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

CHAPTER SEVEN

July 21, 2008 (8:47 p.m.)

Excerpt from ms. pages 108-14,The Red Tree by Dr. Charles L. Harvey:

Some authorities on the subject of criminology, in general, and, in particular, serial killers, consider there to be only two well-documented cases of “authentic” mass murderers dating from the 1920s. Earle Leonard Nelson, popularly dubbed “the Gorilla Killer” and “the Dark Strangler,” was a necrophile who killed more than twenty people (including an infant) between early 1926 and June of 1927. The notorious cannibal and pedophile Albert Hamilton Fish (also known, variously, as “the werewolf of Wysteria,” the “Gray Man,” and “the Brooklyn Vampire”) may have been far more prolific, if one trusts Fish’s own outrageous claims, which would place the number of children he murdered and/or sexually assaulted near four hundred by the time he was arrested in September 1930.

However, I have found no book on the phenomenon of serial killers that records the events at the Wight Farm between 1922 and 1925, even though they were reported at the time in local papers and are easy enough to verify by recourse to police and court records. And yet there seems to be a sort of cultural amnesia at work regarding the affair, and I have been unable to locate printed references to the bizarre murders committed by Joseph Fearing Olney (1888–1926) published any later than April 1927. The final accounts concern his suicide by hanging while awaiting trial for the killings, and the general consensus seems to have been that by taking his own life, Olney, in effect, confessed to the crimes and proved his guilt beyond any reasonable doubt. What follows here is merely an overview of the case, and the reader is referred to Appendix C for a much more complete account. [Of course, keep in mind Harvey never got around to writing those appendices. — SC]

Born in Peace Dale, RI, to the recently widowed wife of a Presbyterian minister, it is difficult to learn much about Joseph Olney’s life prior to his arrest by police in Foster on December 12, 1925. However, we do know that he was an exemplary student hoping to pursue a career in medicine, and that he briefly attended college in Boston before he was forced to leave school for financial reasons. Afterwards, Olney returned home to Peace Dale, where he worked in the same mill that had employed his paternal grandfather, and he remained with his mother until her death in 1918. Olney received only a very modest inheritance, primarily his parents’ small house on High Street.

In the winter of 1919, at the age of thirty-one, Joseph Olney sold the house and took a train west, first to Denver, then on to San Francisco, and then south to Los Angeles, living in cheap boardinghouses and occasionally working at odd jobs. An examination of his personal effects shortly after his arrest indicated that he’d spent part of this time attempting to write an obviously autobiographical novel about the life of a bright young man condemned by circumstance to follow in his father’s unremarkable footsteps. It is unclear whether any portion of this manuscript survived at the time of Olney’s arrest, and the title is not known. But he did manage to finish and sell two short stories during his years in California, both crime tales placed with the successful pulp magazine Black Mask(“Midnight in Salinas,” March 1920; “The Gun in the Drawer,” August 1920). He’d written several other stories in this vein, none of which were to see publication.

During his time in Los Angeles, Olney had what was apparently his first and only romantic relationship. His frequent letters to family members back east report his having met a twenty-four-year-old stenographer and would-be painter named Bettina Hirsch, whom he described as “a beautiful, talented, and educated woman who, like me, finds herself at odds with the world.” There was even talk of marriage, before Hirsch apparently took her own life on Christmas day in 1920. Her body was discovered by a roommate, after she used a straight razor to open both her wrists. The degree to which Olney was affected by his girlfriend’s death is evident in a number of surviving poems and letters he wrote at this time, and in the fact that it abruptly ended his infatuation with California.

There’s a handwritten notation in the right margin here, beside the above paragraph. I’m pausing to mention this if only because, all in all, Harvey’s typescript is surprisingly clean and generally free of such marks. The note reads, simply, “No death certificate on file w/LA Co. Office of Coroner.” I assume this means that Harvey made an inquiry himself, though I suppose it’s possible he learned of the missing death certificate from another source. At any rate, he continues:

He [Olney] returned to New England in 1921, having, with the help of a maternal aunt, managed to find employment as an office clerk for the Ocean State Stone and Monument Company, then operating the granite quarry which would, decades later, flood and become known as Ramswool Pond. And it is at this point that his involvement with the “Red Tree” begins. Joseph Olney was living in a rooming house in Moosup Valley when he heard tales of the locally infamous tree from coworkers. He appears to have first visited it himself just after Easter in ’21, and, thereafter, returned to the site almost weekly; he also began collecting and writing down the history and folklore associated with the tree and the strange occurrences on the Wight Farm. Many of his papers are deposited in the collection of the Foster Preservation Society, and I have had the opportunity to read most of them. To his credit, Olney carefully interviewed dozens of residents of Moosup Valley, Coventry, Vaughn Hollow, et al., regarding the oak, using techniques not dissimilar from those now employed by professional anthropologists and folklorists. He speaks, in his journal, of desiring to write a book detailing the history of the tree, and, here, his mood seems generally upbeat, despite the fact that he must still have been mourning the loss of Bettina Hirsch. There is evidence that he may even have written query letters to publishers in Manhattan, gauging the potential interest in such a volume.

Then, during the summer of 1921, his disposition suddenly changes, and his writings on the tree become darker and less organized. This period seems to have been triggered by a series of nightmares wherein he encountered the “ghost of my dear lost Bettina” at the tree and “in which she led me beneath the rind of the earth, into a fantastic and moldering rat’s maze of catacombs accessed by a secret doorway below the Indian altar stone.” Olney wrote of witnessing “grisly, unspeakable acts performed underground by demonic beings, and, somehow, Bettina was a willing party to it all, and she wished nothing so much as to initiate me into that ghoulish clique.” Still, he continued his research, and his visits to the tree, though it was noted that his work had begun to suffer, and his supervisors complained that he “seemed always distracted, his mind rarely on the job.” Fortunately, most of Olney’s research and writings on the tree are extant (having been seized as evidence for the prosecution).

Though I will not here detour into the grisly details of each murder that Joseph Fearing Olney is alleged to have committed beginning in May of 1922, I will provide a brief summation, as the case has received so little attention. It is important to note that less than one month before the date of the first murder, Olney purchased a used 1915 Model T Ford from a farmer on Cucumber Hill Road, having borrowed $175 from a relative. The automobile would allow him the freedom of movement needed (so the State would argue) to seek his victims from towns a safe distance from his room in Moosup Valley. Olney, it seems, killed by the maxim “Don’t shit where you eat.”

