The Red Tree

CHAPTER TWO

Editor’s Note: A full twenty-six days elapsed between Sarah Crowe’s last entry in that part of the manuscript I’ve labeled “Chapter One” and the first entry in the section I’ve titled “Chapter Two.” Almost all that is known of her activities and experiences during this hiatus — almost a full month — is what she’s chosen to set down on paper. I have confirmed that some of this time was spent at the Tyler Free Library in Moosup Valley, and there were a few emails and phone calls to her agent in New York. Beyond that, we must rely on her account. It should be noted that it was not unusual for Sarah to put a manuscript aside for weeks at a time before returning to it, and, in that respect, the gap is not unexpected, however frustrating it might be to the reader approaching this work as a novel, rather than what can more accurately be described as a journal or diary.

A fucking hot day today. Only a fool thinks she’s escaping the heat of summer by coming to New England. There was rain last night, the first rain in days, but it only seems to have made matters worse. Everything outside the kitchen window is soaked in the scalding-white sun, and the humidity must be at least ninety percent. You live and learn, Miss Crowe, you live and fucking learn.

Two days ago, day before yesterday evening, while trying to escape the heat, I made my first trip down into the cellar of this house. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to do so earlier. The cellar door is just off the kitchen, in a sort of alcove near the hallway that leads to the bedroom and bathroom. It’s an exceptionally small doorway, even by the standards of this place. What do you call the top of a doorframe? I know there’s a word for it. I measured it with a yardstick I found in the attic. Just an inch more than five feet, top to bottom, so I have to stoop a bit to keep from smacking my head. The ten steps down to the hard-packed dirt floor are narrow, and the cellar air is (no surprise) rank, as you’d imagine. Still, there’s no air-conditioning in this dump, and Blanchard won’t spring for window units. All I have are two useless box fans I bought in Foster, and, truthfully, it was a waste of good money, because they only manage to stir the hot air round and round. Sweat soup, I would call it. Anyway, I took a chair down there, one of the chairs from the kitchen table, and a flashlight and the book I’m reading. Fortunately, the cellar ceiling is not nearly so low as the doorway down to the cellar, though I’ve never been claustrophobic. I think that cellar would be a claustrophobic’s nightmare. There are shelves heaped and crammed and sagging with the weight with all manner of junk dating back fuck knows how far — decades, more than a century, I can’t yet say. And then there’s the stuff that’s just been piled directly on the floor. I parked my chair near the foot of the stairs and tried not to think about rats, spiders, and toxic mold spores. I’m guessing it was no more than sixty degrees down there, so it was heaven, really, after the broiling oven that this house becomes every afternoon, every night. I ignored the musty air, the stink like dirt and mushrooms and wet newspapers, though it was genuinely cloying.

Anyway, after only a couple of hours, I grew bored with the novel — it really isn’t very good, worse than one of mine — and started poking around in the refuse. I think maybe an antiques dealer or a historian would have a field day down there. Then again, there’s so much accumulated filth and mildew, deposited in thick, tacky gray strata, perhaps anything of significant value is beyond salvaging at this point. However, I did come across an old manual typewriter buried beneath a bath towel on one of the shelves. The thing weighs, I don’t know, I’m guessing twenty or twenty-five pounds, though it was marketed in the forties as a portable. I found one like it on a website devoted to the history of typewriters. It’s a 1941 Quiet Deluxe portable, manufactured by the Royal Typewriter Company of Hartford (later known as the Royal McBee Typewriter Company) just like Hemingway used at his home in Key West. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,”For Whom the Bell Tolls,and Death in the Afternoon were all written on a Royal typewriter of this very same make and model. I saw one in mint condition online for $475, though the one from Blanchard’s cellar is, sadly, far from mint.

But it does type fairly well, the keys only sticking now and then. Conveniently, there was also a padded manila envelope stored with it, containing several inked silk ribbons that fit the machine. The envelope is lying here beside me. It was shipped from a company called Vintage American Typers from a P.O. box in Burke, Virginia, to a Dr. Charles L. Harvey at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Rhode Island’s Kingston campus. The Burke postmark is dated January 12, 2003. More than five years ago. There was even a single page still in the typewriter’s carriage, a sheet of onionskin paper, cockled finish and all. I don’t know if you can even still buy onionskin paper. It makes me think of the Oxford English Dictionary and Bibles and such. Anyway, the page reads as follows:

And yes, it just ends right there, with the name Micah,about halfway down the single-spaced page. However, I was fortunate to discover a copy of Mysterious New England at the library in Moosup, and, sure enough, the story is on page 156—“Franklin’s ‘Blood’ Apples” by Joseph A. Owens. It corroborates everything on the typed page, which I can only assume must have been written by the same Dr. Harvey to whom the package of ribbons was addressed back in 2003. A nice little mystery, something to take the edge off the monotony of the last month, yeah? Well, it gets better.

