The Witch Elm: A Novel

by Tana French

  click

  trying to push myself up from the floor but my arms were juddering like a seizure, went from under me and face-first onto the carpet

  click

  lunatic swipes and dabbles of red on white fabric, rich metallic reek of blood

  click

  on hands and knees, vomiting, warm liquid spilling onto my fingers

  click

  ragged blue chunks of china, scattered (in retrospect I figure these must have been the remnants of my espresso cup but at the time my mind wasn’t working that way, nothing had any meaning or any essence, nothing was anything except there)

  click

  crawling through an endless field of debris that shifted and crackled, my knees slipping, the edges of my vision seething

  click

  the corridor, stretching away for miles, brown and beige and pulsing. A flick of movement far far away at the end, something white

  holding myself up against the wall, staggering forwards jerkily as if all my joints had been unstrung. A terrible cawing noise coming from somewhere, rhythmic and impersonal; I tried desperately to speed up, to get away before it could attack, but I couldn’t break out of nightmare slow-motion and it was still there, in my ears, at my back, all around me (and now of course I’m pretty sure it was my own breathing, but at the time et cetera et cetera)

  click

  brown wood, a door. Scrabbling at it, grate of my fingernails, a hoarse moaning that wouldn’t form into words

  click

  a man’s voice urgently demanding something, a woman’s face skewed with horror, mouth wide, pink quilted dressing gown, and then one of my legs went liquid and the blindness came roaring back in and I disappeared.

  Two

  After that came a long period—about forty-eight hours, as far as I can reconstruct events—where nothing made much sense. Obviously there are big dark patches where I was out cold, and I’m unpleasantly aware that I’m unlikely ever to know exactly what went on during those. I did ask my mother once, but she got a white, tight look around her mouth and said, “I can’t, Toby,” and that was the end of that.

  Even when I started to wake up off and on, my memories are dislocated fragments arranged in no particular order. People barking at me, demanding things from me; sometimes I tried to do what they wanted—squeeze my hand, I remember, and open your eyes—to make them happy so they would leave me alone, but sometimes I just ignored them and eventually they went away again. My mother slumped in a plastic chair, silver-blond hair straggling loose and a green cardigan falling off one shoulder. She looked terrible and I wanted to put an arm around her and tell her that everything would be fine, she was getting wound up over nothing, all I had done was jump out of my grandparents’ tree and break my ankle; I wanted to make her laugh till her slim rigid shoulders relaxed, but all I could manage was a clumsy grunting sound that sent her hurtling from the chair towards me, mouth stretched wide, Toby oh sweetheart can you—and then more darkness. My hand, with a chunky, shocking arrangement of needle and tube and bandage attached to the back of it, embedded deep in my flesh like some grotesque parasite. My father leaning against a wall, unshaven and baggy-eyed, blowing into a paper cup. There was an animal pacing silently back and forth in front of him, a long-muscled tan creature that looked like some kind of wild dog, maybe a jackal, but I couldn’t focus on it properly enough to be sure; my dad didn’t seem to have noticed it and it occurred to me that maybe I should warn him, but that would have felt silly when quite possibly he had brought the animal himself, to cheer me up, which it wasn’t really doing but maybe later it was going to curl up on the bed with me and that would do something about the pain— The pain was so huge and diffuse that it felt like an element intrinsic to the air, something to be taken for granted because it had always been there and would never go away. And yet it’s not what I remember most vividly when I think of those first couple of days, not the pain; what I remember is the sensation that I was being methodically pulled apart into gobbets, body and mind, as easily as a wet tissue, and that there was nothing at all I could do to resist.

  When the parts of me actually managed to reassemble themselves, tentatively and to whatever extent and in whatever form, it was night. I was flat on my back in an uncomfortable bed in an unfamiliar room, some part of which was partitioned off by a long pale curtain. I was much too hot. My lips were parched; my mouth felt like it was lined with dried clay. One of my hands was tethered to a tube that ran upwards into shadow. Window blinds ticked fitfully in a draft; a machine beeped faintly and regularly.