On Saturday, May 14th, a seventeen-year-old girl named Ellen Whitford vanished from her home in Tuckertown, west of Peace Dale. Four days later, fishermen discovered her mutilated and decapitated body floating in the Saugatucket River. A scar allowed the girl’s parents to identify the nude body. The next headless corpse was also found in the Saugatucket, only two weeks later, on May 29th, however this one remained unidentified for several months, until the woman was determined to have been a mill worker from Peace Dale. A third body was found on Saturday, June 17th, caught in a logjam on a bend of the Chipuxet River, east of Kingston Station, just north of the Great Swamp. By this time, newspapers as far away as Boston and New York were carrying stories of “the Rhode Island headhunter,” and after the discovery of the fourth victim — Siobhan Mary Dunlevy, also a Peace Dale mill worker, also found in the Chipuxet River — the killings (or at least the discovery of corpses) halted until the fifth body turned up in September. The badly decomposed remains of twenty-three-year-old Mary Wojtowicz, the daughter of Polish immigrants, was discovered in the weeds at the northern end of Saugatucket Pond. Identification was facilitated by a birthmark on the woman’s left ankle.

For almost a year no additional bodies were discovered, and we know from Olney’s journals, that he killed no one else until the next spring, when “the South County ripper” resumed his activities on the anniversary of the death of Ellen Whitford. Between May and August, six bodies were found, all decapitated and having suffered other mutilations, all of the victims women between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one, and all but one of them mill workers. In each instance, the bodies had been dumped into a river or pond after the murder, and none were found nearer to the rooming house in Moosup Valley where Olney was still living than that of Joanne Leslie Smith, recovered from the Wood River near Barberville, a good fifteen miles to the southeast. At summer’s end, the waterways of southern Rhode Island once more stopped yielding these gruesome revelations.

I will pause here in my catalog of Olney’s victims to discuss his journals, which more than his suicide, surely stand as undeniable proof of his guilt. The man was exacting in his description of every one of the murders he perpetrated, describing such details as the time of day each girl was killed, the weather, the clothes she was wearing, and the place where he disposed of the body. Every victim’s name was provided, which, in many cases, allowed identifications that might otherwise have been impossible, given advanced decay and/or mutilation. In most cases, Joseph Olney even recorded snippets of his conversations with the victims, and graphic particulars of each death. However, what is most interesting to the problem of the “red tree” are the passages he wrote seeking to explain, to himself, his motives in these crimes, and what psychologists would now refer to as his “delusional architecture.”

The nightmares that he had begun to suffer after his first visit to the tree grew more intense, and, in his writings, Olney claims that it was in the dreams, during his sleeping reunions with Bettina Hirsch in a cavern he believed to exist beneath the oak, that he was instructed by “dire beings” to commit the murders. He writes, on November 5th, 1922, following the first series of slayings:

“I cannot say what they are, these bestial men and women I have glimpsed in that hole. I cannot be sure, even, if they are beast or human beings, but suspect an unholy amalgam of the two. At times, I think they look like dogs born of human mothers, and at others, the human offspring of wolves. Below a high ceiling formed of earth and stone and the knotted, dangling roots of that evil tree, these crossbreed demons caper and howl and dance about bonfires, singing songs in infernal tongues unknown to me. Their eyes burn like embers drawn from those same fires, and she [Hirsch] insists that I watch it all, in order to see and fully comprehend the horrors of her captivity. They have their turns at her, both the male and female horrors, raping her, slicing her flesh with their sharp teeth, torturing her in ways I cannot bring myself to write down even by the light of day. And she tells me, again and again, that her freedom may be gained in only one way, by my making certain sacrifices of flesh and blood to these monsters. In exchange for the fruits of my sins, in time they will release her, and we can walk together beneath the sun. They require only the heads and, occasionally, other organs of the poor wretches I am driven to slaughter. As I have said already, I do not deliver these foul offerings during the dreams, of course, but in my waking hours. All must be buried about the circumference of the great oak, at a depth of not more than three feet. From these shallow graves, the demons retrieve their prizes, and then, during the nightmares, I have watched what they do with my gifts. Bettina says I must not waver in my determination, that I must remain strong, if she is to be given back to the surface, like Persephone after her abduction to the underworld by Hades. I understand. I do understand. I tell her this always. But I can see the fear in her face, and I can see, too, that she is becoming like her jailors, that she is slowly taking on aspects of their terrible form. She says this is because they force her to join in their feasts, and so she has become a cannibal. I tell her I am doing their awful work as quickly as I dare, but that I must be cautious, lest I am found out. If I am caught, she will never be freed.”

Indeed, it is difficult, when reading Olney’s journals, not to feel great sympathy for this man, driven to commit murder dozens of times over by these nocturnal visions of his beloved’s torment and imprisonment. To pick up on his allusion to Greek mythology, this mad-man has become a latter-day Orpheus charged with freeing his Eurydice, though by means incalculably more horrendous than those set forth by Virgil and Plato. In his fractured mind, Joseph Olney was left to choose between, on the one hand, becoming a monster himself and, on the other, allowing the monstrosities from his deliriums to slowly transform his dead lover into one of their own. Albert Fish might have claimed that he was charged by God to kill children, but in Fish’s claims there is not this conviction that another’s damnation hangs in the balance. I am, obviously, not here arguing that Olney’s crimes (or those of any such killer) can be justified, only that, if these “confessions” are genuine, that I cannot view him as an unfeeling fiend. He writes, repeatedly, of the almost unendurable remorse he feels after each kill, and on two separate occasions, he went so far as to write out letters of confession that he’d intended to mail to newspapers, and another he considered sending to a Roman Catholic bishop, in which he asked that someone “well trained in the dark arts required when combating evil spirits” be sent to intercede on his and Hirsch’s behalves. At no point does Olney seem to derive any sort of gratification from his activities.

