The Red Tree (Caitlin R. Kiernan) читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги

CHAPTER SIX

16 July 2008 (10:45 p.m.)

The sky was already beginning to turn the purplish gray shades of dawn before I finally managed to get to sleep “last night.” Though in my last entry I made much less of the three oak leaves I found on the bedroom floor than I made of “Pony” and the whole mess with Constance, as soon as I’d shut off the light and was lying there, waiting for the Ambien to kick in and send me tumbling away to whatever nightmare was waiting, I could hardly think about anything else. What I’d first accepted as just another — and rather humdrum — consequence of living here, next door to that tree and old Hobbamock’s sacrificial stomping grounds, seemed suddenly a threat, an insult, a gibe.

What the hell am I trying to say? The words are not coming to me easily tonight. I’m exhausted, and it’s been a long damn day. What I’m trying to say is that I began to seriously consider the possibility that Constance placed the leaves there, that there was nothing the least bit preternatural about their appearance.

And, so, I was suddenly back at the gaslighting scenario. I got angry, and I lay in bed, sweating, trying to find some way to absolve her, but kept coming back around to the things I’d written about parsimony and the provenance of “Pony.” I began to mull over the implications, that Constance might have visited the tree to get the leaves (though I can hardly rule out her having acquired them from a different red oak, possibly one she encountered on her recent trip into Foster, and that’s probably much more realistic). It was all I could do to stay in bed. I wanted to get dressed and march up those attic stairs and pound on her fucking door. I wanted to see the look on her face when I confronted her and called her on pulling such a sick fucking joke at my expense.

I thought worse things, too. Furious, vengeful ruminations I’m not going to put down here.

The last time I remember looking at the digital clock beside my bed, it was sometime after five. And when I finally slept, there were the dreams. I might have written those down if I’d gotten to this entry before sunset, but I didn’t, and so I’ll either save them for next time or just let them go. Let them fade, and be forgotten.

As for Constance, I hardly saw her again today, and when I did, I mostly kept my mouth shut. She seems completely consumed in whatever it is she’s painting up there. Maybe meaningless sex with older women is her muse. I made no accusations, and she did nothing the least bit suspicious. I did ask her about her work, how it was going, on one of her trips down to the toilet. I was sitting on the living room sofa, trying to make my way through a story on snow leopards in the June issue of National Geographic. Her hands looked as though she’d given up on brushes; indeed, there was paint, mostly shades of green and blue, halfway to her elbows. There were also smears on her face.

“Do you know anything much about painting, Sarah?” she wanted to know, not a trace of condescension in her voice, and I admitted that I knew very little. She watched me a moment, then stared past me, and I couldn’t decide if she was trying to think what to say next, or if, maybe, she’d forgotten we were talking. That unfocused quality to her eyes, which I believe I noted after first meeting her, seemed more pronounced than usual. Her gaze seemed fixed on something far away, well beyond the walls of the house.

“You’re not familiar with František Kupka?” she asked, at last, and once more I admitted my ignorance. I asked her to please write the name down for me, so I could look it up online, so we could talk about the painter later. She seemed skeptical, and in a hurry to get back to work, but did as I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not really so much like Kupka, now that I think about it. He’s just the first thing came to mind.”

“Kupka. Is that Czech?”

“Yeah,” she replied. “Well, it was still eastern Bohemia when Kupka was born. Later, though, he went to Vienna, and eventually to France, of course. You might recognize some of his work, when you see it.” And she named a few of his paintings then, though the only one I can remember is “The Black Idol.”

“Do you ever miss having other writers to talk to?”

“No, not really,” I said. “Truthfully, I’ve never much cared for the company of other writers. I usually just get into arguments I don’t want to get into. Why? Do you miss having other painters around?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “Excuse me, Sarah. I really should get back,” and Constance pointed at the ceiling.

“Of course,” I replied. “I don’t mean to keep you,” and without another word, she turned and disappeared down the hall again. I sat there listening to her footfalls, to the opening and closing of the attic door. I sat staring at the name she’d scribbled on an index card, and the aquamarine smudges her hands had left on the paper. Suddenly, it seemed utterly absurd, that I’d lain awake all night, entertaining notions that Constance was sneaking about trying to freak me out by putting oak leaves on my bedroom floor. Or, for that matter, that she’d written “Pony.”

Later, sometime after a bland lunch of tuna fish and saltines and beer, I went back to Dr. Harvey’s typescript, skipping ahead, only half conscious of what I was looking for there until I’d found it. Beginning on page 262, Harvey documents a number of instances in which those who have had encounters with “the red tree” have been visited afterwards by the appearance of its leaves:

Does the oak perhaps leave calling cards, meant to remind those who have visited it that they have been marked in some way? The pun was unintentional, but I shall let it stand. Does the oakleave calling cards. I have discovered a number of accounts that seem to indicate that at least some of those who’ve gone to the tree have later experienced the spontaneous manifestation of Quercus rubraleaves. The earliest such account goes all the way back to John Potter, fittingly, who in October 1710 wrote of the repeated appearance of “stupendous quantities” of such leaves, “gone red as blood and flame with autumn, and acorns, too,” appearing inside the house he’d built two years before. He recorded his wife’s alarm at the coming of the leaves, and also her consternation at having to repeatedly sweep them out of her home. Then, again, in the summer of 1712, Potter found his rooftop blanketed with “a heavy falling” of red oak leaves, though he claims he was unable to find even a single such leaf lying on the ground anywhere around the house. “The wind seemed unable to dislodge them, and they lay still.” I have even seen one of the leaves from the October ’10 manifestation preserved between the pages of his journal, where, I assume, he himself must have placed it. Potter also mentions an acquaintance from “Satuit” (Scituate) who, following a call on the Potters, found red oak leaves beneath both his bed and writing desk on several different occasions.

This is the earliest example of the leaves appearing a considerable distance from the tree, though it is hardly the last. I have so many newspaper accounts of such episodes that it would be tiresome for me to recount them all here (see Appendix B). Instead, I would call attention to two rather disturbing and exceptional cases.

