The Red Tree

CHAPTER EIGHT

I honestly believed I was finished with this journal. Over the past six days, I allowed myself to start believing that. Certainly, I’ve wanted nothing more to do with it, or with Harvey’s manuscript, or that goddamn tree. And those six unrecorded days were remarkable only in their consistent, unwavering sameness. I read, watched television, and took a couple of long drives, one as far as Providence. Constance stayed in the attic, appearing only rarely, once more distant, and taciturn, and stained always with paint. I began to imagine this is how the remainder of the summer would proceed. And possibly the autumn, as well. Just yesterday, I sat here and thought how July seemed like some long, thoroughly ridiculous nightmare, but that now it was finally over. Two days ago, I packed Charles Harvey’s unfinished book back into its cardboard box and put it at the bottom of the hall cupboard, under some spare blankets. I had planned to do the same with his typewriter, but, for whatever reason, had not yet gotten around to it.

And then, late this morning, I opened the back door, the kitchen door (I can’t recall why), and found neon green fishing line tied about the porch railing near the bottom step. It was drawn taut, suspended maybe a foot above the ground, and led away into the briars and goldenrod and poison ivy, north, towards the red tree. I stared at it for a few minutes, I think. It seems now it took me a moment to fully process what the fishing line signified. I was startled that it was so very green, and couldn’t recall ever having seen that sort of fishing line before. And then I was shouting for Constance, and when she didn’t answer, I went back into the house. I went directly to the attic stairs. I knocked and asked her to please open the door. Then I tried the knob and discovered that it was locked. I banged on the door again, hard enough to hurt my knuckles. But no response came from the attic, and the door remained closed.

I very briefly considered breaking it down. I’m pretty sure that I could have, but then I admitted to myself that Constance was not behind the door. That she was not in the attic, or, for that matter, anywhere else in the house. Standing there on the narrow landing at the top of the stairs, in the darkness and the heat, I admitted to myself that the only place I would find her was at the other end of the length of green fishing line tied to the back porch. For a minute or two, I permitted myself the luxury of pretending that there was no way on earth I was going after her. It was only seventy-five yards, after all, from the house to the tree, and she’d taken precautions, done her little Hansel and-Gretel trick with the nylon line. If she’d wanted me along, she would have asked me. Constance Hopkins is a grown woman, and she can damn well look after herself. I thought each of these things, in turn, and then I retraced my steps and stared at the fishing line stretching away into the weeds and underbrush. I called her name a few more times, shouting loudly enough that people probably heard me all the way up in Moosup. And then, suddenly, the whole thing felt absurdly like a replay of the episode in the basement, and I stopped calling for her.

It was cloudy, and we haven’t had much of that this summer. Even so, the air was very still, oppressive, and I could tell the day was only going to get hotter. Even if it rains, I thought, the heat will only get worse.

I hesitated, lingering there on the porch, and then I took what I prefer to think was, realistically, the only course of action left open to me. I could hardly have called Blanchard or the police, could I? Even now, I don’t know what else I could have done, except maybe go inside and wait to see if she eventually found her way home. And I couldn’t do that, even though that’s what I wanted to do. I’ve known Constance less than a month now, but, in that time, we’ve shared a bed, and we’ve shared the experience of living in this house on this godforsaken plot of land. I’d gone into the basement and brought her back. I’d washed the filth from her skin and hair, and she’d played nursemaid after my last fit and read Bradbury to me. More importantly, perhaps, we’d tried together to reach the tree, and together we’d become lost, when getting lost was all but impossible. All this went through my head, I know, in only a matter of seconds, and then I left the porch and followed the trail of fishing line leading away from the house. I didn’t call her name again, and I didn’t look at the tree first. I just went.

I walked fast, and it took me hardly any time at all to reach the deadfall marking the halfway point between the house and the red oak. I discovered that the fishing line had been looped several times around one of the sturdier of the fallen pine branches, one that’s not so rotten. From there, it turned west, towards the fieldstone wall and the creek, just as I’d expected it to do. I stopped only long enough to catch my breath and wipe some of the sweat from my face. There was a tick crawling on my pants leg, and I flicked it away. Somewhere nearby, a catbird mewled and warbled, its voice sounding hoarse and angry. I looked up and spotted it, perched fairly high in the limbs of a small maple, and it occurred to me that from that vantage, the bird would likely be able to see both me and Constance. So, it could be fussing at either one of us, or both.

I followed the line through the wide breach in the stone wall, and then down the bank to the creek. Here, the nylon had been looped securely round and round the base of yet another tree, before continuing north again, following the stream a little ways. I disturbed a huge bullfrog hiding in a patch of ferns and skunk cabbages at the edge of the stream, and it jumped high into the air and landed with a splash, darting away into the tea-colored water. The ground is pretty soft down there, quite muddy in places, and my shoes left very distinct prints in the mossy soil. But mine were the only prints I saw. The only human prints (I think I also saw a raccoon’s). Somehow, Constance had walked over the very same ground as me and managed to leave none at all. Sure, she might weigh a few pounds less, but not enough that she wouldn’t have left behind footprints. Anyway, I soon found the next tree that had been used to anchor the fishing line; it turned east, heading straight back up the steep bank on the far side of the deadfall. I decided that I’d find Constance first; she had to be close now. I could worry about the missing tracks later on.

The bank was more difficult to climb than I remembered it being, or I was more careless, and twice I slipped and almost tumbled backwards into the stream below. The second time, I scraped my left elbow pretty badly. In the confusion, I briefly lost sight of the fishing line, but immediately spotted it again at the top of the bank. It had been wound about the base of another white pine, and now resumed its path north, leading me directly to the red tree.

Whatever distorting force or trick of distance had prevented Constance and me from reaching it on the sixth of July did not repeat itself. Other than my growing sense of dread, and the fact that I couldn’t find her footprints at the creek, there was nothing even the least bit disquieting or out of the ordinary about the walk from the back porch to the oak. And I suspect maybe I was beginning to let my guard down. I found the end of Constance’s lifeline tied to a sapling maybe ten feet away from the red tree. The plastic spool that had held the fishing line was lying nearby, and I picked it up. It’s lying here on the kitchen table as I type this. McCoy “Mean Green” Super Spectra Braid, thirty-pound test, eight-pound monofilament diameter, 150 yards. I suppose she picked it up on one of her trips into Moosup or Coventry or Foster. It hardly matters. The label on the spool reads, “Soft as Silk, Strong as Steel.” Part of the price tag has been pulled away, but I can still see that the spool cost $14.95.

