The Red Tree

CHAPTER FOUR

No coffee yet, and only one cigarette, and it only half smoked. If I were any less awake, sitting upright wouldn’t be an option. There was a very minor absence seizure last night, late; Constance had come downstairs to bum a cigarette, and she had not yet gone back upstairs when it happened. No big deal. I faded out for a few seconds, but she made a huge fuss over it. Can’t wait until she’s unlucky enough to be around for one of the big ones, if that’s how she’s going to react to the petit mal episodes. She brewed a pot of tea, and kept asking if she could look at my pupils, and if maybe I smelled oranges — stuff like that — and sat with me a while, though, of course, it was entirely unnecessary. I told her it was unnecessary, but she insisted. It must have been almost four in the morning before she climbed back up into her garret and left me alone to try and sleep. And I really didn’t do much better than try. My head filled itself with all the sorts of unease that comes on nights like that, the unanswerable questions, the heavy thoughts to needle me and keep me awake. My health, the book, money, and also the story that Constance had told me about her ghost, the “ghost” she claims to have witnessed in Newport years ago. So, even though it’s probably not fair, I’m going to blame her for the nightmares that came when I finally did doze off. It was almost five a.m., and the sky was going gray. I’m still not accustomed to how early the sun rises here, compared to Atlanta, and I really hate when it catches me off my guard like that. But I was sleeping before genuine daylight came along, thank fuck, or I wouldn’t have gotten even the lousy couple of hours that I managed.

The house is so goddamn quiet. Mist over Ramswool Pond. Birds singing. Little sounds I can’t identify. And these noisy fucking typewriter keys. Constance said not to worry about it, that, after her time in LA, she could sleep through an earthquake (and, in fact, she has, she tells me), but I still find myself trying to strike the keys with less force, endeavoring to somehow muffle that clack-clack-fuckity-clack of die-cast iron consonants and vowels against the paper and the machine’s carriage.The intractable guilt of the insomniac typist—sounds a bit like a stray line Ezra Pound might have wisely persuaded Eliot to cut from The Waste Land.

But the reason that I’m sitting here at the kitchen table (if I need a reason), painfully uncaffeinated, squinting at Dr. Harvey’s accursed typewriter by the wan light of eight ayem, are those nightmares I’ve already blamed Constance for summoning. Just another set of bad dreams, sure, in a parade that’s never going to end until I’m dead and buried (and, oh, what a happy thought, that death may come with nightmares all its own: unending, possibly, an afterlife of perpetual nightmares). But I can’t shake the feeling that there was something new there, and I want to try and put down some of what I recall before I lose it. It’s already fading so goddamn fast, so quit stalling and get to it, woman!

I was walking by the sea, maybe one of the nearby stretches of Rhode Island coastline that I’ve visited — so, it’s no great stretch to understand why I’m blaming the tale of the “ghost” of the Forty Steps. I assume the tide was rising. It seemed to be rising, but I have spent far too little of my life by the sea to be sure. The surf was rough, the waves coming in and crashing against a beach that was more cobbles and pebbles than sand. The air was filled with spray. My feet kept getting wet. Well, I mean my shoes, as I wasn’t barefoot. My shoes kept getting wet, and my socks, because the foamy water was rushing so far up the beach towards the line of low dunes that stretched away behind me. The sky was the most amazing thing, though, and maybe if I weren’t so asleep I could find the language to do my memories of it justice. Maybe. Then again, maybe the demeanor of that sky is forever beyond my abilities to wordsmith. I know a storm was approaching, but no usual sort of storm. Something terrible, something magnificent rolling like a cumulus demon of wind and rain and lightning over the whitecaps, sweeping towards the land, and no power in the cosmos could have waylaid or detoured that storm.

At the library in Moosup, a while back, I read part of a book about the Great Hurricane of 1938, the fabled Long Island Express, and maybe that’s what was in back of my sleeping conjuration of this advancing line of towering thunderheads. The colors, they’re still so clear in my head, a range of blue and blacks, violets and sickly greens bleeding into even sicklier yellows, and that does not even begin to convey those clouds. This was an angry, bludgeoned sky. A bruised sky. A sky bearing the contusions of some unseen atmospheric cataclysm.

I stood there, the polished stones slipping about beneath my wet feet as though they were imbued with a life all their own (and I wish I could recollect that line from Machen about the horror of blossoming pebbles, but I can’t, and won’t do it a disservice by trying). The wind and the spray swirled about me, plastering my clothes and hair flat, filling my nostrils and mouth with all the salty, living flavors and aromas of a wrathful sea. And as the gusts blown out before that storm howled in my ears, I realized that I was not alone, that Constance had followed me down to the shore. She was saying something about her former roommates, the Silver Lake junkies, but I couldn’t make out most of it. I told her to speak up, and, instead, she grew silent, and, for a time, I thought I was alone again.

The sea before me was filled with dark and indescribable shapes, all moving constantly about just below the waves, not far offshore at all, and occasionally something slick and black — like the ridged back of an enormous leviathan or the bow of an upturned boat — would break the surface for a scant few seconds. Smooth, scaleless flesh scabbed white-brown with barnacles and whale lice, or there would be a glimpse of writhing serpentine coils, or of tentacles, perhaps. there would be something festooned with poisonous spines as tall and broken as the masts of a sunken whaler cast up from the depths after a hundred and fifty years lying lost in the silt and slime.

And I felt myself leaning into the wind, and I felt the wind bearing my weight, the resistance of that stinging gale force pushing against my body. I could only wonder that it did not lift me like a kite or a dead leaf and toss me high, tumbling ass over tits, into the air.

Behind me, Constance remained taciturn, and as the storm’s voice grew ever greater in magnitude, ever more insistent, seeming intent upon devouring all other sound, her silence began to wear at my nerves. For whatever reason, her not speaking had become more corrosive than the salt and the lashing blow. As the storm chewed at the shoreline, so her refusal to speak ate at my nerves. And I turned to her, then, and she was standing naked, only a foot or so behind me, her clothing ripped away by the hurricane (if it was a hurricane). Jesus, I need to get laid, because — despite the horrors of the dream — I woke horny from this vision of her, and writing it down, I’m getting horny again. Amanda always said I was easy. I never really argued with her on that point. But, anyway, there’s Constance standing buck-naked on this pebbly, shifting beach while the battered, choleric heavens assailed her pale and unprotected flesh. In that moment, I wanted only to throw her down on the sand and fuck her. I can admit that. Let the tempest take us both, but at least I could go with a goddamn smile on my face. In that moment, or those moments, I wanted to feel my lips against her lips, wanted the heat of her body pressed against my own, wanted to explore every seen and unseen inch of her with my hands and tongue and — yeah, it’s obvious enough to see where that was headed.

