‘I’m a terrible person, I know.’
‘And you looked at him and you thought, he’ll do me nicely.’
‘Oh yes.’
Annabel arched her eyebrows and leaned even closer. ‘And does he? Does he do you nicely?’
‘You were right – you are a slut.’
They laughed. Rachel found it hard to believe that they were gossiping about men at the same time as talking quite calmly about life after death and making wards against a supernatural entity as if these things went together naturally.
‘What is it like?’ asked Annabel. ‘You know, the limbo place, when you touch it?’
‘It’s different depending on where I am. Around here there are lots of old brick walls and bits of crap – nails, wood, broken glass, things like that. I wondered if it was because this whole estate is built on an old factory works, and that it was some sort of echo of that place.’
‘Have you ever tried to see it?’
‘Now how would I go about doing that? It’s my hand that’s over there, not my eyes, and I’m not about to poke one of them out, am I?’
‘No, but there’s sight and there’s Sight, if you know what I mean.’
Rachel stopped what she was doing and stared at Annabel. ‘Are you saying that you can teach me how to actually see what I’ve been touching?’
‘I’m saying that you lose nothing by giving it a try.’ Annabel put down the sticks and string she’d been holding and moved to kneel in front of Rachel, taking Rachel’s right hand and wrist stump in her own hands. ‘Do you know how to make an “okay” sign with your fingers?’
Rachel formed a circle with her right thumb and forefinger and showed it to Annabel. ‘This? So?’
Annabel averted her gaze and gently moved Rachel’s hand away as if it were a torch shining directly in her face. ‘It’s also, in the right kind of circumstances, a sign of the evil eye, so let’s be careful with that. It has a name in Romani: barjok. Now, can you imagine making it with your dead hand instead? And then holding it up to look through, like an imaginary telescope?’
Rachel closed her eyes, feeling oddly like she was somehow betraying Yomi by actively trying to summon up the phantom sensations that she’d spent the last several weeks trying to eliminate. In the end it was as if she’d never bothered in the first place; she could clearly feel her left thumb and forefinger touching each other. She traced the smooth hardness of her index fingernail with her thumb. ‘Ha,’ she said. ‘I’ve just thought: I bet my nails are in an absolute state. Do you think there are any decent nail bars in limbo?’
‘Any decent what?’
‘Never mind.’ She raised her empty wrist to her face and peered through where the loop in her fingers should have been, not expecting to see anything except her own living room.
‘Oh. My. God.’
A hole had opened in the air in front of her left eye and through it she saw the place that she’d only ever touched blindly and fearfully – the limbo realm that hid behind the world. It was like looking through the lens of a telescope while keeping your other eye open, and feeling your brain perform acrobatics with focus and perspective as it tried to reconcile two conflicting images – first superimposing one on the other, then vice versa, then both at the same time. At first it was difficult to make out much detail because it was a lot darker there, but it seemed to be a vast indoor space, like a derelict warehouse. Its walls were indistinct in the gloom, but fissures in the roof allowed an unsteady violet light to spill through, which hinted at things visible only in stranger spectrums still, and picked out the silhouettes of vast, dead machines rearing up like statues in a cathedral to alien gods.
Her new sight caught movement: human figures shambling in the shadows of these looming colossi. She couldn’t pick out details of clothing or expression but she knew from the listless way they trudged amongst the ruins that they were alone and utterly lost. Once she’d recovered from her initial shock, she tried to describe to Annabel what she was seeing.
‘You said that this estate is built on an old factory site?’ Annabel asked.
‘Yes – you think that’s what I’m seeing?’
‘I don’t know. I think that maybe a fair few people die in factories. I wouldn’t be surprised to find more than one trapped somewhere like that.’
‘But that’s…’ Rachel shuddered. One shuffling figure had paused, and now changed direction, heading back towards her. If this factory was analogous to the living world, that would put it somewhere in the street outside. ‘You mean all those times I was reaching into this place I could have touched one of those… I don’t know what to call them. Ghosts? Spectres? I could have touched one at any time?’