These details mean nothing, I know. I know that. I am only trying to put off what came next. That is, I’m only putting off writing it down. Consecrating it in words. But it is so simple. I’d bent over to retrieve the spool, and that was when I saw the spatters of blood dappling the dead leaves, and also dappling the living leaves of creeper vines and ferns and whatever else grows so near the base of the oak. The blood was thick and dark, and had clearly begun to coagulate, but was not yet dry. And what still seems very strange to me — seeing it, I didn’t get hysterical. I didn’t freak out. In fact, I felt as though some weight had been lifted from my mind, a weight I’d carried for a long, long while. Maybe, it was only relief, relief that, seeing the blood, I no longer had to wonder if something was amiss. I can’t say. But I looked up, towards the gnarled, knotted roots of the enormous tree, its bole so big around that three large men could embrace the trunk and still have trouble touching fingertips. And spread out above me, its heavy, whispering boughs, raised against the cloudy sky. And, even though I’d seen it up close once before, and dozed in ignorance beneath its limbs, I looked upon it now as though I was seeing the red oak for the first time. And I wondered how I ever could have mistaken it for anything so uncomplicated and inconsequential as a mere tree.

There’s a passage from Joseph Conrad that says what I felt in that moment far better than I can possibly hope to articulate on my own. Maybe it’s cheating, cadging the words of another author because I find myself wanting, inadequate to the task at hand. I just don’t care anymore.We could not understand, because we were too far and could not remember, because we were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign — and no memories.Or, again, Thoreau’s “Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night.” Or, finally, in my own faltering language, here, before me, was all time given substance, given form, and the face of a god, or at least a face that men, being only men, would mistake for the countenance of a god.

There was a great deal more blood. And something broken lying on the stone slab at the foot of the tree. I made myself look at it. It would have been cowardice to turn away, and I hope I can at least say I am not a coward. The rabbit’s throat had been cut, and its belly torn open. The wet, meaty lumps of organs and entrails decorated old Hobbamock’s altar, and there were also a few smears of blood on the rough, reddish-gray bark of the tree itself. My legs felt weak then, and though I don’t actually recall having sat, I remember standing up again sometime later. I cannot say how long I rested beneath the tree, gazing into those gigantic branches, making my eyes return again and again to Constance’s sacrifice. It may have been as long as an hour. It may have been only half that. By the time I left, the dead rabbit had begun to attract a cloud of buzzing flies, and I understood that the insects, and the maggots they heralded, were also there to serve the tree, in a cycle of life and death and rebirth that I could only dimly comprehend.

Whatever drove Joseph Fearing Olney to murder all those women and then bury choice bits of them beneath the oak, and whatever had finally driven John Potter insane centuries before — whatever it was that had taken Susan Ames and then her husband, and whatever malignancy had at last left Charles Harvey with no choice but to end his own life, I sat there before it, clutching the empty plastic spool that had recently held 150 yards of fishing line. I was sure that the tree would not allow me to leave. Or that, having seen it stripped of any pretense at being merely a tree, I would find myself incapable of walking away. Here was my burning bush, or the Gorgon’s face. Here was epiphany and revelation and, if I so desired, the end of self. So many had been undone before me, and I knew that secret history, and now I also knew the why of the thing.

But I did find the requisite will to leave the tree. Or it allowed me to leave. I’ll likely never know which, and, likely, it makes no difference.

By the time I got back to the house, it was a quarter past two in the afternoon. I could hear Constance moving about upstairs. I considered trying, again, to get her to open the attic door, and I wondered if we’d passed one another somewhere in the woods. If she’d been headed back, following some alternate route to the one she’d marked with the fishing line, as I was picking my way towards the tree. I wondered where she’d gotten the rabbit. And then I went to the bathroom, undressed, searched my skin and hair for deer ticks (there were none), and took a hot shower.

I still have not seen Constance. I have not heard her come down the stairs. But I was in bed early last night, utterly exhausted, and then I slept late. She might have come down then. She might have stood in the doorway of my bedroom, watching me dream and trying to decide what is to become of the both of us, and by whose hand. She did a messy job on the rabbit.

Three things.

First, about half an hour ago I reached into the front right pocket of my jeans and discovered there a section of jawbone, maybe two and half inches long, sporting two molars. That the jaw is human is undeniable. One of the teeth even has a gold filling. The bone is stained a dark brown, and there is clay and soil packed tightly into various cracks and into both the severed ends, partially clogging the porous interior. I held it awhile, as the initial shock faded, turning the fragment over and over in my hands, straining in vain to remember having picked it up and put it into my pocket. Then I stopped trying, and set it on the kitchen table next to the typewriter. I assume,in the absence of any other viable explanation, or any evidence to the contrary, that I must have discovered this scrap of jaw while sitting beneath the tree yesterday. That I must have picked it up (and maybe, when I found it, the bone was even still half buried in the ground), dusted it off, and then slipped it into my pocket. The fact that I remember doing none of these things does not strike meas having any bearing, any relevance, on whether or not this is actually what transpired.

Sitting, staring at that dirty timeworn piece of bone and the two dingy teeth still plugged tightly into their sockets, I thought about going to the closet and retrieving Harvey’s manuscript, so I could read back over the circumstances of the Olney killings. But I didn’t. I put those pages away, and I mean them to stay put away. Regardless, I recall the peculiarities surrounding the recovery of the decapitated heads and other skeletal remains that, between 1922 and 1925, the murderer had buried around the base of the red tree. Chiefly, that not all of the heads could be located, despite the fact that Olney had, in his journal, gone so far as to draw a map of the area around the oak, indicating each spot where he’d deposited bits of his victims. And, also, that all the heads that were recovered, even those of the most recent victims, impressed the medical examiner handling the case as having been in the ground much longer than Olney claimed. No trace of flesh or hair was left, and Harvey writes that the coroner commented that the bone looked more like what one would expect from the excavation of an Indian grave, hundreds of years old, than from a recent burial. There was some speculation, at the time, that the earth below the tree might have been unusually acidic, or more amenable to some sort of grub or insect that may have picked the bones clean. We call this clutching at straws. And now I’m typing these words, these sentences, these paragraphs, stating it all plainly in black and white, and it looks more absurd than just about anything else I’ve written down since coming to Rhode Island and first laying eyes on the tree.

