The Hollow Tree

by James Brogden

  ‘Hey! Wait!’

  They scrambled up a slope of pulverised brick, which was all that remained of a bombed house, and disappeared over the top. Rachel followed, picking her way over the rubble: bricks, plaster, burnt timbers, and mangled items of furniture. She was so intent on finding safe footholds in the sliding debris that she didn’t notice the man in the uniform standing at the very top until he shouted at her.

  ‘Oi! You can’t come through here, miss! It ain’t safe!’

  He was an air raid warden in dark overalls and wellington boots, wearing a broad-brimmed tin helmet with a letter W on the front and a large satchel around his neck. He made violent shooing motions with his arms as he shouted.

  ‘You have to go back!’

  Rachel had absolutely no intention of going back. She carried on climbing, ignoring his increasingly strenuous protests.

  ‘You want to have a building fall on you, do you? Silly cow!’

  ‘Tried that,’ she grunted, coming level with him. ‘Didn’t work.’

  The ARP warden was red-faced and blustering by this time, jabbing a finger in her face and spraying her with spittle as he sputtered, ‘I’ll have to call the authorities, you know! You leave me no choice!’

  ‘Good,’ she said, and grabbed his finger with her left hand and twisted, forcing him to his knees in the rubble as he yelped. ‘You do that. Go and tell the authorities that Beatrice Eaton’s great-granddaughter is here to rescue her soul – then maybe we can end this quickly without too much dicking around.’

  She let him go and he slithered and scrambled down the other side of the debris hill, kicking up dust and sending small avalanches ahead of him. She saw that the back of his uniform had been burnt away, along with most of the flesh and muscle from his back; his ribcage and spine were charred black and shed crumbling fragments as he moved.

  There was no sign of the children, but there was an awful lot of bustle and chaos in the road on this side for them to have disappeared into. Several buildings were on fire, and fire crews were sending streams of water into the flames with little obvious effect. The air was full of smoke, steam, the roar of water and fire, the chuntering of the diesel pump and the shouted commands of men. A crowd of onlookers had turned out to watch, every single one of whom was dead.

  Some, like the ARP warden, wore their deaths openly: burns, eviscerations, crush injuries and distorted limbs. Others were less demonstrative or else had died of more subtle causes, but still had the same hollow-eyed pallor. Rachel didn’t know whether they would be able to see that she was different, but didn’t want to draw the attention of so large a crowd for fear that they would mob her as the shades in the asylum had, so she picked a careful way around them, using piles of smoking debris for cover.

  Above them, the city skyline had changed – it was now a jagged silhouette against the lurid orange of burning, shot through with the questing fingers of searchlights and the fat bumblebee shapes of barrage balloons. Formations of bombers passed in an unending swarm far above even these, the droning snarl of their engines filling the air like the stink of burning. This part of the umbra belonged to the victims of the Birmingham blitz: their memories of three years of air raids shaped and condensed into a single unending night of devastation and horror.

  She saw a tree festooned with the contents of someone’s wardrobe, along with red, dripping ropes of intestines. She passed a woman in a gas mask pushing a pram, her muffled voice singing, ‘Mary in the oak tree, cold as cold can be,’ to something swaddled in blankets which was burned black but still twitching. A housewife sat amongst the ruins of her home and drank tea from a cup and saucer, weeping silently.

  Eventually Rachel found herself in a wider thoroughfare that was almost entirely empty of traffic, which made sense during an air raid. But if the umbra mapped onto the living world as it seemed to do, and she needed to get to the Lickey Hills in time to stop the Small Man from killing Daphne again, then she was going to have trouble flagging down a lift.

  An ambulance screamed by, its bell clanging frantically, followed by an army truck; as it passed her, rows of grimfaced soldiers stared out from the back.

  With a heavy sigh, she picked a direction that felt like south and started walking again.

  * * *

  It had been raining all day, and the M5 was a wide mirrorsheened ribbon as it curved away from where Tom had parked on the hard shoulder. He put his hazard lights on; there was no need to risk anybody else’s life.

