The Hollow Tree

by James Brogden

  ‘Still,’ she said to herself. ‘At least something’s different. That’s promising.’

  ‘What was that?’ asked Eline, catching up.

  ‘She went in there.’ Rachel pointed, and explained what she’d seen. The room looked like it had once been some kind of day room before time’s decay had ravaged it. Carpet tiles, stinking with damp and rot, were peeling from the floor like scabs, while sofas and armchairs sat amongst the shredded debris of their own insides. Someone had collected scores of old plastic seats and jumbled them into a mountain of jutting, rusted legs in the centre of the room, as if in offering to something. Of any inhabitants, living or dead, there was no sign.

  Rachel frowned. ‘I don’t get it.’

  Eline and Tom could only watch, perplexed, as she peered around the room in confusion. There was no evidence for her to think so, but the scribbled ziggurat of chairs gave the impression that it had been built and taken down and rebuilt over and over again in an act of obsessive and mindless construction only momentarily interrupted by their presence. The air crawled with unseen activity waiting to resume after their departure, like cockroaches inside the walls.

  ‘She came in here, I’m certain of it. So why can’t I see her?’

  Tom went over to investigate a warped noticeboard hanging diagonally from one wall, and the tatters of yellowing paper still attached to it.

  FRIDAY NIGHT IS BINGO NIGHT!

  Please replace all board games in the cupboard after use.

  Would you know the signs of a stroke if you saw them?

  Think F.A.S.T.!

  ‘Wait,’ Rachel said. ‘Maybe if I…’ She went back to the doorway, but instead of using her left hand to see the room she reached out and her dead fingers touched the shadow door that still stood in the frame that her living eyes insisted was empty. She pushed, and felt it move, vibrating slightly as its hinges gave a creak she couldn’t hear. She pushed it open fully and stepped over the empty threshold, hoping that when she looked through barjok this time she would see the ghost woman who had so unaccountably managed to hide. There was still so much about this talent that she didn’t understand. She felt like a chimpanzee with a smartphone, prodding until something happened and trying to make sense of the funny lights and sounds.

  Then an ice-dead hand closed over her left wrist, and she yelped with surprise.

  Christ, not again. I’m not dragging anybody else through.

  Tom, at the other side of the room, was turning with surprise and Eline was just opening her mouth to ask what the matter was when two more hands latched themselves onto Rachel’s dead wrist, and sudden terror swamped her.

  Oh fuck, how many of them are there? They can’t all want…

  As one they pulled, and she screamed as she recognised the trap for what it was, too late.

  And her arm disappeared up to the elbow.

  It was just like when she’d pulled the lesh apart, except this time her flesh didn’t come back. More hands grasped at her, scratching, clamping on her like frozen manacles, and before she could brace her feet she was yanked again and her arm disappeared to the shoulder.

  ‘No!’ she sobbed. ‘NO!’

  The more of her arm they took, the more purchase the dead had on her, and the harder they pulled.

  ‘Jesus fucking christ get the moffme GET THE MOFFME!’ she howled.

  Eline grabbed her right arm and yelled ‘Hang on!’ as Tom lunged from the other side of the room. Her left arm, now completely in limbo, was busy with dead hands from knuckle to armpit, fighting amongst themselves, tearing each other away and taking their places, and it was simply too much to oppose, even for the pair of them. With one final despairing shriek Rachel was pulled bodily into limbo, and Eline tumbled after.

  * * *

  Tom stumbled into the empty space where his wife had been a second before, and stopped, gaping.

  ‘Rachel?’ he whispered.

  There was no response. Maybe it was his imagination that made him think the shadows were busier here than they had been – but maybe not.

  ‘Rachel!’ he bellowed, and the reverberations brought a sifting of plaster debris from the ceiling but nothing more.

  ‘RACHEL!’

  30

  THE SMALL MAN’S PRIZE

  THE ROOM WAS IN THE SAME STATE OF DECAY ON THIS side, Rachel saw, but it wasn’t empty. It was thronged with the shades of the dead.

