The Hollow Tree

by James Brogden

  ‘Now then, Mr Thomas Cooper,’ he said, sitting down and cracking his knuckles. ‘Let’s see if you’ve found the right breadcrumbs.’ It was impossible to predict exactly what they might have found, but then a certain level of improvisation was always necessary in great works. When he got to Lorna Heath’s letter, a slow smile spread across his face. ‘Oh well done. Jolly good show. Shall we play a game of follow-my-leader, Mr Cooper?’

  He folded the letter and tucked it into his pocket. ‘Oh no! Not the asylum!’ he chuckled to himself, sauntering out of the library as anonymously as he’d arrived. ‘Whatever you do, don’t go to the old asylum!’

  * * *

  It was the best part of an hour before anybody was allowed back in the library; the local fire brigade was nothing if not thorough. By that time Eline was bored and Rachel’s arm was aching. All Tom had managed to discover from Google was that the Scoles Farm Asylum had been closed and condemned for decades, so there was no chance of following up any records there. Between the three of them they decided to call it a day.

  They were in the process of packing everything carefully into their respective box files when Rachel saw Tom frowning and turning the same documents over and over again. It was the way he looked for his keys or his wallet or pretty much anything in the fridge – looking but not finding, despite it probably being right in front of him.

  ‘What are you man-looking for?’ she asked.

  ‘That letter…’ he muttered, looking under a folder he’d looked under three times already. ‘You know, the one from Bill Heath’s wife. Can’t find it.’

  ‘Here, let me.’

  She looked, convinced it would be on top of the nearest pile, but it wasn’t. The three of them scoured the table and the neighbouring ones, underneath, and even the surrounding shelves, but it simply wasn’t there.

  ‘It can’t have just disappeared,’ Tom protested. Then he saw the way Rachel was looking at him, and reddened. ‘Oh, I really did just say that, didn’t I?’

  ‘Out of the mouths of babes,’ said Eline.

  ‘Maybe that’s exactly what it did,’ Rachel said. She made the sign of barjok and put it to her eye. The other side of this place was dim and almost completely formless; possibly the building was simply too new to have left bits of itself in limbo, and there were no lost spirits nearby to give it memory. The old documents were another thing entirely. Having been the focus of so much attention for so long, they had clarity, like projections of themselves thrown onto the backdrop of limbo by the light of the living world. But the letter wasn’t there either.

  ‘Somebody must have taken it,’ she decided. ‘No way is it just lost.’

  ‘The creature pretending to be Van Alst?’ asked Eline.

  ‘Or his small colleague. I can’t think of anyone else who might be interested in this information.’

  ‘Or interested in keeping it secret,’ Eline suggested.

  ‘That was a very convenient false fire alarm, now that you mention it,’ said Tom.

  Rachel slapped the table. ‘Shit! So what was in it that he could want to stop us knowing?’

  ‘It was all about Heath,’ said Eline. ‘Van Alst’s accomplice. Maybe he knew something that his boss did not want revealed.’

  ‘But that doesn’t make sense,’ objected Tom. ‘Everything that the police could find out is in these files, and they tell us nothing. How can stealing one piece of paper possibly make the slightest bit of difference?’

  ‘If there’s something they don’t want us to know, I want to know what that is,’ said Rachel.

  ‘But we’ve read the letter – we already know whatever he’s trying to hide. There’s no point in him taking it.’

  ‘He cannot be sure that we have read it,’ put in Eline. ‘Likely he is just being thorough.’

  ‘So?’ Tom protested. ‘What good can the information do us anyway? Heath’s long dead. They’re all dead.’

  Rachel smiled. ‘Just because all the witnesses are dead doesn’t mean we can’t still ask them a few questions, does it?’

  ‘Really?’ asked Eline. ‘You said you would not bring anybody else back.’

  ‘I’m not talking about bringing anybody back. Just asking a few questions. That’s if he’s even there at all.’

  ‘Where?’ said Tom. ‘Where exactly are you going to go looking for the soul of a dead World War Two black marketeer?’

  ‘I imagine I’ll start where he died.’