Enter this under things I should have begun to wonder about long before now, but. here’s Harvey’s unfinished manuscript, yet there’s no sign anywhere of all these clippings and notes and such that he repeatedly mentions in the text. How is it, then, that the manuscript was saved, but the files on which the manuscript are based apparently were not? Did he destroy them before his suicide? Were they discarded or destroyed by someone else after his death, even though the manuscript itself was stashed away in the basement? Or are they still here in the house somewhere, so well hidden that I simply have not come across them? Admittedly, I have not searched for them, but I have, since coming here, had occasion to casually peer into almost every nook or cranny where they might have been sequestered. Then again, maybe I have been anything but thorough, and my bored rummaging has been too haphazard. Regardless, I’d love to see some of his sources, if only to confirm that they exist, and to discover to what degree Harvey might be selectively reporting these incidents, thereby distorting them, to suit his needs. But, as he was saying:

The first concerns British Anglican occultist, poet, and novelist Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941), who, I will note, was briefly a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (along with such Edwardian luminaries as William Butler Yeats, Florence Farr, and Maud Gonne). Shortly after the publication of her third, and final, novel The Column of Dust(Methuen; London, 1909) and while at work on Mysticism: A Studyof the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness(Methuen; London, 1911—possibly the most renowned work in a very prolific life), Underhill received a long letter from Margaret Cropper, a close acquaintance who was traveling in New England. Cropper had heard tales of “the fearsome blood oak somewhere south of Foster, in Rhode Island,” and had even visited the tree for herself. The letter in question, which has been printed in the Collected Papers of Evelyn Underhill(Longmans, Green and Co.; London, 1946, edited by Lucy Menzies), recounts a visit to the “old White [sic] farm,” and includes fairly accurate descriptions of the house, the tree, and the supposed altar stone. When the letter reached Underhill, the envelope also contained a single dried leaf, which she identified as having come from a red oak. However, only a few months later, Cropper returned to England, and Underhill notes that her friend had no memory of having sent one of the leaves to her friend. “Indeed, she found the strange tree most wholly repellent and wished to take nothing physical away from her encounter with it,” Underhill writes (ibid). The mystery was compounded when red oak leaves began to appear in Evelyn Underhill’s home with increasing regularity, and she writes of having found more than fifty of them, between the years 1909 (when the letter from Cropper arrived) and 1914, when the peculiar manifestations abruptly ceased. The leaves turned up throughout her home — beneath her bed, in a steamer trunk, in a box of correspondence that had gone unopened since June 1903, inside shoes and coat pockets, and, most bizarrely, once inside a can of plum pudding. Underhill describes the affair as “a botanical haunting, and a most unnerving, if ultimately harmless, affair.” The leaves were usually green and unwilted, though several of them “. wore the gaudy colours of autumn.” The case of Underhill’s “haunting” is also mentioned briefly in both Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’sThe History of Spiritualism(Vol. II, G. H. Doran; New York, 1926) and Slater Brown’sThe Heyday of Spiritualism(Hawthorn Books; New York, 1970).

The last instance of leafy manifestations which I will here discuss is surely one of the most grisly episodes associated with the red tree. And yet it is also one of the most obscure episodes in this mystery, and my only records of it, beyond the memory of locals I have interviewed, is recorded in a pair of short articles in the always dubious pages of the Fortean magazine Fate(which has, over the decades, noted the odd goings-on associated with the tree in a number of articles)—“The Vampire Tree” (January 1982) and “Rhode Island’s Killer Oak!” (October 1983) — both penned by the same author, Patrick Baumgartner (about whom I can learn nothing, and he may have never been more than a pseudonym employed by the magazine’s editors and/or staff writers).

To summarize, according to these two articles, on January 17, 1981, a man from nearby Rice City (just south of here), a goat farmer and cheesemaker named in Fate as George Farrell, went to the Blanchard farm on business. He knew of the tree’s strange reputation, and at some point on that day, he visited it in the company of one of the landowner’s sons (the son is, by the way, the current owner of the property, though he professes no recollection of Farrell or the events described in Fate). Farrell was reportedly disappointed by what seemed a perfectly ordinary oak, and to show his contempt for the local tall tales, used a pocketknife to carve his initials into the bark, above the altar stone. Three weeks later, so both articles report, Farrell’s goats began to give extremely bitter milk. In the weeks to follow, three of the animals began to waste and finally died. Both pieces (which differ very little, and almost amount to reprints of the same article twenty-two months apart) state that the animals were summarily autop sied by a veterinarian from Coventry, who discovered that the they were each missing a “considerable quantity of blood” and that “their udders were distended, and, when opened, it was discovered that they were filled with a dark viscous material that stank of rotting vegetable matter, but, more remarkably, with the undigested acorns and leaves of a Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra).” The January ’82 article states, “The acorns of this species of oak are notoriously bitter and astringent, though they are still eaten by deer and other wildlife. The bitter flavor of the acorns is the result of high levels of the polyphenol tannin.” The veterinarian in question is never named (not even a gender is provided), and I have been unable to find anyone in the area who can tell me who he or she might have been.

The articles state that Farrell was so “angry and disturbed” by the unexplainable deaths of his goats, that he visited the Blanchards again, this time with a hatchet and three cans of gasoline, “. prepared to put an end to the demonic oak.” Fortunately, less hysterical heads prevailed, however, and he was discouraged from seeking his revenge upon the tree. However, Baumgartner’s articles state that, in his efforts to calm the man, Blanchard agreed to remove the section of bark that the goat farmer had carved his initials into, and it was reportedly then delivered to Farrell, who is said to have had it blessed (!) by a Catholic priest before he burned it to ash (in a twist reminiscent of the infamous Rhode Island vampire “epidemic”). The ashes he then buried in a sealed tin box in consecrated earth, possibly in the Greenwood Cemetery in nearby Coventry. The articles both claim that the lid of the tin box was engraved with a cross. In my interviews with locals, I have heard several variants of the story of the poisoned goats, however, in true urban-legend fashion, the details never match, and it is always attributed to the ubiquitous “friend of a friend.” Moreover, I can find no record of a goat farmer and cheesemaker named “George Farrell,” though it is possible that his name was changed by the editors of Fate(who, so far, have not replied to my inquiries for more details on the case, assuming, of course, that their files contain any additional information).