  He got out of the van, shrugging on his waterproof against the downpour, and wandered a little way along the breakdown lane, peering at the tarmac and kicking bits of debris out of the way. It would have been somewhere around here, he reckoned – four years ago but just as fresh in his memory as if it had happened yesterday. Lorries hissed past, buffeting him with their slipstreams. He knew he was being watched on motorway CCTV, but he had a little while before anybody called a patrol four-by-four to check on him; they’d assume he was waiting for his own breakdown service.

  ‘Come on then!’ he called into the shifting veils of rain. ‘You want me, here I am! Let’s talk terms!’

  For a long time, during which he strode up and down the hard shoulder, yelling into the rain, nothing happened. When he finally saw the checkered yellow-and-black livery of a Highways Agency Range Rover approaching slowly with its hazards on, he wasn’t sure if it was a real living rescue driver or the one he’d been calling for. By this time he was drenched and shivering despite his waterproofs.

  ‘I know you can hear me!’ he called. ‘I want to make a trade!’

  The four-by-four rolled to a halt a few metres from him, its windscreen wipers flicking. Through them, he saw the face of the driver who’d saved his life all those years ago, gazing impassively back. Tom reckoned that if anybody were watching this on a screen, all they would see was a crazy man standing in the rain staring at an empty breakdown lane. And they might well have been right; this was crazy.

  ‘Finally,’ he said. ‘What, were you on a tea break?’ Nerves made him flippant, even though his heart was hammering with terror. ‘Get out and talk to me. There’s something I want.’

  The face remained impassive for a moment longer, and then the driver’s door opened.

  38

  APPETITES

  RACHEL WALKED UNTIL HER FEET WERE NUMB, BUT her surroundings hardly changed. One burning, devastated neighbourhood gave way to another, populated by shambling figures. She found tram rails, but nothing passed by in either direction. She was beginning to wonder whether somehow her journey was being deliberately elongated; some power of the Small Man, alerted to her presence, that was stretching out the distance to obstruct her. But if that were the case why not come at her directly? It was tempting to think he was still scared of her.

  It wasn’t long before she saw the first ‘wanted’ poster. Beneath the words ‘Do You Know This Woman? She May Be a Spy! Please Alert the Authorities if You Have Seen Her!’ was a photograph of Rachel. Half a mile further on she ran into a Home Guard patrol. If they hadn’t been making so much noise she’d have walked right into their arms, but as it was the sound of ribald male laughter made her duck behind a section of half-collapsed wall just as a quartet of Home Guard soldiers came around the corner. Only one wore a uniform and a peaked cap; the three following him were in civvies with armbands, tin helmets rattling on their heads and rifles loose in their hands. The rearmost was struggling to hop along while scraping something off the side of his boot against the pavement, and the other two were winding him up.

  ‘Trust Paddy to step in the only dog turd in a hundred yards…’

  ‘Chaps, wait up…’

  ‘Aye, Paddy’s a regular shit magnet. Have you seen that girl of his?’

  ‘Oh, come on now, chaps…’

  Only their uniformed leader seemed to be paying attention to anything around him. Rachel watched him carefully from a crack between two bricks: his quick, dark eyes glancing left and right. She held her breath
as they passed, and only when the sound of their banter had disappeared into the background rumble of war did she peep out, then scurry off in the opposite direction.

  That was when she heard the car. It pulled past her – a Morris Ten with high curved wheel arches and owlish headlights – slowed, and the driver wound down his window. She picked up her pace, glancing sidelong at him and angling away from the pavement because there was no world, living or dead, in which a strange car slowing down for a woman walking alone was a good thing.

  ‘Rachel Cooper!’ he called. ‘I’ve come from Tom. He seemed to think you might need some help.’

  She stopped and backed away warily. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Because there’s Uber in hell. Leave me alone.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ he said. ‘But a quarter of a mile in the direction you’re going is a roadblock, and they’re checking identity papers. I don’t think you want to try to talk your way through that. The man they answer to now is no friend of yours.’

