Exclusive: Read an Excerpt From James Brogden’s The Hollow Tree
Jonathan Barkan
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Horror novels are something we try to cover here on Dread Central but unfortunately they often slip past us. It’s a shame, really, because some of the times where I’ve been the most terrified was while reading a scary story. There’s something about my own imagination conjuring up the visuals to go with a story that makes everything feel far more intimate and possible.
While we may not cover the medium regularly, we still want to bring you opportunities that we feel are wonderful and engaging, which is why we’re very excited today to bring you an excerpt from James Brogden’s upcoming novel The Hollow Tree, which comes out March 13 via Titan Books. A tale of supernatural connections and adaptation to new circumstances, The Hollow Tree sounds like a delightfully eerie read and I hope you enjoy the below passages!
Synopsis:
After her hand is amputated following a tragic accident, Rachel Cooper suffers vivid nightmares of a woman imprisoned in the trunk of a hollow tree, screaming for help. When she begins to experience phantom sensations of leaves and earth with her lost hand, Rachel is terrified she is going mad… but then another hand takes hers, and the trapped woman is pulled into our world. She has no idea who she is, but Rachel can’t help but think of the mystery of Oak Mary, a female corpse found in a hollow tree, and who was never identified. Three urban legends have grown up around the case; was Mary a Nazi spy, a prostitute or a gypsy witch? Rachel is desperate to learn the truth, but darker forces are at work. For a rule has been broken, and Mary is in a world where she doesn’t belong…
You can pre-order your copy of The Hollow Tree via Amazon.
Author James Brogden
Mary in the oak tree
Cold as cold can be
Waiting for the sky to fall
Who will dance with me?
5th May 1945
Nature abhors a vacuum, or so it is said.
Sergeant Nicholas Raleigh and Corporal Rhys Hughes, both of the 9th Bomb Disposal Company, Royal Engineers, looked down at the smooth grey curve of steel, which broke the surface of the ground like a half-submerged sea monster. Surrounding them, the woods of the Lickey Hills were coming into leaf, bright with sunshine and the songs of birds. Meanwhile the bomb at their feet lay in the middle of it all, smug and insolent.
Sergeant Raleigh tilted his cap back and scratched his head, frowning. ‘Thousand-pounder, you suppose?’
‘Give or take an ounce,’ answered Corporal Hughes. He was sitting on a log and eating a cheese sandwich. Coming from a long line of Welsh miners, he’d taken to the Royal Engineers as if born to it. The vast majority of the unexploded ordnance they encountered was in Birmingham – spread out down at the foot of the hills in a grey haze – dealt with in a claustrophobic chaos of shattered buildings and the stench of burning, so he was enjoying the rare chance for a day out in the fresh air, and this place was as good as any for a picnic.
Raleigh didn’t seem to be appreciating the occasion. He was tall and rangy, and some might have said humourless with it, but surviving three years in a post of which the life expectancy was normally measured in months would do that to a man.
‘How long d’you reckon it’s been lying there?’ asked Hughes.
‘Last raid was back in forty-three,’ mused Raleigh. ‘So two years at least. They’ll have been trying to hit the Austin works. This one’s fallen much too short for a simple miss. Probably found things a bit hotter than they expected and dumped the weight before scarpering.’ He looked around. ‘Good news is that there’s nothing nearby.’
The Lickeys were a small range of hills to the south of Birmingham, a well-loved pleasure spot for city-dwellers looking to escape for day trips. A little over a mile from where they were standing, they could see the rooftops of the Austin works, pitted and painted green to look like ordinary farmland, where plane and machine parts for the war effort were made. The bomb had been found by a local gamekeeper who had alerted the Home Guard, and after checking to make sure there weren’t any more in the vicinity, a wide safety cordon had quickly been established. There might have been a few folks up here strolling or picnicking, but nowhere near danger, and other than the tram terminus and the Bilberry Tea Rooms at the bottom, the nearest human habitation was a good half-mile distant.