And, as long as we’re talking absurdities, the more I stare at the chunk of jawbone from my pocket, the more I think about tales of fairy gifts. Or, rather, the perils of accepting any manner of food or drink or gift while within the perimeter of a fairy circle. The base of the tree is round, and so many people have drawn circles about it, repeatedly making of it a mystery (to once again paraphrase Joseph Campbell), or merely underscoring the mystery it has always been. Olney swore that these hills were hollow.

Constance made her offering yesterday, and, shortly afterwards, I sat beneath the heavy green boughs, marveling at the “face” of gods laid bare. And now I find that I came away with a grisly souvenir that I cannot recollect having found, much less having decided it would be a good idea to bring back with me.

And here’s the second thing.

Reading my last entry, I see that twice now, since I began keeping this journal, I have written of experiencing epiphany in the presence of the red tree. Indeed, the second instance seems like little more than a revision, a better-worded second draft, of the first instance (July 6, 2008 [10:27 p.m.]). In its own way, I find this repetition as inexplicable and jarring as the jawbone from my jeans pocket. Or “Pony.” Back in July, when we tried to reach the tree and failed, I first saw the tree for what I now believe it to be. I wrote, “. . it seemed to me more than a tree. . I saw wickedness dressed up like a tree.” But, then, in an entry I made only a few hours ago, writing of my latest trip to the oak, I wrote, “I looked upon it now as though I was seeing the red oak for the first time. And I wondered how I ever could have mistaken it for anything so uncomplicated and inconsequential as a mere tree.” Also, in both cases, I attempt to illustrate or elaborate on my revelation with a string of metaphors and similes.

Now, if the first “epiphany” were genuine, it would preclude the occurrence of a second, would it not? And if my narrative is to be trusted — if my goddamn memories are something upon which I can continue to rely—then I must find some way to account for and reconcile this redundancy. And it is a redundancy. I don’t see how mere forgetfulness could ever possibly account for this repetition.

Finally, a thought has occurred to me, and maybe it’s not the sort of thought I should write down. But I probably shouldn’t be writing any of this down, so, fuck it. I have begun to question my assumption that Constance used the fishing line so she’d be able to find her way back. Sure, I know how rattled she was by our having gotten lost, trying to reach the tree in July. And then her misadventures in the cellar. But she clearly did not use the line to get back to the house. She took some other route. So, possibly it was put there not as a lifeline, but as a means of leading me to the oak. A carrot on a stick. A trail of breadcrumbs left for a hungry animal to lap up. I’m moving the typewriter into my bedroom, away from the kitchen window. I’d rather not sit here now.

It’s raining today, a hard, steady rain, and there’s wind and thunder and lightning. It’s coming at us from Connecticut, I think, and before that this storm must have seen New York, and Canada, perhaps. Maybe it was born in the Arctic, and has spent weeks looking for the sea. Upon reaching the Great Lakes and realizing they were landlocked, perhaps it felt cheated. If a tree can be wicked, surely a storm can feel betrayed. Anyway, I’ve spent most of the day shut away in my room (leaving only to go to the toilet), reading and trying hard not to think my own thoughts, trying only to lose myself in what others have thought before me. But somehow, as though escape from morbid rumination has now been forbidden, I ended up with Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. I’d meant to read something harmless, something new, the sort of throwaway paperback that commuters buy at airport newsstands, intended only to amuse or distract them for the duration of any given flight. Instead, I reread “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Gold Bug,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and “MS. Found in a Bottle.” There are two passages from the latter I wanted to write down, because they seem to speak not only to what I experienced yesterday, upon reaching the end of Constance’s tether and finding myself at the red tree, but also because they say something, I believe, about my present state of mind:

Of course, Poe’s narrator, marooned on that ghostly black galleon as it sails the south polar seas, is a man bereft of the capacity for fancy and imagination. As he says, “. . a deficiency of imagination has been imputed to me as a crime. .” And here I am, a woman afflicted since childhood with far too great a proclivity for fancy. At least, this is the judgment that was passed upon me at a very early age. All those elementary schoolteachers and aunts and my parents and whoever the hell else, those wise adults in Mayberry who fretted about and pointed at my “overactive imagination.” But I suppose that I’ve shown them. Well, then again, considering the lousy sales of my books, maybe they get the last laugh, after all. And maybe it is just those sorts of minds, closed as they are to the corrosive perils of fantasy, that are most suited to encounters with the uncanny. I can only say that Poe’s words ring true. Here is another passage from the same story:

Not long after I made that last entry, as I was beginning “The Cask of Amontillado,” Constance knocked at my bedroom door. I said that I was busy, that I didn’t wish to be disturbed. It was a lie, on both accounts, but, still, those are the words that came out of my mouth.

“I heard the typewriter,” she said, her voice only slightly muted by the wood through which it had to pass to reach my ears. “So, I was surprised when I came downstairs, and saw you weren’t in the kitchen. I was surprised that the typewriter wasn’t on the table. Are you okay, Sarah? Is something wrong?”

I almost asked if she’d noticed the plastic spool lying near where the typewriter used to sit, the empty 150-yard spool of McCoy “Mean Green” Super Spectra Braid. But I didn’t. If I was meant to find that line and follow it to the oak, then we are playing a game now, the sort where one does not show her hand. And if I was not,it would have been an odious thing to say. There’s the worst of this, right there. Not knowing if I am consciously being led down these abominable and numinous roads. Or if we are both adrift on the same black galleon, in the same icy sea. Are we now damned together, or might I be the oblation that will set her free? Has she struck a deal with the tree, her life in exchange for something more substantial than a gutted rabbit? And if that’s the truth of it, was the fishing line an attempt to warn me?

“I’m worried about you,” she said.

The door wasn’t locked, and I told her she could open it, if she wanted. She opened it partway, and peered in.

“There’s no need to be worried,” I replied. “I’m fine.”

I was sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed, and she was standing in the doorway. I was wearing only my bathrobe and a T-shirt and panties underneath it. She was wearing black jeans and one of her black smocks, and her hands and arms and face were a smudged riot of yellows and browns, crimson and gold, orange and amber and a vacant, hungry shade of blue, as though she’d begun, prematurely, to bleed autumn. Dr. Harvey’s antique Royal was (and still is) parked on the dressing table.