But then she did speak, after all, and her voice — though she spoke so,so softly — had no trouble whatsoever reaching my ears over the din of the storm.

“You went to Greece,” she said, “and what you remember most is a dead turtle?”

And in that moment, all my lust was transmuted to mere anger by the alchemy of human emotion. She was not Amanda, and I had never told her my Grecian sea turtle lie. This was a far greater intrusion than her arrival at the farm or her showing up uninvited in my dreams. This was some manner of mnemonic rape, I think, or so it seemed to me then.

“I never told you about the turtle,” I replied, struggling to stay calm, doing a lousy job of it.

“You went all the way to Greece,” she continued, staring past me, staring out to sea. “And then you wrote a book about it. But you left out that thing that made the greatest impression upon you?”

“There never was a fucking turtle,” I told her. “That was just a lie, because. ” and I trailed off, as the whys of my old lie were really none of her business. “I just made it up. And I’ve never told you about that night, about Amanda and the turtle and The Ark of Poseidon.”

She wiped saltwater from her flushed cheeks and smiled a sad, broken sort of smile. “Lady, you wear your past right out in the open, where anyone can see, if they only bother to look. So, don’t blame me for seeing what you’ve put on exhibit.”

Behind me, the bludgeoned sky was suddenly lit by a flash of lightning so brilliant, so blinding, that it seemed to sear our shadows into the beach, like those photos you see taken after the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.The sand will melt and turn to glass,I thought, waiting and bracing myself for that seven-thousand-degree fireball. But it didn’t come — no atomic pressure wave, no flames, no air superheated by X-rays to instantly vaporize the fragile shells of me and her. Only a thunderclap rattled the world, and then, as the rumble echoed across the land, Constance leaned forward and gently kissed me on the cheek.

“When I was a kid, Sarah, I always wanted a Lite-Brite,” she whispered in my ear, and not one single syllable was lost to the jealous, wailing storm, “but it never happened.”

“You are a thief,” I replied, not whispering. “You are a thief of memories that were never yours,” and she laughed at me. There was nothing cruel in the laugh, nothing spiteful. It was more the way you might laugh to lighten a tense mood, to put someone at ease, to make a moron feel less like a moron because she or he is so goddamn dense they can’t see whatever obvious truth is staring them in the face. And it only just this second occurred to me — presumably waking me — that it did not occur to the dreaming me that Constance could have learned these things simply by reading the journal I’ve been keeping on Dr. Harvey’s typewriter. So, is this the subconscious expression of some unsuspected paranoia on my part? Is my sleeping mind fretting that I’ve never made any attempt to hide these pages where no one else can see them, or over my having written all this down in the first place?

“Two billion trees died in that storm,” she said. “Think about it a moment. Two billion trees.” Before I could ask her which storm she was talking about, if maybe she meant the blizzard that brought her into this world like a lion, I saw that she was crying. Only, she wasn’t crying tears, but, rather, diluted streaks of oil or acrylic paints bled from the corners of her eyes, paint in all the shades of that awful storm, as though it had somehow gotten into her and now was leaking out again.

She wiped at her face, smearing the paint across her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose. Then Constance was not speaking, but singing to me, and while the music was a mystery, I knew the words at once—“ ‘What matters it how far we go?’ his scaly friend replied. ‘There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.’ ”

And because this is a dream, and because dreams appear even less fond of resolution than waking life, I woke. I woke horny and covered in sweat and gasping, nauseous and my chest aching, any number of panicked thoughts rushing through my mind — a heart attack? Another seizure? Maybe the seizure to come along and end all my fits once and for all. And too, I had not yet passed so completely beyond the borders of the dream that I did not still fear that hurricane bearing down upon me, bearing down to scrub away the shingle and me and Constance and two billion fucking trees. But, no need to worry, right? Because there is another shore, you know, upon the other side.

I’ve got to end this and get up off my fat ass and make some coffee. It’s almost nine, and I think I hear Constance thumping around upstairs. The typewriter probably woke her, regardless of what she’s been saying. Hopefully, we’ll get our postponed walk in today, out to “the red tree,” if the weather is not too hot and we’re not both too delirious from sleep deprivation.

I’m admittedly at a loss how to write all this down — the events of the past twelve or thirteen hours — but I’m also determined that I will write it down. Some part of me is genuinely frightened, reluctant to put the experience into words, and, still, I find myself driven to compose some account of it. Are we back to writing as an act of exorcism? Wait, don’t answer that question. In fact, no more questions requiring answers, no more questions, just what I am left to believe occurred this afternoon when we tried to visit the tree. We talked about what happened over dinner, which Constance fixed because all I could do was sit here and smoke and stare out the kitchen window at twilight dimming the sky. We talked, but it was an indirect, guarded conversation punctuated with lengthy, uncomfortable silences. I asked her if she’d ever read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House,specifically the scene where Eleanor and Theodora get lost just outside the house and stumble upon a ghostly picnic. She hasn’t, and asked if I’ve read Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths.” I have. Of course, I have. We ended up talking about The Blair Witch Project, though that seemed to come uncomfortably near the bald facts of the matter, and so I brought up Joseph Payne Brennan’s short story “Cana van’s Back Yard,” precisely because I had a feeling Constance hadn’t read it. Inevitably, by fits and starts, we came to Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock,both the novel and Peter Weir’s film, to Miss McCraw and Mrs. Appleyard and her charges, Irma, Miranda, Edith, and Marion.

Constance said, “The girl who wasn’t allowed to go on the picnic, because she hadn’t memorized the assigned poem. The one who had a crush on Miranda? Wasn’t her name Sara?”

I didn’t answer the question, and, thankfully, she didn’t ask it again.

Yes, I know it’s sort of twisted that we had to resort to fictional metaphors and parallels because we were both too goddamned scared to talk about the thing straight on. But I suppose that’s what I’m trying to do now, talk about the thing straight on. Just write it down. Make it only words. Sticks and stones can break my bones, but. I’m starting to think maybe our dear departed Dr. Harvey figured out that words can do more harm than we generally give them credit. You’re stalling,Sarah.