  They let go of her as soon as she was through, and retreated slightly, forming a shuffling mob in a tight circle around her and Eline. They were gaunt and grey, all hollow eyes, gaping mouths and shuffling limbs. Most wore the tattered rags of their institutional smocks, some were in straitjackets and muzzles, and quite a few were naked, their rake-thin bodies like concentration camp victims. Some carried the marks of their deaths: gaping wrists, burns, blackened tongues and throats livid with the marks of homemade nooses.

  But for all that, their individual personalities had been winnowed away over the years down to a single dumb imperative to simply exist. They were pathetic things, Rachel saw, and now that they’d accomplished their purpose they didn’t seem actively malicious. Eline, on the other hand, was shrinking from them in terror, moaning deep in her throat like a trapped animal, which was probably the more normal reaction to being surrounded by a horde of the dead. So why didn’t they freak Rachel out as much as they did Eline? Was she that far gone? Anger quickly rose to replace her fear.

  ‘What do you want with me?’ she demanded. ‘I’m not taking any of you back.’

  ‘No, you most decidedly are not,’ responded a familiar voice.

  The crowd parted to reveal, enthroned on one of the crumbling plastic chairs, the death that wore Van Alst’s face. He’d swapped his long dark coat for doctor’s whites, though they weren’t especially white, blotched as they were with old bloodstains and filth.

  ‘You will never interfere with this place again,’ he added, with venomous intensity. ‘They don’t know that, of course. As far as they’re concerned I’ve brought you here so that they can claw their way back to the living world through your screaming soul. Not that it will work.’ The dead milled uncertainly at his words but he shrugged, unconcerned. ‘But they’ll try it anyway because they literally have nothing to lose and you’ll be insane long before they realise that, and I’ll finally have what is mine.’ He pointed at Eline, who cowered. This made Rachel angrier still: that Eline, who had been so strong, could be made to fall apart so abjectly.

  ‘You’ll have to get through me first,’ she said.

  The Dark Man laughed. ‘You will find that here, in the umbra, my world, you are not quite as strong as you think.’ He raised his left hand. ‘Hm?’

  Rachel looked at her stump, and her sudden shock eclipsed everything that she’d seen so far, because it wasn’t a stump any more. Here, her left hand was real again. ‘Oh my God,’ she whispered. She held it up before her eyes and flexed her fingers. It looked no different than it had in the last moments before it had been crushed. The only thing missing was her wedding ring.

  The Dark Man waved at the restless crowd of impatient shades filling the room.

  ‘She’s all yours,’ he said.

  They shuffled forward avidly. Rachel easily shoved them away but there were so many that when one staggered back three more took its place. Cold fingers pawed at her – at her hair, her skin, her clothes – too weak to harm, only to clutch desperately, and their voices as they begged were whisper-thin, a susurrating chorus of pleading. Their breath, what little they had, was in her mouth, dry and dusty and sickly-sweet with rot.

  ‘I can’t help you!’ she pleaded. ‘I don’t know what to do!’

  They might be pathetic and deserving of pity, but they were so many, so close, fighting with each other to touch her, to be inside her, and through her to be alive again that their collective insistence would kill her just as surely.

  Eline was screaming and thrashing out at them, even though they weren’t interested in her a
t all, but they pressed in on all sides and prevented any escape.

  Then Rachel must have blacked out for a moment, because it felt like a great shadow had thrown itself over both her and Eline and then turned itself inside out like an umbrella, because when she blinked again the dead were gone, along with Van Alst, and she was in an entirely different part of the asylum.

  * * *

  Standing before her was the Small Man, doing his best to look anxious and concerned.

  ‘We don’t have much time,’ he said. ‘My brother will find out where I’ve brought you soon enough. Come on.’

  He set off along a corridor but when Rachel and Eline didn’t immediately follow he looked back, frowning. ‘Or did I get it wrong and you were actually enjoying yourselves back there?’

  A sudden attack of vertigo seized Rachel as her brain tried to cope with the situation. She tottered and Eline caught her.

  ‘Why did you save us?’ Eline demanded. ‘How did you save us?’