  Tom laughed in disbelief. ‘A lunatic asylum?’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t like the sound of where this is going.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ Rachel conceded. ‘But you have to admit there’s a certain mad logic to it.’

  ‘You can’t just… just…’ Tom dragged his hands down his face, looking utterly out of his depth. ‘I can’t believe I’m even saying this. You can’t just go around talking to the spirits of the dead!’

  Eline ahemmed, picking at a fingernail.

  ‘That’s not the same thing!’

  Rachel looked at him closely. ‘Why are you so sceptical all of a sudden? After everything you’ve seen in the last few days?’

  ‘Because,’ he answered, enunciating as if speaking to an idiot, ‘you are basically talking about conducting a séance in a derelict lunatic asylum! You know that bit in a horror movie where they go down to the cellar and everybody says, “How fucking stupid, you never go down to the cellar”? This is that bit! Does it not strike either of you as being just the slightest bit out of order?’

  ‘Oh I’m well aware of that!’ Rachel shot back, stung by his attitude. She knew that he was struggling to process something that she’d had a lot more time to get a grip on, but she couldn’t help herself. ‘My whole life has been out of fucking order since my hand was cut off, you know? Bit of a sliding scale of abnormality from day one. Sort of like…’ She bent and held her palm an inch from the floor. ‘Here: learn to tie your shoelaces one-handed.’ She straightened up and raised her palm over his head as if measuring his height. ‘Here: learn to communicate with the dead. Somewhere around here…’ She lowered her hand to chest level and waved it around. ‘Try to maintain a functioning marriage without your husband thinking you’re losing your fucking mind. I know exactly how ridiculous this sounds, Tom, because I am living it, but I am going to do it anyway because the alternative is to let those bastards call the shots. They killed a kid and used his blood as paint, Tom. They’re still out there, and they don’t give a toss about what you think is “out of order”. So man up and help me like you promised you would or piss off!’

  He stood gaping at her for a moment, then surprised her by grinning. ‘Did you really just say “man up”?’

  ‘Yes.’ She glared at him. ‘Problem?’

  His grin widened. ‘No, sir.’

  * * *

  The Dark Man watched Eline and her two protectors leave the library, and followed them. As with his small brother, the energising effect of the sacrifice at the obelisk enabled him to move unseen amongst the people milling around in the busy plaza, and there was nothing to hinder his approach.

  He drew the revolver from his pocket and aimed it at the back of the human woman’s head, pacing steadily behind. It would cause a stir, of course, but that didn’t matter any more – the important thing was to get to Eline before his treacherous bastard of a brother.

  Then the woman’s hand telephone rang, and she answered it, still walking. ‘Hello… yes…’ She froze in mid-stride. ‘How did you get this number?’ she demanded. ‘Leave us the fuck alone!’ Whatever she heard in reply must have scared the wits out of her, because she looked around wildly.

  ‘He’s found us!’ she yelled, then grabbed Eline’s hand and began to run.

  ‘What?’ called her husband, evidently as confused as the Dark Man was himself, running after them.

  ‘That was him!’ she shouted back. ‘The small guy. He said Van Alst was pointing a gun right at us!’ The three of them were tearing through the crowd, trying to look
in every direction at once. Any hope of stealth was gone.

  The Dark Man swore, dropped his invisibility, and gave chase.

  Some pedestrians saw him coming and managed to get out of his way in time. Others didn’t, and were sent flying. He saw a man in a uniform – policeman, security guard, it didn’t matter – turn and brace himself to meet the Dark Man’s charge, balling his fists. The Dark Man grinned as he feinted right, dodged left and clotheslined him with an outstretched arm as he passed. There was an oof! as the human collapsed, and the Dark Man continued.

  Then his brother was standing in his way.

  He knew that the Small Man couldn’t touch him, but his condition carried enough human instinct to have to flinch at the sudden appearance, and he skidded out of the way, losing his balance and sprawling in an ungainly heap.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said the Small Man. ‘And you’re wrong. You’re making a rather large assumption here.’

  The Dark Man picked himself up and looked past his brother. Eline, Rachel and Tom had disappeared in the direction of the car park. There was no chance of catching them now.