  ‘Cheers for the heads-up,’ she answered. ‘I’ll find a way around, thanks.’

  ‘That one, yes, you might. But not the others, or the Home Guard patrols. And the place you’re heading to in the hills is even more tightly guarded.’

  She looked more closely at the driver. He had fair hair and a wide face with a neat ginger goatee, and even though he was driving a thirties automobile he was dressed in a modern hi-vis jacket with orange shoulders and a uniform she knew very well: the Highways Agency. ‘Who are you? Why would Tom send you? How could he?’

  ‘Look, it’s all the same to me whether you get in or not. I’ve kept my side of the bargain. If you’re too stubborn or too stupid…’ He shifted the car into gear and started to move off.

  ‘Wait!’ Rachel yelled, and ran after him. ‘What bargain? What deal has Tom done with you?’

  The car stopped again. The Highwayman leaned over and opened the passenger side door, saying nothing. After a moment’s agonised indecision she got in, and he set off.

  The inside of the Morris smelt of vinyl, Bakelite and cigarettes, but at least it was warm. The driver was larger than he had first seemed, filling his side of the car, and she saw that his seat was shifted back as far as it would go but his knees were still bent. ‘I know what you are,’ she said.

  The psychopomp glanced at her. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Then you’ll know exactly what kind of deal your husband made.’

  ‘Is he…?’ She couldn’t bring herself to say the word.

  ‘No. Not yet. How long exactly?’ He shrugged. ‘Nobody ever knows. Not even us. But he’s been living on borrowed time, and all borrowing has its cost.’

  ‘What would it take…’ She swallowed, fearing the consequences of her question. ‘What would it take for you to leave him alone?’

  ‘You misunderstand. Death is simply a biological process that cannot be bargained with. We are not death, we simply guarantee safe passage to what comes next. This hell you see around you is made by the dead for themselves. Would you rather he be left to something like this?’

  ‘So why did you save him that day on the motorway? You just said that death can’t be cheated.’

  ‘I said it couldn’t be bargained with. Cheating it is an entirely different thing.’

  ‘But why do it anyway? Why not just take him?’

  The Highwayman simply smiled cryptically. ‘Your Small Man is not the only one who likes to play games.’

  Rachel closed her eyes and let the tears come. ‘He was just trying to protect me,’ she whispered. ‘That’s all he’s ever tried to do.’

  The psychopomp grunted. ‘Then make it count.’

  A few minutes later he added, ‘Start now – get in the back. We’re coming up to the checkpoint.’

  She could see brighter lights in the road up ahead so did as she was told, climbing over and into the back. There she found a tarpaulin bundled up on the seat and lay on the floor, pulling it over her.

  The car slowed, stopped, and footsteps approached.

  ‘Got some ID, pal?’ asked a voice.

  ‘No,’ said the Highwayman. ‘You know what I am. You’ll let me pass.’

  This was met with mutterings of consternation from further off. The first voice returned, nervous and bullish. ‘We know all right. Whether we let you pass is another matter, pal. There’s new orders. You’ve got to answer to the new authorities just the same.’

  Rachel heard the springs in the driver’s seat creak as he shifted his considerable weight.

  ‘What I answer to,’ said the Highwayman, ‘will do much the same to your new authority as this.’ There was a sudden scream from his interrogator, which turned into a series of choked squawks as the car rocked, and then something that sounded like a very large chicken drumstick being pulled apart. There were screams of ‘Let him pass! For God’s sake let him pass!’ The Highwayman grunted with satisfaction, started the car and set off again.

  When he signalled that it was safe to do so, Rachel climbed out of hiding and rejoined him in the front. Through the windscreen she saw that the burning cityscape had been replaced by a line of dark hills, above which floated a single fat barrage balloon.

  ‘Your Small Man has done a good job of consolidating his power in this part of the umbra,’ said the Highwayman. ‘His brief existence in the world of the flesh has given him a taste for power. Power!’ he laughed shortly and shook his head. ‘There is no god, or gods, or devils after this. No. But there are… appetites. Hungers. Aspirations. There is nothing which aspires which was not first human.’