Remember that woman at the store on the Plain Woods Road, the one who thought I had a “right” to know about this place’s previous tenant, but then wouldn’t actually tell me what she was talking about? Well, after finding the typewriter and the envelope of ribbons, after reading that page, I put two and two together, whiz-bang, and figured that she must have been speaking of Dr. Charles Harvey, as I’d already been told by Blanchard that the house’s former tenant had been a professor at URI. It seemed an unlikely coincidence.That professor pretty much had to be the same professor who’d written about the blood-filled apples. I googled the guy’s name and discovered that, yes, he did live here for almost three years, 2001 to 2003. Harvey was a folklorist and anthropologist with an interest in urban legends and occultism in the Maritime and New England. Born in Eugene, Oregon, in 1942, he received his doctoral from UC Berkeley in 1969. Dr. Harvey was on an extended sabbatical from the university, supposedly writing a book on the evolution and propagation of “fakelore” in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts when he died here,in Blanchard’s house, on August 7th, 2003. Well, no. Not actually in the house, but on the property. The obits were sketchy on details, but it seems he hung himself from a tree somewhere within the boundaries of the Wight Farm. He’d divorced his wife years before, and his only daughter lives up in Maine. That’s the stuff I was able to glean from the internet. But I also phoned Blanchard this morning, to tell him I’d likely be a couple of days late on July’s rent (still waiting for that damned check from Germany), and, as tactfully as I could, I broached the subject of Charles Harvey. I made notes during the conversation, pretty much a word-for-word transcript of that part of the call:

Me: So, anyway, I just found out about that Harvey fellow, Charles Harvey, the suicide.

(long silence)

Me: The URI professor? Rented the place before me.

Blanchard: Yeah. I know who you mean. The man wasn’t right. So, what. You angry I didn’t tell you about him?

Me: No, I’m not angry. I’m just curious.

Blanchard: I’m the one found him, you know.

Me: No, I didn’t know that. None of the obituaries or articles I found online mentioned that.

Blanchard: Well, ain’t like it’s the sort of thing they hand out medals for, finding a man strung up in one of your trees. But I did. I found him not far from the house.

Me: This house?

Blanchard: Yeah. Used an extension cord, not rope, but it worked just fine. He’d been up there four or five days, the coroner said. That’s what they told me. It was hot weather, and that wasn’t a pretty thing to come upon. Birds had been at him, and the maggots, and whatnot.

Me: I had no idea.

Blanchard (sounding defensive): Hardly the sort of thing you go around advertising when you want to lease a house. Not the sort of thing attracts the element I want to be renting the place out to.

Me: No, I guess not. Still, you know, it was a bit of a shock. I have to admit that.

Blanchard: You’re not angry about this, are you?

Me (laughs): No, no. It’s fine. Really. I was just curious, that’s all. Poor man.

Blanchard: I suppose you gotta have sympathy for situations like that. Still, he wasn’t right, and he croaked himself owing me two months back rent. His girl up in Portland offered to pay, but hell, what kind of asshole would I have looked like taking the money from her?

Me: He was writing a book. That’s what I read.

Blanchard: Yeah, he was writing a book. You don’t come across like the superstitious sort to me, Miss Crowe.

Me: No, I’m not superstitious.

Blanchard: So, sure you’re not sore I didn’t tell you about him?

Me: I’m sure. Why didn’t the daughter take his typewriter with the rest of his belongings?

Blanchard: Daughter didn’t take none of his stuff. My wife sent a bunch of it off to the Goodwill, and I just threw most of the rest out. I thought someone might be able to use that typewriter someday, so I put it in the basement.

Me: And the ribbons?

Blanchard: Ribbons? You lost me.

Me: There was an envelope with ribbons for the typewriter. Several of them. I found those, too.

Blanchard: Yeah. There was an envelope. That’s right.

Me: So, what happened to his book? The manuscript, I mean. There was a page still in the typewriter. I assume he died with it unfinished.

Blanchard: Listen, Miss Crowe, can we please talk about this later? I don’t want to be rude, but I got business over in Wakefield this afternoon, and I’m already running late as it is.

I told him not to worry, that I was probably being nosy and that I hate nosiness, especially when I’m the guilty party. I promised again to have the rent to him by the 10th of the month, and he thanked me for letting him know I’d be late with the check, then hung up first. I switched off the cell phone, and promptly hid it from myself. Maybe I’ll find it later. Maybe not. If anyone wants to harass me, they can use the landline.

Anyway, I’m left to conclude that the late Dr. Harvey’s unfinished book, in all likelihood, went to the local landfill or a bonfire or whatever,if it’s true that the daughter in Maine claimed none of his effects. I can’t imagine why Blanchard would have lied about something like that. All that survives is that one peculiar page, incomplete reflections on “bloody apples” from a tree that died seventy years ago. I’ve been thinking about driving down to Connecticut, to Franklin (formerly Norwich), where Micah Hood’s cursed fruit is said to have sprouted some three hundred years ago. If I’m lucky, I might can get a magazine article or short story out of this.

And that reminds me, I got the extension on the novel. The extension on the original extension. The guillotine will just have to wait another six months. Dorothy’s a miracle worker, but I gather my publisher is magnificently displeased, and I’ve had to promise this will never, ever happen again and so forth. Which is rather like promising you’ll never get the flu again, or let it rain on the Fourth of July. Do they think I’m doing this shit on purpose, just to foul up their publishing schedule? Right now, I’d probably give all the fingers on my left hand (I type mostly with my right) for a finished manuscript to appease my editor and fulfill my contractual obligations. Something I could trade in for a decent goddamn payday. Anyway, maybe if I can give Dorry a short story to peddle, everyone will leave me alone for a while. Also, I think this will be the last entry I make in the notebook. I’ve got half a mind to dust off Dr. Harvey’s old Royal machine, feed it a little oil to loosen up the sticky keys and suchlike, and transcribe everything from the spiral-bound notebook to typescript. It’s something to do. And I haven’t felt like going near the laptop for anything but the web (mostly porn, I will admit) since I got here.

Blanchard called at some ungodly hour this morning and woke me up to tell me he’s letting the upstairs, the attic, out to some artist from California. What the fuck? I think I actually said that to him. He pointed out that the lease permitted him to do so, that, as it happens, I’d only rented the downstairs portion of the house. I asked him to hold on while I read through the lease, and yeah, the bastard’s telling the truth. It’s right there, which is what I get for not bothering to read the things I sign before (or after) I sign them. He offered to let me out of my lease, like I have anywhere to go. I declined. I half think he wants me to leave. Likely, I’m just being paranoid, but maybe I shouldn’t have brought up the subject of the dearly departed Dr. Harvey. The woman arrives next fucking week. So much for solitude.

