I do not believe, at this point, that I was still searching for Dr. Harvey’s manuscript. I think, more likely, I was only trying to show myself that Amanda had been wrong all along. That day in Tavistock, and all those other days and nights. I was not afraid of the dark, or of the hunger of abandoned places, or, for that matter, of anything else that she might have accused me of. That she is dead (there, I’ve said it, I’ve written it), and so would always have the last laugh as regards all these little grudges and jabs, hardly seemed relevant. It was not in vain, because if I was proving something to Amanda, I was also proving something to myself. Jesus fuck, Amanda. No one we knew ever believed that there was anything between us but the sex and some virulent allure, my dirty dishwater circling the drain of you. Not a very pretty comparison, but maybe it’s the best we’ll ever deserve, either one of us. Anyway, I went into that stinking, muddy darkness because, once upon a time, she thought I was a coward. Two little girls bickering because neither of us ever learned to love, and this was my latest chance to give you the finger, Amanda, posthumous though it may be.
The ground made a soft, squelching sound beneath my sneakers, and I slipped once or twice, almost falling. I hastily looked over the contents of the shelf nearest the archway, which held very little besides row after row of ancient canned goods (mostly cucumber pickles, I think, but the fuzzy clots of mold in the jars made it hard to be sure) and disintegrating bales of The Farmer’s Almanac and Field and Stream. I paused, shining my light north, towards the place where the darkness ought to have ended in another wall, probably earthen. But the batteries were getting weak, and the beam would not penetrate that far, however far that might be. And this is when I saw the grimy chifforobe missing all its drawers, sitting just a few feet farther in, and on top of it was a cardboard box, not so different from the manuscript boxes I get from Staples or Office Depot. I grabbed it, suddenly wishing to be anywhere at all but that slimy hole in the world, wanting to be outside, beneath the summer sun again. Better the sweat and glare and stifling, relentless heat than that clinging damp and darkness. I tripped climbing the stairs and have a nice yellow-green bruise on my left shin to show for it. I’m sure, if Amanda had a soul, and if it somehow survived her body, she was cackling at panicked, fraidy-cat me from whichever afterlife or underworld she’s consigned herself. I bolted the basement door behind me, and sat down on the floor. I actually kicked the cellar door hard, two or three times, leaving muddy footprints that I’m gonna have to wash away. I thought for a moment I was going to knock the goddamned thing off its hinges. It was all anger, the force behind those kicks—anger at my own kid fears and my memories and Amanda’s suicide and the goddamn overdue novel I’m not getting written. I lay on the floor a while, grateful for the muggy kitchen, the stagnant air that did not stink of mold. I lay there until my heart stopped racing. And then I sat up and looked inside the box.
It was taped shut, but most of the adhesive had dried out long ago, and I didn’t need a knife to get it open. Inside was page after page of the same onionskin paper I’d found in the Royal’s carriage, and so there I was, returned fucking victorious from my own personal katabasis, Hecate back from the bloody bowels of hell with rescued Persephone, what the fuck ever. I’d done the deed, and now I held the prize, and seeing it there, my fury quickly, calmly, melted away. Not caring that my dirty fingers would leave smudges, I lifted the first page from the box, and then the second, and then the third, reading over them as quickly as I could. After maybe ten or fifteen minutes, I finally had the presence of mind to get up and carry the box to the kitchen table, where, after half a decade, I reunited it with Harvey’s typewriter.