‘You did, remember?’ Annabel replied, indicating herself. ‘I’d be careful about drawing attention to yourself. If their experience is anything like mine they’ll be desperate for any way to escape, and they won’t be gentle about it.’
Rachel dropped her dead hand and blinked as the bright warmth of the living room re-established itself around her. Annabel was watching her with concern. ‘Are you all right?’
‘No,’ Rachel answered. ‘How could I be all right? Is that what it’s like for you, having the Sight? Can you see that too?’
‘It’s not the same thing. It’s more of a knowing thing.’
‘But it’s all just there! Around us, right here! Behind it all, I mean.’
Annabel seemed to be taking it all quite calmly, picking up the sticks she’d discarded and tying them together with string. Rachel found her nonchalance infuriating. ‘How am I supposed to be all right, knowing that?’
‘You already knew it was there, though,’ the Romani woman pointed out. ‘You’ve known about it for weeks, by your own admission. You’ve touched it. You’ve messed about with it. You saved me from it. Does it make that much of a difference actually seeing it?’
‘Yes! Yes it does!’
Annabel’s gaze was stern. ‘Well it shouldn’t. Stop your blartin and grow up, woman. You’re stronger than this. Something came out of that place after me and you almost tore its bloody arm off, remember that? It’ll come for me again and so we need to be ready when it does – more importantly your man needs to be ready too and he doesn’t know a thing about any of this. You’re going to have to explain it to him and make him follow your lead, and you can’t do that if you’re flapping all over the place like a pigeon trying to catch a taxi, can you?’
Despite herself, Rachel smiled. ‘A pigeon catching a taxi?’
21
TELLING TOM
‘WHAT’S THAT MESS ALL OVER THE FRONT DOOR?’ demanded Tom when he came back from the pub. He found Rachel sitting at the breakfast bar in the kitchen with a large glass of red wine and an almost empty bottle. Lined up in front of her on the counter was a pile of dead leaves, a piece of broken glass, and a small black beetle. ‘And what’s this all about?’ he asked, half-smiling, half-frowning. ‘Where’s your friend?’
‘She’s gone to bed. Bit of a busy day, what with one thing and another.’ Rachel took a large gulp of Shiraz. ‘Honey, sit down. There’s something I need to show you.’
* * *
She decided that he took it quite well, all told. He didn’t freak out, accuse her of attempting to trick him, or try to have her sectioned. If anything he seemed hurt that she hadn’t told him before, but accepted her misgivings about what his reaction would have been. He got her to produce things with her dead hand several times, watching her like a hawk, and inspecting the damage that was caused whenever something came through: a cracked tile, a sudden stench from the fridge as a perfectly ripe cauliflower spontaneously rotted in seconds, a glass shattering in the dishwasher, and other incidents until he’d seen enough to satisfy himself that it was real. He prodded at the detritus from the other place.
‘So how does it work then – touching the other side, I mean?’
Rachel snorted. ‘You think I know?’
‘No, I mean how do you bring thing
s through? And how does it feel?’
Rachel considered, finding it hard to put into words something that half her mind continued to insist was impossible, despite the truth of it right in front of her. ‘It’s funny,’ she said. ‘You’d think there would be, I don’t know, ectoplasm or a flash of light or something, but it’s just, I hold something with the hand that isn’t there any more, then bring my other hand up—’ she mimed the action ‘—I transfer it from one to the other and…’ She shrugged. ‘Alakazam. It appears.’
‘Have you ever tried sending something the other way?’
The question was so simple that it stunned her to realise that she’d never even considered it. ‘Wow. No. I never, I mean, why would I?’
‘Why does anybody do anything?’ Tom asked. ‘To see if you can?’
Rachel picked up an apple from the fruit bowl on the breakfast bar. It was glossy and green, and had a pleasingly solid heft to it; it felt real, like it couldn’t possibly just vanish out of the world.