I have now typed everything from the notebook. It comes to sixty-five pages, all stacked neatly on the table beside me and the bottle of Jack I’ve been working on since yesterday. From here on, I’ll keep this journal — which is what it seems to have become — on the dead man’s typewriter and give my pens a rest. I had to drive all the way to Foster to get paper, a pack of five hundred sheets. So, I cannot type more than five hundred pages. Oh, and the woman, this painter from California, is named Constance Hopkins. My luck, she’ll be straight. Watch and see.

Spent most of the day in the basement, hiding from the heat and trying not to think about the imminent arrival of the dreaded attic lodger. Also, I got to thinking that just maybe, when Blanchard stowed the old typewriter and the envelope of ribbons down there, possibly he did the same with the anthropologist’s unfinished manuscript. So, hours spent picking through all the moldering junk. I tried to be systematic, beginning at the shelf where I found the typewriter. It wasn’t there, just empty Mason jars, cardboard boxes of grimy machine parts, a busted electric fan that surely must have dated back to the twenties, a plastic milk crate filled with bundled copper wiring, three broken claw hammers, and so forth. I moved from one slouching plywood and cinder-block shelf to the next, venturing deeper into the basement than I ever had before. After about an hour and a half, I came across a low archway of fieldstones and mortar, and realized it marked the northern periphery of the house, below the kitchen table. I shone my flashlight through the arch, and it was clear that more shelves, more boxes, more indistinguishable mountains of refuse, lay on the other side. I thought about giving up the search and heading back to the stairs. Surely, Blanchard would have put the manuscript near the typewriter, had he decided to keep the thing (which was beginning to seem unlikely). I lingered there at the place where the house ends, where the merely dank basement seemed to give way to a genuine clamminess. There was a draft, air that was not cool, but cold, cold and unpleasantly damp, leaking through the archway, and I spotted a rusty iron horseshoe mounted on the keystone. A few of the nails had come loose, and it was hanging down, not up, and the first thing I thought of was Blanchard’s question on the phone—“You’re not a superstitious woman, are you?” or however he phrased it. The remaining nail had a distinctly square head, so I’m guessing that horseshoe’s been up there quite some time. There was a red-brown ghost of rust on the granite from when it had hung with the two ends pointing upwards towards the ceiling, so the overall impression was of something like an hourglass. I thought of the red bellies of female black widow spiders, and tried to recall if they live as far north as Rhode Island. And then I remembered when Amanda and I went to England (a sort of working vacation), how she’d laughed at me because I wouldn’t follow her into some damned abandoned railway tunnel that she wanted to explore. I chickened out and let her go in alone. I looked it up online, the tunnel, before I started writing this entry; it was, in fact, the Morewell Tunnel at Tavistock in West Devon (N 50° 31.154 W 004° 09.997). It had been a passenger rail, closed down since the 1960s, and was overgrown when we visited. There was a gate you had to scale to get inside — to trespass,as I’d pointed out to Amanda. She made clucking noises and scrambled nimbly over the chain link.

“All right,” she’d said. “But if I break my neck, you’re to blame.”

I think I told her to get bent, go fuck herself, something like that. Words that only made her laugh harder, her laughter echoing off the tunnel walls as she vanished from sight. That day, the tunnel entrance struck me as an open mouth — the most obvious analogy possible, I suppose. Specifically, I thought of the gaping, open mouths of predatory water things, like snapping turtles and anglerfish, lying in wait for a curious, tasty morsel to come along and have a look inside before those jaws slammed closed. I stood there shivering, while the miserable English sky drizzled, waiting for the tunnel to snap shut.Are you superstitious, Sarah Crowe? Maybe just a little?

Anyway, the memory of Amanda mocking me that day was enough to get me moving again and through the cellar archway, past that horseshoe, that rust hourglass. The temperature seemed to drop a good ten degrees, and the hard-packed dirt floor gave way to a somewhat muddy, uneven floor, with native rocks showing through, here and there. I shone the flashlight at the ceiling. It was a foot or so lower than in the basement proper, and countless roots and rootlets had penetrated from above, giving it an ugly, hairy appearance.

There was a rough-hewn stone threshold, too, dividing those portions of the basement to the south and north of the archway. It wasn’t granite or schist or phyllite or whatever, but some dark, slaty rock that reminded me of the older headstones I’ve seen in local cemeteries, the picturesque ones dating back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I kneeled down for a better look, playing the incandescent beam over the stone. I’m going to have to go back with my camera and get some photographs. The damned thing is inscribed with an assortment of crude designs. At first glance, I thought I was just seeing graffiti. Maybe something Blanchard’s kids or grandkids had done, or something done, who knows, a hundred, two hundred years ago by someone else’s kids. But I quickly recognized a few of the symbols, that they were symbols. Astrological, alchemical, Cabbalistic — really a nonsensical jumble, which put me in mind of the hexes you can still see painted on barns in Pennsylvania’s Dutch Country. The planetary symbol for both Pluto and Jupiter, various presumably Christian crosses and Hindu swastikas, letters from the Hebrew alphabet, a pentagram — a hodgepodge, as though either some very superstitious person had decided to cover all of his or her bases, or, more likely, a teenager armed with a book on the occult. And yeah, sure, I can admit that it gave me the creeps, and yeah, I can also admit I had second thoughts about exploring the darkness beyond the horseshoe-guarded archway. I’m a big girl, and I can admit when something gives me the heebies. And when I’m being silly. But there was Amanda, the fucking ghost of Amanda, my goddamn memories of her standing in the maw of the Morewell Tunnel, laughing at me. I turned away from the threshold, turning, I noted, towards Ramswool Pond, and let the light play across this newfound vacuity below the old farmstead.