Having transcribed all that, one thing that sort of leaps out at me is the surname of the possibly pseudonymous Fate“ journalist”—Baumgartner. Anyone with even a smattering of German will see what I mean, that Baumgartner translates to “tree gardener.” Odd that Harvey missed that; it certainly would have bolstered his assertion that the name was merely anom de plume. Or, I don’t know, maybe he did catch it, but appreciated the wordplay too much to spoil it for those among his readers who’d get it on their own. Also, I wonder if I ask Blanchard about this George Farrell fellow, if he’d be any more forthcoming with me than he was with Dr. Harvey. That is, assuming that there’s something here to be forthcoming about. It all smacks of “witch trial” histrionics to me, and if not for mine and Constance’s lost picnic, that damning firsthand experience with the tree, I wouldn’t be disposed to believe a word of this, giving the tales in the typescript no more credence than I’ve given the stock-in-trade of supermarket tabloids — Elvis sightings, Nostradamus, Bible prophecies, women who claim to have been impregnated by Bigfoot, UFOs communicating via crop circles, astrology, the Bermuda Triangle, and so forth.

Oh, there’s quite a bit more here about all the attempts over the years to burn and cut down the tree, I just don’t feel like copying it. But there have been many unsuccessful and aborted attacks upon the oak, it would seem. It strikes me as just shy of miraculous that the thing is still standing more than three centuries after the first word of it reached the ears of white men. You’d have thought, if nothing else, some bunch of teenagers would have cut it down and or something as a prank. Maybe I should not be so awed at the tree’s apparent wickedness as by its resilience. Then again, maybe they’re one and the same.

Bedtime, old lady. Put the spooks to rest.

July 18, 2008 (2:16 a.m.)

Have I mentioned the heat? I don’t generally whine about weather. I’ve never much seen the point, but Jesus fuck. I’m about a hairbreadth from breaking down and getting a little window unit AC of my own, stick it on the damn credit cards, and worry about it later, after I haven’t died of heat prostration. The meteorologists say there are cooler days ahead, and I do hope they’re not just fucking with us.

Constance came down from the icy sanctum sanctorum of her garret this afternoon, as paint-stained as ever, but somewhat more talkative. I must admit, it was something of a relief, at least at first. My own company wears so goddamn thin. Even that of a flaky, temperamental artist is preferable, at this point. However, one of the first things she did was comment on the heat downstairs, and I briefly contemplated murdering her and hiding the body in the basement. Or taking it to the red oak, in hopes that Hobbamock the Narragansett demon might be pleased, take pity upon me, and grant a boon of cooler weather.

“You should come upstairs,” she said, and “You should ask me,” I replied.

Constance laughed, but did not proceed to invite me back to the attic. We sat on the living room floor for a while, talking and sweating, before moving to the kitchen table, which was even more cluttered than usual. She looked over a few pages of Dr. Harvey’s manuscript, offering no comment. We drank cold beer and nibbled at Spanish olives, whole-wheat crackers, and slices of Swiss cheese, because, lunchtime or no, we were both too hot for an actual meal.

“You know what it makes me think of?” she asked, and nodded at the window, nodding towards the tree. This was fifteen or twenty minutes after she’d returned the pages to the manuscript box, and it took me a moment to realize what she meant.

“No,” I replied and took another sip of my beer.

“It’s like something from Violet Venable’s awful garden in New Orleans. You know, in Suddenly, Last Summer.”

I forced myself to stare out the window, north towards the tree and the steely shimmer of Ramswool Pond, for a moment before answering her. “I think, technically, it was Sebastian’s garden. Mrs. Venable had merely become its caretaker after her son’s death.”

“Is that what you think?” and now, suddenly, there was a trace of derisiveness in her voice, something verging on contempt. I looked at the tree again, at the high blue sky suspended above it, not a cloud in sight. The sun seemed to have robbed the entire world beyond the window of shadows, or even the potential for shadow. Given the topic at hand, it was impossible for me not to be reminded of Catherine Holly’s fevered description of the sun on the day of her cousin’s murder — a gigantic white bone that had caught fire in the Mediterranean sky.

“Is it?” Constance prodded.

“It’s too hot to argue with you about Tennessee Williams,” I told her.

“I didn’t know we were arguing, Sarah. I only thought we were having a conversation. I thought you might be getting lonely, down here all alone. I thought maybe you would appreciate someone to talk with.”

“Sebastian planted the garden,” I said. “It was Sebastian’s garden,” and she laughed and lit a cigarette.

“The garden, it’s a womb,” she said. “The green and, in the end, barren hell of Violet’s own womb, guarded by carnivorous plants. I mean, really, those pitcher plants and the Venus flytrap and whatever the hell else Violet was keeping in that miniature greenhouse, that garden within the garden, those plants she hand-fed — if that’s not the vagina dentata, I don’t know what would be.”

I turned away from the window and stared at Constance a moment or two before saying anything more. The smoke rising from her cigarette curled into a sort of spiral above her head.

“I tend to avoid conversations about vaginas with teeth,” I said, finally, and she laughed again and tapped ash into an empty saucer.

“So not a big fan of Freud?” she asked.

And, by this point, I was growing angry, what with the heat and the sunlight and the fact that Constance was clearly, for reasons known only to her, trying to pick a fight with me. Thinking back on what I said next, I’d like to believe it was something more than me being a cunt, that she had the embarrassment coming, whether or not it’s the truth of the matter.

“The vagina dentata isn’t a Freudian concept,” I replied. “I’m not sure Freud ever even addressed it, as that image runs counter to the whole Oedipal thing. Freud said that little boys are afraid that their mothers have been castrated,not that their mothers’ vaginas have teeth.”

Check.

Constance glared at me and narrowed her hazy red-brown eyes, taking a long drag on her cigarette and then letting the smoke ooze slowly from her nostrils. I could tell that she was choosing the words that would form her retort with exquisite care. I glanced back to the window.