Corporal Hughes stood, brushing crumbs off his knees and tugging his uniform jacket down over his comfortably proportioned belly. ‘So are we going to blow it up then, Sarge, or not?’
Raleigh favoured him with a grim smile. ‘Why yes, Corporal, I rather think we are.’
The explosion was quite literally earth-shaking. Birds burst from the trees as a massive geyser of dirt, leaves and bits of tree fountained into the air and rained debris over a wide area, just as echoes of the detonation rolled out from the hills and over the city below. The silence that followed it was almost as deafening, and in that frozen moment fearful and wondering eyes turned to the sky. When the last fragments had fallen, Sergeant Raleigh and Corporal Hughes approached to inspect the damage.
Hughes placed his hands on his hips and gave a low, awed whistle. ‘Well that’ll clear your tubes and no mistake,’ he said.
It appeared as if God Himself had reached down and scooped out a sixty-foot wide handful of the hillside, leaving mounds of soil and rocks settling back into the crater in small avalanches, and splintered trees about the periphery. All that remained of the bomb was a twisted fragment of tail fin right at the very bottom and a litter of leaf debris that had been sucked into the crater by the blast’s initial vacuum.
‘You’re not wrong,’ Raleigh replied. ‘Right, let’s get the worst of it.’
They set to giving the immediate area a quick once-over for the largest and most obvious pieces of shrapnel, to be dumped in the crater and covered over. It would not be many more seasons before the woods reclaimed the spot as if nothing had ever happened; as if there had been no such things as war, or bombs. Already birdsong was slowly returning to the woods, filling the shocked silence.
Raleigh’s explorations were interrupted by a sudden cry of alarm from Hughes. ‘Sarge!’ he called. ‘Come quick!’
He found Corporal Hughes standing by the wide trunk of an old, dead oak tree. It had succumbed to either lightning or disease many years ago, and it had sheared off about seven feet from the ground, the remains of its limbs being little more than stark, fingerless stumps. The explosion had caused a great split to open up in it, a ragged fissure revealing that the trunk was hollow. At the bottom, in the shadow of a shallow well formed by the centre of the roots, he made out the deeper darkness of an eye socket staring back at him, and he recoiled.
‘Sweet Mary mother of God,’ he breathed.
The skull was lying on a pile of what he at first took to be old sticks, but then saw that they were ribs, leg bones, arm bones, the blocky lumps of vertebrae and a littering of fingers and toes. Stuffed into the hollow trunk, the corpse had been unable to fall and had simply rotted where it stood, the disarticulated remains collapsing through themselves and into a jumbled pile with the skull uppermost, staring up at the opening in the top of the broken trunk, which was forever beyond reach. There was fabric – too stained to tell the colour or whether it was shirt, trousers, or dress – and strands of dark hair still attached to the skull.
Hughes’ normally ruddy face was pale, and he was making strange gulping noises as his cheese sandwich threatened to rebel.
Both men had seen their fair share of death: bodies mangled and torn apart by German bombs, burned in fires, lacerated by shrapnel, crushed by fallen buildings, or any one of a dozen other ways a person could be killed. Neither could claim to be unaffected, but you took a deep breath and you carried on and you did your job. It was horrific, but explainable, and hard to think of as murder. It was war. This, however, was something entirely different, and coming as it did in what should have been a place of natural beauty and tranquillity gave it a particular sense of violation.
Hughes had managed to get himself under control. ‘Poor bugger. Who do you think he was?’
The police were called, but they could not discover the identity of the corpse beyond that it was the remains of a young woman. No witnesses came forward, and as the hills lay right on the boundary between the districts of Birmingham and Bromsgrove the investigation was passed back and forth between the two county constabularies until the threads of the investigation were hopelessly tangled and eventually lost altogether.
Still, nature abhors a vacuum, and no more so than the hole left by a soul taken friendless, anonymous and alone. Like air, or birdsong, myth floods in to fill the gap.
Categorized:News