Yes, I am.

We didn’t get out of the house until almost noon, and I’m not writing all that. Neither of us had slept very much, and we kept finding little chores that needed doing, little distractions. Hindsight can create all manner of illusions, and here, hindsight might suggest some prescience. You know, the man who misses his flight because he needs new shoelaces or Starbucks takes too long with his frap puccino or what the hell ever, and then he finds out the plane crashed, so surely some extrasensory force or guardian spirit was at work? That sort of thing. But the truth is we were bleary and distracted by exhaustion, and neither of us was really up to it. She didn’t get much more sleep than I did.

And she was still worried about me, because of last night’s seizure, and that kept coming up, and whether I was actually well enough for the walk. But the day was much, much cooler than yesterday, and the humidity quite decent, and I assured her that I would be fine. She pointed out that I couldn’t possibly know that, and I reluctantly conceded and told her that I’d learned I couldn’t let this condition turn me into a shut-in. I have no means of predicting these episodes, but I have to live my life, regardless. What I didn’t say was, Constance, please mind your own goddamn business, although, by then, that’s what I was thinking. She’d asked me twice about my medication, had I taken it, should we carry it with us, what sort of side effects do I experience from it, do I tire easily, shit like that.

“We’re not even going a hundred yards from the back door,” I told her. Andthere’sthe single most damning fact of this thing, right there, the undeniable that I wish I could find some way to deny.We were not going even a hundred yards from the back door.

“Sarah, it’s just that I need to know what to do, if something happens,” she said, packing a canvas tote bag with bottled water and a couple of apples and the sandwiches she’d made. “And I don’t. I don’t know what’s myth, and what’s for real.”

“You saw what happened last night,” I replied. “What else is there you need to know?”

“Yeah, but that was only a little one, you said. Right? So what if there’s a really bad seizure? What then? I don’t know what I’m supposed to do to help you. I mean, should I take along a spoon or something, to keep you from swallowing your tongue?”

I laughed at her, which didn’t help the situation, and said, “Only if you want to watch me break the few good teeth I have left.”

“It’s not fucking funny,” she growled and stuffed a whole handful of granola bars into her bag, enough granola to keep a troop of Boy Scouts hale and hearty and regular for a couple of days.

“No,” I said. “It’s not funny at all, which is probably why I make jokes about it.”

“Well, it’s not funny, and the jokes won’t help, if something happens.”

And so I told her what she could do, which really isn’t very much — that she should try to make sure I don’t hit my head on anything hard or sharp, and that she should roll me over into the recovery position, if possible, so I don’t strangle on saliva or anything. It seemed to help, just telling her that stuff, and at least she didn’t cram any more granola bars into the bag. I guess I’d taken the edge off the sense of helplessness she was left feeling after last night.

“How would I know if it’s bad enough to call an ambulance?” she asked.

“Constance, do I look like I could afford whatever it would cost to get an ambulance and paramedics all the way out here?”

“Jesus,” she sighed. “I’d fucking pay for it, alright? I would pay for it before I’d let you lie there and die in the woods.”

I lit a cigarette and stared out the screen door towards that huge red oak, silhouetted against the cloudless northern sky. “If it ever lasts more than five minutes,” I said. “Now, are we going to do this, or stand here talking about my fits all day?”

“I’m ready when you are,” she replied. And that’s what was said before we left, as best I can now recall. There wasn’t much else said until fifteen or twenty minutes later, when we realized that we were lost. Or, rather, when we began to admit aloud to one another that we were lost. At first, I think it was more embarrassment than anything, embarrassment and confusion, and I’m sure we both thought that whatever had gone awry would right itself after only another minute or two. We’d simply gotten turned around somehow, that’s all. People don’t like to admit when they’re lost, not only from a fear of looking like a horse’s ass, but also because the admission entails an acceptance that one is in some degree of trouble. And, in this case, I spent half my childhood and teenage years in the woods back in Alabama and know well enough how to walk less than a hundred fucking straight yards from Point A to Point B, plus I’d already visited the tree once. Constance is a local and, despite her time misspent in Los Angeles, is also no stranger to walks in the woods. So, we were both fairly, and not unreasonably, reluctant to admit, even to ourselves, that something was wrong.

Near as I can tell, it started when we reached the break in the fieldstone wall and the deadfall of pine branches and had to leave the path to cross the stream running out of the pond in order to make our way around that impenetrable snarl of rotting wood, poison ivy, and greenbriers. We were both sweating by this time, and I paused at the stream to wet the bright yellow paisley bandanna I’d brought along before tying it once again about my throat. Constance crossed before me, and stood there staring in the direction of the red tree and Ramswool, talking about catching salamanders and turtles when she was a kid. I made some joke about tomboys, and then followed her across, noting how very dark the water was. I didn’t remember this from before — the somber, stained water — but it made sense, thinking about it. All that rotting vegetation surely produces a lot of tannin, which leaches directly into the stream. Where the water was moving, it was the translucent amber of weak tea, and where is wasn’t, here and there in deeper, stagnant pools, it was the rich, almost black brown of a strong cup of coffee. I associate this sort of “blackwater” with bayous and with the Southern coastal plain, and it seemed oddly out of place here on Squire Blanchard’s farm. Also, it brought to mind Dr. Harvey’s mention of the Bloody Run in Newport, that stream supposedly painted red with the blood of so many slain Hessian conscripts during the Revolutionary War.

She suggested we follow the west bank a little farther, as there was considerably less in the way of briars and underbrush on that side of the creek. And since we could still plainly see the upper boughs of the red tree from the broad gully the stream had carved, it made sense to me. The ground was a little muddy, and maybe the gnats and mosquitoes were worse, but the air was cooler down there in the leafy shadows of that hollow. We could always cross back over, scale the steep bank, and then the stone wall, when we were even with the tree. And now, typing this, another (rather obvious) literary parallel occurs to me, “Little Red Riding Hood” and the mother’s instructions that her daughter not dare stray from the path leading safely to her grandmother’s house. The Brothers Grimm, and Charles Perrault’s “Le Petit Chaperon Rouge,”and also, of course, Angela Carter’s retellings in The Bloody Chamber. Constance and I had strayed from the path, like mannish Miss McCraw and the four doomed students who followed her up Hanging Rock, or. digression, digression, fucking digression. Tell the story, Sarah, or don’t tell the story, but stop this infernal beating around the bush (and no, I shall not here initiate yet another digression regarding that unfortunate choice of words).