There’s what seems to me a fairly glaring contradiction in all this. First, we have Bettina Hirsch described as “a willing party to it all,” intent upon her former lover’s induction into this bacchanalia of the damned. But,then we have her beseeching Olney to commit multiple murders because “. her freedom may be gained in only one way. certain sacrifices of flesh and blood to these monsters. In exchange for the fruits of my sins, in time they will release her. ” (Though, Harvey also says that Olney wrote he was told to murder by the “dire beings” he imagined lived below the tree.) I have no idea whether Harvey recognized these contradictions or not, and I have even less idea why I’m worrying over it all.

July 23, 2008 (11:32 a.m.)

The last two days, Monday and Tuesday. I don’t even see how I can hope to write coherently about the last two days. They have come and gone, and they have changed everything, utterly, and yet, I understand, it is not a change of kind, but merely one of degree. Constance and I should have run. We should be far away from this place, but we’re not. We are here. I did try to get her to go. I tried even after she went back upstairs and locked herself in tight behind that attic door. But I’m getting ahead of myself, and, besides, maybe Constance knows something I’m too damn thick to fathom. It may be that it’s too late to leave, and it may be that it was too late weeks ago. Possibly, it was too late before I ever laid eyes on this house and the tree and Constance Hopkins, or even before Amanda’s death.

I find myself saying and writing things I would have found laughable only a few days ago. Maybe Constance knows all this stuff, already. She’s at the head of the class, the bright pupil, perhaps, and I’m sitting in the corner with my pointy hat, my nose pressed to a circle drawn upon the wall.

I am alone down here, in the stifling, insufferable heat (though a thunderstorm is brewing to the west, I think, and maybe there will be some relief there), and she’s upstairs. I am alone, but for my shabby, disordered thoughts and whatever mean comfort I can wring from the confidences I divulge to this typewriter, to the onionskin pages trapped in its carriage.

Thunder, just now. But I didn’t see any lightning.

What I’m going to write, this is how I remember it. This is the best I can do. It is, by necessity, a fictionalized recalling of the events. Of course, it’s been that way through this entire journal (and I must surely have said that already, at least once or twice or a hundred times). I cannot possibly remember even a third of the actual words, what was said and by whom and when, every single thing that was done and cannot now be undone. But that’s okay. That’s fine and dandy. I just have to get the point across, the broad strokes — the essential truth of it — putting some semblance of these things down here, so that they are held somewhere besides my mind (and, presumably, Constance’s mind, as well). My excuse for an “entry” yesterday, the long excerpt copied from Harvey’s manuscript, that was me avoiding this, sitting down to do the deed and then losing my nerve. But still needing, desperately, to type something, almost anything, even if it was something terrible that only made it that much more impossible to “look away” from what is happening here. At least, it forced me to not look away, all that shit I retyped about lunatic Joseph Olney and the women’s heads and limbs and livers and all that he buried around the oak. Looking back, it seems remarkably masochistic, but, then again, Amanda did always insist I am the sort who takes a grand, perverse pleasure in causing herself discomfort.

Start here. It’s as good a place as any.

Early Monday afternoon, day before yesterday.

I was reading a book I’d brought back from the library. My agent had called, an hour or so earlier, with the usual questions, which I’d avoided answering. But it had put me in a mood, because I’ve been trying so hard not to think about the fact that the novel isn’t getting written. I was sitting in the living room, on the sofa, sweating and drinking beer and reading A Treasury of New England Folklore. I was reading, in particular, about something called the “Moodus Noises” in East Haddam, Connecticut. Strange sounds and earth tremors dating all the way back to the Indians, who had given the place where this was all supposedly happening a name meaning “place of bad noises.” Anyway, I was reading about the Moodus noises when Constance came downstairs.

I’d not seen her since our walk to the mailbox together, and that was on Saturday. So, here it was Monday, and I’d not seen her in almost two days. She’d stopped coming down for meals, or even to use the bathroom, unless it was while I was sleeping. And, probably, that’s exactly what she was doing, sneaking downstairs while I was asleep. Well, no, not sneaking. I should not say sneaking. Merely deliberately choosing to avoid contact. But she finally showed her face, paint-stained, as it always is now, and smiled, and she pretended there was nothing the least bit odd in shutting herself away like that since Saturday afternoon.

She looked like hell, truth be told. Her cinnamon-colored eyes were bloodshot, and she squinted like the sunlight hurt them. It was obvious — whatever else she’s doing up there — she’d not been sleeping. She had a strip of cloth in her hands, a rag, and she was wiping her hands with it, over and over, obsessively, but the rag was so thoroughly impregnated with paint I can’t imagine it was doing any good. She asked me for a cigarette, and I gave her one, lit it for her, and then Constance sat down on the floor, not far away from me. She took the Altoids tin from a pocket of her smock and set it on the edge of the coffee table, opened the lid and tapped ash into it. She asked what I was reading, and I think I showed her the cover of the library book. She might have nodded. I didn’t tell her about the Moodus noises.

I don’t remember the small talk, only that there were ten or fifteen minutes of nothing in particular being said. Nothing of substance or of consequence. And then, suddenly, she laughed, stubbed out her Camel, and snapped the lid of her ginger Altoids tin shut again.

“That day in Jamestown, on the way to Beavertail, when we stopped at McQuade’s because I had to pee,” she said and wiped at her paint-stained nose. “You acted like you didn’t remember having written that story. Why would you do that, Sarah? Why would you lie about something like that?” And it actually took me the better part of a minute to realize that she was talking about “Pony.”

“I wasn’t lying,” I said, finally, and she laughed again and shrugged.

“So. it was like some sort of a blackout? Like alcoholics have? You’re saying you did that, but you don’t remember doing that, so it was like a blackout.”

“I didn’t say that, either.”

“I know, later on, when I gave the story back to you, you pretended like you’d never said there wasn’t a new story. When I gave it back to you, in the kitchen.”