“Sarah,” she said, “has something happened? After the seizure, or because of it? Something I should know about? Or maybe when we were in the basement—”

“Do you remember it now, the basement?” I asked, and she stared at me a while before answering.

“Nothing I haven’t told you already.”

“Irgendwo in dieser bodenlosen Nacht gibt es ein Licht,”I said, not meeting her eyes. “Has that part come back to you?”

“Sarah, I don’t even remember what that means, what you told me it means.” And she took a step or two into the room, though I’d only given her permission to open the door, not enter.

I shut my eyes and listened to the rain peppering the windowpanes, the one in front of me and the one on my right, south and west, respectively. I wished that she would leave, and I was afraid that’s exactly what she was about to do. I could hardly bear the thought of being alone, so near to the oak, but her company had become almost intolerable. So, there’s me between a rock and a hard place. Scylla and Charybdis. The devil and the deep blue sea. The fire and the frying pan.

“If you need to talk, I can listen,” Constance said.

“But you’re so busy,” I told her, and if I’d had my eyes open, I think I would have seen her flinch. “So much canvas, and so little time, right? That muse of yours, she must be a goddamn slave driver.”

“Sarah, are you pissed at me? Have I done something wrong?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” I answered. “Is there something I might have missed?” I opened my eyes, then, and I smiled at her. I wanted to shut the fuck up and not say another single word, and I wanted to take back what had been said already. I was sitting there — detached, dissociative— watching Constance, listening to the madwoman who’d hijacked my voice. In that fleeting instant, it seemed so perfectly crystal clear that I’d entirely lost my mind. But then the comforting certainty dissolved, and I could not dismiss the possibility that the madwoman — despite, or because of, her madness — might be wholly justified in her apprehensions.

“Not that I’m aware of,” Consytance replied. Her voice had become wary, and she glanced over her shoulder, back towards the hallway and the kitchen. And the cellar door, of course, which lies in between the two. When she turned to face me again, the corners of her mouth were bent downwards in the subtlest of frowns.

“You must miss Amanda terribly,” she said. There was not even a hint of anything mocking or facetious in her voice. There was no sarcasm. But, still, there was that wariness.

“Didn’t I already tell you that Amanda is none of your concern?” I asked her. Or what I asked was very similar. Typing this, I am once more forced to admit that much of these recollections are approximations. Necessary fiction. My memory does not hold word-for-word, blow-by-blow transcripts. Very few minds are capable of such a feat, and mine doesn’t number among them. To again quote Poe (from The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket):

I’ve had more than one heated “discussion” with readers and other writers regarding the use of unreliable narrators. I’ve seen people get absolutely apoplectic on the subject, at the suggestion that a book (or its author) is not to be faulted for employing an unreliable narrator. The truth, of course, is that all first-person narrations are, by definition, unreliable, as all memories are unreliable. We could quibble over varying degrees of reliability, but, in the end, unless the person telling the tale has been blessed with total recall (which, as some psychologists have proposed, may be a myth, anyway), readers must accept this inherent fallibility and move the fuck on. Have I already mentioned the crack someone at the New York Times Book Review made about my apparent fondness for digression? Consider the preceding a case in point.

Whatever specific words I might have used, I made it plain to Constance I did not wish to discuss Amanda.

“She was a painter, too,” Constance said, as though she hadn’t heard me. And it wasn’t a question, but presented as a statement of fact.

“Not exactly,” I said, wishing like hell that I had a cigarette, but I was out, and I wasn’t about to bum one off Constance.

“How do you mean?” she asked, and took another step into the room. The paranoid woman sitting at the foot of my bed noted both the physical incursion being made and Constance’s refusal to drop the obviously prickly matter of Amanda. “She didn’t paint?”

“Not with brushes,” I said. “Not with tubes of paint. At least, not usually. She used computers.”

“Graphic design?”

“She called it photo-montage,” I told Constance, who nodded and glanced at the typewriter on the dressing table. “She created composite images from photographs.”

“Oh,” Constance said. “Photoshopping,” and whether or not she’d meant to attach any sort of derisory connotation, that’s how the paranoid woman at the foot of the bed received the comment. And it triggered in me something that had not been triggered for quite some time, and I found myself needing to defend Amanda.“It was amazing, what she did,” I said, sitting up straighter, keeping my eyes on Constance. “She made photographs of things that couldn’t be photographed.”“Right,” Constance nodded, looking at me again. There was no trace of malice in her distant sangría eyes. “I had a course on photo manipulation in college. But I’m not a photographer, I’m a painter.”

“I think Amanda might have told you she was both.”

“Do you have any of her work here?” Constance asked, and I shook my head. I don’t. Everything of Amanda’s that I still own (including her artwork) is back in Atlanta, in the storage unit there. I almost brought a scrapbook with me, printouts of fifty or sixty of her favorite pieces. She referred to them as “giclées”—what she sold to her clients and from her website.

“There’s still some stuff online, I think,” I said. “Unless her agent or someone else has had it taken down.”

“That seems unlikely,” Constance said very softly.

“Does it?”

She didn’t reply, but sat, uninvited, on the floor a few feet away from me. She offered me a cigarette, and, having one offered, that’s not the same as bumming. She also offered me a light, but I had a book of matches in the pocket of my robe. I smoked and stared at the rain streaking the south-facing window.

“I’m scared,” I said, and the paranoid woman curled up inside my skin cringed, and cursed, and called me a traitor.

“We’re both scared,” Constance said. “I’m not ashamed to admit that. I only work the way that I’ve been working when I’m hiding from something, Sarah.”

“So, you’ve been hiding from something since you arrived,” I said, and laughed. Thinking back, I wish that I hadn’t, but it slipped out, like the smoke slipping across my lips and out of my nostrils. And it pleased the paranoid woman. Maybe she’s the one who laughed, and it wasn’t me, at all.

“Haven’t we both been hiding?” Constance countered. “You think the only baggage I brought back from LA was the crap you helped me carry in? Fucking shitstorm out there,” she said. “I’ve been trying to forget about it, just live my life and forget things best forgotten.”

“I never said that Amanda was something best forgotten,” the paranoid woman muttered, all but whispering, and kept her eyes on the window. Constance sighed loudly, and apologized. It made me want to hit her; I’d not asked for an apology, and I didn’t expect one.