I think we’d walked for about ten minutes, when Constance noted how odd it was that the tree did not seem to be getting any closer. Or rather, that we didn’t appear to be getting any nearer to it. I laughed it off, said something about optical illusions or mirages, and we kept going, slogging more or less northwards towards the tree, which was still clearly visible. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, there was no longer any denying the fact that, somehow, the red tree had become a fixed point, there to the northeast of us, and that we should have already long since passed it and reached the edge of the pond. By then, it should have become necessary to turn 180° and look south to see the tree, but it remained more or less precisely where it had been, relative to our position, when we’d climbed down from the path to the nameless little stream.

“This is sort of fucked-up,” Constance said, not exactly whispering, but speaking very softly, as though she might be afraid someone would overhear.

“No,” I replied. “This is bullshit,” and I turned right, sloshing back across the tannin-stained water, getting wet to my knees and hardly caring. I scrambled up the bank, and over the fieldstone wall, and there was the path, and there was the far side of the deadfall, standing between me and the house, even though the pile of branches is, at most, only ten feet wide, and we would have passed it immediately, as soon as we began following the stream towards the tree. I stood there, out of breath, a stitch in my side, tasting my own sweat, and I shouted for Constance to get her ass up there.

After she’d seen it for herself, she shook her head and said, “It’s a different one, that’s all.” But the uncertainty in her eyes didn’t even begin to match the intended conviction of her words.

“Constance, I was here less than a week ago. Trust me. There was only one deadfall.”

“Well, then this one’s new,” she said, her voice taking on a frustrated, insistent edge. “These limbs fell later,after you came through here, okay?”

I took the bandanna from around my neck and watched her while I wiped at my face with it. The stream water had long since evaporated, and the only moisture on the yellow cotton was my own perspiration.

“Fine,” I said, because I could see she was scared, and I know I was getting scared, and nothing was going to be accomplished by arguing about the hurdle of vines and rotting white pine blocking our route back to the house. “But how long have we been walking, Constance? How long have we been following that creek, with the tree not getting any closer?”

She looked at her wristwatch, and then looked towards the oak, and then looked back to me.

“I’m guessing at least half an hour, right?” I said, and, before she could reply, I continued, because I really did not need or want to hear the answer to my question. “And even if you take into account the time needed for us to climb down to the stream and back up here again, and the few minutes we spent by the water, talking about salamanders and tadpoles and shit, even if you take all that into account, why aren’t we at the tree? How the hell does it take half an hour to walk three quarters the length of a football field?”

“We’ll clear it up later, I’m sure,” Constance said, turning away from the deadfall and towards the tree. But the way she said it, I was left with little doubt that she’d prefer I never even mention the matter again, much less try, at that safely unspecified, but later,point in time, to puzzle out what we’d just experienced.

She started walking along the narrow path, and because I had no idea what else to do, I followed her. All around us, the trees were alive with fussing birds and maybe a chattering squirrel or two. I still have a lot of trouble telling angry birds and angry squirrels apart. There was a warm breeze, and, overhead, the branches rustled and the leaves whispered among themselves. Constance walked fast, and so I had to move fast to keep pace. Before long, she was almost sprinting, her footfalls seeming oddly loud against the bare, packed earth of the trail.

Five or ten minutes later I was breathless and sweating like a pig, and I shouted for her to please stop before I had a goddamn coronary. And she did stop, but when she looked back at me, there was an angry, desperate cast in those brick-red eyes of hers. Those irises not unlike the tannin-colored water of the stream.

“Look at it,” I gasped, leaning forward, hands on knees, gasping for air and hoping to hell I could get through the next couple of minutes without being sick. “Jesus Christ, Constance, just stop and fucking look at it.”

And she did. She stood there in the muttering woods, while I struggled to catch my breath, while my sweat dripped and spattered the dirt. She stared at the red tree, and then she asked, “Why doesn’t it want me to reach it? It let you, but it won’t even allow me to get near.” I am moderately sure these were her precise words, and I managed a strangled sort of laugh and spat on the ground.

“Let’s go back,” I said, doing my best to conceal my own confusion and fear. “Like you said, I’m sure it will all make sense later. But I don’t think either of us is in any shape to keep this up.”

“What if it’s me, Sarah?” she asked. “What if doesn’t want me getting close?”

I stood up, my back popping loudly, painfully, and I took her arm. “Let’s go back,” I said again. “It’s just a tree. It doesn’t want anything, Constance. We’re hot and confused and scared, that’s all.”

She nodded slowly, and didn’t argue. I held her arm and softly urged her back the way we’d come. She took a bottle of water from the canvas tote bag, twisted the cap off, and when she was finished, passed it to me. The water was warm and tasted like plastic, but it made me feel just a little better. I remembered the sandwiches and apples and all the damned granola bars she’d packed; if we were lost, at least we wouldn’t starve right away.

“Come on,” she said, returning the water bottle to the tote. “I don’t want to be out here anymore. I need to be home now.”

“That makes two of us. But, please, do me a favor, and let’s not try to make a footrace of it, alright?”

“Fine. You go first,” she replied, and the tone of her voice, her voice and the circumstances combined, there was no way I could not think of some adolescent dare. An abandoned house, maybe, a door left ajar, hanging loose on rusted hinges, opening onto musty shadows and half light.You go first. I dare you. No, I double-dog dare you.I was always a sucker for dares.

“If you keep your head, when everyone about you is busy losing theirs,” I said, and began walking south again, following the trail back to the house.

“Who said that?” she asked, and pulled her arm free.

“I’m paraphrasing,” I replied.

“So who are you paraphrasing?”

“Rudyard Kipling,” I told her, though, at the time I was only half sure it was Kipling and not Disraeli.

“The same guy that wrote The Jungle Book?” she asked, and I knew Constance was talking merely to hear her own voice, to keep me talking, that she was busy trying to occupy her mind with anything mundane. “Mowgli and Baloo and Bagheera, right?”