I took a deep breath, and lit a cigarette of my own. She stared at the floor instead of watching me. And it was so hot, on Monday afternoon. The mercury was somewhere in the nineties, and before she came downstairs, I’d been thinking about Constance in her garret, painting, and about an old Twilight Zone in which the Earth’s orbit had changed, bringing it nearer to the sun. There was a girl in that episode who was a painter, trapped in a deserted, doomed city that I think was meant to be New York, and, at the end of the episode, her paintings of the huge devouring sun were all melting, and someone — another woman — was screaming at her to please stop painting the sun. That’s what I’d been thinking about before Constance emerged from her garret; well, besides the mysterious underground noises in Connecticut. Oh, those were blamed on Ol’Hobbamock, too, by the way. Sometimes, the book said, they’d been felt as far away as Boston and Manhattan. Then, in the 1980s, a seismologist explained it all away. Micro-earthquakes. Something like that. Constance, where is our scientist-errant on his white steed, microscope and slide rule in hand to combat the darkness pressing in about us?

“I don’t remember writing it,” I admitted.

“And so you thought I wrote it, like maybe I was trying to make you think you were losing your mind.”

I set my book down, then, wanting so very badly to remain calm, but knowing full fucking well that there was only so long I could keep the anger at bay, only so long I could push down the things I wanted to say to her. It was so close to the surface, and had been since she’d first mentioned the story, that day out on Conanicut Island.

“Why would I do something like that to you?” she asked, sounding hurt, and I told her I had no idea, but pointed out that I’d never actually accused her of writing the story.

“No, but you thought it.”

“You don’t know what I thought.”

“Even if I could write, that doesn’t mean that I could write just like you,” she said, and tapped a fingernail against the lid of the Altoids tin.“I know that,” I replied, straining to keep my voice level, calm. I probably gritted my teeth. “Constance, no matter what I may have thought,I never said that you wrote the story. I don’t think you wrote the story. Clearly,I did. That’s pretty inescapable. I just can’t remember having done it.”

“So, you’re telling me you wrote a whole story during blackouts. Or is this missing time, like those people who say they’ve been abducted by space aliens talk about?”

“I don’t know what this is,” I said, truthfully. “But I don’t remember writing the story, and I have tried. I’ve tried hard, believe me.”

“Usually, I’m the crazy one,” she said, and pocketed her Altoids tin. “Maybe you should see a doctor, Sarah.”

“I don’t have the money to see a doctor. I don’t have insurance. Anyway, when all this started — my fits, I mean — I saw doctors then, and I spent a fortune doing it, and, in the end, they couldn’t tell me shit.”

She nodded, but it was a skeptical nod.

“I keep meaning to read the stuff Chuck Harvey wrote about the tree,” she said, changing the subject. “I suppose I’d better hurry, before you give it to that person at URI.”

And it occurred to me then that I’d forgotten all about the professor in Kingston who’d agreed to take the typescript off my hands. She’d never called back after the Fourth, and I’d never contacted her again. Maybe she was glad. Maybe she’d never wanted anything to do with it, and was only trying to be polite.

“No hurry,” I told Constance. “I don’t think I’ll be turning it over anytime soon. That woman never got back to me, and I never called her, either.”

“You found it in the basement?” Constance asked, even though I’d already told her that I had.

“Yes,” I said. “I probably mentioned that when we first talked about it.”

“People forget things,” she said, and there was no way for me to miss the fact that those three words were meant to cut me. Meant to leave a mark.

“Yes,” I replied. “Yes. People forget things.” Maybe I sounded as cool as a fucking cucumber, and maybe she could hear that I was losing the battle with my anger. I don’t know. The way things turned out, it hardly matters.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” she said. “The basement. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I mean, you haven’t been back down there since the day you found Harvey’s book, right? And me, I’ve never been down those stairs. Isn’t that odd, Sarah, that I’ve been living here for almost a month, and I’ve never gone into the basement?”

“No,” I replied. “I don’t think it’s all that odd.” The anger was changing over to panic, now, and I found myself gripped by an urgent, almost overwhelming need to keep Constance from going down to the basement of the farmhouse. I’d started sweating, and my heart was racing. “There’s nothing down there. Just a lot of junk. Junk and dirt and spiders.”

“If I went, would you go with me, Sarah?”

“I’d rather not,” I said, and forced out a laugh.

“Why?” she asked. “Are you afraid? Are you afraid of the basement?”

I sat up, and here it was, the anger bubbling to the surface at last. I heard it in my voice. I felt it leaking from me, felt the release of letting out even the smallest fraction of it. “This isn’t grammar school, Sarah. This isn’t grade school, and we’re not on the fucking playground, making dares.”

“You’re scared,” she said with an awful sort of certainty, and her eyes were still on the floor. Only, I knew then that it wasn’t the floor she was staring at. It was the basement beneath the floor that she was trying to see through the boards.

“Fine. I’m scared.”

Constance picked up the rag (she’d lain it beside her) and started wiping at her hands again.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about this,too,” she said. “That’s where it all began, down there,” and she stopped wiping her palms long enough to jab an index finger towards that enormous unseen vacuity below us. “That’s where it started, in the cellar. With you finding the typewriter, and then going back—”

“It’s not even half that simple,” I said, cutting her off, and she looked up, glaring at me. Her eyes were different, intent,focused,and they reminded me of something that I am reluctant to put down here. Something, I suppose, I am loath to acknowledge having seen in her face, or in any woman’s face. Many years ago, I was at the zoo in Birmingham, and there was this area devoted to local wildlife. The cages were all out of doors, but they were still cages. Raccoons, foxes, bobcats, owls, possums, a black bear, and so forth. The animals native to northern Alabama. And almost all of them were pacing back in forth in their small enclosures, pacing restlessly, frantically even. Maybe it was nervous energy, or maybe they were stuck in a sort of in stinctual loop, looking for an escape route that must surely exist, somewhere, if only they kept looking. But there was this cougar, just lying in her cage,not pacing, but lying perfectly still. I stared in at her, and she stared back out at me. And I swear to fuck, if animals can hate, I saw hatred in her eyes. As if she understood the situation through and through — the iron bars, the futility of trying to find an exit, her captors, that I was of the same species as her captors, even that I was part of the conspiracy that had made her a prisoner. It gave me a shiver, that day, though it was a hot summer afternoon, gazing into the reddish eyes of that cat, knowing that the only thing in the world keeping the panther from tearing me apart were the bars.

There was the exact same malice in Constance’s eyes. I mean,exactly the same. It didn’t help, either, realizing that her irises were so similar in color to the cat’s. She glared up from her place on the floor, and there were no iron bars in between us, restraining her, protecting me. But then it passed, the expression, that clarity of purpose or whatever, almost before I could be certain what I’d seen. Her eyes were only here yes again, sort of distant, distracted, far away, and she glanced back down and shook her head.