“What about our friend out there?” she asked. “You believe that old tree has teeth?”

Checkmate.

“You’d think it would fucking rain,” I said, and I suppose that can stand as a white flag of surrender, my refusal to acknowledge her question.

“Screw it,” Constance muttered, and I didn’t look at her, but I could hear her standing, could hear the legs of her chair scraping loudly across the floor as she pushed back from the table. “There are better ways than this to waste my time.” And when she’d gone, and the attic door had slammed shut, I sat alone and watched the red oak, pretending that I didn’t feel like it was watching me.

July 18, 2008 (9:15 p.m.)

Home again, home again.

Home. Does that word, and the concept behind the term, retain any meaning whatsoever for me at this point? If not, how long since it has? Did Amanda and I ever have a home? Any of the women I lived with before Amanda, did we have homes? Was that shitty little house I shared with my parents, back in the dim, primeval wilds of Mayberry, was that home? I can hardly look at this old farmhouse of Squire Blanchard’s and see it as anything more than a place where I am presently sleeping, eating, writing this idiot journal, hiding from New York and the ruins of my career, and so forth.

The house I share with Ms. Constance Hopkins. A few nights ago I fucked her, and briefly thought I’d found some sort of fulfillment or satiety or surfeit, whatever. This morning, I came very goddamn near to murdering her. I don’t know what she’s doing up there, in the chilly seclusion of her ivory garret. But unless she has contrived some daring new oil-painting technique that involves hammers, power tools, and stomping about as loudly as possible, I’m left to conclude she’s just trying to get on my nerves.

Late this morning, after washing my breakfast dishes, I was trying to read, nothing important, nothing of any consequence, nothing I was really even interested in reading, but still, I was trying to read. In this house where I also live, and for which I also pay rent, whether it is or is not a “home.” Finally, I got the broom and banged the handle sharply against the ceiling several times. She responded with about fifteen minutes of complete and utter silence, after which, the noise resumed anew, with the addition of Very Loud Music (it might have been the Pogues, but I’m really not sure, as I could only clearly make out the bass lines). Maybe the right thing to do would have been to knock on her door and politely ask her to hold it down. But, I know myself well enough to know that what I would have done, instead, is pound on her door and order her to lay the hell off before I strangled her. A fight would have ensued.

So, I got in the car and drove up the road to the Tyler library in Moosup. I’m not sure what effect my retreat might have had on Constance. Did she see it as a victory, having chased me from the house? Or, if her objective was to bedevil me, did I rob her of the satisfaction? I don’t care,not really. I’m only thinking out loud. I realize that, either way, the trip to the library merely delayed some inevitable confrontation. If she’s spoiling for a showdown, I cannot hope to avoid it indefinitely. Sooner or later, tomorrow or the next day, I’ll find the proverbial end of my proverbial short fuse and tell her to lay the hell off or die. Jesus, how many times have I, directly or indirectly, threatened the bitch’s life in this entry? When they find her rotting corpse in the basement, this will be the document that sends me to the chair. Or to the room where the lethal injections are administered. Does Rhode Island have the death penalty? I should hope so. I’d hate to actually serve a life sentence for the death of Constance Hopkins.

Really, Judge. Honest injun. The noisy little clit-tease had it coming.

So, yeah. The library. The woman at the front desk commented that she hadn’t seen me in a while and wanted to know if maybe I’d been working on a new book. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, right? I said something inoffensive, I can’t recall what, found an anthology of New England writing (essays, scary Puritan sermons, short stories, etc.) and did my best to hide among the shelves. At least the place is air-conditioned, so it was an escape from the heat, which shows no signs of letting up, regardless of what the weathermen are telling us. I found a reasonably comfortable armchair, and proceeded to read an excerpt from Thoreau’s The Maine Woods(1864). I’ve never read much Thoreau, beyond Walden,of course, which I think I “had” to read for some college lit class or another. Anyway, this excerpt from The Maine Woods sort of sucked me in, and I sat there for more than an hour, reading. At one point, I got up and photocopied a page, to get a passage that had struck a chord. I think I’m going to include part of it here, though I’d not planned to do so when I sat down and started typing. Reading the following lines by Thoreau, I could not help but see them in light of Dr. Harvey’s manuscript and the red tree:

Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made for ever and ever, — to be the dwelling of man, we say, — so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can. Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific, — not his Mother Earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in, — no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie there, — the home, this, of Necessity and Fate. There was there felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites, — to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we. We walked over it with a certain awe, stopping, from time to time, to pick the blueberries which grew there, and had a smart and spicy taste. Perchance where our wild pines stand, and leaves lie on their forest floor, in Concord, there were once reapers, and husband-men planted grain; but here not even the surface had been scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what God saw fit to make this world. What is it to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared with being shown some star’s surface, some hard matter in its home! I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one, — that my body might, — but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

Is this a fraction of the tree’s apparent mystery, that it exists, essentially, out of time, and so, in some sense, out of sync with the world that surrounds it? Having been spared (or successfully having resisted) the tripartite ravages of deforestation, agriculture, and human population that so quickly reshaped the geography of New England, has the red oak become — I don’t know — an embittered survivor? Does it hold within it resentful memories of an earlier state of this land, Thoreau’s elder “. Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night.” I am well enough aware what shaky ground I am on, seeming to ascribe the potential for acrimony to a plant,to something that, even now, I could not believe is in any way sentient.

And yet, have I not previously, and with all fucking sincerity, called the red tree wicked? Am I trying to have my cake, and eat it, too?

This afternoon, sitting there in the AC and the reasonably comfortable armchair, reading Thoreau, I was interrupted by the librarian who’d seen me come in. She’s the sort of woman who puts me in mind of egrets and herons — tall and thin and frail, the skeleton beneath her skin seeming hardly more substantial than the hollow bones of wading birds. Maybe ten years my senior, and, admirably, she’s made no attempt to hide the gray in her hair, which, unfortunately, had been molded into some do that would have been out of style when I was still in high school. She was standing over me, holding the only book of mine anywhere on the library’s shelves (and I was surprised, back in May, to see even that one), a ten-year-old hardback of Silent Riots. The paper dust jacket was protected behind one of those crinkly, clear cellophane covers they put on library books. Both were somewhat tattered and had yellowed with time.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Miss Crowe,” she said, “but would you please sign this for us?” And she held the book out to me, and a ballpoint pen, making it clear that telling her no really wasn’t an option.

“Have you read it?” I asked, and she nodded.

“I have, indeed. Right after the first time you came in, I guess, I remembered seeing it. And I read it then.”

I took the book from her, and the pen, and opened Silent Riots to the title page. I signed my name, trying to remember the last time I’d signed one of my books, trying hard to recall how long it had been.

“Not the sort of thing I usually read,” she admitted, “I mean, it is rather explicit. A bit grim for my tastes. But, even so, I thought it was quite well written. Poetic, even.”

I gave the pen back to her, but kept the book, flipping past the dedication and indicia pages and the table of contents to the first story, “The Ammonite Violin.”

“If a few more reviewers had agreed with you,” I said, forcing a smile, “maybe it would still be in print. Then again, maybe not.”

“Is that very important to you, what critics say, or what readers think?”

“I won’t lie,” I replied. “Audiences are nice. So are royalty checks.”

She stared at me then, mired in that uncomfortable sort of silence that often follows the receipt of unexpectedly candid answers. Finally, she nodded and said something about how nice it must be to have the “cottage” all to myself, how conducive to writing the solitude must be. To my meager credit, I didn’t laugh at her. But I did explain that I was no longer alone, and I mentioned Constance by name and added that she was a painter.

“Oh,” the librarian said, her face brightening at once. “Oh, well, now that’s wonderful, isn’t it? I mean, a writer and a painter, under the same roof. Why, you almost have your very own artists’ colony, don’t you?”

“Almost,” I replied.

“Please ask her to stop by here sometime. I’d love to meet her.”

I told her that I would, knowing that I wouldn’t do anything of the sort. Then I asked the birdlike librarian if she’d mind me holding on to the book a while, and she said certainly not, because, after all, I’d written it, hadn’t I? So, she left me by myself again, and I laid the anthology of New England writing on the floor beside my chair and spent the next couple of hours reading those stories I’d written more than a decade ago. Some of them hold up well enough. Some of them almost do. And others make me cringe, and leave me thankful that Silent Riots vanished after the hardback and then only one paperback printing.

It was almost six o’clock when I finally closed the book and allowed myself to think about heading back to the sweltering house and temperamental Constance. The library’s open until eight on Wednesdays, and I seriously considered hanging around until they shooed me out the door. But poring over all those old stories had a peculiar effect on me — I never read my own stuff after it’s published. Well, practically never. I wasn’t exactly depressed, at least no more than usual, no more than when I’d come in. But I found myself wanting to be back in the house, because even if it isn’t home, it’s the sorry substitute that has to suffice for the foreseeable future, and at least there are enough of my things there to foster the illusion that it’s where I belong. I wanted a beer, and I desperately needed a cigarette, and to lie in my “own” rented bed for a while. Maybe, I thought, while I was gone, Constance had succumbed to an attack of ennui and hung herself. Or maybe she’d had a nasty accident with a nail gun.

No such luck.

I found her sitting in the hallway, not far from the foot of the attic stairs. Just sitting there, sobbing, her legs pulled up close to her chest, her arms wrapped tightly about them. The hall light was off, and the shadows had grown almost as thick as the heat and the incongruent reek of sweat and turpentine coming off her. I stood staring at her, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do or say, and then she let me off the hook by speaking first.

“I think I owe you an apology, Sarah.”

“Yes,” I agreed, squatting down next to her. “I think you do.”

“I’m never at my best when I’m afraid,” she said, and I recalled her telling me the exact same thing the day she’d dared me to go back to the tree alone and we’d argued (And how long ago was that? A week? Ten days?). She wiped roughly at her snotty nose with a paint-stained hand, then, leaving a dark smear of indigo across her upper lip and the end of her nose.

“Constance, have you entirely given up washing your hands? Or is that part of your process?” I asked, and she smiled and almost laughed.

“They just get dirty again,” she replied. “Well, no. Not dirty. It’s not dirt, is it? But you know what I mean.”

“The sacred grime of creation,” I said, affecting as professorial a tone as I was able. I stopped squatting, because it was making my hips ache, my hips and my kidneys, and I sat down on the floor.

“Anyway, I wanted you to know, I am sorry.”

“You should be,” I told her.

She didn’t respond immediately, but stared at her hands a while, staring into all those competing, intermingled hues of blue and green smudged across her palms and knuckles, the flecks of red and orange and yellow on her fingers. Her hands made me think of autumn leaves tumbling in a rough surf. In the waves before a storm, perhaps.

“You know, last time,” she said, “you were a lot more gracious.”

“Last time was the first time. And last time, we’d not made love.”

Constance smirked and shrugged her shoulders. She’d stopped sobbing. “Is that what we did, Sarah? Did we make love? I thought it was just sex.”

I sighed and dug my cigarettes and lighter out of my shirt pocket. I offered her one and she accepted, and then I lit it for her before lighting my own. I breathed the smoke in, and breathed the smoke out, hurrying the nicotine into my bloodstream.

“Yeah, it was just sex,” I admitted. “Poor choice of words. I’m not feeling at all perspicuous at the moment.”

“I’m not saying it wasn’t good.”

“I didn’t take it that way,” I told her, and watched our cigarette smoke rising, commingling, curling and slowly dissipating in the muggy air.

“It was good,” she said. “At least, it was good for me. And it helped clear a lot of negative shit out of my head. It just didn’t stay cleared out.”

I blew a smoke ring, and said, “I’m always available for repeat performances.” Which is about the best I’m capable of, when it comes to flirting.

She laughed and stopped looking at her hands long enough to wink at me.

“Then I’ll keep you posted,” she said. And, changing the subject, “I think there’s a coyote hanging around the house.”

“So there are coyotes up here.”

“Oh, yeah. There are,” she replied. “Lots of them. But this might only be a fox. I’m not sure.”

“No wolves,though, right?” I asked her, and looked about for something within reach that could serve as an ashtray.

“Not likely. Not anymore. Though, back in March, a farmer shot a wolf somewhere up in western Massachusetts. It was in the newspapers. It was even on television.” She took the now-familiar ginger Altoids tin from her smock and opened it, tapping ash into it, then passing it to me. “It was killing livestock,” she continued. “Still, the first wolf anyone’s seen in Massachusetts in something like a hundred and sixty years, and this Swamp-Yankee fucker up and shoots the poor thing for eating his goddamn sheep.”

And I very nearly asked Constance how she knew what had been in the local papers and on the local news, given she was in Los Angeles back in March. But there are always phone calls to, and from, relatives and friends back east, right? There’s always the internet. I kept the question to myself.

“You saw a coyote?” I asked, instead.

“No. Well, maybe. I’ve seen something a couple of times now, skulking around by the garbage cans. It might only be a fox, but it seemed big for a fox. And the wrong color.”

“Should we tell Blanchard?”

“What for?” she asked. “So he can murder the poor thing.” That was the word she used—murder.

And then we were talking about bears, specifically about the black bear that was spotted around South County in May. It had displayed a fondness for bird feeders. But I wasn’t thinking about bears or birdseed. I was thinking about Harvey’s manuscript and the account of Susan and William Ames. Back in 1840, not so long before the last wolves were exterminated from the forests of New England, didn’t the doomed Mr. Ames claim to have repeatedly seen his missing wife in the company of a very large wolf? That’s what I remember, though I haven’t looked back through the manuscript to see if my memory is mistaken.

Time to end this meandering mess of an entry and go to bed. If I’m lucky, I won’t dream about wolves and the wayward wife of William Ames. If I’m really lucky, I won’t dream about Amanda, either, or Constance Hopkins, for that matter. Somehow, in only the space of half an hour, while we were sitting there in the hallway talking about wildlife, I went from furious to horny. I think I prefer furious; it’s quite a bit less distracting.

July 19, 2008 (4:34 p.m.)

So far, I’ve hardly seen Constance today. She came down for breakfast. And she walked with me to the mailbox. But that’s pretty much it. Whatever she’s doing in the attic, at least she’s returned to doing it more or less quietly. On the way back to the house, I brought up her “coyote” sightings again, though I didn’t tell her I’d had a nightmare because of them. Unlike yesterday, she seemed oddly reluctant to talk about the matter, almost as if, in the interim, she’d thought better of having mentioned it at all.

“If there are coyotes around, doesn’t it seem odd that we never hear them?” I asked. “I’ve always gotten the impression they’re pretty noisy animals.”

Constance shrugged and sorted through the day’s junk mail. “It might have only been a stray dog,” she said. “There must be lots of feral dogs about. Maybe a stray German shepherd or something like that.”

“Maybe,” I said, and didn’t press the issue, as it does seem perfectly reasonable that someone could mistake a feral German shepherd for a coyote.

As for the nightmare, I might just as well blame Harvey’s manuscript as Constance’s coyote. I didn’t go to bed last night when I was done at the typewriter. I sat in the living room a while, trying to concentrate on a DVD — Deborah Kerr and Jean Simmons in Black Narcissus(1947). It’s one of my favorites, has been for ages, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Harvey’s manuscript in its cardboard box. So I ended up in the kitchen again, flipping through the pages in search of the account of William and Susan Ames (if only the thing had an index). Turns out, it was way back in the first chapter, right there in the first few pages. But Harvey returns to the subject later, and on page 173 proceeds from numerous retellings and embellishments of the Ames legend to the subject of ghostly dogs and purported cases of lycanthropy in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. His writing here is somewhat less focused than usual, and I’m assuming that, like most of the book, he must have meant this only as a rough first draft:

Traditions of spectral canines of the sort best known from the British Isles are, as it happens, not alien to the States. Indeed, I have assembled numerous examples from various parts of New England. Though hardly as well known as the Barghest of Yorkshire or dreadful Black Shuck of East Anglia, there is, for instance, central Connecticut’s “Black Dog of West Peak.” Like many of its ilk, the appearance of this “black dog” is said to be an omen. Indeed, there is even a folk rhyme devoted to the animal’s seeming ability to bestow good luck or ill upon those who happen to catch of glimpse of it: “If a man shall meet the Black Dog once, it shall be for joy; and if twice, it shall be for sorrow; and the third time, he shall die.”

Though often sighted, the dog that haunts the steep volcanic Hanging Hills south of Meriden is said to leave no tracks and to utter a silent howl. The most oft-recounted tale associated with this apparition concerns the fate of one W. H. C. Pynchon, a geologist from Manhattan who frequently made excursions to the area to study its igneous rock formations. The April-June 1898 issue of The Connecticut Quarterly includes the definitive account of Pynchon’s three encounters with the beast, which, as the rhyme dictates, ends with his death (though, in actuality, the geologist did not perish in the Hanging Hills at the end of the Nineteenth Century, but died peacefully on Long Island in 1910).

Closer to home, there is Rhode Island’s own “phantom dog of Fort Wetherill” in Jamestown. Less renowned, perhaps, than its cousin to the west, sightings of this dog are also reputed to portend doom. In Tiverton, there are reports of a “pitch-black dog” that has been seen to transform itself into the figure of a woman, who then proceeds to play a violin before vanishing. Similarly, though less musically inclined, is the shape-shifting black dog of Newport, which also transforms itself into a woman who is given to peering in through windows.

That last detail is reminiscent of the famous Bête du Gévaudan, an unidentified wolflike animal that terrorized the peasantry of France’s Margeride Mountains from 1764 until at least 1767, slaughtering as many as one hundred and thirteen people.La bête was also alleged to have possessed shape-shifting abilities, and some of the reports indicate that, like the Newport lycanthrope, it was fond of gazing in through windows. Similarly, there are reports of a huge animal, suspected of being a werewolf, that is said to have wrecked a coach and laid waste to a farm east of Gresford in northern Wales in 1791, and to have stood up on its hind legs “like a human being” to gaze in through the windows of the farmhouse. The creature was said to have had blue eyes.

Yeah, I know. Precisely the sort of shit I needed to be reading before bed. Anyway, Harvey eventually finds his way back to the red oak and the strange happenings here at the “old Wight place”:

We see an element of the lycanthropic associated with the property, beginning with the death of Mr. and Mrs. Ames. The latter, you will recall, was said by her distraught husband to have been witnessed walking in the company of “a great wild beast,” though he also seems to have been of the opinion that it was nothing so mundane as either a wolf or panther. I will assume he also ruled out bears. A contemporary account of the affair, from the Providence Journal(“Horror from Moosup Valley,” October 2, 1840), even mentions that Ames had repeatedly looked up to find the face of Susan watching him from one of the windows, and that, on one occasion, William saw both the woman and her bestial attendant staring in at him.

During my research, I have assembled more than a dozen additional tales from the Moosup Valley/Coventry region featuring wolflike creatures, and oftenwere wolflike creatures. Many of these encounters are reputed to have taken place on the farm, usually within sight of the red oak, though a fair number come from what is now the George B. Parker Woodland Wildlife Refuge in Coventry. I will begin this catalog of lupine oddities with those sightings from the Parker Woodland.

This 860-acre tract of land is located along the northern side of Maple Valley Road, about 250 yards east of the intersection of Route 102 (Victoria Highway), about ten miles from Providence. The tract has something of a reputation as a “ghost town,” as the woods are dotted with evidence of Colonial-era agriculture, including a multitude of fieldstone walls, foundations, wells, rock-wall pens that once held livestock, and the stone foundations of numerous buildings. In 1760, a dam was built on Turkey Meadow Creek, north of Maple Valley Road, and two abandoned stone quarries likely date from roughly the same period. Remains of a sawmill (ca 1760–1785) can be seen at the brook. The lion’s share of this land was part of the Shawomet Purchase (1642), and was then obtained by the Waterman family in 1672. After almost a century, the Watermans sold the land to Caleb Vaughn in 1760. Probably, the most celebrated structure here is the meager remnants of the Isaac Bowen House, a center chimney that was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. Much has been made of the low stone cairns that are situated between Turkey Meadow Brook and Biscuit Hill Road (to the north), and the usual bevy of wild assertions have been made as to their possible origin, everything from Phoenician to Celtic settlers (and stranger things, as we’ll soon see). In truth, they are likely only the remains of furnaces used in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries to produce large quantities of charcoal, and rock piles made by Colonial settlers and the Narragansett Indians before them. One marvels at the constant invocation of Celts, Vikings, and other European races as an explanation for the creation of such cairns, as though Native Americans lacked the know-how to simply stack stones.

However, the most colorful interpretation of the Parker Woodland cairns — and the most relevant here — is to be found in the writings of the Hungarian-born orientalist Arminius Vámbéry (who, by the way, was an acquaintance of Bram Stoker’s; Vámbéry makes a cameo appearance in Chapter 23 of Dracula, when Van Helsing refers to “my friend Arminius, of Buda-Pesth University”). The “Coventry Center stones” are briefly mentioned in Vámbéry’sWerewolvery in Europe and Rituals of Corporeal Transformation(London, 1897), a digression from his study of supposed episodes of werewolvery in Ireland during the spring of 1874. In the book, the author tries to link a string of Gévaudan-like attacks in County Limerick to “a tradition among the people. of ‘raths’ or ‘hollow hills’ leading down into the chthonic realm of theGælic Daoine Sidhe.

He pauses in his examination of the “Black Beast of Limerick” to note that the “mysterious cairns in Rhode Island, while having no known link to fairy lore or even the mythology of the Red Indians, were, in the year 1843, the scene of an attack that appears to fit the pattern herein suggested.” Vámbéry proceeds to discuss the death of a mill worker, named as John Shattuck, who “. is said by newspaper accounts to have been slain by an enormous wolf. Some witnesses, however, dispute the identification of the killer, agreeing that it was a beast, but that the creature walked upright, yet was no bear.

I can’t say that I’ve ever been much for stories of wolf-men (or man-wolves), but, reading this section of the ms., I was struck by the prevalence of such stories in legends, superstition, religion, and folktales. Cynophobia on a cultural (or even species) level, something that almost seems hardwired into human consciousness. Wolves (along with jackals, foxes, wild dogs, etc.) are a sort of all-purpose boogeyman, from the Christian bible to the Qu’ran,from the Aesopica to the Brothers Grimm, the “Big Bad Wolf ” to Lon Chaney, Jr. Wolves, like snakes, have played the fall guys and villains in my thologies since almost forever.

In fact, I can even cite an example from my own childhood. When I was a kid, my maternal grandparents lived out in the wooded mountains maybe five or six miles south of town. And ever since I was very small, they both regaled me and my sister with stories about something they called the “wolfeener” (I never saw the word written out, so that spelling is admittedly one of my own invention). They both claimed not only to have heard this creature’s peculiar, high-pitched howl, but, on one occasion, to have seen it with their own eyes. They insisted that, though wolflike, it was no wolf — that it was larger, fiercer, and, well, just different. My grandfather, who was a brick mason by trade, could reproduce what he said was the creature’s call, and that sound never failed to scare the bejesus out of us. Even my mother claimed to have repeatedly heard the animal. I recall my grandmother once coming across a photograph of a hyena in a book, and telling me that when she’d seen the wolfeener, it had looked a lot like that; she had been adamant on this point.

I have often thought that this word they used—wolfeener—might have originated somehow from wolverine,though the wolverine has been extinct in the southern Appalachians since the end of the Pleistocene, some ten or eleven thousand years ago. For that matter, to my knowledge, red wolves (Canis rufus) were extirpated from Alabama by the early 1920s, when my grandparents were still small children. And coyotes (Canis latrans) didn’t reenter the state until after the 1960s, so neither red wolves nor coyotes seem likely suspects for the actual identity of the “wolfeener.” Of course, one wonders what stories their parents and grandparents told them,about a much wilder land. Okay, enough of this crap. Back to Harvey:

“. Local folklore attributes the ancient stone mounds south of the mill where Shattuck was employed to Native devil worship, and also consider it a site frequenty chosen for the sabbats of witches. The mounds were, therefore, feared by locals and generally avoided. A witness to the attack upon Shattuck claimed that the beast emerged from one of the mounds and, afterwards, retreated back into the earth, by way of the same cairn from which it had arisen.