“Yeah,” I answered. “But my favorite was always ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. ’ My favorite story by Kipling, I mean. You know, the one about the mongoose and the two cobras—”

“I never read it,” she said. “But I saw the Disney movie when I was a kid. I don’t remember a mongoose.”

“Rikki-Tikki-Tavi wasn’t in the Disney film.”

“I never read it,” she said again.

And the conversation went on like that for a while, I don’t know exactly how long. Kipling and Disney and what the hell ever, until she stopped and checked her watch, and I stopped and waited on her.

“So, where’s the deadfall?” she asked, and laughed a brittle, skittish laugh, looking up from her wrist and staring down the trail winding on ahead of us. “We should be back to it by now.”

I didn’t answer her, and I also didn’t ask how long it had been since we’d turned back towards the house. I didn’t need to ask to know that we should have already reached the deadfall. I glanced off to my left, and the fieldstone wall was exactly where it ought to be, sagging in upon itself with the weight of all the centuries that had passed unnoticed since its construction, the long decades since the last time this land was farmed and anyone had bothered with the wall’s maintenance. I could hear the little stream mumbling coolly somewhere beyond it.

“Well, we’re going the right way,” I said, peering up through the dappled light, checking the afternoon sun to be sure we were still walking south.“Maybe the trail forked somewhere back there, and we were talking and not paying attention, and we went the wrong way,” she said hopefully, and I nodded, because it was a better story than whatever was running through my head.

“Maybe,” she said, “we went left when we should have gone right, or something like that.”

I looked again at the stone wall, those moss- and lichen-scabbed granite and gneiss boulders, and I could feel her eyes following mine.

“So maybe there are two streams,” she said, and now the brittleness in her voice was edging towards panic. “And those goddamn stone walls are everywhere out here. That doesn’t mean anything, Sarah.”

“I didn’t say it did,” I told her, knowing perfectly goddamn well it was the same wall, and that I was hearing the same stream. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re thinking it, though,” she said. “Don’t lie to me, because you’re standing there thinking it.”

“You never told me you were fucking clairvoyant,” I said. “Why is that, that you never bothered to say you could read my mind?” the words hard and mean and out before I could think better of it. And probably, at that juncture, I was somewhere past caring, anyway. I had my own apprehensions to worry about, and I was tired of coddling her.

“We’re lost,” she said. “We’re lost out here, and you know we’re lost.”

“Seventy-five yards,” I reminded her. “Constance,no one gets lost walking seventy-five yards from their back door to a goddamn tree, walking in a straight line,when you never even lose sight of where it is you’re headed.” And it occurred to me, then, and for the first time, that I couldn’t see the farmhouse, even though I’d been able to keep track of it almost the whole way the first time I’d gone to the tree. Even though, as I believe I mentioned in an earlier entry, a quirk of the landscape had, admittedly, made it harder to keep the house in view than the red tree. I walked a little farther down the trail — another ten or twenty yards — and Constance followed me silently; I was grateful that she didn’t ask what I was doing or what I was thinking. But I still couldn’t see any sign of the house. I stopped (and she did likewise, close behind me), checking the sky again to be absolutely certain I’d not lost my bearings, that we were, in fact, still moving roughly due south.

“Next time, just to be on the safe side, how about we bring along a compass,” I said, trying once more to make a joke from something that wasn’t funny, something that might become funny — tomorrow maybe, or next week — when we were safely out of these woods. When the inevitably obvious rational explanation had finally, mercifully,become obvious. Predictably, Constance seemed to find no more humor in the compass remark than in my earlier failed attempt to get her to loosen up and laugh about the seizures. She glared at me, a spiteful, how-dare-you glare, and then let the canvas tote bag slip from her arm and fall with a thump to the ground between us.

“I’m tired of carrying it,” she said, though I had not asked. “My shoulder’s sore.”

I simply nodded, not taking the bait, if, indeed, she was baiting me. Instead, I stared back towards the red tree, and for the first time since finding Dr. Charles Harvey’s manuscript, hidden away in the basement, it seemed to me more than a tree. It seemed, in that moment, to have sloughed off whatever guise or glamour usually permitted it to pass for only a very old, very large oak. Suddenly, I felt, with sickening conviction, I was gazing through or around a mask, that I was being allowed to do so that I might at last be made privy to this grand charade. I saw wickedness. I could not then, and cannot now, think of any better word. I saw wickedness dressed up like a tree, and I had very little doubt that it saw me,as well. Here was William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch—the frozen moment when I clearly perceived what lay at the end of my fork — and the perfect Dadaist inversion of expectation, something, possibly, akin to that enlightened state that Zen Buddhists might describe as kensho. The epiphanic realizations of Stephen Dedalus, only, instead of Modernist revelations I was presented with this vision of primeval wickedness. And I knew, if I did not look away, and look away quickly, that what I saw would sear me, and I’d never find my way back to the house. I thought of Harvey, then, and I thought of William and Susan Ames, and John Potter’s fears of Narragansett demons.

“Listen,” Constance whispered, and her voice pulled me back to myself, and I was only standing on a path in the woods again, staring at her sweat-streaked face, the dread and terror shimmering brightly in her eyes. “Did you hear that, Sarah?”

“We’re going to be fine,” I told her, not acknowledging the question I’d only half heard. “We have to stay calm, that’s all.”

And she held an index finger to her lips, then, shushing me. Speaking so quietly that the words were almost lost in the background murmurs of the forest, she said, “I heard voices. I heard. ”

But then she trailed off, and I could have been sitting at the kitchen window, watching one of the deer, its every muscle tensed and ears pricked. I could have been sitting at the table, waiting for the deer to bolt at whatever I could not hear.

And I realized that Constance was holding my left arm, her hand gripping me tightly just above the elbow.

“I don’t hear anything,” I whispered back to her, despite her silencing finger, despite my head so filled with the view of that awful, dizzying wickedness sprouting from the stony soil.

But then I did,though it was not voices or anything that could be mistaken for voices. From our right, past the fieldstone wall, came the undisputable commotion of something large splashing through the stream. And despite the prickling hairs at the nape of my neck, despite the gooseflesh on my arms and the rush of adrenaline, I opened my mouth to tell her it was only a deer, only a deer or a dog — a wild dog at the very worst. But she had already released my arm, was already off the path and running, and helpless to do anything else, I followed. I cannot say how long I chased her through those woods, the greenbriers ripping at my exposed face and arms, branches whipping past, my feet tangling in the wild grapes so that it is only by some miracle I didn’t fall and break my neck. As we ran, I was gradually overcome with the conviction that I was not so much trying to catch up with her, as fleeing some unspeakable expression of the wickedness I had seen manifest in the red tree. All I had to do was look over my shoulder to see it. But I did not look back. Like Constance, like the frightened does and fauns, I ran.