“Now, I’ve made you angry at me,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to. I promise I wasn’t.”

“I’m sorry, but I would rather not go back down there,” I said, deciding it was best not to get into whether or not I thought Constance was trying to get a rise out of me. Better not to question her sincerity, so I simply chose to ignore what she’d said, that and the passing, unfamiliar glint in her eyes.

“Then I’ll go by myself. It’s no big deal. I just want to have a look around. It bothers me, not knowing what’s down there, underneath us.”

I took a deep drag on my cigarette and peered at her through the smoke I exhaled. “Why didn’t it bother you before? Why all of a sudden?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. “Maybe it did bother me.

Or maybe I just never stopped to think about it.”

“There’s nothing down there,” I told her again, more emphatically than before. “Just junk. A whole lot of junk, sitting around in the dark, gathering dust.”

“Then I’ll see it for myself, and I can stop wondering about it. I can start thinking about my painting again, and get back to work.”

“You won’t just take my word for it? My word isn’t good enough for you?”

“Sarah, that’s not what I mean. Don’t make this into something it isn’t,” and she sighed and ran the long fingers of her right hand through her tangled hair. It wasn’t pulled back in her usual ponytail, and was dirty enough I could believe she’d not washed it in weeks. “I won’t be long. I’ll go down and see whatever there is to see, and I’ll come right back up. Are there lights down there?”

“No,” I replied. “There are no lights in the cellar.”

“But we have a flashlight, right?”

I nodded, then pointed towards the kitchen with my cigarette. “Yeah. A couple of them. In the drawer beside the sink. The drawer on the right of the sink.”

“You won’t be mad at me?” she asked. “If I go, you won’t be mad at me?”

“No, Constance. I won’t be mad at you,” I lied, an easy lie, given how pissed I was with her already. “I just fail to see the point.”

“So, what was the point when you went, Sarah?”

And I wanted to say I’d only gone into the cellar back in June because I was hot as hell and looking for someplace to get away from the heat, someplace cool to read. But then she would have asked why I did more than read, why I ever went poking about, and then, having found the typewriter, why it was I returned to search for the rest of the manuscript. I knew I had no answer that would satisfy her or convince her not to go down there. So, I didn’t bother. The answer, in both instances, was that I was curious, and my curiosity was no more valid than whatever was eating at her.

I think I was a cunt not to have tried harder to stop her from going into the basement. I know I was a cunt for letting her go alone.

I didn’t tell her about the slate threshold with its array of chiseled symbols, or about the archway dividing the basement. I didn’t mention all that space beyond the arch and the threshold that I’d not had the nerve to explore. I certainly did not mention the nightmare I’d had about finding Amanda down there in a Vernean landscape of giant mushrooms.

My fingers hurt, and I’ve got to take a break. Get something to eat, maybe. Go upstairs and see if I can get Constance to talk to me. I know I can’t, but I need to try, anyway.

July 23, 2008 (continued; 1:57 p.m.)

She didn’t open the door for me, but she says that she’s alright. The way things stand, I don’t suppose I have any choice but to believe her. Believe her or break down the damn door and be done with it. But I think I’m finished with heroics for the time being. I have to wait until she’s ready to open the door and come out on her own.

Anyway, yeah, I showed Constance where the flashlights were, and I pretended not to hear the cellar door creaking open. I sat there on the sofa, pretending to read A Treasury of New England Folklore. I stared at the pages, reading the same paragraphs over and over again; something about a sea serpent flap in Gloucester Harbor, back about 1817 or so. An assortment of “tall tales”—ghost ships and the ghosts of drowned sailors, Ocean-Born Mary and Caldera Dick and crazy, bloodthirsty Cotton Mathers.Wonders of the Invisible World.But, in truth, I know now that I was sitting there listening,waiting, though I probably could not have said for what. For some sound or sign from below, and when I heard it, I would know. Still, I tried to reassure myself, because I knew there really wasn’t anything beneath Blanchard’s old farmhouse but all the refuse that had accumulated down there over the years — over the centuries, no doubt. Constance would dig about in the mess until she grew bored, and then she’d come back upstairs, and I could say I’d told her so. I could bask in smug vindication, and she’d skulk away to her garret again in a cloud of turpentine fumes. All would be as right with the world as I could reasonably expect.

Only, that’s not the way it went, not at all.

About an hour and a half passed, me sitting there trying to read, and the day seeming to grow hotter, my T-shirt sticking to me. We were out of beer, but I wasn’t about to drive into town to get more, not with spelunker Constance prowling around in the cellar. I was just about to give up on the book and look for something else to read when I heard what I’d been listening for.

It was the smallest sound. Any smaller, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have heard it.

It might have been my name. It might have been something else, the particular words, I mean. It hardly matters, these specifics, because it was plainly a cry for help. It was alarm, and it was dismay, and it was fear. I called out to her, once or twice, fairly certain that there would be no answer, and there wasn’t. I waited until the sound came again, and it wasn’t a long wait. I went to the kitchen, to get the second flashlight from the drawer to the right of the sink. I switched it on and off, checking to be sure the batteries hadn’t gone dead. The casing is blue plastic; the one that Constance took with her is green. She’d left the cellar door standing open, as I’ve said, and I lingered a moment before that low entryway, shining my flashlight across the ten wooden steps leading to the hard-packed dirt below. They seemed steeper than I recalled, the stairs, and the air rising up from that pit was cool and smelled much too stale, too sour, to ever describe as simply “musty.”

Constance’s paint-stained rag was lying on the topmost step, and I picked it up. I shouted for her again, and, again, there was no answer. It occurred to me that a draft might cause the door to swing shut, and I took the time to wad the rag and wedge it firmly into the space between the bottom edge of the door and the floorboards. Also, I went back for my cell phone, which I’d left on top of the television after Dorry called that morning. I’m not very fond of cell phones, and I’ve often threatened to get rid of mine. But suddenly I saw it as a lifeline — a second source of light, a clock, and a means of reaching the outside world (assuming I could get reception down there). I slipped it into my front jeans pocket and went back to the cellar door; that’s when I heard Constance yelling again, and, this time, it was clearly my name.

