The Witch Elm

by Tana French

  “Toby,” said a rich warm voice that for a moment felt almost comforting, a lifeline amid the confusion. “This is Detective Mike Rafferty. Listen: your uncle’s collapsed. He’s in an ambulance, on his way to St. Ciaran’s Hospital.”

  “What?” I said, after a moment. I managed to sit up, dizzy and rocking. “What happened?”

  “We don’t know yet. Who’s his next of kin?”

  “What? He doesn’t have, I mean—”

  “He’s the oldest brother, right? Who’s next? Your dad?”

  “Phil. My uncle Phil.” Gradually my eyesight was clearing, but the room looked wrong, unstable and dangerous: armchairs canting at subtle angles, rug rucked up, gray-tinged darkness that could have been dawn, twilight, storm.

  “Can you send me his number? Like now, right away?”

  “Is Hugo dead?”

  “He was alive five minutes ago, anyway. The paramedics were stabilizing him. I’m following them to the hospital”—for the first time I realized there was background noise, engine rush, Rafferty had me on speakerphone as he drove. “We should be there in ten minutes, if you want to meet us there. Get me that number first.”

  “OK,” I said. “I’m coming,” but he had already hung up.

  My phone said it was quarter to seven in the morning. Somehow I texted him Phil’s number and ordered a taxi and found my coat and shoes—dazed, heart rattling, unsure whether this was really happening or whether I was still trapped in the dream. Raw wet air, streetlamps still on. The taxi jolting from side to side. Thick vanilla stench of air freshener, the rearview mirror festooned with rosaries and miraculous medals and yellowed pictures of saints. The driver was a hunched, skinny old guy who hadn’t said a word since I got in, and I wanted to lean forwards and tell him there had been a change of plan and I needed to go to Donegal, Kerry, just keep on driving so I would never have to get out.

  * * *

  The first step into the hospital hit me like a tidal wave. It was all there, the unceasing blur of noise, the relentless parching heat, but most of all that smell: disinfectant layered thickly over utter pollution, hundreds of bodies and sicknesses and terrors crammed together in too little space. The place felt like a weapon expertly crafted to strip you of all humanity, hollow you to a shell creature that would do anything it was told for the slim chance of someday getting out into the living world again. I almost turned and ran.

  Somehow I managed to explain the story to the pancake-faced woman on reception, but I forgot her directions the second I turned away and ended up lost in a maze of corridors and stairwells, miles of rubbery blue floor tiles, people in scrubs bustling past me without a glance, wards jammed with metal beds and jaunty pale-blue curtains and drawn gray faces, things beeping and someone moaning and a guy on crutches dragging himself along with a terrible thousand-yard stare that I knew only too well. I had lost track of what floor I was on and I was fighting a flutter of panic—no way out, trapped here forever—when I turned a corner and saw a lean dark figure at the far end of the corridor, back to me, hands deep in overcoat pockets. Even against the numbing white light I knew it was Rafferty.

  In that place he looked like salvation. I limped towards him as fast as I could, and he turned.

  “Toby,” he said. He was shaved and crisp and alert, smelling of that sprucey aftershave; the hospital didn’t seem to have affected him at all. “I was waiting for you.”

  “Where is he?”

  Rafferty nodded towards a set of double doors. Next to them was an intercom with a large sign above it saying “THE BELLS,” which set a bubble of hysterical laughter rising in my throat. I managed to swallow it down. “They’re just getting him into a bed. They said we can go in once he’s settled.”

  “What happened?”

  “Not sure yet. I left him around half-ten last night. He was tired, wanted to get some kip, but he was in good form; joking, even, telling me if he was getting one last weekend away from home he would’ve rathered Prague. I made sure someone would check on him every half hour, see if he needed anything, wanted a doctor.” It seemed to me that Rafferty should have sounded at least a little defensive, Hugo had been in his care and now look, but he didn’t; he was cool as ice, he might have been filling in another detective on the night’s events. “According to the officer on duty, he got to sleep somewhere between eleven and half past. No complaints, not in pain, not feeling sick, didn’t want anything. The last check was at six: he was asleep, breathing fine. I got in at twenty past. He was on the floor, unconscious. We got the ambulance straightaway. I told them about his cancer, and the seizures.”