I got a beer from the refrigerator (because, already, the heat was feeling a lot less welcome than I’d imagined it would be while I was still in the basement) and then sat down to reread, more carefully, those first few pages. The first was simply a title page—THE RED TREE by Dr. Charles L. Harvey and all that. The usual. The second page was occupied by two epigraphs, one from Thoreau, the other from Seneca the Elder. Neither meant very much to me, but perhaps they will later, once I’ve had a chance to get through the manuscript. The third page was blank, but the fourth bore the heading—CHAPTER ONE: THE CURSED ACORN—only THE CURSED ACORN was crossed out, and a string of question marks had been scrawled in directly above it in red ink. I sat there, sipping at my beer, the amber bottle perspiring and growing slick in my hand. Despite the things I’d read online, nothing here, before me, pointed to Harvey’s unfinished book being a study of regional “fakelore.” Rather, it looked to be concerned with local traditions regarding a tree on the plot of land now known as the Wight place. What’s more, it quickly became evident that this tradition amounted to stories of murder, witchcraft, lycanthropy, cannibalism, and a miscellany of other unpleasantries, dating back to the first decade of the Eighteenth Century. Scanning those thin, hand-corrected pages, the typescript and Harvey’s annotations, I got goose bumps—swear to fuck, I truly did—and found myself pausing repeatedly to glance out the window at the farmland gone fallow and brushy, the oaks and pines pressing in around the dark expanse of Ramswool Pond.
Hardly the sort of shit you advertise when you’re trying to rent out a house, indeed.
June 28, 2008 (4:47 a.m.)
Jesus fuck, the goddamn nightmares. Screw the seizures. Please just give me a pill for these goddamned bad dreams. I awoke from one about fifteen minutes ago, and stumbled out here from the bedroom for a drink (bourbon, yes, but I did cut it with water). I stood at the big window in the den for a few minutes, watching the eastern sky. The birds are awake and chittering away in the trees and bushes, and I know the sun will be along before too much longer—already, the sky is lightening—but the way I feel right now, soon can’t come soon enough. Maybe it won’t be so bad having someone else in the house, even an artist from California. Even if she’s straight.
So, yeah, here I sit, typing on Harvey’s Royal after a measly four hours’ sleep. Not sleeping is one of the triggers; for the fits, I mean, so this can’t become a habit. I have to sleep, bad dreams or no bad dreams. I have to sleep, but I just couldn’t stay in bed after that, couldn’t say “Fuck it” and pop another Ambien. I need to be awake. I need to be awake and in this world. And I think I really am going to write down what I can recall about the dream, with the dimmest hope that it will loosen its grip on me. I know I am awake now, and not merely stranded in some mundane intermission between one terror and the next. I know the sun is coming. I know I can get a nap later, when the day is all around me, and I don’t have to go back down to sleep beneath the starry canopy of the fucking night.
It’s another oft-cited, so-called weakness of my writing, by the way. All the dream sequences. The “reliance” on dream sequences, and, some of the stuff I’ve seen said, you’d think I’d invented the blasted things. As though the reviewers (and here I refer particularly to those self-styled reviewers who leave comments at Amazon and suchlike) have managed to get through high school and college (big assumption here, I admit) without ever encountering such a basic narrative technique. Let them pick on Pushkin or Shaw or Mary Shelley or goddamn Shakespeare and leave my sorry midlist ass the hell alone. I’ve actually had my agent suggest that my novels would come across as more accessible and I might increase my readership if I avoided so many dream sequences. And I am appalled at authors and critics alike who brand the use of dreams in fiction as a “cheat,” used only by writers who cannot “figure out,” in a waking narrative, some other means of saying what he or she has to say.
This attitude denies so much of . . . yes, I have digressed, and I am on my goddamned soapbox. But, honestly, honestly . . . I have lost track of the times readers have complained that they couldn’t follow the “story” because they weren’t clear what was “really happening” and what was “only” a dream. Right now, from where I fucking sit, it’s all a dream, marked by varying degrees of lucidity. Get with the program or stick to television (though, it must be noted
that film and TV rely very, very heavily on dream sequences, so you’d think—if for no other reason—the lowest common denominator would have long since become accustomed or desensitized or whatever to writers employing dreams to expand and further the story). Whatever. I did not sit down here to complain about readers who cannot be bothered to be literate. Yeats said (and this one I know from memory, and let it stand as my sleep-addled defense, if any defense is needed):I have spread my dreams beneath your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Outside, the sky continues to brighten. The sky is the color of blueberry yogurt. Harvey’s unfinished manuscript is still in its box, here beside the typewriter. I’ve read the first two chapters. And that probably wasn’t so terribly bright of me, not after I figured out what his book is about, but curiosity and cats and all that. My dreams be damned, how would I not read it?