And I said something then like, “If it turns out you’re just fucking with me, if it turns out this is a joke, you’re a dead woman, Constance Hopkins.” I said it loudly enough that she should have heard me, but there was no response. The old stairs complained softly beneath my feet, and I went down them quickly. In only a few more seconds, I was looking up,at the dingy yellow-white rectangle leading back into the hallway and the house and the sweltering summer world above. That’s when I almost lost my nerve, and thought maybe it would be best if I called Blanchard and let him deal with this, whatever this was. But what the hell would I tell him? That his attic lodger was lost in the basement, and I was too chickenshit to go looking for her? An absurdity compounded with an absurdity. And if you put it like that,pride wins out. The fear of lasting embarrassment trumps the fear of things that go bump in the cellar, so I turned away from the stairs, playing the flashlight slowly over all those sagging shelves and cardboard boxes, the broken furniture, the rotting bundles of newspapers dating back to god knows when.

There was no sign of Constance anywhere, and my mind went to the fieldstone-and-mortar archway waiting somewhere up ahead, and the slate threshold and the odd marks or glyphs carved deeply into it. I thought about how far away her voice had seemed to be. Now, the basement around me was, as they say, silent as a tomb.

“Constance!” I screamed into the darkness. The darkness made no reply whatsoever. “I’m coming!” I screamed. “Just stay where you are and wait for me to find you!”

Moving quickly as I dared along one of the crooked aisles between the shelves, it didn’t take me too long to reach the arch marking the northern edge of the house. And there was the upside-down horseshoe, just like I remembered, all its luck spilled out long ago. There was the threshold, scarred with occult gibberish, and I shone the flashlight into the gloom packed in ahead of me. I spotted the shelf weighted down with its load of elderly Mason jars and spoiled bread-and-butter pickles. Then I saw the cast-off chifforobe where I’d found Harvey’s manuscript more than a month earlier (only it feels like it’s been three times that long, at least). I took a deep breath, a very deep breath, and stepped across the threshold, passing beneath the inverted horseshoe, and into air so cold and damp and heavy I might well have slipped beneath the surface of some unclean winter-bound pond.

The muddy ground sucked at the soles of my tennis shoes, but I pushed on, leaving the drawerless chifforobe and the jars of pickles behind me, calling out for Constance and still getting no answer. This far in, the junk and litter abruptly ended, and now there was only a broad, more or less flat expanse of muck and rock, broken by an occasional shallow puddle. The ground here had begun to slope gradually downwards, an incline of only a few degrees, at the most, just enough that I was aware of it. There was no sign of a wall anywhere, in front of me or to either side, and the thought crossed my mind that, maybe, when John Potter excavated for the original foundation, more than three hundred years before I’d ever had the misfortune to set eyes on the house off Barbs Hill Road, maybe he’d stumbled across some sort of cavern. And having thought that,there was really no way not to let my mind wander back to Joseph Olney’s mad visions or the tales of the Parker Woodland cairns. I know enough geology to know that solutional caves can form in granite and gneiss bedrock, as well as in limestone, so it certainly wasn’t impossible. But if that were the case, there was no knowing how far or in what directions this underground space might lead. Besides, if the house was built atop a cave system, wouldn’t Blanchard have at least fucking mentioned it? Wouldn’t he surely have cautioned us not to go prowling around beneath the house?

I stopped and looked back over my shoulder, back the way I’d come, aiming the flashlight towards the brick archway and the chifforobe. But the beam revealed nothing behind me now except the otherwise featureless plain of mud and stones and pools of stagnant water. I’ll admit, it isn’t much of a flashlight, but I knew I couldn’t possibly have gone more than twenty or thirty yards past the slate threshold. Thirty yards at the most. And that was the last straw, I suppose, not being able to see the archway, and the panic I’d managed to keep at bay since descending the stairs started closing in on me.

I dug the cell phone out of my jeans and flipped it open. It chirped at me, just the silly little tone it makes when opened or closed, but, in the darkness, the sound was loud and unexpecteded, and it startled me. I almost dropped the flashlight. The phone’s colorful display screen glowed cheerfully in my hand, informing me that it was 2:23 p.m., and I cursed myself for not having noted the time before entering the cellar. The phone was showing two bars, so I figured I could at least get a call out, if it came to that. I saw the battery was low, so I closed the phone and put it back into my pocket, then pointed the flashlight north again. The mud and darkness seemed to go on that way forever, sloping very gradually, almost imperceptibly, in the direction of the red tree and Ramswool Pond.

For the first time, I shone the flashlight up, sweeping the beam along the ceiling of the chamber, the space, the cavern — whatever I should call it. The word abscess comes to mind, with all its various connotations. At any rate, the ceiling was maybe fifteen feet above me, and, near as I could tell, appeared to be composed mostly of stone, though I noted that, in places, the roots of trees and smaller plants had broken through. Which got me to thinking — if I had found a cavern exposed when the foundation was dug back in the 1700s, such a broad hollow at such a shallow depth, what the fuck was keeping it from simply collapsing in upon itself and creating a huge sinkhole behind the farmhouse? I shone the light to my left and right, but still saw no evidence of a wall to either my west or east, respectively. It seemed impossible to me, and still seems so now, that the ceiling could have supported its own weight (not even taking into account the trees and such). I tried not to dwell on it. At least, I thought, I could easily follow my muddy footprints back to the archway and the cellar proper, and took all the solace in that thought that I could scrounge.

Belatedly, I began to count off my steps, and, probably, it was more to have something to occupy my mind than anything else. I kept walking north, towards the place where the pond and the red tree waited, shining the flashlight ahead of me, occasionally calling out to Constance. I’d not heard her since entering the cellar. My shouts echoed down there, the way voices echo in empty buildings, or large enclosed spaces. The way voices echo inside abandoned warehouses, or in cathedrals, for example.

