The Hollow Tree, page 14
“We can get a caravan,” he said quietly.
The black car stopped behind them. A foot from his rear bumper.
A line of bright blue had emerged in the southern sky. It would be brighter, later. The trees rustled in a new breeze. Bobby waited for a car and horse box—a long brown head lolled dark eyed in the window—to turn at the crossing, and then he followed, putting on speed. The black car kept close.
“God’s sake,” Bobby said.
He slowed down, and, rolling down his window, waved the dark car on.
“Go on then, soft lad, overtake,” he said.
The black car just slowed down and stayed behind them.
“Are we going to be late for school?” Becky said.
“No, pet, we’re fine,” he said, and sped up.
He drove quickly down the long straight road to the town, then dropped his daughter off outside the primary school, indicators clicking. She skipped out, grinned, and waved to him in the car park before joining her friends.
“Remember, yer mam is picking you up,” he yelled after her, and his deep brown voice made a few small heads turn.
She looked around with furrowed brows, mouthed “I know” to him, and disappeared into the school.
Bobby knew the large black car was waiting on the main road. The drive to the school was a dead end, and there was no way out without driving past it again.
The school car park was for teachers only. “Fuck it,” he said. He parked up. There was a narrow footpath between stone houses, away from the school grounds. Bobby walked down it, hood up, hands deep in his pockets.
As he left the footpath and entered the main street of the town, he could not hear any footsteps behind him. He looked over his shoulder as he turned. No one there. He had nowhere to go in particular, but he pounded down the main street, coming in a blur to the market cross. The Lion was open but he could not drink. He had given that up.
He stomped down the Bank. He was shaking his head. “Being daft,” he told himself. “Paranoid.”
But he carried on. Down past the old toy shop where, as a child, he had begged his grandpa for soldiers. Past the crooked old shop where, legend had it, before the tarmac was laid and electricity threaded through the town’s stones, Oliver Cromwell had slept overnight. Past a boarded-up shop, and down to the road that ran alongside the river Tyr. The ruined mill was ahead, its empty windows gaping, its smashed portal a door into the dark. There, where something in him changed, where his path to uniform and service and death was laid. He had not been in there since.
He turned right, past another pub, its whorled windows swollen like an old drunk’s eyes, and walked along the river. He stopped for a while, leaning his large body against the wall. The south bank of the river was all trees and bungalows, windows glinting like teeth between bare branches.
The black car came down the bank and turned onto the road along the river. It slowed steadily as it reached him. Grinding on the tarmac. A dark shadow behind the wheel.
Bobby set off again, walking faster along the side of the churning river. Over the old county bridge, and onto the other bank. He crossed the road which led to the moors.
The car was slowly moving over the bridge. Bobby was being hunted. He saw the stile, leading into the darkness of the Deepdale woods. He jumped over it and moved quickly into the trees. He walked quickly along the beck, into the tree line, and was gone, into the night of the daylight forest.
The black car mounted the grassy verge, and a tall bearded man stepped out. He locked the 4x4, and followed Bobby into the trees.
As he entered the trees, crunching on the undergrowth, stepping on a rotten branch, splintering it underfoot, hearing the cold beck run over black stones, he drew a short blade from a long sheath.
16.
Bobby looked behind, briefly, and saw the tall, lithe, bearded man walking slowly into the woods, something lethal glinting in his hand.
He began to run, deeper into the woods, into the thickest stands of trees of Deepdale. He knew it well, and his hunter did not. Bobby was heavy, but he was fit, and he could move. He heard snap and whip of the man crashing through the undergrowth. Bobby knew he had the advantage. He was a soldier, and he knew this ground. His heart was beating fast, but he was thinking clearly.
Bobby veered hard, off the main path, and scrambled and dove into the trees. He half-crouched in a thick stand of trees and bush. He could see the man, now only twenty yards away, standing still on the track, knees bent, holding a sharp blade. His body was still. He was looking from side to side.
Bobby could not move now. The man would see him. His nose was close to the earth of Deepdale—it smelled wet from rain, deep and old.