  It occurred to me, gradually, that I must be in a hospital. This seemed like a good idea, given the kind of pain I was in. Just about everything hurt. The epicenter seemed to be a spot just behind my right temple; it felt full to bursting with a dark, hideous, liquid throbbing that made me too afraid to put up my hand and feel it.

  The rush of sheer terror, once started, wouldn’t stop. My heart was racing so frantically that I thought I might be having a heart attack; I was panting like a runner and every breath flared pain through my left side, which set the terror rising even more wildly. I knew there had to be a button somewhere nearby that I could press for a nurse, but I couldn’t afford to do that: what if she gave me something that knocked me out, and I never managed to struggle back up again?

  I lay very still for a long time, gripping fistfuls of bedsheet and fighting not to scream. Thin stripes of gray light slid between the slats of the window blinds. Somewhere beyond the curtain a woman was crying, quietly and terribly.

  At the heart of the fear was the fact that I had no idea how I had got there. I remembered something about Hogan’s and Sean and Dec, walking home, phone kisses to Melissa or had that been another night? and then nothing. If someone had tried to kill me—and it certainly felt like they had, and had come pretty close to getting the job done—then what was to stop them coming after me in here, what was to stop them being behind the curtain right now? Sore, weak, shaking, staked down by tubes and God knew what else, I wasn’t going to be much use against a merciless determined killer— The blinds clicked, and a spasm of fear nearly shot me out of the bed.

  I don’t know how long I lay there, trawling doggedly and desperately through the ragged shards of my mind. The woman in the other bed was still crying, which was at least slightly reassuring: as long as she kept going, I could be fairly sure there was no one creeping up on her side of the curtain. I was pretty close to tears myself by the time I finally managed to come up with one image: my living room, sudden blaze of light, two men frozen and staring at me.

  Maybe this sounds strange, but it came as a huge relief. Burglars had beaten me up: it could happen to anyone, and now it was over and I was safe; they were hardly going to track me down in hospital to finish the job. All I had to do was lie there and get better.

  Slowly my heart rate calmed. I think I even smiled, through it all, into the dark. That’s how convinced I was, you see, how utterly and blessedly certain, that it was all over.

  * * *

  In the morning a doctor came to see me. I was awake, more or less—the noise level out in the corridor had been building for a while, brisk voices, footsteps, the sinister rumble of trolley wheels—but I could tell from the pale, head-cracking blast of light through the window that it was early. Behind the curtain someone was telling the woman in the other bed, with the cool, heavily emphasized firmness you would use on someone else’s tantruming toddler, “You’ll just have to accept that everything we’ve done has been within best-practice guidelines.”

  I must have made some sound, because there was a rustle off to the side and a voice said gently, “Toby.”

  I flinched, sending pain crashing everywhere, but it was my father: leaning forwards in a chair, rumpled and red-eyed. “Toby, it’s me. How are you feeling?”

  “OK,” I said blurrily. Actually I was feeling a lot les
s Zen than I had when I went to sleep. Everything hurt even worse, which wasn’t supposed to be happening; I was supposed to be getting better, and the possibility that things might not be that straightforward set the panic scritch-scratching at the edges of my mind again. I managed to get up the courage to touch two fingertips gingerly to the spot behind my right temple, but it seemed to be covered in a thick pad of gauze, which didn’t tell me anything useful, and the movement ratcheted up the pain another notch or two.

  “Do you want anything? A drink of water?”

  What I wanted was something to put over my eyes. I was trying to pull together the focus to ask for it when one edge of the curtain twitched aside.

  “Good morning,” said the doctor, putting his head through the gap. “How are you today?”

  “Oh,” I said, struggling to sit up and wincing. “OK.” My tongue was about twice its usual thickness, and sore on one side. I sounded like some bad actor playing handicapped.

  “Are you feeling well enough to talk?”