And then we were through the last clinging wall of vines, the last bulwark of poison ivy and ferns, dashing wildly across the weedy yard surrounding Blanchard’s farmhouse. I was shouting for her to stop, that we were safe now, that it was over, because that sense of being pursued had vanished, abruptly and completely. She did stop, so suddenly that I almost ran into her, though I know now it wasn’t because of anything I’d said. Constance stood a few feet away, drenched in sweat, wheezing so loudly I might have taken her for an asthmatic. There were tears in her eyes, and blood from what the briars had done to her face, and she was laughing uncontrollably. She pointed at the house, and at first I didn’t see what was wrong with it, what it was that she wanted me to see, what she needed me to see. For a time, I saw only the house, and the house meant only that the ordeal was over and we were safe, and neither of us would ever be so foolish as to go wandering off towards that wicked, wicked tree again. But the relief washed away, rolling easily out from under me, like pebbles on a beach before the towering clouds and indifferent winds of an advancing hurricane.

We were standing on the south side of the house, not far from the front door, despite the fact that we’d been walking, and then running,south, bound for the back door. And sure, later we would tell ourselves that, obviously (there’s that word again), in our panicked flight and having forsaken the path, we’d wandered in a half circle, passing east of the house, and then doubling back again without having realized we’d done so. Never mind the questions left unanswered, the inexplicable events that had led to that pell-mell dash.

And now I look at the clock on the wall and see I’ve been sitting here the better part of three hours. My eyes hurt, I have a headache, and I feel like every bone in my body has been pummeled using a sock filled with pennies. No more of this tonight. I’ve set down the broad strokes, and I probably shouldn’t have done even that much. I’m going to have another beer, a handful of ibuprofen, and go the hell to bed.

I sat down after dinner and read back over what I’d typed out last night. I even read a few bits of it aloud to Constance, which was, all things considered, rather ballsy of me, I think. She listened, but didn’t offer much beyond the occasional frown or shrug. Since yesterday, her mood has seemed to grow increasingly sour, and tonight she is distant, uncommunicative. I can’t be sure if she’s angry at me, or angry because she’s embarrassed, or just plain angry. Maybe some combination of the three, and understandably freaked out, in the bargain. Anyway, after I read the pages, I considered trying to make a more detailed and more coherent account of the experience. But, on the one hand, I don’t think I’m up to it, and on the other, what I wrote last night — for all its considerable faults — is likely far more honest and interesting in its immediacy than any carefully considered, reasoned version of our “lost picnic” (Constance’s phrase, and I take it as a reference to Lindsay’s novel) than I would produce tonight, more than twenty-four hours after the fact. I’ve had too much time to think about something that seems pretty much impervious to explanation. I mean, to any explanation that does not assume or require a violation of the laws of physics or recourse to the supernatural. And I think our stroll through the woods has taught me how deeply committed I am to a materialist interpretation of the universe, even when the universe deigns to suggest otherwise.

I woke this morning to find Constance sitting on the porch, smoking and staring into the trees and undergrowth at the edge of the front yard. There was a sketchbook lying open in her lap, and an old coffee mug of charcoal pencils on the porch rail. But the paper was blank. Near as I could tell, she’d drawn nothing. She didn’t seem to notice me until I said her name, and repeated it a second time; even then, when she turned and looked at me, there was something about her eyes, something about her expression, that made me wonder if she understood I was addressing her.

“How about some breakfast?” I asked, yawning and scraping together half a smile or so.

Constance blinked at me, like maybe she was having to work to remember my name. After a few seconds, there was a faint glimmer of recognition, and she turned away again. She took another drag from her cigarette and looked back towards the yard and the woods beyond.

“Sarah, I don’t feel like cooking for you today,” she said.

“That’s not what I meant,” I replied, caught slightly off guard and determined not to begin the day with an argument. “How about I cook something for the both of us. I think there are still a few eggs in the fridge.”

“I’m really not hungry,” she said.

I started to go back inside and leave her alone with her thoughts, whatever they might be. I’m sure that’s what I should have done. There was nothing I had to say that she wanted to hear, and I’m not quite so dense that I couldn’t see that. But, just as our inexplicably failed bid to reach Dr. Harvey’s red tree seems to have caused Constance to withdraw, so it has left me somewhat less content with my own company than usual.

“So how about I make you a cup of joe?” I asked. “Or tea? Or, hey, fuck it, what about a beer? A cold Narragansett wouldn’t be such a bad way to start things after yesterday.”

“I’m fine,” she said, grinding that last syllable and sounding anything but, and she stubbed out her cigarette in a ginger Altoids tin she’s taken to carrying around with her. She popped the butt inside and snapped the tin shut.

“Constance, you know, some things, no matter how long you sit and stare at them, they just stay weird. You don’t always find a library book—”

“Don’t you patronize me,” she said, and, looking back, it was probably for the best that she interrupted me when she did. I just wish I’d have had the presence of mind to keep my mouth shut to start with. Constance glared at her Altoids tin, clutched tightly in her right hand, and I was beginning to think she was going to turn around and throw it at me. I suppose I’d have had it coming.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” she continued, slipping the tin into a pocket of one of the black smocks she wears when she paints. “And don’t try to tell me there’s no point obsessing over it, because I know you’re doing the same goddamn thing.”

“I won’t,” I said. “I wasn’t trying to.”

“You know what I think?” she asked, and then told me before I could reply. “I think you could go inside and pack yourself another picnic lunch right now and head back to the tree alone. I think you could do that, Sarah Crowe, and you wouldn’t have any trouble whatsoever finding it, or finding your way back here again, afterwards.”

I shrugged, wishing I hadn’t left my own cigarettes inside, but not about to ask Constance for one.

“You know,” I replied, getting a bit pissed, but doing my best not to let it show. “Me not patronizing you, that would have to include my telling you how crazy that sounds, right?”

“Yeah? So why don’t you try it, Sarah? If it’s crazy, what have you got to lose?”