“That’s really not what I meant,” she said. “It just came out wrong. I know there’s not a one-to-one correspondence going on here, Sarah. We both got bad shit in our immediate pasts, that’s all I mean. And then we come here, and what do we get? Chuck Harvey’s pet fucking obsession. That goddamn tree. . ” And I’ll say she trailed off here, because I got the distinct impression that there was something else she wanted to say, but didn’t.

And now the paranoid woman was yammering from someplace inside my head, intimations of seduction and guile, insincerity and head games. I silently told her to shut the hell up and leave me alone, but, I admit, I also hung on every word she said. Constance wanted something. Probably, Constance had wanted something all along, and I was getting tired of waiting to find out what it might be.

“I know that I shouldn’t be shutting myself away up there,” she said and pointed a finger towards the bedroom ceiling and the attic. “But it wasn’t so bad. . I mean, maybe I didn’t quite realize what I was doing, until you shut yourself up in here.”

“Not room enough in one house for two reclusive mad-women?” I asked, and she didn’t laugh.

“Is that what you think, Sarah? That we’re insane?”

“Don’t you? I mean, isn’t it preferable to the alternative?” And I stopped staring at the window, then, and stared at her, instead. “Oh, wait. You’re the one who opened a wormhole to 1901 and reached through space and time to stop that woman from shooting herself. I nearly forgot that part. So, for you, I guess this isn’t so strange at all, is it?”

Constance stared back at me for a second or two, then let her eyes stray to the floorboards. She laid both her paint-stained hands palms down on the varnished wood and took a very deep breath. The paranoid woman smiled with my mouth, no doubt quite entirely pleased with herself.

“We can be cunts about this,” Constance said, and it sounded as though she were choosing her words now with great deliberation. “If it’s what you want, we can each retreat to our respective corners of the cage, and cower there in our own private misery and fear. We can be alone while we wait to see what happens next, if that’s how you think it ought to be. But it’s not what I want, and you need to know that.”

“What do you want?” I asked, crushing my cigarette out on the floor. “What do you expect me to do? I’ve already told you I don’t have the money to leave this place, to find somewhere else to live. So, will it really be so much better if we cower in the same corner? Is that what you want, Constance, someone to hold your hand while we wait for whatever came for Charles Harvey, and all those other people, to come for us? Or is it just the sex? Is the fear starting to make you horny?”

Constance shook her head very slowly and licked anxiously at her lips, which I noticed were very raw, chapped, like she’d been gnawing at them.

“You won’t even try to listen,” she said. “I can leave here, Sarah. If I’m willing to leave you alone with that. .” and she glanced towards the north wall, but I understood that she was really glancing towards the red tree. “All I have to do is pack my shit and make a phone call or two, and I could be somewhere else.”

“Then that’s what you should do,” I told her, and used an index finger to wipe at the ashy gray-black smear I’d left on the floor. “In fact, that would probably be for the best, don’t you think?” And I said those things. I know perfectly well I said those things, or something similar. There seemed no possibility of reaching all the way down to the solid bottom of my anger, the bedrock bottom of the well of spite and bitterness and resignation that’s opened up in me after my last visit to the oak. It just goes on and on, that great invisible wound, like the cavern below this house goes on and on. It didn’t matter one iota that what I wanted was to put my arms around Constance, to beg her not to leave, to tell her how much it terrified me even to think of being alone. The paranoid woman spoke from the wound the tree has left in me, and I simply could not summon the will to silence her and deny her and permit the day to take some other, less self-destructive, route.

“Yes, you should go,” I said.

“Sarah, I’ve told you already that I’d never leave you here. I couldn’t do that. I won’t.” I glanced at Constance from the corners of my eyes, and she looked like she was about to start crying. Seeing that pleased the paranoid woman no end, and the wound in me grew wider by some terrible, immeasurable increment.

“Don’t you dare start crying,” I sneered. I could say “the paranoid woman” sneered, but I’m not letting myself off the hook so easily.I sneered, and I balled one hand tightly into a fist. “It makes me sick to my fucking stomach, the sound of a woman crying.”

“Is this how you talked to Amanda?” Constance asked, covering the lower half of her face and turning away from me. “When she needed you, is this the way you treated her?”

“We’re not talking about Amanda,” I said, and clenched my hand so tightly that my short nails dug bloody half-moon grooves into the flesh of my hand.

“No,” Constance replied. “No, I don’t guess we are.”

“It’s only a tree,” I said through gritted teeth, full in the knowledge that I’d never told so great a lie in all my life, and would never find one to top it. “And if you think differently, I believe there’s an ax in the basement. Or Blanchard would probably loan you a chain saw, if you think you’re up to it.”

Constance wiped at her nose, and quickly stood up. It wasn’t hard to see that I’d frightened her, or, to be more precise, that I’d added another dimension to her fear. At the time, it seemed like I’d only evened the score.

“I’ll be in the attic,” she said, and left me in the bedroom, easing the door shut behind her. When the lock clicked, I went back to staring at the window, at the rainy day outside, and tried not to think about the tree. Later, though, I took the piece of human jawbone I found in my jeans pocket yesterday and tossed it out the back door, into the high grass and weeds.

I’m going to stop typing now. I don’t think I can bring myself to say anything more.

”Carl G. Jung,Man and His Symbols(1964)

The house is so awfully quiet this morning. Maybe Constance took my advice and left in the night. I would almost believe this, the house is so quiet. There is no sound of her footsteps from upstairs. I am dressed, but have spent most of the last hour sitting on my bed, watching the south-facing window, and the trees, and the sky. Occasionally, I have heard a bird or an insect, but these noises seem to be reaching me from someplace far, far away, and are muffled by distance. I am unaccustomed to there being such a profound silence in this house. You can always hear the birds, the cicadas, the wind, the creaking of venerable timbers still settling after hundreds of years, whatever. This is a new sort of quiet.

So, yes, I would think that Constance Hopkins has gone, and I am alone; that she left in the night, only I hardly slept. My body seems to have found some way around the meds. The Ambien has ceased to work. I don’t know. But I was awake, save maybe half an hour between three and four, and then an hour (at most) between about seven-thirty and eight-thirty. Both these intervals are plainly far too brief to have accommodated her departure. I feel certain of this. She couldn’t have gotten out of here that quickly. Constance wouldn’t have dared to go on foot, not after her talk of coyotes or wild dogs on the property, and a car or truck would surely have awakened me.