  “Yeah. Yes.” I wasn’t, but I urgently needed to know what the fuck was going on.

  “Well, that’s a big step,” the doctor said, closing the curtain behind him and nodding to my father. “Let me give you a hand there.” He fiddled with something and the head of my bed lifted, with a displeased wheezing sound, so that I was half-sitting. “How’s that?”

  The movement made my vision swoop and dip like I was on a fairground ride. “Good,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Good good.” He was a young guy, only a few years older than me; tall, with a round, bland face and a receding hairline. “I’m Dr. Coogan”—or it may have been Cregan or Duggan or something totally unrelated, who knows. “Can you tell me your name?”

  Just the fact that he was asking, like I might actually not know, was disturbing. It brought back a churning flash of chaos, loud voice snapping in my ear, bright light swinging and bouncing, my whole body convulsing with dry retches— “Toby Hennessy.”

  “Mm-hm.” He pulled over a chair and sat down. He was holding a sheaf of cryptic-looking paper that I assumed was my chart, whatever that meant. “Do you know what month it is?”

  “April.”

  “It is indeed. Do you know where you are?”

  “In a hospital.”

  “Right again.” He made some kind of note on the chart. “How are you feeling?”

  “OK. Kind of sore.”

  He glanced up at that. “Where’s the pain?”

  “My head. It’s pretty bad.” This was an understatement—my head was pounding so hideously that it felt like my brain was actually rocking with the force of every heartbeat—but I didn’t want him to go off in search of painkillers and leave me without any explanations. “And my face. And my side. And”—I couldn’t think of the doctor-appropriate term for “right above my arse,” I knew there was one but it wouldn’t come out—“here?” The movement pulled an involuntary noise out of me.

  The doctor nodded. He had small, clear, shallow eyes, like a toy’s. “Yes. Your tailbone is cracked, and so are four of your ribs. There’s nothing we can do to help with those, but they should all heal on their own with no lasting damage; nothing to worry about. And I can certainly get you something for the pain.” He held out a finger. “Can you squeeze my finger?”

  I did. His finger was long and a bit chubby and very dry, and there was something nasty about touching it that intimately.

  “Mm-hm. And with the other hand?”

  I did it again with the other hand. I didn’t need medical training to tell the difference: my right hand felt the same as always; my left had a dreamlike cotton-wool quality that terrified me. My grip was soft as a child’s.

  I glanced up at the doctor, but he gave no sign that he’d noticed anything. “Very good.” He made another note. “May I?”

  He was indicating the bedsheet. “Sure,” I said, disorientated. I had no idea what he wanted to do. My father was watching in silence, elbows on his knees, fingers steepled in front of his mouth.

  The doctor flipped back the sheet, expertly, revealing my bare legs—I had a couple of ugly bruises—and the rucked-up skirt of the hospital gown, which was a graying white with a discreetly perky print of little blue diamonds. “Now,” he said, placing the palm of his hand to the bottom of my foot. “Can you point your foot against my hand?”

  Flex, extend, other foot, left weaker than the right again, although not as badly, surely the difference wasn’t as big— There was something horrifying about being exposed and handled so efficiently and impersonally. He was acting like my body was meat, not attached to a person at all. It took all my willpower not to jerk my foot away from his hand.

  “Good,” he said. “Now I want you to lift your leg against the pressure of my hand. All right?”

  He tweaked my gown straight and put a flat palm on my thigh. “Wait,” I blurted out. “What’s wrong with me?”

  I half-expected him to slap me down like he had the woman in the other bed, but she must have just been neurotic or a pain in the arse or something, because instead he took his hand off my leg and sat back in the chair. “You were attacked,” he said gently. “Do you have any memory of it?”

  “Yes. Not all of, the whole thing, but— I mean, that’s not what I mean. Do I have a, a—” I couldn’t come up with the word. “My head. Did they break it? Or what?”