‘I’m not sure about this,’ she said. ‘Whenever I move things from one place to the other something causes damage in response. That’s how we got into this whole mess, remember?’
‘Maybe that’s because you’re stealing something from limbo that’s already there. You’re not doing that in this case – you’re putting something in instead.’
Rachel looked at him. ‘And all of a sudden you’re the expert.’
‘You lose nothing by trying.’
‘Really. Well if I do this and your chair collapses and dumps you on your arse, don’t blame me.’
She concentrated on the phantom sensations from her left hand, imagining her unseen fingers reaching to grasp the apple and what its weight and smoothness would feel like, and she brought her right hand across – and it was gone. In the end it was no more difficult to pass it from one hand to the other than if she’d been a whole-bodied person. She brought it back again, and tensed, waiting for the backlash.
Nothing happened.
‘Well what do you know?’ she said in soft surprise. Then she laughed.
‘What’s so funny?’ asked Tom.
‘Oh I was just thinking of the glorious life of crime I could lead doing this. Imagine what I could smuggle through airport metal detectors.’ She passed the apple back and forth a few more times before another idea struck her. ‘What if…’ She tried to hold the apple in both hands, living and dead, at the same time. It felt slippery, like a magnet trying to skid past another with the same polarity, and a shimmering violet haze began to form in the air between her hand and her stump. She cried out in disgust as the apple rotted in her grip and abruptly exploded, showering the pair of them with decaying fruit.
Tom and Rachel stared at each other for a moment with bits of apple on their faces and in their hair, and abruptly burst out laughing.
‘Entropy,’ he murmured, picking bits off himself and examining them. ‘Something like that, anyway.’
‘What’s that?’ said Rachel, surprised. Bless him, but it seemed altogether too scientific a word for her husband to have come out with.
‘There’s this bloke works for us, Jules, big fella, beard, reads loads of science fiction – all that stuff about parallel universes, quantum this, that and the other. He tried telling us once about this type of energy called entropy, the tendency of things to fall apart, and said it was the handyman’s best friend because no matter how much you fixed anything it was always going to collapse. We said that was just a piss-poor excuse for why he couldn’t mix concrete properly. But what if there really is a parallel universe that you’re somehow touching, and it’s got too much entropy, and every time you bring something through from there a bit of entropy leaks through with it?’
Rachel didn’t like to contradict him, because Tom was a fundamentally practical man and the ability to put a scientific label, however inaccurate, to the phenomenon was a crutch that he needed to support his suddenly skewed notions of reality, but she felt instinctively that the other place wasn’t just a parallel universe. Somehow that seemed even less believable than the idea that she was reaching into the world of the dead.
‘Can I just point out,’ she said, ‘that you’re taking this an awful lot better than I was expecting.’
‘What were you expecting?’
She shrugged. ‘You screaming something like, “Holy fucking shit what is that thing burn the witch”?’
Tom was silent for a moment. ‘Rache,’ he said eventually, ‘something happened to me once, that I’ve never told a soul before, not even you. Back before we met, when I was working for Highways, I was on a cone crew with two other guys – chap called Neil driving the truck, while me and this older bloke everyone called Boffey walked along behind, picking up the cones and stacking them on the back, as you do.
‘Anyway, it was eleven at night, and the motorway was virtually empty. We’re not going very fast, literally walking pace, and this traffic officer in his big black and yellow four-by-four zooms past and pulls in diagonally right in front of us with his hazard lights on, blocking the way. He doesn’t get out but just sits there, and I don’t realise it at the time, it’s only later I think there are supposed to be two to a patrol, but this guy is on his own.
‘This gets up Neil’s nose, of course, so he gets out of the truck to ask the idiot what does he think he’s doing. But the guy doesn’t even turn his head to look while Neil is tapping on his window. He just sits, staring straight ahead like a shop window dummy.