Am I alone? It should be a simple enough question to resolve. Leave my room, and learn whether or not I am alone in the house. I did leave once already, but only long enough to go to the bathroom. I didn’t try to find Constance, because, honestly, the possibility that she’s gone had not yet occurred to me. The profundity of this silence had not yet occurred to me. I figured she was sleeping, and then I realized that I couldn’t hear her window unit chugging away up there. That’s not so unusual, early in the day, but it started me thinking, I suppose. It would serve me right, after what I said to her yesterday. I am well enough aware of that. It’s nothing I wouldn’t have coming.

I’ll go looking for her when I finish this entry. I’ll go upstairs and knock on the door to her garret, and she’ll tell me to get lost, or we’ll make nice, or she’ll ignore me, but there will be some minute sound to betray her presence. I’ll press my lips to the keyhole and whisper apologies, and assure her that I wasn’t myself yesterday. I wasn’t. But I think that I’m getting better now.

There was a dream this morning, and I want to write it down, all of it that I can recall. I know it was the honesty that comes in sleep, that it was me trying to get through to me. I started to write it earlier, but didn’t get any farther than that quote from Jung. I suppose I intended it as some sort of an abstract or preface, a deep breath before diving headlong into icy waters. Then, as I was typing the last few words of the excerpt, there was a sudden rustling in the bushes below my window (the west window), and I had to stop and try to see what it was. But I couldn’t see anything out there, nothing that could have caused the commotion, and I’m going to assume it was only a rabbit, or a bird, or an errant breeze.

I have never been comfortable writing out my dreams. That used to mystify Amanda. Or she claimed that it did. I know that I’ve included only a handful of dreams since I began keeping this journal, back in May. I had a therapist, years ago, who insisted that I keep a dream journal as part of our work together. I reluctantly acquiesced, but made at least half of it up. She never knew the difference, and reading back over it, later, I discovered that I had a great deal of trouble distinguishing between the real dreams and the counterfeits. That bothered me at the time. What more intimate lie can a person possibly tell herself? I would suppose forgetting which was which was me getting some sort of cosmic comeuppance, if I believed the universe worked that way. My forty-four years have yet to reveal any consistent, compelling evidence of justice woven into the fabric of this world.

I’m digressing. I’m stalling.

In the dream, Amanda and I were on the road in the same sky-blue PT Cruiser that brought Constance here from Gary, Indiana. Amanda was driving, and I was sitting in the backseat. At first, I didn’t know where we were. I’d been listening to her talk, watching as we passed an unremarkable procession of woods, pastures, houses, farms, roadside convenience stores, and gas stations. Then I remembered Amanda’s funeral, and I assumed the whole thing — her death — had been some sort of misunderstanding. I didn’t bring it up, but there was an indescribable sense of relief, that we’d all clearly been mistaken in thinking that she’d died of the overdose, or of anything else. I know that these sorts of dreams are not uncommon, encountering a loved one who has died and “realizing,” in the dream, that the person never actually died. But, to my knowledge, this is the first time I’ve had such a dream about Amanda.

She was talking about a difficult client, a bisexual woman with a thing for horses and centaurs and Kentau rides and so forth. The client wanted some elaborate set of photographs done, but hated the idea of photo manipulation and was insisting that as much be done with makeup and prosthetics as possible, because she wanted pictures of “something real, not fake.” In the dream, this was the last client that Amanda had before she killed herself. Or, rather, the last one before I’d only thought that she killed herself. In the dream, this was the woman she slept with, and then lied to me about having slept with. And, in the dream, I clearly remembered having written “Pony,” in our apartment in Candler Park though, now, awake, I recognize that those memories were false. Also, the woman that Amanda was fooling around with wasn’t a client. She owned a sushi restaurant in Buckhead.

“It’s all fake,” Amanda said. “I told her that. Either way, it’s all pretend. But that only seemed to make her more determined to have her way.”

And then we were walking together along a narrow wooded path, though I don’t recall our having stopped and gotten out of the car. It was very hot, and the air was filled with mosquitoes and gnats. I remember shooing away a huge bluebottle fly that had lighted on my arm. The path was familiar, even though it was someplace I’d not been since I was a teenager. It was the trail leading down to the flooded quarry in Mayberry where I used to collect trilobites, where I discovered Griffithides croweii in 1977. I was very excitedly explaining all this to Amanda, and I said that maybe we’d get lucky and find another one of the trilobites before we had to leave. I was talking about crinoids and brachiopods, horn corals and blastoids, all the sorts of sea animals preserved in the hard yellow-brown beds of cherty limestone. There was a tropical ocean here then, I told her, three hundred and fifty million years ago, aeons before the coming of the dinosaurs, in an age when hardly anything ventured onto the land.

“Dear, you’re not paying attention,” she said.

And I realized then that we weren’t approaching the nameless chert quarry in Alabama, but the granite quarry that is now Ramswool Pond. Soon, we were standing at the edge, staring down into what looked a lot more like molten asphalt than water. It was that quality of black, pitch black, and seemed to my eyes to have the same consistency as hot tar. When I picked up a stone and threw it in, it didn’t vanish immediately, but lay on the surface for a moment before slowly sinking into the substance. There were no ripples. There was no splash, either. The surface of that pool was perfectly, absolutely smooth.

“I don’t think we should be here,” I told Amanda, but she sat down on a boulder and pointed into the morass spread out before us.

“Well, it wasn’t exactly my idea,” she said. “Isn’t this where you saw that girl drown herself?”

That’s something I never told Amanda about, the naked girl I’d seen (or thought I’d seen) that summer afternoon thirty-one years earlier. The beautiful girl whose hair I recall being as black as tar.

“Wasn’t her name Bettina?” Amanda asked. “The girl you saw drown, I mean. Didn’t it come out, that her name was Bettina. Wasn’t she also some sort of an artist?”

And then I saw something lying in a clump of weeds not far from us. Clearly, it had crawled out of the pool. It was still alive, but seemed to be in a great deal of pain, its skin entirely coated in the black goop from Ramswool Pond. Amanda said something, but I can’t remember what. I couldn’t take my eyes off the writhing thing on the shore. It had been a woman once. I could see that now — a female form discernible through the glistening, tarry ooze — but any finer features were obscured. She was dying as I watched, because the black stuff was very slowly eating her alive. It was corrosive, I think, like digestive fluids, and an oily steam rose from the body and lingered in the air.