”Vámbéry then proceeds to recount a second, earlier incident involving the George B. Parker Woodland cairns, this time dating from 1828 and involving a young woman named Sally Waite, said to have been the youngest daughter of a farmer “. who worked a plot of land not very far distant.” According to Vámbéry, the Waite girl suffered a series of “nightmares and waking visions” in which she witnessed elaborate “ceremonies conducted by demonic entities dwelling below the mounds, involving the blood sacrifice of both farm animals and human infants.” She “. repeatedly claimed that these beings were calling out to her, wishing for her to join them in their unholy fellowship and subterrestrial depredations.” She is reputed to have said, “The night has teeth. The night has claws, and I have found them. Walking through these woods, I have faced it.” After talking so openly of her dreams, Sally’s parents began to worry about both her sanity and her soul, and are said to have consulted a local Presbyterian minister. Then, on a snowy night in January, the girl slipped out of her family’s house (shades here of Susan Ames) and was found dead, two days later, her frozen and mutilated body spread out across one of the cairns. “Much of the corpse had been devoured, and tracks discovered in the mantle of new-fallen snow were queer, recalling no animal familiar to the people of the countryside. They seemed to vanish at the periphery of one of the mounds. Though there was much panic and talk of tearing open the stone heaps to find and destroy whatever lay inside, I can find no record that any such action was taken.”

Unfortunately, Vámbéry fails to cite his sources, and I have personally been unable to find any newspaper or periodical account of either incident, nor have any of the locals I’ve interviewed known of them. However, I have succeeded in uncovering an intriguing pair of sightings dating from the mid-1950s, recounted in an article in Argosy(April, 1962) by Don Valigursky, “A New England Wolfman?” In this short and somewhat lurid article, two sightings of a “hairy beast that walked upright” were made along Maple Valley Road. One might, at first, relegate these to Bigfoot lore (not unknown to the state), except that the witnesses both emphasized that the “loping monsters” they saw exit the woods and cross the road in front of their car’s headlights (both sightings were at night) had long, dog- or wolflike muzzles. In one of the two sightings, the driver — named as Mrs. Joann Laycock of Foster — reported that “I hit the brakes when I saw it come out of the trees, because at first I thought it was a deer. I’m used to seeing deer on the road at night, and you don’t want to hit one. But I soon saw it wasn’t a deer, and it rose up on its hind legs and stared directly at me, looking through the windshield. Its eyes were red in the headlights, and I’d swear before a court of law that the thing smiled at me before crossing the road and vanishing into the forest again. I saw its teeth, and they looked like a dog’s teeth.” Again, local newspapers do not back up these stories, nor have I found any evidence that the two witnesses named in the article ever lived in the area, or even existed (though both names may certainly have been changed for publication). Don Valigursky, I will note, also wrote a number of articles in the 1970s on the “pigman” of Northfield, Vermont, and one on Sasquatch sightings in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

But now, let us return to a number of similar occurrences here at the Wight Farm, some of which are clearly linked to the “red tree.”

Jesus, it’s got to be some kind of neurotic me sitting here transcribing this outlandish manuscript, a suicide’s obsession. Has it become my own obsession? In touching and reading these pages, in my trip to the tree and my exploration of the vast basement below the house, have I become infected by this same idée fixe? Has Constance’s “coyote” only exacerbated it? Did Harvey see coyotes of his own? I wonder. I need to stop and cook dinner, for myself, and for Constance, if she will come downstairs long enough to eat. But first, my dream from last night.

It’s nothing much, and anyone can see that it was plainly inspired by what Constance said, and what I later read in Harvey’s typescript.

I was outside, out back behind the house, not far from the steps. There was an amazing moon in the sky, the sort I always think of as a harvest moon — low and huge and a luminescent yellow orange, rising over Ramswool Pond and the red oak and everything else. I smelled smoke, and wondered if there was a forest fire, and I remember hearing a raucous chorus of birds — catbirds, robins, mockingbirds, jays — and thinking it was strange to hear so many song-birds at night. The air was cold, and my breath fogged. I turned to go back inside, and that’s when I spotted the pale figure of a woman crouched in the weeds at the edge of the yard. There was a very large dog with her. I won’t call it a coyote or a wolf. It just struck me as a very large dog. It licked her face, and, in return, she licked at its muzzle, and I realized then that the two of them — this woman and the dog — were lovers, and I felt suddenly ashamed, as though I’d been caught spying on some especially private moment.

The woman stood up, and though I think she’d been clothed when I first saw her, she was now entirely naked. The dog sniffed at the space between her thighs, and she stroked the top of its shaggy head. I started to say something, but then I saw the way her eyes shone red in the night. She was watching me now, and I realized that she looked a great deal like Amanda, but also a lot like Constance. Her face was the perfect amalgamation of their two faces.

She spoke, finally, and it surprised me, because I think perhaps I had assumed she was feral and so probably had never learned to talk. At least, not any language of men. The hound stopped snuffling her crotch and pricked its ears, listening as she spoke.

“There is another shore, you know,” she said, “upon the other side.” And in my dream, I recalled that earlier dream, me and Constance on the beach with the tempest at my back, and that she’d said those very same words.

The woman with the dog smiled then, and the teeth that filled her mouth were inhuman things. Then she turned and disappeared into the woods, though her companion peered at me a while longer before it also turned away and followed her. I woke sweating and disoriented, and I knew that I’d been crying in my sleep.

What she said, what Constance said in the earlier dream, I knew it was familiar. I googled it this morning. It’s Lewis Carroll, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,a line from the “Lobster Quadrille”:

“What matters it how far we go?” his scaly friend replied.

“There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.”