‘And as we’re standing there scratching our heads and discussing whether we should call it in – because we figure maybe he’s stoned or drunk or he’s broken up with his wife and we don’t want to get him on a discipline but at the same time this isn’t normal at all – an articulated lorry coming down the opposite carriageway loses control, goes straight through the central reservation, across all three lanes of our carriageway, smashes through the guard rail and goes down the embankment literally twenty feet from where we’re standing.
‘If that traffic officer hadn’t pulled in and stopped us, we’d have been right in front of that lorry and wiped out completely. Turned out the lorry driver had been on the road from Montenegro for twenty hours straight.
‘So obviously we’re staring down at the wreck and Neil runs for the radio in our truck to call it in and me and Boffey turn back and see that the traffic officer’s gone. We didn’t hear any engine, and we didn’t see him drive off. He was just gone. We hadn’t thought to check the registration number so there was no way of telling who it was, and there was no CCTV as evidence that it happened at all, except that there were three of us there and we know what we saw.
‘Now I’m not saying that it was the ghost of a dead traffic officer patrolling the motorway who saved our lives that night, but in the absence of another explanation I’m open to the possibility. Likewise, I have to believe that you pulled those leaves and stuff out of somewhere, because as crazy as this sounds it’s actually easier to believe that than the alternative.’
‘What’s the alternative?’ she asked.
‘That you’ve been secretly training as a street magician and you’re deliberately messing with my head to gain access to my family fortune.’
She stared at him for a moment, trying to work out whether or not he was being serious. He winked at her and she burst out laughing. ‘You dick,’ she said, and swatted him.
‘Seriously though,’ he added. ‘Don’t you think you should tell the doctors?’
‘Tell them what, exactly? What do I tell Yomi? That her physiotherapy has had some unexpected side effects?’
‘I don’t know. But you don’t know what this might be doing to your nervous system or your cells or something. You need to get advice from someone, I don’t know who.’
‘What if it was a ghost?’ she said. ‘Your traffic officer. What if it really was someone back from the dead. Do you think that’s possible?’
‘Fifteen minutes ago I wouldn’t have said it was pos
sible for a person to materialise stuff from a parallel universe, so what I think is or isn’t possible is a bit up for grabs at the moment. But people are different, though, aren’t they? They have to be.’
‘Why? If there are leaves and wood why can’t there be flesh and blood?’
‘Because people have minds, and souls…’
‘What if, when you die, something of you stays in that other place, just like something of this leaf? Some kind of echo, or like when you make a photocopy of a photocopy. According to Google, throughout the whole of human history, about 107 billion people have ever lived, which if you divide that by the world’s current population means that fifteen people will have died for every person alive on the planet. Maybe not everybody goes to the other place and becomes a ghost; maybe it’s only one in a thousand, but even that would mean 107 million ghosts in the world. If ghosts exist, we must be absolutely surrounded by them. And if they are in that other place, is it really surprising if from time to time they come back through?’
Tom heaved a huge sigh and rubbed his eyes with the heels of both hands. ‘This is a lot to take in,’ he said. ‘We’ve both been drinking. I think I need to sleep on this for a bit…’
Rachel shook her head and placed her hand over his. ‘Sorry, can’t let you do that, I’m afraid. There’s more, and I’m not doing it with a hangover. It’s hard enough sloshed.’
‘More?’ he laughed. ‘What more could there be?’
‘What if,’ she said slowly, watching him from under her lashes, ‘one of them were to have come back through and was asleep in our back bedroom right now?’
She watched him process this: the little snort of disbelief, the sideways glance to see if she was making fun of him, the slight widening of the eyes as he saw that she wasn’t, the deepening of his breathing as the adrenaline kicked in, and the sudden rock-hard tension in the sinews of his hand as he pulled it away. He lurched towards the hallway and the staircase.
‘Tom! Wait!’ She hurried after him, putting her hand on his shoulder, but he shook her off.
The Hollow Tree Page 17