I do not believe, at this point, that I was still searching for Dr. Harvey’s manuscript. I think, more likely, I was only trying to show myself that Amanda had been wrong all along. That day in Tavistock, and all those other days and nights. I was not afraid of the dark, or of the hunger of abandoned places, or, for that matter, of anything else that she might have accused me of. That she is dead (there, I’ve said it, I’vewrittenit), and so would always have the last laugh as regards all these little grudges and jabs, hardly seemed relevant. It was not in vain, because if I was proving something to Amanda, I was also proving something to myself. Jesus fuck, Amanda. No one we knew ever believed that there was anything between us but the sex and some virulent allure, my dirty dishwater circling the drain of you. Not a very pretty comparison, but maybe it’s the best we’ll ever deserve, either one of us. Anyway, I went into that stinking, muddy darkness because, once upon a time, she thought I was a coward. Two little girls bickering because neither of us ever learned to love, and this was my latest chance to give you the finger, Amanda, posthumous though it may be.

The ground made a soft, squelching sound beneath my sneakers, and I slipped once or twice, almost falling. I hastily looked over the contents of the shelf nearest the archway, which held very little besides row after row of ancient canned goods (mostly cucumber pickles, I think, but the fuzzy clots of mold in the jars made it hard to be sure) and disintegrating bales of The Farmer’s Almanac and Field and Stream. I paused, shining my light north, towards the place where the darkness ought to have ended in another wall, probably earthen. But the batteries were getting weak, and the beam would not penetrate that far, however far that might be. And this is when I saw the grimy chifforobe missing all its drawers, sitting just a few feet farther in, and on top of it was a cardboard box, not so different from the manuscript boxes I get from Staples or Office Depot. I grabbed it, suddenly wishing to be anywhere at all but that slimy hole in the world, wanting to be outside, beneath the summer sun again. Better the sweat and glare and stifling, relentless heat than that clinging damp and darkness. I tripped climbing the stairs and have a nice yellow-green bruise on my left shin to show for it. I’m sure, if Amanda had a soul, and if it somehow survived her body, she was cackling at panicked, fraidy-cat me from whichever afterlife or underworld she’s consigned herself. I bolted the basement door behind me, and sat down on the floor. I actually kicked the cellar door hard, two or three times, leaving muddy footprints that I’m gonna have to wash away. I thought for a moment I was going to knock the goddamned thing off its hinges. It was all anger, the force behind those kicks — anger at my own kid fears and my memories and Amanda’s suicide and the goddamn overdue novel I’m not getting written. I lay on the floor a while, grateful for the muggy kitchen, the stagnant air that did not stink of mold. I lay there until my heart stopped racing. And then I sat up and looked inside the box.

It was taped shut, but most of the adhesive had dried out long ago, and I didn’t need a knife to get it open. Inside was page after page of the same onionskin paper I’d found in the Royal’s carriage, and so there I was, returned fucking victorious from my own personal katabasis, Hecate back from the bloody bowels of hell with rescued Persephone, what the fuck ever. I’d done the deed, and now I held the prize, and seeing it there, my fury quickly, calmly, melted away. Not caring that my dirty fingers would leave smudges, I lifted the first page from the box, and then the second, and then the third, reading over them as quickly as I could. After maybe ten or fifteen minutes, I finally had the presence of mind to get up and carry the box to the kitchen table, where, after half a decade, I reunited it with Harvey’s typewriter.

I got a beer from the refrigerator (because, already, the heat was feeling a lot less welcome than I’d imagined it would be while I was still in the basement) and then sat down to reread, more carefully, those first few pages. The first was simply a title page — THE RED TREE by Dr. Charles L. Harvey and all that. The usual. The second page was occupied by two epigraphs, one from Thoreau, the other from Seneca the Elder. Neither meant very much to me, but perhaps they will later, once I’ve had a chance to get through the manuscript. The third page was blank, but the fourth bore the heading — CHAPTER ONE: THE CURSED ACORN — only THE CURSED ACORN was crossed out, and a string of question marks had been scrawled in directly above it in red ink. I sat there, sipping at my beer, the amber bottle perspiring and growing slick in my hand. Despite the things I’d read online, nothing here,before me, pointed to Harvey’s unfinished book being a study of regional “fakelore.” Rather, it looked to be concerned with local traditions regarding a tree on the plot of land now known as the Wight place. What’s more, it quickly became evident that this tradition amounted to stories of murder, witchcraft, lycanthropy, cannibalism, and a miscellany of other unpleasantries, dating back to the first decade of the Eighteenth Century. Scanning those thin, hand-corrected pages, the typescript and Harvey’s annotations, I got goose bumps — swear to fuck, I truly did — and found myself pausing repeatedly to glance out the window at the farmland gone fallow and brushy, the oaks and pines pressing in around the dark expanse of Ramswool Pond.

Hardly the sort of shit you advertise when you’re trying to rent out a house, indeed.

Jesus fuck, the goddamn nightmares. Screw the seizures. Please just give me a pill for these goddamned bad dreams. I awoke from one about fifteen minutes ago, and stumbled out here from the bedroom for a drink (bourbon, yes, but I did cut it with water). I stood at the big window in the den for a few minutes, watching the eastern sky. The birds are awake and chittering away in the trees and bushes, and I know the sun will be along before too much longer — already, the sky is lightening — but the way I feel right now, soon can’t come soon enough. Maybe it won’tbe so bad having someone else in the house, even an artist from California. Even if she’s straight.

So, yeah, here I sit, typing on Harvey’s Royal after a measly four hours’ sleep. Not sleeping is one of the triggers; for the fits, I mean, so this can’t become a habit. I have to sleep, bad dreams or no bad dreams. I have to sleep, but I just couldn’t stay in bed after that, couldn’t say “Fuck it” and pop another Ambien. I need to be awake. I need to be awake and in this world. And I think I really am going to write down what I can recall about the dream, with the dimmest hope that it will loosen its grip on me. I know I am awake now, and not merely stranded in some mundane intermission between one terror and the next. I know the sun is coming. I know I can get a nap later, when the day is all around me, and I don’t have to go back down to sleep beneath the starry canopy of the fucking night.

It’s another oft-cited, so-called weakness of my writing, by the way. All the dream sequences. The “reliance” on dream sequences, and, some of the stuff I’ve seen said, you’d think I’d invented the blasted things. As though the reviewers (and here I refer particularly to those self-styled reviewers who leave comments at Amazon and suchlike) have managed to get through high school and college (big assumption here, I admit) without ever encountering such a basic narrative technique. Let them pick on Pushkin or Shaw or Mary Shelley or goddamn Shakespeare and leave my sorry midlist ass the hell alone. I’ve actually had my agent suggest that my novels would come across as more accessible and I might increase my readership if I avoided so many dream sequences. And I am appalled at authors and critics alike who brand the use of dreams in fiction as a “cheat,” used only by writers who cannot “figure out,” in a waking narrative, some other means of saying what he or she has to say.

This attitude denies so much of. yes, I have digressed, and I am on my goddamned soapbox. But, honestly, honestly. I have lost track of the times readers have complained that they couldn’t follow the “story” because they weren’t clear what was “really happening” and what was “only” a dream. Right now, from where I fucking sit, it’s all a dream, marked by varying degrees of lucidity. Get with the program or stick to television (though, it must be noted that film and TV rely very, very heavily on dream sequences, so you’d think — if for no other reason — the lowest common denominator would have long since become accustomed or desensitized or whatever to writers employing dreams to expand and further the story). Whatever. I did not sit down here to complain about readers who cannot be bothered to be literate. Yeats said (and this one I know from memory, and let it stand as my sleep-addled defense, if any defense is needed):

Outside, the sky continues to brighten. The sky is the color of blueberry yogurt. Harvey’s unfinished manuscript is still in its box, here beside the typewriter. I’ve read the first two chapters. And that probably wasn’t so terribly bright of me, not after I figured out what his book is about, but curiosity and cats and all that. My dreams be damned, how would I not read it?

Look at this. Two and a half pages already, and I’ve managed not to get to the point. I have managed to skirt the point, to dance around the periphery of the point. Stop writing about dreams, Sarah, and writing about writing about dreams, and just write the dream.

The sky is going milky.

I cannot recall the beginning of it, but I was back in the basement with my flashlight. I know that I wasn’t looking for Harvey’s manuscript, because I clearly recall setting it down on one of the sagging shelves of pickles or machine parts or whatever, so I’d have a hand free. I was on the other side of the archway, past that odd threshold and its preposterous array of glyphs. I was somewhere past the threshold, trying to locate the north wall of the basement, pacing off my steps, one after the other, doing my best not to lose track and have to start over again. I realized that I must have walked very far beyond the house, and the footing beneath me grew increasingly wet. There were stagnant pools of black water standing here and there, pools whose depth it was impossible to judge, and I did my best not to step too near any of them. They seemed. unwholesome. Yes, that’s the word. Of course, truthfully, the whole damned place seemed unwholesome, as if I had somehow stumbled into an actual gangrenous abscess in the ground, a geological infection that had hollowed out this cavity below and within Blanchard’s land.

Here, where the pools of water began, there were far fewer shelves, and all of them contained nothing but antique books, volumes swollen from the moisture, their covers warped and spines splitting open like overripe berries. I did not stop to examine them, to learn any of their titles. I didn’t want to know, any more than I wanted to approach those motionless obsidian puddles. And this is when I realized that I was not alone. I heard footsteps first, and looking over my shoulder, I saw Amanda. Only, in death (and she was dead, of that I am certain) she had taken on aspects of various of her photomontages, the sick fantasies of her pervert clients. She had the ridged and lyre-shaped horns of a male impala sprouting from her skull, and her eyes were as black as the pools of stagnant water. When she came closer, I could see that her cheeks and the backs of her hands were flushed with tiny scales that appeared to shimmer with some internal light all their own.

“Changed your mind, did you?” she asked, and when I nodded yes, she laughed — and it was so much her laugh, in no way distorted by the dream. It was simply Amanda laughing, and I was grateful to hear it again. And then she asked, “So, was it inquisitiveness, or was it peer pressure? Or maybe you just got to thinking I wouldn’t want to fuck a woman who was afraid of the dark.”

“I am not afraid of the dark,” I replied, a little too emphatically. “It isn’t safe down here. They seal these places for a reason.”

“So, you’ve come to save me?” and she laughed again, but the sound was neither as pure nor as welcome as before. “Are you my Lancelot? Are you the kindly huntsman come to rescue me from all the big bad wolves?”

And I told her no, it wasn’t anything like that, that I was only trying to find the north wall of the basement, because I knew it had to be there somewhere. I explained that if there were no north wall, then there’d be nothing to hold back Ramswool Pond. And since the basement clearly wasn’t flooded, it stood to reason the wall was there somewhere.