  The Small Man pinched the bridge of his nose, reining in his obvious impatience. ‘As my brother said, you are in my world now, and I make the rules. Do you want to see Bill Heath or not?’

  ‘How do you know about that?’

  ‘For God’s sake, woman!’ he snapped. ‘Yes or no?’

  Yes was the only answer they could give, though it lessened Rachel’s distrust of him not one bit, and as they followed him she couldn’t shake the feeling that far from this being a rescue they were only being led deeper into the trap.

  They were in a corridor somewhere on the asylum’s top floor, she guessed, from the fact that just overhead through the space where the ceiling had been and the blackened ribs of the roof joists beyond, she could see the violet light of whatever passed for sky in this place. The doorways down each side of the corridor were open and dark, except for one where the door remained closed – it was heavy wood, hinged and banded with iron, more suitable to a dungeon than a hospital. Here the Small Man took out a ring of heavy cast-iron keys and fitted one into the lock.

  ‘It wasn’t easy keeping Heath out of the way,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Van Alst’s myth is very strong in this place. But then that was inevitable, of course. Heart of the labyrinth.’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ said Rachel.

  He looked at her, one hand on the door. ‘Of course you do. You knew there was something you could use against him here and so I’ve brought you to it.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because the enemy of my enemy is my friend,’ said Eline scathingly. ‘He’s using us, just like he used you to kill his other brother, the lesh.’

  The Small Man winked at her. ‘Catches on quick, don’t she?’ He pushed the door open.

  * * *

  The cell was as ruined as Rachel had come to expect: big chunks of plaster had fallen from the walls, leaving red bricks exposed like raw muscle, and black mould covered what was left. A rat-eaten mattress sagged on a rusted iron-framed bed, on the edge of which sat the shade of a man with his head in his hands. He looked up as they entered, and Eline gasped.

  ‘Bill? Bill Heath?’

  His eyes widened as he saw her, and began to spill with tears. ‘It’s you!’ he wept. ‘I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! I should have told somebody. But I was scared. I shouldn’t have left you there. I should have done something the moment we found you.’

  ‘What do you mean, “found me”?’ demanded Eline. ‘You put me there, you and that bastard Van Alst! Shot me and dumped me like so much rubbish!’ The Browning was in her hand and pointed at his face. He gazed at the muzzle vacantly. ‘You killed me, you bastard. You watched him shoot me and then you drove me up to that place and you put me in that tree and you left me to die!’ She was shrieking now, her cheeks wet with tears.

  ‘No…’ Heath murmured, in tones of great puzzlement. ‘No, that’s not what happened…’

  The Small Man, who had his ear pressed against the door, cursed. ‘He’s here. Shit. Heath, just tell her. You!’ He pointed at Rachel. ‘Help me hold this door shut!’

  Rachel leaned against the cell door next to the Small Man. Despite being a good six inches shorter than her, this close he was even more unpleasant. There was a sweet smell about him, like a teenager’s antiperspirant, but it also reminded her of the rot on the dead patients’ breath.

  ‘A simple ambush,’ he tutted. ‘That’s all it was supposed to be. And then you had to bring her along and now I’ve got to protect the pair of you.’ He shook his head. ‘Sickening.’

  ‘So sorry to have inconvenienced you,’ she retorted.

  Heath was shaking his head slowly. ‘But… no… we didn’t shoot anybody. We found you there. You were already in the tree when we got there. You were dying. I left you to die. I’m so sorry…’

  Rachel felt a sudden sick realisation unfolding within her. ‘Eline…’ she warned.

  Heath’s eyes wandered to her. ‘Eline? Who’s Eline?’

  ‘Me!’ screamed Eline. ‘I am! Eline Lambert! Van Alst’s “piece”, you lying bastard! He was spying for the Germans and I double-crossed him and he killed me for it!’

  Heath shook his head again. ‘But… I don’t understand… You’re not Van Alst’s girl. She was drunk so we took her back to her digs after the pub. Then we went up to Beacon Hill, to the tree. It was hollow. Good for hiding things we stole. Cigarettes and stockings and such. He wasn’t a spy. Nor was she. She worked in a grocer’s. And her name wasn’t Eline – it was Sally. You were in the tree. I’m so sorry…’

  ‘You’re lying!’

