Chapter 25
STEPHEN
His headache is getting worse by the minute.
It’s unrelenting, like a sharp needle is piercing his brain, unlike anything he’s experienced before.
It isn’t only his head either, but his neck and shoulders too.
Even his eyeballs pulse in his skull, like they have their own heartbeat.
Painkillers aren’t touching it, about as useful as a grain of rice to hold off starvation, but he takes more anyway.
He can’t remember the last time he took some.
It’s more than four hours ago, though, the safe time frame to take more of the same type of painkiller. He thinks …
The stench of raw meat and blood makes him feel worse. Even standing outside the butcher's shop isn’t far enough away for the odour not to claw at the back of his nose. Hell, he can practically taste it on his tongue.
The headaches started several months ago, seemingly overnight.
One morning he woke up with one and it stuck around for five days before it finally went.
Then, another. And another. Until he got fed up with them, so he visited the GP who asked him so many questions, he lost track of what he was even there for.
Headaches. Yes, headaches. Mind-numbing, debilitating headaches.
Not migraines. They were something else entirely.
His doctor told him it could be stress related, especially as he knew what had occurred in Stephen’s life lately, but Stephen knew it wasn’t stress or anything else like that.
He wasn’t being stubborn about it either, the way most men were these days when it came to their ailments, but he made it perfectly clear the headaches were not caused by stress, so the doctor booked him in for an MRI scan.
And that was the beginning of the end.
Now, he finds himself staring into the distance, seemingly waking up several minutes later, having no recollection of where he is. It happened earlier as well, back at the detective’s cottage. He’d stared up the hill towards the tree.
He had seen something, and hadn't been strong enough to pull his eyes away from the thick branches, no matter how hard he tried.
Something was sucking him into the tree.
Pulling. Drawing him closer, like it wanted a piece of his soul.
Perhaps it was calling to him the way the ravine and the fallen tree had called to him back in Cherry Hollow.
Trees are living things after all.
They have life flowing through their veins, just like humans do.
But a tree’s veins were called vascular bundles, responsible for transporting water, nutrients and sugar to the tree itself.
Not dissimilar to blood. Trees absorb nutrients from the earth, using whatever life source is around them to grow.
Perhaps …
No, it isn’t possible. Even Stephen knows that a person’s soul can’t live inside anything else other than its host's body.
John Hammel’s soul is not living inside The Hanging Tree …
But what a story angle!
His brain instantly starts drumming up story arcs he can use to write an article.
Because there will be an article about The Hanging Tree.
He’s sure of it. Just like The Creature had taken over Cherry Hollow, The Hanging Tree has taken over the sleepy, quiet village of Bethgelert, holding its residents hostage to a curse formed a century ago …
The story practically writes itself.
Stephen blinks several times, realigning his vision.
When he comes to, he sees a man standing on the other side of the road from him.
The man is a farmer, complete with the cap and padded jacket and wellington boots.
He even has a collie dog at his side off the lead because, apparently, farm dogs can roam free around here without the need to be constrained.
The man is staring at him.
The back of Stephen’s neck bristles.
He is about to step across the road to approach the man, to ask him why he’s staring, when the butcher’s shop door opens, a bell sounds, and the detective rejoins him, carrying a bag of sausages.
‘We have a lead,’ he says. ‘I suggest we head to see Diane Bevan. She lives at Pen-Y-Bryn, I believe, then we’ll stop by Frank Hammel at Blackberry Farm.’