She shrugged and pointed at one of the puddles, not far from her muddy, bare feet. “You never can tell,” she said, “what goes on down below. Given any thought to where these fuckers might lead?”

“They’re mud holes,” I replied, growing impatient with the argumentative ghost of my argumentative lover. “They don’t lead anywhere.”

She smiled the sort of smile that maybe dead people commonly smile, and said, “You always were a woman of unfounded assumptions, Sarah.”

And around us, then, suddenly there were fireflies, and swirling motes of unidentifiable bioluminescence that seemed to make the darkness no less dark. The ceiling of the basement was draped with more than roots, I saw, with the sticky silken threads of larval glow worms, and I imagined there were zodiac constellations drawn in the arrangement of their deadly lures. Amanda held up her arms, as though she’d summoned this swarm, as though she worshipped or made herself an offering to it. And the basement had, I saw, grown into a cavern, something straight out of A Journey to the Center of the Earth,and forests of oyster-colored mushrooms the size of redwoods towered all around us. I heard the crashing waves of a not-so-distant sea, and Amanda sat down on a rock, and, slowly, she lowered her arms.

“So, what. You think this is usual?” she asked me, or some question very near to that, and I turned, trying to see the way back to the arch, and, past that, the foot of the stairs leading to a place that was only a basement.

“I don’t know what I think anymore,” I lied.“Perhaps you ought to put it back,” and I knew she meant the manuscript, Harvey’s manuscript, without having to ask.

“Perhaps you’re not ready for this.”

“That’s not for you to say,” I told her.

“And the typewriter, too,” she continued, as though I’d not even spoken. She did that a lot, when we were both alive. “It can’t be healthy, Sarah, having it around like this,working with it, a thing that has recently borne such strange fruit.” And if her allusion was lost on me in the dream, it’s not lost on me now.

The impala horns abruptly dropped from her head, and where they’d been nothing was left but two bloody stumps. She sat looking at them, the horns, and her expression was not so much sad as wistful, I think.

“Kind of makes you wonder,” she said, nodding at the shed horns. I waited for her to elaborate, but she never did. And I saw then that a variety of pale fungi had begun to sprout from her flesh, from her jeans and T-shirt, not so much devouring as simply augmenting,and I knew that, in this dream, I was neither a knight-errant nor a woods-man who saves lost girls from hungry wolves. nor from parasitic toadstools and yeasts, molds and agarics. I had already told her that, but as I watched Amanda’s body slowly, steadily bloom with the progeny of unseen spores, any doubt I might have harbored in this regard vanished.

There was more, what seems like hours and hours more, a roiling tumble of nonsense and phantasmagoria, a flight through that subterranean forest to the shores of Verne’s Mare Internum,his Liedenbrock Sea, perhaps. It may be I sailed a plesiosaur-infested ocean, or maybe I only sat on that alien shore, gazing up at a sunless, electric sky. But, however it proceeded, I don’t think I’m up to writing the rest. Whatever I might remember of the rest. The compulsion that drove me from my bed to this chair and the typewriter of Dr. Harvey has deserted me.

Since coming here, I have written two dreams, and damned little else, and in each one, of course, I encounter you, Amanda. In each one, I have no say in what becomes of you, so, in that respect, at least these are true dreams. Then again, in each one, you seem somehow imperiled, when I find it hard to believe there was ever any threat to you beyond your own penchant for self-destruction. So, paradoxically, the dreams may also be lies. Or both things are equally true — a particle and a wave, as it were — and I’m only being narrow-minded. A woman of unfounded assumptions, a woman of either-or.

But sitting here, watching the day coming on — a morning pregnant with the promises of yet another scorcher — it occurs to me that perhaps I should consider passing Harvey’s manuscript along to someone. I really don’t know who. Perhaps URI would want it, some former colleague or his department or the library or something, if his daughter in Maine truly has no interest. I surely do not need this new source of morbidity. I brought more than enough here with me. Maybe today I’ll try to call the university. I could drive it over, the manuscript, if there’s anyone there who wants it. If no one at the school is interested, maybe I’ll contact Brown or the Providence Athenaeum. At this point, I’d appreciate what I could deem a valid excuse to blow a tank of gas on the road trip and get away from this place for a day. And I can’t imagine that Blanchard would mind my getting rid of the manuscript. Not that I’ll bother to ask him, not after the way he’s foisted this new impending upstairs neighbor upon me. I googled her, by the by, and got nothing at all.

I suppose I could even try to track down the daughter; I doubt it would be very hard to do. I have her name from the obits. But there’s something, I think, inherently creepy and stalkerish about doing that. Unless Blanchard’s lying, she had a chance to claim her father’s work and passed. Who knows what that relationship was like? Maybe she’s glad the old man croaked himself, and maybe she even has a right to be. Maybe he was a complete bastard, and the last thing she needs is some stranger butting in. It just seems somehow wrong that this manuscript has languished in the basement of a farmhouse for half a decade. Then again, this all supposes there’s something here worth saving. But I suspect I’m hardly qualified to make that call, and the same is likely true of Dr. Harvey’s disinterested daughter.

I need coffee. I need coffee, and I need to drive into Coventry for groceries. I’m down to my last can of Campbell’s Chicken and Stars soup and a little bit of peanut butter. And I’m awake now, and the sun is shining. I’m bleary as hell, and maybe the slightest bit drunk, but at least the damned dream has stopped feeling like anything more than another permutation of the Nightmare.

The first bad seizure yesterday since leaving Atlanta. In Which Our Heroine is Lulled into a False Sense of Security. Yes, I’ve been drinking since I got here, a little, but I’ve been religious about my meds, and I think I had actually allowed myself to believe that shit was over and done with. Then, yesterday evening, after I got back from the market, after the trip to Coventry, I was washing dishes and. it occurs to me, now, I’ve never tried to describe one of these things. Vincent van Gogh, my favorite fellow epileptic, wrote in a letter to his brother, Theo:

Hell, that makes it seem almost a desirable experience. Me, I have nothing so romantic nor pleasant to report. I was standing at the kitchen sink, setting the coffee cups out to dry on a dish towel, and then I was lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. Maybe ten minutes had passed. There was a small cut on my left hand from a broken cup, and I’d bitten my lip pretty badly, so my mouth tasted like blood. I lay there for a while, because sometimes they come in clusters. Sometimes it’s BAM — BAM — BAM. I lay there feeling sick and hungover and disoriented, dazed, stupid. I lay there, thinking about the first time, the first time to my knowledge, at least, and how badly it scared Amanda. I think it scared her a whole lot more than it scared me. She cried. It wasn’t the only time I saw her cry, but it was one of the few times. She told me she thought that I was dying, and then there were all the goddamn specialists and tests I didn’t have health insurance to cover, and that’s what she should have cried over. I spent most of the evening on the sofa, feeling Not Quite Right. I watched television and tried to read. I fell asleep and woke hours later with a crick in my neck, but feeling somewhat less strung-out.

Anyway, enough about that, the raging electrical storms behind my eyes. I thought maybe I had something to say here, something to match the grand dreamquest of Mon sieur Vincent van Gogh, but I don’t. I have a broken cup, a bandage on my hand, a swollen lip, a few bruises. missing time. I have the knowledge that this thing is still with me, this shaking malady, my tarantella, and I can sit here all night long wondering what part it played in Amanda’s death, and what part it is playing now in my inability to write anything more than these meandering entries on the typewriter of Dr. Harvey. For the first time since coming to this house, I wish there were someone else with me. Right now, for whatever reason, I don’t want to be alone. It’s not so much the fear, though I’d be lying if I said I’m not scared. I’m sick of my own company. I am weary of my own voice, of talking to myself, of talking and there being no one to answer me, but me. Then again, it’s really nothing I haven’t earned.

I spent the better part of the morning on the phone, mostly with people at URI, trying to find a final resting place for the manuscript. After being passed from one office to another to another and back again, from one secretary or administrative assistant or grad student or professor to another, round and round the goddamn mulberry bush, I finally found someone in the Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology interested in the manuscript. Only, she’s leaving for a vacation tomorrow and won’t be back in until after the Fourth, but I don’t suppose that matters a great deal. The box sat in the dank and the dark on that chifforobe for five years. Another week’s hardly going to make much difference. And it gives me time to finish reading the thing, even if Dr. Harvey couldn’t been bothered to finish writing it before stringing himself up. It’s grimly fascinating stuff, as promised by that first page I found, the bit about the “bloody apples.” Oh, sure, it’s grim stuff I no doubt shouldn’t be reading, out here with only the woods and the deer and my fits for company, but if I pretend it’s only fiction, how does it differ from any number of the novels in that stack I have not yet managed to read? I’m tempted to have it photocopied at the library in Moosup, just so I’ll have a record. I’m certainly not going to sit here and retype the whole damned thing. But I will transcribe the following passage, from Chapter One, because it gets straight to the heart of the matter, and I’ll confess it’s made me start thinking about looking for some other place to live (though the Coming of the Attic Artist already had me thinking along those lines). Harvey writes (on page 8 of the manuscript):

And, as long as I’m typing this, I may as well also include this,from ms. pages 3–5:

Like I said, grim reading. And the more of it I read, the more my mind fills up with questions. For example, exactly how old is this house, did this Ames fellow actually build it, and if it was constructed on a preexisting foundation, then how old is that structure? And is the basement (including the muddy area north of the archway where I found the manuscript) part of the original foundation, or was it dug later by William Ames in the 1830s? I suspect that these are questions that can be easily answered by the librarians at the Tyler Free Library, which is where I shall direct them next time I’m up that way, when I drop by to have Harvey’s ms. copied before handing it over to the folks at URI.

Looking back over what I said before typing out the two quotations, I can’t believe that I actually said this business about a “red tree” on Blanchard’s land has me considering whether or not I should be scouting for a new place to live. Pull yourself together, old woman. This is New England, and you can’t swing a dead cat without smacking a ghost or a haint or whatever. Worry about paying next month’s rent, not about pulling up stakes because the local folktales have you spooked.

There was some sort of minor delay in the arrival of the Dreaded Attic Lodger, buying me an extra day or two of privacy before the invasion. But she’s coming tomorrow, or so I have been informed by the ever so thoughtful Mr. Blanchard. Thursday afternoon, he said. And Squire Blanchard wanted to know if, by any chance, I’d be around, just in case she had questions or needed help with this or that or what the hell ever.

I told him, “I feel it’s my solemn duty to inform you I’m not much of a Welcome Wagon. In fact, I might be the opposite.”

He laughed, even though I hadn’t, and then there was a long, uncomfortable pause in our conversation. I really do think he’s beginning to regret having rented this dump to me. Also, I was warned that he’d hired some Mexicans to clean out the attic (I can only assume that if the lodger had arrived on time, she’d have been greeted by the dust and clutter I encountered up there the day I found the measuring stick). As promised, the cleaning crew showed up this afternoon, two men and one woman, and near as I can tell, they spoke not one word of English between the three of them. What I’ve retained from my two years of high-school Spanish barely allows me to order a taco and ask directions to the toilet. Quisiera un taco, por favor. Dónde está el tocador? Dónde está lavabo? Yeah. well, my language skills, my one purported talent, have never strayed particularly toward any foreign tongue (of course, there are plenty enough readers and reviewers who would argue I’m not so hot with English, either).