Look at this. Two and a half pages already, and I’ve managed not to get to the point. I have managed to skirt the point, to dance around the periphery of the point. Stop writing about dreams, Sarah, and writing about writing about dreams, and just write the dream.
The sky is going milky. . . .
I cannot recall the beginning of it, but I was back in the basement with my flashlight. I know that I wasn’t looking for Harvey’s manuscript, because I clearly recall setting it down on one of the sagging shelves of pickles or machine parts or whatever, so I’d have a hand free. I was on the other side of the archway, past that odd threshold and its preposterous array of glyphs. I was somewhere past the threshold, trying to locate the north wall of the basement, pacing off my steps, one after the other, doing my best not to lose track and have to start over again. I realized that I must have walked very far beyond the house, and the footing beneath me grew increasingly wet. There were stagnant pools of black water standing here and there, pools whose depth it was impossible to judge, and I did my best not to step too near any of them. They seemed . . . unwholesome. Yes, that’s the word. Of course, truthfully, the whole damned place seemed unwholesome, as if I had somehow stumbled into an actual gangrenous abscess in the ground, a geological infection that had hollowed out this cavity below and within Blanchard’s land.
Here, where the pools of water began, there were far fewer shelves, and all of them contained nothing but antique books, volumes swollen from the moisture, their covers warped and spines splitting open like overripe berries. I did not stop to examine them, to learn any of their titles. I didn’t want to know, any more than I wanted to approach those motionless obsidian puddles. And this is when I realized that I was not alone. I heard footsteps first, and looking over my shoulder, I saw Amanda. Only, in death (and she was dead, of that I am certain) she had taken on aspects of various of her photomontages, the sick fantasies of her pervert clients. She had the ridged and lyre-shaped horns of a male impala sprouting from her skull, and her eyes were as black as the pools of stagnant water. When she came closer, I could see that her cheeks and the backs of her hands were flushed with tiny scales that appeared to shimmer with some internal light all their own.
“Changed your mind, did you?” she asked, and when I nodded yes, she laughed—and it was so much her laugh, in no way distorted by the dream. It was simply Amanda laughing, and I was grateful to hear it again. And then she asked, “So, was it inquisitiveness, or was it peer pressure? Or maybe you just got to thinking I wouldn’t want to fuck a woman who was afraid of the dark.”
“I am not afraid of the dark,” I replied, a little too emphatically. “It isn’t safe down here. They seal these places for a reason.”
“So, you’ve come to save me?” and she laughed again, but the sound was neither as pure nor as welcome as before. “Are you my Lancelot? Are you the kindly huntsman come to rescue me from all the big bad wolves?”
And I told her no, it wasn’t anything like that, that I was only trying to find the north wall of the basement, because I knew it had to be there somewhere. I explained that if there were no north wall, then there’d be nothing to hold back Ramswool Pond. And since the basement clearly wasn’t flooded, it stood to reason the wall was there somewhere.
She shrugged and pointed at one of the puddles, not far from her muddy, bare feet. “You never can tell,” she said, “what goes on down below. Given any thought to where these fuckers might lead?”
“They’re mud holes,” I replied, growing impatient with the argumentative ghost of my argumentative lover. “They don’t lead anywhere.”
She smiled the sort of smile that maybe dead people commonly smile, and said, “You always were a woman of unfounded assumptions, Sarah.”
And around us, then, suddenly there were fireflies, and swirling motes of unidentifiable bioluminescence that seemed to make the darkness no less dark. The ceiling of the basement was draped with more than roots, I saw, with the sticky silken threads of larval glow worms, and I imagined there were zodiac constellations drawn in the arrangement of their deadly lures. Amanda held up her arms, as though she’d summoned this swarm, as though she worshipped or made herself an offering to it. And the basement had, I saw, grown into a cavern, something straight out of A Journey to the Center of the Earth, and forests of oyster-colored mushrooms the size of redwoods towered all around us. I heard the crashing waves of a not-so-distant sea, and Amanda sat down on a rock, and, slowly, she lowered her arms.