“Look, I’m going to make a pot of coffee, and maybe when I’ve had three or four cups, when I can see straight, maybe then we’ll continue this conversation.”

And I was already stepping across the threshold, back into the house, already pulling the door closed, when she said, “You won’t do it, and you won’t do it because you’re scared. But I wish you would, Sarah. I wish you’d try going back without me.”

“Okay. So, maybe I will,” I said, knowing full well I wasn’t about to do any such thing. “But first, I’m making coffee, and getting something to eat. And you are more than welcome to join me, if you should happen to get tired of sitting out here not drawing whatever it is you’re staring at so intently.” And I shut the door, quickly, before she could get another jab in or possibly raise the stakes of her silly little dare.Hey, old lady, I’ll even screw you if you’ll just try to find the tree again without me. Sure, give it another shot, and, if you make it back, I’ll throw a pity fuck your way.I went to the kitchen and wrestled with the temperamental old percolator that came with the place, and I listened to NPR and had a bowl of stale Wheat Chex without milk, because the carton of “Rhody Fresh” had gone over. Constance didn’t join me, though halfway through my second cup of coffee, I heard the front door slam, heard her stomping upstairs to her garret. When I was done, I tried valiantly to occupy my mind by doing a half-assed job of cleaning the kitchen and the bathroom. Both badly needed it, though the work did little, if anything, to distract me. I kept stopping to stare up at the ceiling, wondering what Constance was doing overhead in the air-conditioned sanctuary of her attic, if she was painting or sketching or just lying on the futon beneath the chugging window unit, worrying at her memories. Or I’d find myself sweat-soaked and gazing at a sink filled with dirty dishes and sudsy water, or at the toilet brush, and realize that I’d spent the last five minutes standing there, thinking about the tree, playing back over the events of the day before. No less guilty than my housemate of trying to see past what had happened to anything else that would make more sense and not leave that cold, hard knot in my guts.

When Constance finally did reappear, it was late afternoon, and I was lying on the sofa in the den, intermittently dozing and trying to concentrate on Alice Morse Earle’s unutterably dry Customs and Fashions of Old New England(1893), which I’d brought home from the library in Moosup a few days before. She slipped into the room without a word and sat down on the floor not far from me. There were a few fresh-looking smears of paint on her smock, and she was accompanied by the pine-sap smell of turpentine. There were motley stains on her hands and fingers, too, several shades of blue and green and red.

After a moment, she cleared her throat, so I closed my book and dropped it to the floor beside the sofa.

“We still on speaking terms?” she asked.

I rubbed at my eyes, and watched her a moment or two before answering. “It would be damned inconvenient if we aren’t,” I said.

“Good,” she smiled, guarded relief creeping over her face. “I shouldn’t have said those things. I know I shouldn’t have.”

“Yeah, well, we both saw some seriously freaky shit. Not exactly the sort of thing you tend to forget overnight. And, besides, I really should have had enough smarts to leave you alone this morning.”

She picked up Customs and Fashions of Old New England and stared at the spine. “You were actually reading this?” she asked.

“No,” I told her. “Not actually.”

Constance set the book back on the floor between us and, with her left index finger, traced invisible circles and figure-eights on the black cover.

“I’m never at my best when I’m afraid,” she said.

“Not many people are,” I replied. But it sounded trite, maybe even condescending, and I sighed and shut my tired eyes. Orange and yellow ghost images floated about in the incomplete darkness, a swirling, leftover smutch of four-thirty sunlight generated by my confused retinas.

“What I said about you going back out there alone, I know I wasn’t making a lot of sense.”

“It’s okay, Constance. Really. Don’t worry about it.”

“But I want to try to explain,” she said, and I opened my eyes. “I don’t like people thinking that I’m scared, but it’s worse when they think I’m crazy.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” I said, and she lifted her finger off the cover of the library book and glared up at me, looking more confused than anything else. “You know what I meant,” I said, and there was undoubtedly more exasperation in my voice than I’d intended there to be.

“I know what you said.”

“I say too much. You’d think anyone lives this long, she’d have figured that out by now. Regardless, you don’t need to explain anything to me. I don’t think you’re crazy. I was half asleep and just mouthing off.”

“I never should have come back here,” she said. “I should have stayed in Los Angeles.” And this time I didn’t reply. I lay there on the sofa, rubbing my eyes and waiting for whatever it was that she would or wouldn’t say next. There was a noise outside, the wind or an animal poking about, but nothing unusual. Still, Constance turned her head away, turning towards the direction from which the noise seemed to have come. It wasn’t repeated, and after a while, she asked, “Have you read the whole thing? All of it?”

“Lord no,” I said, assuming she meant the library book. “I’ve hardly started it. Frankly, I don’t know why the hell I brought it home.Good House keeping in the age of Cotton Mather.”

“I wasn’t talking about this,” she said impatiently, and tapped the cover of the library book with her knuckles. “I mean Chuck Harvey’s manuscript. Have you finished reading it?”

“He didn’t even finish writing it,” I replied.

“Yeah, I know that, but have you read everything he did write?”

“No,” I told her, sitting up, and wondering if she’d be up for a drive to the beach, thinking it would do us both good to get out of the woods and away from this house for a little bit. Hell, I even thought about volunteering to spring for a room in Stonington or Mystic (because, after all, that’s what credit cards are for). “I haven’t. I’ve read, I don’t know, maybe half of it.”

“But you do intend to finish it before you take it to that woman at URI, right?”

“Maybe it would be better if I didn’t,” I sighed, not sure where she was headed, but already pretty certain she’d say no to a night away from the house.

Constance had gone back to drawing her invisible curlicues on the cover of the library book. “Well,” she said, “that’s up to you. But I need you to promise that you won’t get rid of it before you let me read it all.”

“You think your answers are waiting in there somewhere?” I asked, trying to remember if we had anything for dinner or if I’d have to drive into town.

“Just promise me that, alright?”

“Sure. No problem. I promise, cross my heart and hope to die,” and after that, she seemed to relax a bit.

“Scout’s honor?” she asked.

“Not fucking likely,” I laughed and had a go at combing my hair with my fingers.

“Oh, I was a Girl Scout,” Constance said. “Troop 850. I had my first taste of weed on one of the camping trips.”

“No shit? The Girl Scouts have a marijuana merit badge?”

She laughed, but we didn’t talk very long, and after a while she vanished into her garret again, saying that she wanted to get back to work. She came down for dinner (Velveeta grilled cheeses and Campbell’s Soup; at least I didn’t have to go to the store), but didn’t stick around long afterwards. Maybe I’ll do the beach thing by myself tomorrow, and hope that the tourists aren’t as bad on Mondays, that their numbers have declined since the Fourth.

Earlier today, I was going through one of the boxes of books I brought up here with me from Atlanta, one of the few that didn’t go directly from the old apartment into storage. Comfort books, I call them, a hodgepodge of familiar volumes that I’ve read again and again and again, some of them since childhood. My personal take on Linus van Pelt’s blue security blanket, I suppose; the bookworm’s dog-eared solace. So, I was sorting through the box, only half remembering having packed most of what was in there, and at the very bottom was a big hardback,The Annotated Alice,with all Martin Gardner’s marginalia and John Tenniel’s illustrations. It was a Christmas gift when I was only eight years old, and I guess that would have been 1972. Yeah, ’72. I didn’t own many books as a child, and certainly not hard-backs. My father, a high-school dropout, said it was a waste of good money, paying for books when there was a library right there in Mayberry (though I suspect he himself never set foot in it). Anyway, my mother found a used copy of The Annotated Alice at a yard sale sometime in the autumn, and then gave it to me for Christmas that year. You can still see where $1.25 was penciled in on the upper-righthand corner of the title page, and she tried unsuccessfully to erase it. The book was printed in 1960, so it was already, what, twelve years old when she gave it to me. And Jesus, how I loved that book. There are long passages that I committed to memory, that I can still recite.

Today, I lifted the book out of the box, and it fell open to pages 184-85, a little more than halfway through, just past the beginning of Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. On page 184, the Tenniel woodcut shows Alice entering the mirror above the fireplace, and on the opposite page, she’s emerging from that other mirror in the reversed world of the Looking-glass House. Hidden in between these two pages — and Alice’s act of passing from one universe into its left-handed counterpart — was a folded sheet of wax paper, and pressed between the two halves of the wax paper were five dried four-leaf clovers, and also a tiny violet. I removed the wax paper and closed the book, setting it aside. Seeing the pressed clovers and the single faded violet, there was such an immediate flood of memories. I don’t know how long I sat there holding those souvenirs and crying. Yeah, crying.

Amanda and I used to joke that it was her superpower, finding four-leaf clovers. I’ve never been any good at it myself, but she could stand over any given patch of clover, and, within only a minute or two, without fucking fail, spot at least two or three. And here were five from some spring or summer afternoon that I could not recall, only that she had found them for me. I picked the violet. I can’t even remember now what led to the preservation of these particular clovers. I mean, if I’d saved every four-leaf clover Amanda ever found and gave to me, I’d have hundreds of the things. I didn’t even put them in the book, so I can only assume that Amanda did. For some reason lost to me, or never known to me,these were special. Maybe if Amanda were still alive, she’d know why. I could have picked up the phone and called her, and she would have laughed and told me, would have described that morning or evening, the circumstances that made these matter so much more than all the others.

I’ve spent so much energy casting Amanda as the villain, even though I know perfectly well that’s bullshit. It’s easier to recall the constant bickering, the minute wounds we inflicted upon each other, her low blows and my cheap shots, and incidents like her taunting me outside the Morewell Tunnel, than to tell the truth. The truth is so much more inconveniently complicated. But here were these five clovers and the violet stashed inside this book I’ve cherished since I was a kid, undeniable evidence that it wasn’t all hurtful, no matter how “toxic” her therapist might have deemed our relationship. Here was proof that a moment had existed when she loved me enough to put these tokens of good luck, which came so easily to her, but always eluded me, where she knew I would always have them.

I sat on the living room floor, and held the wax paper, and cried until my sinuses ached and there was nothing in me left to cry. I was terrified that Constance would come downstairs, and I’d have to try to explain, but she didn’t. And then I put Amanda’s keepsake back between pages 184 and 185, closed the book, and returned it to the bottom of the cardboard box.

In Chapter Five of Harvey’s manuscript, he relates an apparently well-documented incident from 1957 that bears an unnerving similarity to what happened to Constance and me on Sunday afternoon. An unnerving similarity, or a remarkable similarity, or both. This is new territory for me, and so I’m not entirely certain what adjectives are most appropriate. In all honesty, I’d pretty much resolved to stop reading the manuscript. I’d decided, before Sunday, to let Constance read it and satisfy whatever morbid curiosity motivates her, then deliver it to the sociologist in Kingston. The thing has begun to make me nervous, and before Sunday, I would have said it makes me nervous in no way that I can lay my finger on. Now, I can lay my finger on page 242, and point to the precise source of my unease — or one of the sources, as I am beginning to see that it all fits together somehow, even if I cannot yet fully articulate the extent of the nature of this interconnectedness.

On page 242, Harvey writes:

There’s quite a bit more of this. In fact, Harvey devotes the majority of Chapter Five to the episode, to various interviews with Olivia Burgess (née Adams) and to numerous secondhand sources. He claims (and it does appear, from his account) that Burgess stuck to her story, as first reported, until her death in 1987 at age seventy-five. Some of the later versions of the tale, notably those appearing in Fate and Argosy magazines, took considerable liberties and embellished the story, as though it weren’t bizarre enough to start with. The Argosy article states that Burgess found fresh bloodstains on the stone and around the base of the old oak, and the Fate article not only claims that she was pursued by a “large black wolflike animal” during her ordeal, but tries to link the episode to both UFO sand the nuclear accident in Windscale, Cumbria, which happened to occur that same day (and was considered the world’s worst reactor mishap until Three Mile Island).

While certainly not identical to the apparent distortions of space and time that Constance and I experienced on our “lost picnic,” the parallels are unequivocal. I have packed the unfinished manuscript back into its box and left it at the foot of the attic stairs for her to read. I think I’ve had enough. Enough of those pages and enough of this place, enough of that wicked tree that I have to see every time I forget not to look out the kitchen window. Enough, period. If someone had told me Olivia Burgess’ story a week ago, I’d have called them a crank or a liar. Now, I’m wondering if it’s possible to sue that bastard Blanchard for neglecting to mention that he was renting me a house built on Hell’s doorstep?