Anyway, the men hauled toolboxes, sheets of plywood, and some huge-ass shop-vac contraption up there, and before long the noise from all that hammering and shouting and vacuuming was intolerable. So I cleared out, deciding it was as good a time as any to visit Dr. Harvey’s apparently infamous tree. The manuscript places “the red oak” only seventy-five yards north of the house, just a few meters east of the low fieldstone wall that runs along much of the length of the creek flowing south out of Ramswool Pond. And, reading that, I realized the tree is within easy view of the goddamn kitchen window, that I’ve been staring at the thing for two months now with no idea whatsoever that it was anything more significant than the Very Big Tree between the house and the pond. So, not much of an adventure, except there’s a tiny wilderness of briars and poison ivy that begins just beyond the back stoop.

Do New Englander’s have stoops?

It was sunny, not more than a wisp of cloud in sight, and there was a nice breeze, so it seemed like a good day for a walk. And almost anything would have been preferable to the deafening roar of the shop vac and the pounding hammers. I pulled on the leather boots I rarely wear, a long-sleeve T-shirt (despite the heat), a pair of jeans, and grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge. I spritzed myself with tick repellant and smeared some sunscreen on my face. Then I lingered a moment in the kitchen doorway, looking out across and through the undergrowth towards that huge tree, its upper boughs silhouetted against the blue sky, wondering how many times during the past two months I’ve seen it, how many times I’d sat staring directly at it, and I considered how Dr. Harvey’s text had changed a tree into an object of. what word would be appropriate? There’s a quote from Joseph Campbell that I’ve always loved, and it seems to apply here: “Draw a circle around a stone and thereafter the stone will become an incarnation of mystery.” Or something to that effect. Clearly, to my mind, a circle had been drawn about that old tree, and no matter how many times I’d already seen it, no matter how ordinary a tree it might in fact be, the story of doomed William and Susan Ames and everything else I’d read in those pages had traced a circle about the oak (and I’m sure Campbell would have agreed that if it’s true for a stone, it’s true for a tree).

I had only a little more trouble reaching it than I’d expected. The poison ivy is fucking rampant, and though I’ve never been allergic to it, not to my knowledge, there’s always a first time. Also, about halfway to the tree, the wall’s collapsed, and the “path” is blocked by a deadfall of jagged pine branches that I wasn’t about to try to go over or through. Instead, I crossed the shallow creek, skirting the jackstraw tangle of branches and tumbled stones. My feet got muddy, and then climbing back over the stone wall where it resumed north of the deadfall got me to speculating on what sorts of poisonous snakes lurk in those woods (turns out, thank you, internet, there’s some confusion over whether or not there are any venomous snakes in Rhode Island; there might be copperheads and timber rattlers, but, then again, there might not). I spotted a couple of rabbits, a doe, and almost twisted my ankle two or three times. By the time I reached the tree, it was nearly four p.m., and I was mosquito bitten and drenched in sweat. There’s a large slab of rock at the base of the tree, and I sat down on it to get my breath and wipe away some of the sweat stinging my eyes. It’s harder to see the house from the tree than it is to see the tree from the house, and I assume this is the result of some vagary of topography and vegetation.

At any rate, all in all, the tree was a disappointment. Not much of a mystery, no matter how many circles Harvey and the local yokels might have drawn around it. It’s big, sure. Huge, really. But. that was that. A huge oak tree. I was underwhelmed — though, honestly, what had I expected? To hear the ghostly, disembodied voice of lost and presumably wolf-gnawed Susan Ames calling out to me across a hundred and sixty-eight years? I was too tired to even think of heading back right off, so I lay down on the wide slab of granite or whichever brand of igneous rock is exposed at the base of the tree, and just lay there a while, staring up into the branches. There were catbirds, and they fluttered about and scolded me for intruding upon whatever secret catbird affairs they conduct out there. Truthfully, despite the sweat and the scratches from greenbriers, despite the bug bites, it was nice being there beneath the tree. So what if it has a bit of a bad reputation. So do I. In fact, I suspect I could have fallen asleep there, if not for all the noise the catbirds were making. Certainly, Harvey’s talk of cutting the tree down or burning it — his evident fear of it — seemed entirely absurd, lying there, sheltered from the sun by its broad, whispering leaves.

When I’d gotten my second wind, I sat up and examined the oak a little closer. The roots are genuinely impressive, enormous, like gnarled, arthritic fingers digging into the soil and ferns and detritus of the forest floor. It was impossible not to be reminded of Tolkien’s ents, and, in particular, of Old Man Willow snaring Merry and Pippin in the crushing folds of its trunk, but even these thoughts, of that cunning, black-hearted tree in Bombadil’s Old Forest, failed to elicit from me any actual dread of “the red oak.” A little awe, maybe, that this great tree still stood after all these long decades, after centuries, seemingly impervious to the ravages of time. I walked about its periphery, and found a few places where people had carved initials and dates into the wood. I’ll have to go back and write them down. The only one I recall offhand is “1888,” which I assume was carved into the bark more than forty years after the whole Ames affair had supposedly occurred.

It’s getting late. I should take my pills and go to bed. I have no idea what time that woman will actually show up tomorrow. I ought to get up early and head for Providence or Newport, stay gone a few days and let her wonder, let Blanchard worry about whatever questions she might have. But what I ought to do and what I do are very rarely ever one and the same.