  I couldn’t see anything through the double doors, empty corridor, white and blue and chrome— “What did they say? The doctors?”

  “Not a lot. They checked him over in the ER, took him for a CT scan; then when they came out, they said they were heading here to ICU. I’m not family, they can’t tell me much. But they said”—Rafferty moved to catch my eye, I couldn’t stop jerking my head around, trying to get a handle on the place, all the perspectives seemed off—“Toby. Mostly, when someone who’s in custody gets taken to hospital, we keep an officer right next to them at all times. In case they try to do a runner, or attack someone, or they say something we need to hear. With your uncle, the doctor said no need for that, I could wait out here.”

  “But,” I said. He was trying to tell me something, but I wasn’t sure I was getting it right. “If it was a, another seizure, they’ve got drugs for that. They can do things—”

  The door wheezed behind me and I whipped round. It was a stocky white-haired guy in green scrubs, pulling off latex gloves. “Are you here with Hugo Hennessy?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m his nephew. What happened? Is he, is he OK?”

  The doctor waited for me to go to him. He had to be about sixty, wide-shouldered but flabby with it, but he moved like a boxer, that same absolute arrogant control of the space, like everyone else was there only by his permission. His eyes slid over me—droopy eyelid, gimpy leg—with a casual assessment that set my teeth on edge.

  “You know about your uncle’s brain tumor,” he said. “Yes?”

  “Yes. He was diagnosed a couple of, I think August—”

  “He’s had a brain hemorrhage. It’s fairly common: the tumor disrupts the tissues, erodes through them, and eventually you’ll have bleeding. The blood created pressure on the brain. That’s what made him lose consciousness.”

  “Is he—” I was starting to say Is he awake yet or possibly Is he dead, but the doctor kept talking like I didn’t exist.

  “We’ve stabilized him. A hemorrhage like this can make the blood pressure unstable—his was all over the place, when he came in—so we’ve given him medication to keep that under control. Now we’re just going to keep monitoring and see how he does. We’ll hope he wakes up soon. It all depends on how much damage has been done.”

  I realized who he reminded me of: the shitbird neurologist, back when I had been in hospital, brushing past my desperate questions like everything about me was too unimportant even to register. “Is he going to—” Going to be OK was wrong, obviously Hugo wasn’t going to be OK, but I didn’t know how else to—

  “We’ll have to wait and see,” the doctor said. He punched a code into a keypad by the door, thick blunt fingers. “You can go in and see him now. Second room on the left.” He held the door for me—and for Rafferty, who hung back, letting me go in ahead—before he nodded and strolled off down the corridor.

  Rich stench of hand sanitizer and death, a girl sobbing somewhere. Hugo’s room was small and overheated. He was flat on his back; his eyes were a slit open and for a moment I had a wild burst of hope, but then I saw how still he was. His skin was grayish and sagging back from his face, leaving his features standing out too sharply. Wires and tubes poured out of him, fine and flexible and nasty: a tube spilling from his open mout
h, another from his bony arm, another from under his sheet, wires sprouting from the neck of his gown. Machines everywhere, beeping, bright-colored zigzags running across a monitor, numbers flickering. All of it was horrifying but I clung to it all the same—they wouldn’t be bothering with all this stuff unless they thought he had a fighting chance, surely they wouldn’t, would they?

  A nurse—Indian, soft and pretty, glossy hair in a neat bun—was writing something on a chart. “You can talk to him,” she said, nodding encouragingly at Hugo. “Maybe he can hear you.”

  I pulled a brown plastic chair to the bed and sat down. “Hugo,” I said. In the edge of my vision Rafferty moved the other chair into an unobtrusive corner and sat down, settling himself for the long haul. “It’s me. Toby.”

  Nothing; not a twitch of his eyelids, not a movement of his lips. The machines beeped away steadily, no change.

  “You’re in hospital. You had a brain hemorrhage.”

  Nothing. I couldn’t feel him there. “You’re going to be fine,” I said, ludicrously.

  “I’ll come back soon,” the nurse said gently, to all three of us, hooking the chart onto the end of the bed. “If you need me before that, you can push this button. OK?”

  “OK,” I said. “Thanks.” And she was gone, almost soundless on the rubbery floor, the open door letting in a faint trail of sobbing for a moment before closing behind her with a soft whoosh.

  Hugo would hate this place, everything about it. Maybe he was deliberately staying in a coma so he wouldn’t have to deal with it, I wouldn’t blame him— “Hugo,” I said. “The sooner you wake up, the sooner you can go home. OK?”

  For a moment I thought his mouth tensed as if he was trying to say something, around the tube, but then it was gone and I couldn’t be sure it hadn’t been my imagination.

  There were a hundred things I wanted to tell him, ask him. Maybe one of them would reach him, deep amid the darkness and the wingbeats and the swags of clinging cobwebs. I had been there too, not so long ago; if anyone could find the way through that shifting labyrinth to Hugo and lead him back, surely it would be me.

  But there was Rafferty, an angular shadow filling up my peripheral vision, turning everything unsayable. “What did he say?” I asked, when I couldn’t ignore him any longer. “At the station?”

  Rafferty shook his head. “I can’t go into that, man. Sorry.”

  Those golden eyes, on me, giving away nothing. I couldn’t tell whether he knew Hugo had been lying to him and why, or what he might do about it—arrest me, drag me away for questioning, Talk and we’ll let you go back to your uncle? I thought about saying it straight out, simple as that, as if we were just two people together in this room: Look, we both know the story. Let me stay here till this is over, one way or another, and then I’ll do whatever you want. Deal?

  I couldn’t trust myself to make it work. Instead I turned back to Hugo. One big hand lay loosely on the sheet beside me, and I put mine over it—it seemed like what I was supposed to do. His was cold, somehow bony and rubbery at the same time; it didn’t feel like human flesh and mine wanted to jerk away from it, but I made myself stay put because maybe he could feel things in there, maybe I had followed my mother’s hand or my father’s back to the daylight, who knew? I sat still, watching Hugo’s face and listening to the endless even beeping and catching Rafferty’s keen split-wood smell with each breath, trying not to move in case it made something happen.

  * * *

  I don’t have any clear sense of how long we were in the hospital. I remember bits and pieces, but not the order they came in; there was something wrong with the way time worked there, something had fallen out of it so that events didn’t link together in any sequence but just drifted round and round, disconnected, in the huge humming white-lit void.

  My father was there, shirt collar twisted, hand clasping my shoulder so hard it hurt. I remembered him back when I was in hospital, the long-limbed tan creature that had paced in the shadows around his feet; I almost asked if he had brought it this time but luckily it dawned on me that it probably hadn’t been real. The nurse made notes on Hugo’s chart, adjusted dials, swapped bags. I had a go at Haskins’s diary, I told him, while you were gone. I actually found something he doesn’t hate, can you believe it? He loves reading to his kid. I can’t work out what he was reading, though; you’ll have to do it when you get home, I stuck a Post-it on the page . . . Hugo’s face didn’t change. Phil was crying, silently, wiping his eyes with a knuckle again and again.

  Two visitors per bed I’m afraid said a different nurse so sometimes I was in a waiting area, rows of black plastic seating and a vending machine humming in the corner, a dumpy middle-aged woman holding hands with a blond teenage girl and both of them staring into space. My mother bent to kiss my head and when I didn’t flinch away she held me close, smell of cut grass and cold air, a deep breath before she let me go.

  My family yammering questions at me, Why was he what did he but no no no that’s insane of course he didn’t what the hell— I pictured their faces if I told them the truth: Hey at this stage you should probably know it looks like it was me all along, all my fault, sorry about that guys . . . For an awful second I thought I might be going to do it, or faint, I wasn’t sure which. I sank down into a chair and put my head in my hands, which turned out to be a good move: they backed off and left me alone. Leon stalked the edges of the waiting area, gnawing his thumbnail, not looking at me.

  Hugo I meant to ask you, you know what they found down the tree, did they tell you? Leaning in closer, was that a twitch of his hand— Lead soldiers. Were those yours? And my father laughing, a startled crack too loud in the dry air: Those were mine! Oliver was a little brat, whenever any of us had a favorite toy he’d get fascinated by it and try to steal it, so we were always hiding things from him . . . I must have forgotten where I’d put those! And then silence, while we waited for Hugo to smile, tell us all the things he’d hidden from Oliver and where to look for them.

  You should go home and get some sleep someone said to me but that seemed way too complicated; instead I dozed on the plastic chairs, woke bleary-eyed with a hard crick in my neck. Susanna was texting, thumbs flying. There was one nurse who was the image of the pretty brunette who had eyed me in the pub that night, scrubs instead of tight red dress now and face bare of makeup but I would have sworn it was her; her eyes passed over me and I couldn’t tell if she had recognized me, I wanted to catch her arm as she went by and ask her but somehow she was always too far away.

  On one of Hugo’s machines an alarm started up, loud urgent beeping. I fumbled for the call button, heart pounding, my dad shouting beside me, but before I could find it a nurse came in—casual and brisk as a waitress, surely she should have been rushing?—and turned the alarm off. Let’s just turn this up a bit fiddling with some dial, standing back to watch the incomprehensible colored lines run across the screen, and then with a small reassuring smile to us: Now. That’s better.

  The light at the windows came and went in unnatural fitful flickers, bright one moment and night the next. Hugo you have to tell me what to say to Mrs. Wozniak, remember? How to break it to her? Should I, I mean, what should I . . .

  And always Rafferty, silent in the corner, waiting. Rafferty still in his overcoat like the heat didn’t touch him, its rucked-up folds patterning him with deep shadows at strange angles. One time Oliver was giving out to him, belly puffed and finger pointing, ridiculous accusations, the decency to give the family some privacy for God’s sake. Rafferty nodded, understanding, sympathetic, in complete agreement, but then Oliver was gone and he was still there, head leaned back against the wall, at ease.

  Hugo. Squeeze my hand or something.

  Somewhere an old woman sang “Roses of Picardy,” quietly, in a rusty quaver. The alarm went off again, a different nurse bustled in. What is it? Phil asked, gesturing at the machines with a hand rigid with tensio
n, what’s happening? The nurse made mysterious adjustments and notes: We’re just having a little trouble keeping his blood pressure under control. Doctor will talk to you when he comes round.

  Only just as she turned to leave another alarm started going frantically and suddenly things changed, the nurse spinning back to Hugo’s bed with her mouth open, Rafferty sitting up straight— Out the nurse said sharply, hitting a button, everyone out, now— Then we were in the corridor and Rafferty had a hand on my back and one on Phil’s, steering us quickly towards the waiting area—me stumbling, my leg had gone to sleep—and as he pulled open the door a voice snapped behind us, just like on TV, Clear!

  The waiting area, all my family standing up in unison, white-faced, What what what happened, Phil explaining in a dead-level voice while Rafferty melted off to some corner. I couldn’t look at them. The dumpy woman and the teenager were gone and instead there was an old guy with droopy bloodshot eyes and a suit worn shiny at the knees, who didn’t even look up from stirring his Styrofoam cup of tea.

  For a long long time nothing happened. My father and Phil and Oliver were shoulder to shoulder, a tight pack, pale and somehow all looking alike for once. I wanted to go to my father but I couldn’t, not knowing what I did. I wished my mother was there. Leon leaned against the wall with his eyes closed, chewing ferociously at his thumbnail. There was blood on it.

  When the white-haired doctor finally came out we leaped to cluster around him, at a respectful distance and keeping our mouths shut till he deigned to speak, like good little petitioners. “Mr. Hennessy’s stable,” he said—even, weighted voice, carefully pitched to let us know long before he said the words. “But I’m afraid it’s not good news. We were hoping his hemorrhage would resolve, but instead of improving he’s going the other way. He’s needing escalating amounts of support.”