“You don’t want to see this,” I told Amanda.

“My name is not Amanda,” she protested.

“No, but it’s what I call you when I write about you. You wouldn’t want me to use your real name, would you?”

“You use hers,” she replied, and pointed at the writhing mass in the cattails and reeds. “What the fuck’s the difference, Sarah?”

And then the thing in the weeds began to scream — a scream that gave voice to both pain and fear — as the black water ate deeper into its flesh. I took Amanda’s hand and tried to pull her to her feet. “We’re not supposed to be here,” I said.

She looked up at me, surprised, a guarded hint of a smile on her lips. And she said, “Turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.” And before I could reply, the sun had gone down, and risen again, and set a second time. We were no longer at the edge of Ramswool Pond, but standing at Hobbamock’s altar stone with the red tree towering above us. And the moon was so full and bright I could see everything, and, too, there was a roaring bonfire somewhere nearby.

I could smell the woodsmoke, and I could hear the hungry crackling of the flames. And all about the tree, but farther out from it than the place where Amanda and I stood, there was a ring of wildly capering figures. She told me not to look at them, just as I’d told her not to look at the dying thing from the pool, but I stole a glance.Just a glance, but it was enough to see that they weren’t exactly human. In the firelight, their hunched silhouettes were vaguely canine, and I said something to Amanda about the coyotes that Constance thought she’d been seeing hanging around the garbage cans. Then Amanda was reciting Edgar Allan Poe, and her voice was as fervent, as fevered,as the swirling, whooping, careening dancers:

And if I’m to believe anything that Charles Harvey wrote in his unfinished book, the serial killer Joseph Fearing Olney became obsessed with these same lines, writing them over and over in his journals and on the walls of his jail cell. He even wrote them on slips of paper that he would place inside the mouths, beneath the tongues, of the decapitated heads he buried at the base of the red tree. Beneath the tongues he had forever silenced.

In my dream, there was no wind. The air was as stagnant as whatever vile black vitriol had seeped up from the earth and filled in Ramswool Pond. But, even so, the branches of the ancient, wicked oak moved, swaying, creaking, scraping against one another, leaves rattling like dragon scales, as though a hurricane were bearing down upon the land.

“Two billion trees died in that storm,” Amanda said. “Think about it a moment, Sarah. Two billion trees.”

“Not this one,” I replied, gazing up into those restless boughs. “This one seems to have ridden out the tempest just fine.”

“Yes,” she said and smiled. “But don’t think that was all luck, Sarah. It took a lot of blood and sweat to keep her safe when that storm came tearing through. It has always taken a lot of blood and sweat, keeping her safe. Like all doors, she tends to swing open, and so care must be taken to mind the hinges and the latch.”

And I think I asked, “We are talking about the oak?”

And I think that Amanda replied, “If that’s how you see her, yes, we’re talking about the oak.”

I forced myself to make notes in pencil, not long after I awoke, or I’d have lost almost all of this. But even so, I’m having trouble making sense of much of what I scribbled down, half asleep. Partly, that’s because most of the handwriting is illegible, and, partly, because a good deal of what I can read still refuses to yield anything like meaning. I know that I’m filling in some of the gaps. Making some of this up. Approximating. That therapist who wanted me to keep the dream journal, I told her I could not possibly remember my dreams verbatim, and being a writer, it was inevitable that I might invent things as I wrote them out. But she said not to worry. So, right now, I’m trying hard not to worry.

I stood with Amanda, at the altar beneath the red tree, and the dancers howled and skipped around us. Sparkling embers rose into the sky to meet a grotesquely swollen full moon. The moon was still low on the horizon, and only half visible above the tree. I would call the scene hellish,only, at the time, I don’t believe it struck me that way at all. Only my waking mind would render it hellish in retrospect, measured against my waking values and fears and preconceptions. Dreaming, I wanted to accept Amanda’s invitation and “join the dance,” that perverse “ring around the rosie” and whatever it might entail. I wanted to be initiated into the mysteries of the tree, or into the mysteries that the tree merely represented.

“What have you brought for her?” Amanda asked, and I felt entirely inadequate, standing there beneath the single glaring white eye of the moon. At first, I was certain that I’d brought nothing at all, no offering to lay upon the slab that I now understood must have been placed at the foot of this tree long before John Potter, long before the Narragansetts. Watching those giant branches moving against the backdrop of the moon and stars and the indigo nothingness of space, I didn’t need Amanda or Harvey or anyone else to explain to me that this ground was consecrated long ages before the Europeans came in their sailing ships, before tribes of nomads wandered across an icy spit of land connecting two continents. Before any man stood here, and before any tree was rooted in this soil, the land was touched and claimed and set aside.

In the dream, I was wearing the ratty wool coat that Amanda finally gave to Goodwill so she wouldn’t have to see it anymore, so that I’d have to buy a new one. I reached into the coat and retrieved from an inner pocket several pages of Charles Harvey’s manuscript, rolled into a tight bundle and tied off with a piece of green fishing line. I held the pages out so that Amanda could see them.

“Well,” she said, still smiling, “that’s a start.”

“I would have brought more, but he never finished writing it.”

“He couldn’t finish,” she said. “You cannot ever conclude what has no end. It’s like walking the circumference of a circle. You can only get tired and find some arbitrary place to stop.”

“Do you know how tired I am?” I asked her, and she said that she did, and then she took the rolled-up pages of typescript from my hands. I was glad to be rid of them. I remember, distinctly, being extremely glad that they were no longer my responsibility. And that was the sense I had, that they’d been a responsibility I’d shouldered for a very long time.

“Stop looking at the sky,” Amanda said. “You’ll go blind, if you don’t look away.”

And so, instead, I looked down at the altar stone, seeing clearly for the first time all the sacrifices painstakingly laid out upon or near the stone, or set in amongst the roots of the tree, or tucked into knotholes (I have always called these “Boo holes,” after Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird). There were bloodier things than murdered rabbits, but I do not think it will serve this narrative to describe them in detail. Even that monster Joseph Fearing Olney would have felt himself inadequate before that banquet. And I knew it was a banquet, that there would soon be a feast, of one sort or another.

“Hercules did not slay the child of Typhon and Echidna,” Amanda said, speaking very softly. She bent down and lifted a white votive candle from the altar stone. “In severing that immortal head, he only set the Hydra free, so that she could take her rightful place in the Heavens.”