The bearded man moved slowly forward, keeping his shoulders low. Bobby’s legs were exposed, but his body and head were hidden in the tall weeds and thorns. If he stayed still, the man might not see him. But if he did, he was vulnerable.
A tiny green insect settled on his broad wrist. He noticed, in his dive from the path, he had ripped the back of his hand. There was a ribbon of skin, tremulous and half ripped, and new blood flooding the tear.
Who was this killer on his trail? Bobby was momentarily angry. Angry because he had panicked, and run. He should have stood his ground. Angry, too, for his daughter. Angry at the violence, which like an animal, was entering his life again. He had moved back home to be free of it. Now it was here, dressed in black, bearded, ready—for some reason—to harm him.
Bobby looked closer at the man’s blade. It was more like a stiletto blade than a machete. If it pierced him, it could breach the walls of his heart, or slice a new mouth into his guts. Bobby sized him up. The man was tall, but not that big. Bobby could overpower him.
Images flitted in his skittering mind—the rapid click clack of machine gun fire in the fir trees of Bosnia. Splinters about his helmeted head. The thump of mortars. And later, much later, the thunder of strikes in the desert. The vicious sucking of air. Mangled bodies, humans wrenched inside out. A basement full of choked bodies in T-shirts and sports clothes. A man, at a distance, decapitated by rifle fire.
Then, he was here. In the woods of his hometown. His ripped hand closed on something hard; he looked to it, a strange, sickle-shaped rock. Hard and curved, it jutted from the moss and the bracken. He grabbed it.
The bearded man at last moved. He walked forward, tentatively, and then quicker, crouching along the path. Then he stopped, and turned, and faced the thicket where Bobby lay. Then he turned again, all black clothes and lethal poise, to face the way he had come.
Bobby gripped the rock, and rose to his feet.
The bearded man swung around, but the rock had already left Bobby’s hand, flung hard. It flew lower than he wanted, and thumped into the man’s chest. The man grunted with the sharp pain and staggered back.
Bobby charged him, his head down, his shoulders square, pushing his weight forward to crush the bearded man. But his foot snagged and he tumbled. Some hard loop in the undergrowth had tripped him. The bearded man stepped aside neatly, and, as Bobby fell past him, plunged his blade down.
Bobby felt force, not pain. The bearded man raised the blade again in a clear arc again, and Bobby prone, kicked at him, hit something solid, and pulled himself up.
For a moment, they stood, both crouched, one armed, one wounded, and looked at each other. The bearded man, his face pale like dough, his eyes fetid as pond water. Bobby was tattered and huge and wild—and bleeding.
“What are you doing?” he found himself saying. It came from him, came from somewhere near or above him.
The sword moved again, on a deadly arc—and it missed Bobby.
He turned and ran. Deep into the deep of the Deepdale, as hard as he could. He ran, knees high, through bushes and undergrowth. Thin branches whipped and snapped. The ground rolled and jutted beneath his feet. Up ahead was another path, coming down from the edge of the dale to this wooded valley. He turned around. He could see a figure flitting through the trees. There was no time. He needed to arc a U-turn, and find his way back to the town.
For speed, he followed the beaten path. It pressed uphill, a steep slope. The man would reach it soon, also. Bobby reached for his phone as he pelted along the track—jumping over rocks and boulders—but he had left it behind, charging in his house.
On his right was a barbed wire fence, and over it, there were thinning trees and flat fields. To his left, the dark of the dale, and the heavy woods. He did not want to try and leap the fence. And open fields were a killing ground. He came to a thin, muddy stream, a trickle of water leaking brown from the field. He shuddered left, and took off, helter-skelter, down into the trees again.
But the hill was too steep and treacherous underfoot. And Bobby was weakening. He shot forward, fell, and came to a battering halt at the base of a thick tree.
He was still and blank with pain. Before he could move, the man was at him. There was a moment of violence and confusion. The bearded man’s breath was in his face. His elbow chopping back and forward. Pain ripped through Bobby’s side, in his guts, and with a fiery heat spread fast over his belly and his thighs.
The bearded man stood up, unsmiling, and nodded. His glove was red with blood, and the blade in it, sharp as a razor, thin like a spine. His arm dripped death. And then he was gone, like a blown shadow, disappearing into the trees.
Bobby pulled himself up. He felt his side. He moved his hand away and it was shockingly wet with hot dark blood. Dark and red. He looked to his jacket, and in it there were savage rips, its stuffing hanging out in a wisp of white. He pulled up his ripped sweatshirt. His body had been changed—there were swellings and tears and undulations. New ragged apertures in his flesh. He was suddenly exhausted. He was punctured, leaking. His side suddenly shrieked with pain and he bellowed.
In slow motion, as if caught in mud, or water, or a living dream, he crawled down the thickly wooded slope, his eyesight blurring. He was deep in the woods, the sky only flashes of ice-blue in the canopy.
He slipped again, and fell further, and then rested on his side. He lay in the mud and green for a short while, pain thrashing across his body. He saw, clearly, the blood on his fingers, red as a berries, red as a postbox sending messages. He knew that if he lay down and slept, he would bleed out. He had to refuse the sudden warm offer of the long night. That would come, anyway. He refused, right now. Until it could not be refused.
Staggering to his feet, crouching, he lurched forward to a concrete wall that emerged out of the thick green branches and trunks. He had been to Deepdale many times before and not seen this building, this abandoned place. In his slipping mind, he wondered why it was here, so far from the town, from roads and people and civilisation. Maybe the woods themselves had built this ruin. Or it had grown out of the mud, out of the stone.
Bobby knew he could not stop moving. He had to get back to the town. He lurched left again and headed the way he thought Ullathorne lay. It would be easier if he found the beck—the beck would lead him home.
Trees ghosted past him. Thorns tore at him. Weeds gripped his legs. He held his side, held his sides inside, held his blood in his wounds, and suddenly found himself, after another brief fall, facedown in the water. He looked down into the clear stream. His blood had flowed into it—it swirled and misted. A nebula of blood, slowly blooming.
Momentarily, his mind stilled. He felt warm and calm. His mind shrank and focussed. Past his eyes he saw something move.
He saw feet—bare muddy feet, feet in sandals. Feet also marching, on legs matted and filthy. Claws, glinting with resinous death. He smelled old skin, and new leather.
Prone, unmoving, he looked wildly into the trees. Dark eyes moved between bare branches. The trees had thickened. The beck was now a river, and was thick as dye. On the far shore, there was a silent procession. People moving, carrying a long stretcher. On it was a dead king, with coins for eyes, clean shaven, with a circlet beside his cold and wounded head. Metal was glinting in the glimmering tree dark. Many hands held him. The dead king seemed to lie in suit trousers, a white shirt, his arms enfolded, hands holding branches of vine and ash, elm and yew.
Women in green, their hair braided and long, sang a low, lowing melody, and children walked silently, their faces hidden in painted masks. Men strode, low and loping—bronze glimmered, iron was held fast. As silent as dreams the figures moved through the bars of trees.
The sky in the cracks of the canopy was blue, but the stars shone. More stars than he had seen before—a beach of stars, shoals of shattered light. He looked across the entire arc of the sky, his eyes glittering with the revealed sky. He did not blink, he did not sigh. Bobby lay bleeding, run through in the running river.
Then, after a while, there was movement, soft feet on moss and pebble, and through the nettles and gleaming wild garlic, a short man in brown and black came near. Clad in soft garments, in treated skins.
His face was a crumple of creased leather, his eyes dark as wet stone, his voice slick like sap and the slither of white root. The man sat beside the stream, his black hair long and braided. He had brown eyes—deep brown eyes, like the forgotten peaty pools in the heart of the hills. He reached out, across time and into the still and always flowing stream, and touched Bobby between his eyes. Blood swirled, and spiralled out of the nebula, back into the body. Out of the earth, and into the living.
Then he was gone.
Bobby was in the stream. He lay, his face half under the cold water of the Deepdale beck, hidden miles into the occluded valley, the branches low about him. His body was drenched in chill moor waters, and his blood had washed away. His fingers were white and gently wrinkling, his boots cleaned of the mud and dust of life.
He thought only in shreds and fractals. But in those fluttering shreds was his daughter at her school, working her way through lessons, laughing with her friends. Her day advanced beyond the moment of her father’s death. Like love, he was now outside time.
Robert Stang, lying in the cold stream, opened his mouth to call his daughter’s name, and then his mind stilled, his eyes closed, and he dropped into the sea of everlasting dark.
The Hollow Tree
The sun had still not crested the hilltops, and in the clearing of the hollow tree, there was darkness and silence. Dew was forming like eye gleams on the still leaves of the spare undergrowth. Without the sun, the giant tree cast no shadow. It was sunk deep into the enclosing dark, like a bone inside a body. Buds on its healthy branches were minute, waxy, and unready. No birds were singing in the dawn. The fading moon was caught in sinews of moving cloud. Stars were still in the darkest blue sky but the trees do not count or name the patterns. Their business was with the earth.
The hollow tree stood, as it had, age after age. Its roots held the earth and rock, it drew water, and drank it, and breathed it, and fed it to the sky.
Everything was inside it, and it was inside everything. Dumb, but not numb, it was as alive as the world, but still and silent. It was dead and alive, motionless, and always moving. It was a bridge—a home—a tower—a vast flower.
There was movement in the glade about it: something, unafraid, was slowly pacing beyond the borders of the undergrowth. The rabbit’s fur, as it moved, was pricked and puffed, as, black-eyed, it shuffled onto the ring of bare earth around the hollow tree. It moved to the spine of a submerging root that spanned from the central black trunk. The rabbit sniffed and blinked. A ripple ran through its brown-grey pelt. Ears up, it looked left, right, and up, to the city of branches above. There was the breath of a flutter in the undergrowth. Another flutter, and a crack. In a bound, the rabbit returned to the weeds and was gone.
The hollow tree had stood for countless unremembered dawns like this. The world had moved and the sun’s light had come again. It was blushing the eastern skin of the Pennines; a sheet of light laid over the plunging fells and the tumbling white-teethed ghylls. Shadows seemed to seep from the hillsides, drawing pools of darkness from the trunks, as if they had absorbed in their night of submergence the sunless dark, and now could be tapped of it, like sap.
Dew now lay in tiny pools on bark and limb. A rime of moisture shivered on cold branches and many-knotted twigs.
A single brown bird emerged from a feathery hold. It opened its mouth and croaked. A gentle wind had risen, and was bringing on its gusts the smell of the river, its mulch and jetsam, and a metallic, thin scent—iron, and the murky residue of foulage and farm-spill.
The bird was not alone. Across the waking forest, the hunters, the mothers, rose or peeked from their nests.
A drifting owl, exhausted, cooed a pale hoot to its home. Its silver wings skimmed through the upper canopy of naked branches. It drifted on a rising heat, and looked down upon the giant tree, black and alone in its own clearing, the surrounding woods standing back, giving the old ogre space, heat, light, water.
The rising sun and the fading moon glimmered in the owl’s round eyes—it saw all as it flitted on the opening air. On the far bank of the ancient river, a shudder of a fox headed to the warm town for scraps. It saw a tiny mouse exiting at pace away from the field’s open killing floor. As the owl dipped to its home. It sensed, higher up, a swifter killer.
There, the hawk, high above, lolling on the heat of the exhaling earth, gently tipped its weight below the cloud line. The river below was a running ribbon being pulled into the sea, and the fields about, all slick with soil sleep and the condensation of vegetation, glistened. A sudden gleam caught its deadly eye.
It dipped, its body as light as a knife, and below, in the old woods it scanned the clearing of the hollow tree. Human-sweat was there, and footprints. The hawk remembered the glade: it had snapped a shrew there, several turns of the sun ago—a whiskery visitor to the glade, who stopped fatally to stare up at the falling hawk, until it was too late.
Inside the tree there was dark, and an iron hardness, and things the hawk did not want to disturb. But the gleam had gone. He saw nothing below in the grove of the giant—only the coal-glint of a black armoured beetle tending to its morning chores, free of dread—and it rose again, scanning the lightening fields, the mist now gathering like frost in the hollows of the valley.
