say it,’ prompted Mary. ‘Dead. If I really was dead. Yes?’

  ‘If you really were dead, then what have I been touching all this time? The place where dead people go?’ Rachel laughed, because fuck it, why not go all the way? ‘Hell? Have I been bringing back bits of Hell? Because every time I have, something has retaliated. Tom nearly died, for heaven’s sake. And now I’ve brought you through from – wherever – and you’re a bloody sight bigger than an insect or a cat. What if something bigger comes after me? What if it comes after Tom again, or my mum, or his family? I can’t not know. And how can you not want to know who you are?’

  ‘Well which would you want to be?’ Mary demanded. ‘A prostitute, a gypsy witch or a Nazi spy? Which death would you like? And maybe none of them are the truth, just stories. I know I died – isn’t that enough? I died and someone put me in a tree! What version of that story do you think I could possibly want to be true?’

  A nurse, hearing raised voices, stopped by the room with a smile of concern. Rachel discreetly hid the web pages with their images of ghosts, corpses and spectral trees. Kingfisher House was not likely to approve of that as reading material for its patients.

  ‘Hi, Mary,’ the nurse said. ‘How’s everything going in here?’

  ‘Everything’s fine here, thank you.’

  The nurse glanced at Rachel, but kept addressing Mary. ‘I think five more minutes, don’t you?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Rachel. ‘I’ve taken up too much time. I’d better go.’

  ‘No rush,’ smiled the nurse, ‘just, I think maybe a change of scenery in a bit would be a good idea, yes?’

  ‘Of course.’

  As the nurse moved away, Mary said, ‘She thinks you’re upsetting me.’

  ‘Am I?’

  Mary sighed. ‘Yes, but you have a right to, I suppose. I wouldn’t be here at all if it wasn’t for you. Fair’s fair. I’ll try to help you however I can, but I don’t know how much good I’ll be.’

  Impulsively Rachel folded her into a hug, and only then realised how thin Mary was, and how brittle her bones felt. ‘Everything will be fine,’ she said. ‘You’re away from that place now. You’re safe.’

  * * *

  The doctors at Kingfisher House, satisfied that Mary didn’t pose a threat to herself or others, were happy to let Rachel take her out the following day. When Rachel came to collect her after breakfast, Mary didn’t look too thrilled at the prospect. ‘Are we going to try and jog my memory today, then?’ she asked, in tones of glum resignation. ‘Is that the plan?’

  ‘Eventually,’ said Rachel. ‘I thought we might get you some new clothes first, though. Fancy a spot of shopping?’

  Mary’s eyes lit up.

  * * *

  It hadn’t been Rachel’s intention to deepen Mary’s feelings of culture shock – at the back of her mind had been a vague idea of seeing how much of the modern city centre Mary recognised and using that as a way into her lost memory – but just parking the car was adventure enough, never mind actual shopping.

  For Mary, absolutely everything was astonishing. The concrete ring-road and flyovers, the glass-fronted highrises which reflected the clouds like a second sky, the outlandish way everyone was dressed, and all walking around apparently talking to themselves or into their hands. They ate sushi and took selfies on Rachel’s phone and Mary marvelled at the image of herself.

  The novelty was short-lived, however. For each new wonder there were a dozen things to increase Mary’s anxiety: strange sounds that made her jump, and flashing advertisements that made her wince. The multimedia LED billboards in the shape of huge eyes over the entrances to New Street Station absolutely terrified her, and she wouldn’t go near them. By lunchtime Rachel decided to abandon their shopping mission and head out of town for the relative calm and hopefully more familiar surroundings of the Lickey Hills.

  * * *

  Rachel drove herself and Mary to the picnic area on Beacon Hill, the westernmost of the Lickeys, as it seemed like the most obvious place to start. ‘There used to be trams running along here,’ Mary said as they drove along the A38, pointing at the dual carriageway’s central reservation, which was green with grass and tall horse-chestnut trees, none of which had been planted when she had been alive, but which to Rachel’s memory had been there forever.

  ‘There’ve been no trams down here since the sixties,’ said Rachel. ‘Although the council has just started putting them in the city centre, actually.’

  Mary laughed. ‘Oh well, looks like I’m just in time,’ she said, but as an attempt at humour it felt strained. She twisted the strap of her seat belt with white-knuckled fingers. Neither of them was able to forget that Rachel was driving her back to the place where she’d been murdered.

  Beacon Hill was a wide sward of open grass rising in a gentle slope to a lookout point built out of stone in the form of a small castle. Like pretty much everywhere else on the hills it was bustling with families, while older couples sat on park benches overlooking the panorama of the southern reaches of the West Midlands urban sprawl. Suburbs spread out into an umber haze of air pollution. The weather had turned overcast, and a chill wind tugged at them.

  ‘I remember generalities,’ said Mary, as they approached the lookout. ‘Like this thing – this wasn’t here. It was just one of those big brass plates that pointed out where everything was, on a big lump of concrete. But I don’t know how I know that. I can’t recall a specific time when I was up here. I just know I
was, once.’

  ‘So no memories being jogged free, then?’

  Mary shrugged. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘That’s okay. We’re just scratching the surface.’

  Rachel took out her tablet, called up a page from the Hollow Isle website and read:

  ‘“On Friday 11 May 1945, the Birmingham Post ran a feature article on the Oak Mary mystery, prompted by the police who had by that point drawn a blank with their initial investigations into the woman’s identity. It included an appeal for witnesses and an artist’s sketch of what the body was found wearing, which consisted of—” blah blah blah we know all this, “—which prompted the journalist to venture the entirely unfounded opinion that the girl had been murdered while out for the evening at a nearby dancehall. There was absolutely no reason to suppose this, except perhaps that it allowed him to conclude with the portentous question: ‘So, who did Mary enjoy her last dance with?’ Several days later a piece of graffiti appeared on the base of a nearby monument; in large, stark white letters was written Who danced with Oak Mary? Soon copycat messages began appearing on walls all over Rednal, Rubery and Northfield, and it quickly passed into local legend. Even a schoolyard skipping rhyme developed:

  Mary in the oak tree

  Cold as cold can be

  Waiting for the sky to fall

  Who will dance with me?”’

  ‘Please stop,’ said Mary, and hunched her shoulders tighter against the wind. ‘Please. Let’s go and see this monument, and get it over and done with. I need to walk.’ She strode off ahead, a small, hunched figure.

  A few hundred metres down the road from the Beacon Hill car park there was a gap in the hedgerow just about wide enough for a vehicle, and then a track that soon opened out into a wide space hemmed in on all sides by tall groves of oak and yew. In the centre of it a huge column of stone thrust itself into the sky like an accusatory finger. The obelisk must have been twenty metres high; it was made of grey, unadorned granite so dour-looking that despite the bright sunlight it seemed to radiate its own chill. In two places birch saplings had taken root in cracks between the blocks. It was supported by a wider plinth and surrounded by a spiked metal railing from which the black paint was flaking away. The plinth itself carried a plaque dedicated to some long-forgotten eighteenth-century nobleman, but the lettering was obscured by the faded ghost of crudely painted words: