The Witch Elm

by Tana French

Once the fear took hold, I was fucked. I’d never known anything like it could exist: all-consuming, ravenous, a whirling black vortex that sucked me under so completely and mercilessly that it truly felt like I was being devoured alive, bones splintered, marrow sucked. After an eternity (lying in bed with my heart jackhammering, adrenaline firing me like a strobe light, feeling the last few threads that held my mind together stretch to snapping point) something would happen to break the vortex’s hold—a nurse coming in so that I had to make mechanical cheerful chitchat, an uncontrollable rush of sleep—and I would clamber up out of it, shaky and weak as a half-drowned animal. But even when the fear receded for a while, it was always there: dark, misshapen, taloned, hanging somewhere above and behind me, waiting for its next moment to drop onto my back and dig in deep.

I was finding all this kind of unsettling. I had always considered the world to be basically a safe place, as long as I didn’t decide to do anything actively dumb like getting hooked on heroin or moving to Baghdad. These guys were talking like I had been happily bopping along through a minefield where all you had to do was break up with your girlfriend or mow your lawn and boom, curtains for you.

“I have dolls in my shoes,” she said. “Oh,” I said. I had no idea what she meant. “That’s nice.”

“I know this is a nasty situation, and it’s been a big shock, and I appreciate you helping us out in the middle of it all. If you’d like to talk to anyone about it, I’ll put you in touch with our Victim Support advocates, and they can find you someone who—” None of us apparently felt the need for professional assistance to unpack our feelings about finding a skull in the back garden.

Faye had always been sweet, flaky but sweet, unlikely to ask about your problems but deeply concerned about them if you reminded her they existed.

I was starting to wonder if his plan had been some illness-generated delusion involving the bat-signal or a Rafferty voodoo doll or something.

It was like Susanna and Leon had dumped an enormous IKEA package in the house: presumably it would change the landscape if and when I got up the energy to assemble it, but until then it was just there, in the middle of everything, where I barked my shin or banged my elbow on it every time I tried to get past.