  Something threw itself heavily at the other side of the door, and it shuddered.

  ‘What are you doing with my girl, little brother?’ called Van Alst from the other side. ‘I thought you just wanted the woman.’

  The Small Man made a face. ‘Little. Always going on about the height. You see,’ he said to Rachel, ‘he and I are what you might call mutually exclusive. For one of us to exist, the other logically cannot. Therefore we cannot confront each other directly, and so we must act through proxies. Which is why you currently are the only thing holding this door shut.’

  ‘What?!’ The door was struck again, opened an inch and then slammed shut as Rachel planted her feet and shoved back hard. ‘Lock this fucking door!’ she demanded.

  The Small Man stepped towards Eline and Heath, twirling the key on his forefinger. ‘Now if I did that, you’d be free to interfere again, wouldn’t you?’ he said. ‘No, I think it’s better if you stay right there.’

  Heath was imploring Eline to listen to him. Her gun was pointed straight at his face. ‘You were already in the tree when we got there! I don’t know who you are but I swear, we didn’t shoot you! We didn’t even have a gun! You were already there! And your head… there was so much blood… you must have been dead. I didn’t do it!’

  The door was rammed again, harder, and this time the gap was wide enough for an arm to come darting through just as Rachel pushed back again, trapping it, and the Dark Man howled in rage and pain. ‘Eline!’ she screamed. ‘Whatever he’s saying, it’s all lies! Don’t believe him! It’s a trick!’

  ‘Oh no,’ said the Small Man, taking the knife out of his pocket. ‘It’s the truth, from the very lips of the dead, and they never lie.’

  ‘And then you opened your eyes,’ said Heath. ‘I was looking down into the tree and you… opened your eyes and looked right up at me! You knew I was there! You knew I could see you and that I wasn’t going to do anything to help.’ He buried his face in his hands again, sobbing.

  ‘For God’s sake, why didn’t you?’ Rachel demanded.

  ‘Yes, why didn’t you?’ echoed the Small Man. ‘Go on, Heath, tell her.’

  ‘Van Alst,’ Heath whispered. ‘He said we’d get blamed. That we’d hang. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was scared!’

  The Dark Man threw himself at the door again. ‘You lying mongrel!’ he snarled at the Small Man. ‘You never said anything about Heath bein
g here! You said you wanted the woman!’

  ‘And you just keep on believing me, don’t you, mein bruder?’ the Small Man sighed, shaking his head.

  ‘Heath!’ the Dark Man screamed. ‘Keep your trap shut, you gutless little turd!’

  ‘Eline!’ cried Rachel. ‘Please, help me! I can’t hold this much longer.’

  But Eline’s attention was fixed on the shade of Bill Heath, who was rocking back and forth on the edge of his bed, weeping. She was pale and shuddering, and the gun wavered in her hand. The Small Man was right behind her, close enough to be nuzzling the hair above her ear, but she didn’t seem to notice that either.

  ‘Thank you very much, Bill,’ said the Small Man. ‘You’ve been most forthcoming. Now if you’ll just be so kind as to—’

  ‘Then Van Alst picked up a big pile of dead leaves,’ Heath continued, ignoring the Small Man, his eyes fixed on the woman in front of him. ‘And he… dumped them straight on your face and he said, “That’s that then,” and walked off. But I saw you spit the leaves out, so I know you were alive for at least a while. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘No!’ Eline whispered, backing away now, her pistol drooping. ‘This didn’t happen! This can’t have happened…’

  ‘You only said one thing—’

  ‘We don’t need to know any more!’ said the Small Man sharply. For some reason he seemed surprised, and even afraid of what more Heath might say. But Heath’s confession, once begun, wouldn’t rest until it had run its course.

  ‘Just one word… just a name.’

  ‘Heath! For once I agree with my brother: keep your trap shut!’

  ‘What name?’ moaned Eline.

  ‘Stephen.’