  “You were hit in the head at least twice. Once probably with a fist, here”—he pointed to the left side of his jaw—“and once with a heavy sharp object, here.” That spot behind my right temple. I heard a tight breath from my father. “You had a concussion, but that seems to have resolved well. You also have a skull fracture, which caused an extradural hematoma—that’s a bleed between the skull and the outer covering of the brain, caused by a ruptured blood vessel. Don’t worry”—I wasn’t really following a lot of this, but at that my eyes must have widened, because he raised one hand reassuringly—“we corrected that surgically, as soon as you came in. We drilled a small hole in your skull and drained the blood, and that relieved the pressure on your brain. You were very lucky.”

  Some vague part of me felt that this was a fairly outrageous thing to say to someone in my situation, but a bigger part seized on the comfort of it—lucky, yes, I was lucky, the guy was a doctor after all, he knew what he was talking about, I didn’t want to be like the whiny woman in the other bed. “I guess,” I said.

  “You were indeed. You had what we call a lucid interval, after the attack. It’s fairly common with this kind of injury. We’re estimating that you were unconscious for an hour or more, due to the concussion, but then you came to and were able to call for help before you lost consciousness again?”

  He blinked at me inquiringly. “I guess,” I said again, after a confused moment. I couldn’t remember calling anyone. I still couldn’t remember much of anything, actually, just dark seething flashes that made me not want to look too closely.

  “Very lucky,” the doctor repeated, leaning forwards to make sure I understood the seriousness of this. “If you hadn’t managed to get help, and the hematoma had been left untreated for another hour or so, it would almost certainly have been fatal.” And when I stared at him blankly, unable to do anything at all with that: “You nearly died.”

  “Oh,” I said, after a moment. “I didn’t realize.”

  We looked at each other. It felt like he was waiting for something from me, but I had no idea what. The woman in the other bed was crying again.

  “Now what?” I asked, managing to keep most of the fluttering panic out of my voice. “I mean, my hand. My leg. Are they going to—? When are they going to—?”

  “Too soon to know any of that,” the doctor said briskly. He wasn’t looking at me any more, he was doing something with his notes, and that made the panic surge higher. “The neurologist will be around to have a—”

 
“I just want a, a, a—” I couldn’t come up with the word, and I was afraid this was where he would put on that toddler-quelling voice and tell me to stop asking questions and behave myself—

  “We understand you can’t give us any guarantees,” my father said, quietly but firmly. “We’d just like a general idea of what to expect.”

  After a moment the doctor nodded and folded his hands on top of the notes. “There’s often some damage after an injury like this,” he said. “Yours seems to be relatively minor, although I can’t say anything definitive based on a bedside assessment. One common effect is seizures, so you’ll have to be watchful for those, but they usually peter out over time. We’ll be referring you to a physical therapist who can help with the left-side weakness, and there are occupational therapists available if you find yourself having trouble with concentration or memory.” His tone was so matter-of-fact and reasonable that he actually had me nodding along, like all of this—seizures, occupational therapist, stuff straight out of some melodramatic medical show light-years away from my real life—was perfectly normal. Only some tiny peripheral part of me began to understand, with a sickening drop, that this was in fact my real life now. “You can expect most of the improvement to come over the next six months, but it can continue for up to two years. The neurologist will . . .”

  He kept talking, but out of nowhere I was swamped by a tidal wave of exhaustion. His face doubled and blurred to nonsense; his voice receded into a faraway meaningless gabble. I wanted to tell him that I needed those painkillers now please, but summoning up the energy to talk seemed impossibly hard, too much for anyone to expect of anyone, and the pain went with me down into a thick treacherous sleep.

  * * *

  I was in the hospital for just under two weeks. It wasn’t that bad, all things considered. The evening of my chat with the doctor, they (apologetically, with some autopilot mumble about overcrowding) found me a single room, which was a relief: the neurotic woman in the other bed kept crying and it was starting to grate on me, drill its way into my dreams. The new room was bright and airy and quiet, and I gave myself a mental pat on the back for having good health insurance even though I hadn’t expected to need it for decades.