“Echidna,” I said, and the word brought to mind nothing but those spiny little egg-laying mammals from New Guinea. Amanda nodded, and with the candle, she set the pages I’d given her on fire. Some of the ashes settled across the altar, while others rose upwards, like the embers of the bonfire, becoming lost in the swaying branches of the red tree.

And Amanda said to me, “And again she bore a third, the evil-minded Hydra of Lerna, whom the goddess, white-armed Hera, nourished, being angry beyond measure. . ” Then she paused, the flame having burned down very near to her fingertips, and she dropped the smoldering remains of my offering onto the stone with everything else. “Only, Mother Hydra was not evil-minded, though I well imagine Hera was angry,” Amanda said, but did not bother to elaborate.

And around me, the dream moved like the tumbling colored beads or shards trapped inside a kaleidoscope’s tube, and I tumbled with them. The night passed away, and Amanda was replaced by Constance, and the scene at the tree by the attic of Blanchard’s farmhouse. The din of the dancing creatures was replaced by the commotion from the air conditioner, which was making much more noise than usual. Constance was sitting on her inflatable mattress, and I was sitting nearby in a chair. She said that she was pretty sure the AC was on its last leg, that it was about to blow the fan or an evaporator coil or something of the sort.

“I sounded like that the time I caught pneumonia,” I said, and she laughed.

“I thought you’d be at the tree,” she said, and jabbed a thumb in the direction of the oak. Bright moonlight shone in through the attic windows, and the same sort of votive candles that had burned at the altar were scattered about Constance’s garret. “I thought they’d have you out there for the festivities. Way I had it figured, Ms. Crowe, you’d be the guest of honor, or the main course.”

“Is it that sort of feast?” I asked, and she shrugged.“Wasn’t that how it went, when those boys caught up with Sebastian Venable beneath the blazing bone sky?

Wasn’t he finally devoured for his sins by vengeful Mediterranean urchins, while poor Catherine watched on?”

“That’s not how it ever seemed to me,” I said. “To me, it always seemed that Sebastian merely consummated his desires. He’d looked upon the face of god, when he and Violet took their cruise to the Galapagos Islands—”

“The part of the play with the predatory birds and the baby sea turtles,” Constance said, and I nodded.

“Sebastian was only seeking after release, having seen too much, and that day the boys at Cabeza de Lobo were only providing that release.”

“It means ‘head of the wolf,’ ” she said.“Cabeza de Lobo,”and I told her that I already knew that.

“Well, you’re a smart cookie. Not everyone would,” she replied, and then added, “But yes, I think it’s exactly that sort of a feast.”

“They never proved that Olney was a cannibal,” I said. “Not like old man Potter. They had no real evidence that he ate from any of the women he killed. And he denied it.”

This conversation, there was so much of it. It went on and on while the air conditioner wheezed and choked and sputtered. And at some point I realized that, while I was still wearing my old wool coat, Constance was completely naked. I hoped she would invite me into her bed again. She sat there like some heathen idol, some Venus made not of marble but living, breathing tissue. Her legs were open, revealing the wet portal of her sex, and she didn’t seem to mind that I stared, but, like Amanda, she warned that I could go blind, if I looked too long or too closely.

“I thought that only worked with masturbation and the sun,” I protested.

“Moonlight is merely reflected sunshine,” she said, “and every star is another sun.” Then, as I watched, her skin changed, or I noticed for the first time that it had been meticulously painted with a pattern of overlapping oak leaves. And, before my eyes, the painted leaves turned from summer greens to rich shades of red and brown. And they began to fall, slipping off her body and settling onto the mattress all around her. I remembered the kanji tattooed above her buttocks:

and for a while, I could only watch the spectacle of the leaves drifting down from Constance’s shoulders and breasts and face. It was too beautiful to turn away from, and like Harvey’s Quercus rubra,somehow too sublime, too terrible. I realized that the air in the attic had lost all its characteristic odors — turpentine, oils and acrylics, linseed oil, gesso, stale cigarette smoke. Now there were only the faintly spicy smells of autumn.

“Did you do that all by yourself?” I asked, meaning the elaborate painting on her skin.

“Oh, hardly,” she laughed. “Too many spots I could never reach on my own. I had help. But, I don’t think you’re paying very close attention.”

“That’s what everyone keeps telling me,” I said.

“Maybe, Sarah, it happens that you can’t see the forest for the trees.” And we both laughed then, because it was such a corny thing for her to have said, even in the interminable, rambling dream of mine.

“All two billion?” I asked.

“At least,” she said. The leaves were still falling from her painted body, and I marveled that she could shed so many and not be diminished. I thought how each one must be like a dead skin cell, sloughed off to make room for its successor.

And then Constance took a piece of powder blue chalk from a fold in the sheets and held it up for me to see.

“You may need this,” she said.

“Colored chalk?” I asked.

“No, Sarah. Not colored chalk. This,” and now she leaned forward, her body rustling like a blustery day in October, and she used the stick of chalk to draw something on the floor between us.

“I’m never going to be able to remember all that,” I said, and, indeed, whatever she wrote or drew, I’d forgotten it completely by the time the dream ended and I awoke.

Constance scowled, the way she does. “I can hardly do everything for you,” she said and then pointed at what she’d written on the attic floor. “I can hardly make it any more perfectly straightforward than that.”

“My memory isn’t what it used to be, that’s all.”Constance shrugged, dislodging a few more leaves. She sat up straight again, and she closed her legs, so I could no longer see her vagina.

“Is it a cipher?” I asked.

“It’s a door, Sarah. And like all doors, it tends to swing open, and so care must be taken to mind the hinges and the latch. It must be kept locked, and someone has to keep the keys. But I imagine you know that already. Amanda would have told you that.”

“Her name isn’t Amanda.”

“No, but that’s what you call her, when you write about her. You call her Amanda. Or Helen.”

I was no longer in the attic, then, but sitting at the kitchen table, my fingertips resting on the typewriter’s brass keys. I was looking out into the August night towards the red tree, and there was that bloated moon. And there, below the moon, was the flickering glow of the bonfire. I began typing, trying to recollect what Constance had drawn with her blue chalk.

This is my dream. What I remember of it, and for what it might be worth. I have to leave this room now, and find out whether or not I am alone in the house.