  ‘What?!’ he barked. ‘What assumption am I making, paardenlul?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘You betray me at the caravan, you get in my way now, and you say I am wrong? How have I misconstrued your intentions?’ He spat the words with venomous sarcasm.

  ‘You assume that I’m still interested in Mary.’

  That brought the Dark Man up short. ‘What?’

  ‘I tried to tell you at the caravan, but you wouldn’t listen. It’s your own stubbornness that forces me to intervene. You can keep Mary – it’s the woman Rachel I want.’

  ‘For what conceivable reason? Her ability to reach into the umbra?’

  The Small Man delivered another one of his infuriatingly enigmatic smiles. ‘Possibly.’

  ‘If you are thinking that you can somehow use her to build yourself a following in the umbra, I assure you, They will not stand for it.’

  ‘You just let me worry about Them. If you could just refrain from trying to kill her for five minutes, then maybe both of us can come out of this with something. Tell me, brother,’ he smiled smugly again. ‘Would you like to know where they’re going?’

  29

  ASYLUM

  WHEN BIRMINGHAM BOROUGH COUNCIL BOUGHT A hundred and ten acres of land at Scoles Farm to build a lunatic asylum in 1852, the city’s populace was insulated from the inmates by several miles of open countryside. They therefore remained largely untroubled by the plight of the nearly two hundred pauper lunatics who were locked away in conditions little better than one of the great city penitentiaries upon which its design was based. By the time Bill Heath was incarcerated there in 1947, the institution had increased to a population of nearly a thousand, with the addition of outbuildings, accommodation blocks, workshops, rambling wings and annexes, a high-vaulted chapel and even a patients’ farm, making it a small village in its own right. It was invisible to the wider world, unreached by any roads that a stray traveller might chance upon, a hidden fiefdom of the confused and desperate.

  The great economic rationalisations of the late twentieth century saw its slow starvation and ultimate demise as care was returned to ‘the community’, and the newer buildings were sold off and demolished to make way for a new housing estate. Behind neat wooden fences, new families erected swing sets and paddling pools on tidy lawns of turf laid over the substrate of crushed brick and plaster that was all that remained of cells where inmates had screamed and laughed and wept mere decades earlier; the gardens of suburbia fertilised by the rubble of madness.

  Meanwhile the original Victorian building was slapped with a preservation order as being historically significant while simultaneously anybody who wanted to develop it into flats or sheltered accommodation were refused planning permission and so, trapped between layers of bureaucracy, the asylum was left to rot into itself. It squatted in the middle of the estate behind high wire fences and a screen of overgrown trees and bushes, ignored except by stray cats and teenagers, existing in a collective blind spot like the hollow and rotten heart of an old tree.

  Four storeys high, its long frontage was opened by dozens of tall, rectangular sash windows with scrolled corbels like a Georgian mansion; every pane was broken. When the place was first abandoned an attempt had been made to board the doors and windows in the ground and first floors with sheets of bright blue plywood, but many had been torn away or burned. Numerous arson attacks had left the roof a charred ribcage and straggling greenery was reclaiming the eaves and gutters. There was no point in security guards or warning signs, or even in repairing the many holes made in the perimeter fence. The ruin was its own warning: Come in, those gaping windows said. Have a look around, make yourself at home – we’ve got loads of broken glass, rusty nails and rotten floorboards for you to play with.

  It was not hard for Rachel, Eline and Tom to find a way in. The problem lay in where to start.

  There had been a brief debate about whether to explore the old asylum during the day or under the cover of darkness, but Tom had flat out refused to go into the place at night, not just because it was creepy, but also he didn’t fancy ending up in Accident and Emergency. Again. Sense had prevailed and they approached the ruin of Scoles Farm in bright midmorning sun the following day.

  They climbed in through an arched ground-floor window, which was half-obscured by a buddleia bush growing out of the wall. The heavy scent of its flowers mixed with that of damp plaster and scorched wood as they found themselves in a wide hallway running the length of the building. Their feet crunched in a litter of broken glass, splintered wood, dead leaves and plaster.