When I’d counted thirty or so steps — counting silently to myself to avoid that unnerving echo — I stopped again, and, again, I shouted for Constance. The gradient was becoming steeper, and another odor had been added to the dank stink of the place, the smell not of rotting plants and not of mildew, but of rotting flesh. I suppose it might well have been nothing more than my imagination grinding away in the darkness. As it was, I was trying hard not to consider the possibility that the same bizarre violation of physics that had plagued our “lost picnic” was now at work, belowground, the same warping of distance and time that Olivia Burgess claimed to have experienced when she visited the tree in October 1957. That possibility was plenty enough morbid without adding to it the faint reek of death. And the air was growing noticeably colder. My breath had begun to fog. Of course, it was so awfully humid down there — the dew point would have been so high — it would not have had to have been that cold in order to see my breath. Unless I’m misremembering the science about relative humidity and dew point and the condensation of moisture, which is always a distinct possibility.

Regardless, for whatever reason, I found this is where I was unwilling to go any farther. Thirty or so paces past where I’d begun counting my footsteps. I’m not even sure it was any sort of conscious decision; I simply could not bring myself to go any deeper into that place. I stopped and shouted for Constance, and my voice sounded enormous. But, when I once again shone the flashlight to my left and right, I found rough granite walls only ten or fifteen feet away on either side of me, and when I pointed the beam at the ceiling, it was near enough that I could have reached out and touched it, despite my strong impression that the northward slope here was, if anything, a few degrees more acute than when I’d first noticed it. I stared at the walls a moment, and then at that ceiling. The stone did not look like the stone of a natural cavern, but appeared to have been hewn with picks and chisels. Quite some time ago, by the look of it, as the marks left on the granite by iron tools were faint, faded by time and erosion. But they were unmistakable. Some one made that passageway.

That’s when I heard something behind me, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I almost screamed. I turned quickly around, expecting anything at all, but there was only Constance, standing a scant few yards away. She was naked, though almost every inch of her bare skin was smeared with the ocher mud, a yellowish shade of ocher leached, I guess, from the minerals in the gneiss or granite. Her long hair was matted with mud, tangled with it, and, by the flashlight — if only for an instant — her eyes seemed to glimmer iridescently, the sort of predatory eye shine I would have seen, say, from that cougar at the Birmingham Zoo, or from a coyote or feral dog prowling about our garbage cans. She said something then, though I honestly have no idea what. It was barely more than a whisper.

I said something, as well, but it wasn’t a reply. I think it was only her name. I must have sounded relieved, and perhaps surprised, as well. I must have sounded breathless. I remember realizing that I was sweating, despite the chilly air.“

I got lost,” she said, speaking louder now, but only slightly louder. I am sure that is what she said, but the next part was, I am equally sure, not in English. At the time, it sounded to me like German or Dutch, or even a mix of the two. She said it twice, seeming to take special care to enunciate unfamiliar syllables. Later, trying to recall the details before I sat down to write this, I became convinced it was German that she’d spoken to me, and that what she’d said was something close to“Irgendwo in dieser bodenlosen Nacht gibt es ein Licht.”Or, if it was Dutch, instead—“Ergens in deze bodemloze nacht is er een licht.”Both would translate the same—“Somewhere in this bottomless [or unending] night there is a light.”

Constance has since told me that she neither speaks nor understands German (or Dutch). Moreover, she has no memory of my having found her down there, much less anything she may have said. She tells me she remembers going down the stairs, and that she remembers finding the fieldstone archway and the chifforobe, before she became disoriented.

Anyway, I think I said something about the cold, then, that she must be freezing, that we had to get her back upstairs, something of the sort. I won’t even pretend to know precisely. I expect I said the sort of thing one says after finding a lost friend underground. And Constance shook her head and frowned, like there was something she needed me to understand, and I wasn’t listening. Or I was too thick to grasp her meaning. And that’s when she raised both her arms, which had been hanging limply at her sides. And I saw the leaves she was clutching. They were green, and not the least bit wilted. She might have picked them from the boughs of the red oak only moments before.

“Sarah, do you see?” she asked, and there was more than a hint of urgency in her voice. “Do you see it now?”

“Where did you find those?”

“You’re not listening to me,” she sighed.

“We have to go,” I said, unable to take my eyes off those fresh green leaves. “Where are you’re clothes? We have to get you out of hear.”

“My clothes?” she replied, as if she hadn’t quite understood the question.

“Yes. You’re clothes. Your naked,Constance. Where are you’re clothes?”

And I am absolutely certain off what she next to me. Letting the oak leaves slip from her fingers and settle about her feet, sunk in too the sticky mud too her ankles, Constance Hopkins said, “The men took them, Sarah. The men with the hammers, they took them away.”

I open my mouth to ask, I think, what she meant, what the fuck she was talking about, and that when I heard another sound behind me. From the chance inn her expression I could.

July 25, 2008 (5:17 p.m.)

Constance found me after the seizure that interrupted the last entry. The thing couldn’t have lasted more than two or three minutes, but there’s no way to know for sure. It’s all pretty much guesswork, figuring out what happened. I struck my chin hard against something, and bit my lip. There’s actually a spot of blood on the page that was in the carriage at the time. I also hit my forehead, possibly on the edge of the table, but I might have hit it against the floor. That’s where Constance found me, on the kitchen floor. Then I spent most of yesterday lying in bed, headachy and feeling hungover, thinking through a fine yellow haze (to employ an old simile I invented while trying to explain the postseizure disorientation and grogginess to Amanda). Anyway, if this wasn’t the worst of the fits I’ve experienced so far, it was surely a close second or third. I should have seen it coming — the stress and lack of sleep, all the crazy shit from the cellar, then sitting here for hours on Wednesday, trying to make some coherent record out of my disjointed memories.

Constance keeps trying to blame herself.

She looks at the bruise on my forehead, or the one on my chin, or the cut on my lip, and she says, “I shouldn’t have left you alone.” Or “If I hadn’t gone into the basement, and then you hadn’t had to come after me.” Or “I should have made you rest.” That sort of thing. Whether she’s right or wrong, it’s a pointless, stupid game, and, right now, I haven’t the stomach for this sort of futility and hindsight.

Looking back over the paragraphs I typed immediately before the seizure, I can see evidence of the mild aphasia that sometimes prefaces the attacks, in the particular pattern of misspellings and typos and so forth. I’ve seen that before, so it’s nothing new.

My head still hurts like hell, and now Constance is talking to me, telling me to “give it a rest,” and I think I will. More later.

July 26, 2008 (4:48 p.m.)