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

  ‘I and your Small Man and others of our kind were human once. It is possible that the reason I saved your Tom was out of… nostalgia, perhaps? We exist to service those appetites, which were themselves once human, and thus we may be seen as guides and guardians or reapers and demons, depending.’

  ‘Depending on what?’

  He shrugged. ‘How you die, whether you are ready to die, where you choose to go after you die—’

  ‘Wait – we get to choose?’

  He blinked at her as if the question was so stupid it surprised him that she would even utter it. ‘Of course. What else would be the point?’

  ‘And which of these appetites do you serve? Where are you going to deliver Tom’s soul?’

  ‘Have you not been listening? That depends on him, not me. But your Small Man, now, he wants to be Big. He has acquired an appetite. He aspires. He has kept Oak Mary for himself when he should have delivered her, because her belief – and the belief of others in her – makes him strong. She is the saint around which he will build his church. In so doing he has overstepped the bounds of his condition, and that is a very dangerous thing. You have set yourself against him and have the means to destroy him because his power, like the power of any death, is founded on the belief of its victim and for the moment Oak Mary believes that he is her killer. Convince her otherwise – convince her of her true death – and he will no longer exist, just as the two others who appeared with him ceased to exist when they were disproved.’

  ‘I was going to do that anyway,’ Rachel pointed out.

  ‘Yes, but now you know there is a bigger picture. Do this, and you draw the attention of those appetites. That may be something you wish to avoid.’

  ‘Are you offering me a chance to back out?’

  The Highwayman merely stared ahead at the road and grunted, which could have meant anything.

  ‘One of your lot dressed as my dad tried to tell me the same thing, a little while back,’ Rachel said. ‘My answer’s the same as it was then: fuck that. And just so you know,’ she added, ‘I don’t care about your bigger picture. I don’t care what kind of a deal Tom made with you. You come near him again, you and I are going to have words.’

  He looked at her, and there was a new wariness in his expression. ‘That will be an interesting conversation,’ was all he said.

  * * *

  They drove past the bro
ken chimneys and shattered windows of the Longbridge works where Eline had claimed to have worked, though Rachel knew now that it had just been an echo of Beatrice’s life. In the same way, Annabel’s accidental cursing of her son had simply mirrored Beatrice’s grief at abandoning Stephen; her false lives had all carried within them some element of the truth that they unconsciously acknowledged.

  The Highwayman seemed not to need headlights, steering confidently in the almost pitch dark as the road rose, taking them right into the shadow of the hills, and the houses began to give way to woods. The black silhouette of the barrage balloon, moored in the hills to protect the factory, seemed to hang directly over the car, like a massive, impossible weight ready to crush it.

  He pulled over at a bend in the road. ‘Here’s where you get out. Take the trees for cover and make your way up the slope to the oak; that’s where he has her.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  The Highwayman grinned, and she saw his teeth gleam in the dark. It was the first time she’d seen him smile, and it wasn’t an altogether reassuring sight. ‘I am going to keep his men up there very busy on your behalf.’

  She got out of the car and stood at the roadside. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t thank me. Thank your Tom, for as long as you can.’ Then he flicked the headlights on high beam, gunned the engine loudly and set off up the hill at a roar, leaning on the horn.

  Rachel wasted no time, and began clambering uphill through the bushes. She knew these hills so well that she could have found the Mary Oak easily, even in the dark, but it seemed that even the vegetation was under the Small Man’s control; she was snagged and tripped by brambles, stabbed by gorse thorns, whipped across the face by thin branches and stung by nettles. In a strange way, though, it was exhilarating to be able to grab at branches and roots with both hands to haul herself along. If she’d remained an amputee her progress would have been much slower.

  A distant commotion erupted: shouts and gunfire and flashes of light through the trees. The Highwayman was making good on his distraction. She gritted her teeth, braced her feet and pushed onwards.