  ‘Still fucking creepy if you ask me,’ Tom said, keeping his voice low, as if fearing the building was so dilapidated that the ceiling would collapse on them at any loud noise. ‘Has it occurred to you that if they didn’t want us to know about this place they might be waiting here to stop us finding whatever it is?’

  ‘Of course it has,’ said Rachel. ‘I’d be worried if they weren’t – it would mean we’re on the wrong track. Look,’ she added. ‘That thing with the fire alarm? He’s keeping his distance. He’s scared, and he should be. I can do something that I don’t think they’ve ever come across before. That gives us an advantage.’

  ‘So does this,’ said Eline, and from a deep pocket in her coat produced the Browning.

  ‘Just be bloody careful where you point that thing,’ Tom grumbled.

  ‘Mon chéri,’ she replied, ‘I was doing this before your grandmother was born.’ She began picking her way along the corridor. ‘Come, let us find these ghosts.’

  Taking a deep breath, Rachel made the sign of barjok and looked into limbo. With the exception of a strange violet light coming from outside, and the fact that she couldn’t see Eline or Tom, the corridor looked exactly the same. There was no shadow of an older place underlying the physical ruins, no suggestion of the asylum as it had been, or remembered by any souls who still lingered here, no sign of any souls at all. It was actually something of a relief; the soul of a person dying in such a place as this couldn’t be a pretty sight. Still, her frustration mounted as they explored the ruins and she saw absolutely nothing.

  ‘You’d think there’d be someone lost here,’ she said.

  ‘Nothing?’ asked Eline.

  ‘Pardon the pun, but this place is dead.’

  ‘We should try upstairs,’ suggested Tom. ‘That’s where their dormitories will have been. Down here will be all meeting rooms and offices.’

  Rachel shrugged. ‘It’s worth a try.’

  They backtracked down the long corridor towards the building’s centre, where twin flights of metal stairs curved upwards. Rust and paint flaked off them in equal measure, and they creaked alarmingly underfoot. The open centre of the stairwell was screened with heavy wire mesh, presumably to stop suicidal inmates hurling themselves straight down the middle, and the screens had caught b
urned and sodden wreckage from the upper floors. On one landing was a rusted wheelchair tipped forward onto the stumps of its axles where its smaller front wheels had been, like an animal with its forepaws amputated, and Rachel’s stump gave a sudden furious burst of phantom pins and needles in sympathy. Looking up, she could see daylight through rents where the ceiling had first bowed inwards and then ruptured.

  At the top of the stairs was another long corridor at right angles, leading deeper into the building with numerous dark doorways all down the right-hand wall, but the left had completely collapsed into a vaulted space which must have been a grand hall behind the hospital’s main doors. What had once been a corridor was now a wide ledge between the rooms on their right and an echoing gulf, which the doors looked over. The void was bristling and cross-hatched with old scaffolding, put there in years past to shore up the fire-damaged roof.

  ‘Fuck this,’ said Tom. ‘This is not safe.’

  ‘I have to say—’ began Eline in agreement, but Rachel shushed them both. She was looking through barjok, and she’d seen someone.

  It was the shade of a woman in a ragged smock, so emaciated that it was impossible to tell her age; she was all angles and shadows, like a marionette made of dead sticks. She’d been standing in one of the doorways, but as if aware that she’d been spotted, turned to look at Rachel, who gasped despite herself.

  After a moment – in which Rachel realised that she had no idea what to say, if in fact she could communicate at all – the shade turned and walked away along the open-sided corridor.

  ‘Wait!’ she called, and followed.

  ‘You’ve seen something?’ asked Eline, hurrying after.

  ‘Rache, be careful!’ warned Tom. ‘The floor is fucked!’ He hung back, indecisive. ‘Jesus, Rache, you’re going to get yourself killed!’ Eventually he too followed, wincing at every creaking floorboard.

  The thin woman disappeared around a corner. Rachel followed but stopped short, blinking, as her sight tried to reconcile something impossible: there was a pair of swinging double doors which her right eye, looking at the living world, saw lying on the floor covered in debris, and another large room beyond. Her left eye, however, looking through the hole that her fingers made into limbo, insisted that the doors were still standing – one was still swinging slightly from the phantom woman’s passage into the room beyond.