“You should try to get some sleep,” Constance said, gently pressing her left index finger to the ugly plum-colored mark centered between my eyebrows.

“But I’m not sleepy,” I replied. “I feel like I slept all day yesterday. I’m not sleepy. I’m bored.”

She sighed loudly and moved her finger to the bruise on my chin, which looks quite a bit worse than the one on my forehead.

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

“Yeah, but not so much.”

“It looks like you were in a fight.”

“Well, does it look like I won, or does it look like I lost?” and so she told me she couldn’t say for sure, that she’d need to see the other woman. She brushed a strand of hair from my eyes, and I marveled that her hands were nearly clean, most of the oil paint scrubbed away.

That was late yesterday afternoon, after she had shooed me away from Dr. Harvey’s typewriter and talked me into lying down again. Constance sat on the bed next to me, and whenever I’d open my eyes, the room was filled with the most brilliant buttery light. The bedroom has two windows, one facing south and one facing west, so it gets the afternoon sun (Constance says that’ll help keep it warm in the winter). I’d open my eyes, and she’d be sitting there, worrying over me, scowling like she does, and there would be the dressing table and the chest of drawers and the ivory walls and all that butter-yellow light washing over everything. There’s a framed Currier and Ives print on the bedroom wall, “The Return from the Woods.” Like the furniture, it came with the place. In that light, I could imagine no other picture hanging on the bedroom wall.

In that light, her eyes were only a dark shade of brown.

She was reading to me. It had been her idea. I don’t think I’ve had anyone read to me like that since I was a girl. But, like the light, and like the simpler brown it made of her eyes, it was comforting, and I listened while she read from an old Ray Bradbury paperback I’d brought with me from Atlanta,A Medicine for Melancholy. She has a good, strong reading voice. She was halfway through “The Day It Rained Forever,” and I broke in and told her so.

“It’s hard to find people with even halfway good reading voices,” I told her, “and most times, when you do, they come off like they’ve been practicing for some sort of slam-poetry thing.”

“Thank you,” she said, then went right back to reading to me about Mr. Terle and Mr. Fremley, Mr. Smith and Miss Hillgood in that hotel in the desert. The light coming in the west-facing window seemed perfectly suited to the story, and, mostly, I lay still and listened, concentrating on her voice more than the words, watching dust motes caught in that sunlight, rising and falling at the whim of whatever forces govern the movement of dust motes.

Later, though, when the sun had set, and after I’d eaten the dinner of ramen noodles and wasabi-flavored rice crackers Constance had made us, I began to grow antsy. I told her I needed to do something,that I was probably as rested as I was going to get. She asked me if I meant I needed to write, and I think I laughed.

“Are you going to finish it, the stuff you were writing about what happened down there?” She glanced at the floor, as though I needed any clarification.

“Do you think I should?” I asked her, and Constance didn’t answer right off. When she finally did, she turned her head away, towards the Currier and Ives print and the west window. I could still see her face reflected in the dressing table mirror. She closed her eyes while she spoke.

“I know you didn’t have to come after me,” she said, and there was more, but it wasn’t anything she hadn’t already said — Constance thanking me again for finding her and getting her back upstairs, thanking me for bathing her and washing the mud from her hair, for getting a Valium and some hot soup into her, and so on.

“You didn’t answer my question,” I said, at the risk of seeming less than gracious. She opened her eyes, and I saw that she saw me watching her through the looking glass.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t, did I?”

“Do you want me to write the rest of it?”

“Part of me does,” she said. “I think it’s the same part of me that’s glad you never got rid of the manuscript. And the same part of me that wanted to reach the tree and that was angry when we couldn’t.”

“The part of you that had to see the cellar?”

“Yeah, more than likely,” and she turned towards me again, though I kept my eyes on the mirror, which now showed me only the back of her head, her black hair pulled tightly into a high ponytail.

“And what about the other part of you?” I asked. “What does it want?”

“It wants to go back to my paintings,” she said. “It wants me in the attic, working like a fiend. I suspect it really doesn’t care what you write and what you don’t write.”

“Well, then, maybe that’s the part you should be listening to,” and I asked her for a cigarette.

“We smoke too much,” Constance said. “Both of us. We’re both gonna die of emphysema or lung cancer or something if we keep it up.”

I laughed, and she told me she was serious, but then she laughed, too.

“Personally, I don’t think I need to write the rest of it down,” I said. “I know that I certainly don’t want to. So, perhaps it’s best if we keep it between us.”

“But we’re not talking about it.”

“We’re talking about it right now, Constance,” and she scowled again. She told me not to be an ass, that I knew damn well what she meant.

“I don’t have answers,” I said. “If that’s what you mean, I don’t have any more answers than you do.” And, frankly, I was thinking that maybe I had quite a few less. There were questions that I wanted to put to Constance, questions about what she’d seen down there, below the floorboards, about the things she’d said to me, and where those oak leaves had come from, for starters. But, the few questions I had dared to ask, she’d been unable, or unwilling, to answer.

“Do you think we should stay?” she asked.

“I can’t afford to leave,” I replied. “I simply don’t have the money. But if you do, I would understand if you found another place, Constance.”

“I wouldn’t leave you here alone,” she said, and I think maybe she said it a little too quickly, too eagerly, as though she’d practiced the line beforehand. I wished that the sun were still up, the room still bathed in that buttery late-July sun that the twilight had stolen. By the lamp beside the bed, Constance’s eyes had taken on their old reddish tint.

As for today, well, it was almost as if the whole thing never occurred. She’s gone back up to her garret, and I’ve hardly seen her since breakfast. I’ve gone back to my reading and the television and this typewriter. Earlier, I sat here and just stared out the kitchen window at the red tree for the better part of an hour. Maybe I’ll try to reach the woman at URI again. Maybe I’ll talk to Blanchard. I dreamed of Amanda last night, and it was not a pleasant dream. She’s something else that Constance wanted to talk about, but I told her I thought we had plenty enough ghosts to deal with, thank you very much.

“Besides,” I added, “Amanda is my own private haunting. She’s nothing I want to share. And she’s nothing you need to hear about.” And Constance nodded, but it was more of a if-you-say-so sort of nod than anything else.

I’m thinking of getting a combination lock for the cellar door, next time I go into town.