“So, what. You think this is usual?” she asked me, or some question very near to that, and I turned, trying to see the way back to the arch, and, past that, the foot of the stairs leading to a place that was only a basement.
“I don’t know what I think anymore,” I lied.
“Perhaps you ought to put it back,” and I knew she meant the manuscript, Harvey’s manuscript, without having to ask. “Perhaps you’re not ready for this.”
“That’s not for you to say,” I told her.
“And the typewriter, too,” she continued, as though I’d not even spoken. She did that a lot, when we were both alive. “It can’t be healthy, Sarah, having it around like this, working with it, a thing that has recently borne such strange fruit.” And if her allusion was lost on me in the dream, it’s not lost on me now.
The impala horns abruptly dropped from her head, and where they’d been nothing was left but two bloody stumps. She sat looking at them, the horns, and her expression was not so much sad as wistful, I think.
“Kind of makes you wonder,” she said, nodding at the shed horns. I waited for her to elaborate, but she never did. And I saw then that a variety of pale fungi had begun to sprout from her flesh, from her jeans and T-shirt, not so much devouring as simply augmenting, and I knew that, in this dream, I was neither a knight-errant nor a woods-man who saves lost girls from hungry wolves . . . nor from parasitic toadstools and yeasts, molds and agarics. I had already told her that, but as I watched Amanda’s body slowly, steadily bloom with the progeny of unseen spores, any doubt I might have harbored in this regard vanished.
There was more, what seems like hours and hours more, a roiling tumble of nonsense and phantasmagoria, a flight through that subterranean forest to the shores of Verne’s Mare Internum, his Liedenbrock Sea, perhaps. It may be I sailed a plesiosaur-infested ocean, or maybe I only sat on that alien shore, gazing up at a sunless, electric sky. But, however it proceeded, I don’t think I’m up to writing the rest. Whatever I might remember of the rest. The compulsion that drove me from my bed to this chair and the typewriter of Dr. Harvey has deserted me.
Since coming here, I have written two dreams, and damned little else, and in each one, of course, I encounter you, Amanda. In each one, I have no say in what becomes of you, so, in that respect, at least these are true dreams. Then again, in each one, you seem somehow imperiled, when I find it hard to believe there was ever any threat to you beyond your own penchant for self-destruction. So, paradoxically, the dreams may also be lies. Or both things are equally true—a particle and a wave, as it were—and I’m only being narrow-minded. A woman of unfounded assumptions
, a woman of either-or.
But sitting here, watching the day coming on—a morning pregnant with the promises of yet another scorcher—it occurs to me that perhaps I should consider passing Harvey’s manuscript along to someone. I really don’t know who. Perhaps URI would want it, some former colleague or his department or the library or something, if his daughter in Maine truly has no interest. I surely do not need this new source of morbidity. I brought more than enough here with me. Maybe today I’ll try to call the university. I could drive it over, the manuscript, if there’s anyone there who wants it. If no one at the school is interested, maybe I’ll contact Brown or the Providence Athenaeum. At this point, I’d appreciate what I could deem a valid excuse to blow a tank of gas on the road trip and get away from this place for a day. And I can’t imagine that Blanchard would mind my getting rid of the manuscript. Not that I’ll bother to ask him, not after the way he’s foisted this new impending upstairs neighbor upon me. I googled her, by the by, and got nothing at all.
I suppose I could even try to track down the daughter; I doubt it would be very hard to do. I have her name from the obits. But there’s something, I think, inherently creepy and stalkerish about doing that. Unless Blanchard’s lying, she had a chance to claim her father’s work and passed. Who knows what that relationship was like? Maybe she’s glad the old man croaked himself, and maybe she even has a right to be. Maybe he was a complete bastard, and the last thing she needs is some stranger butting in. It just seems somehow wrong that this manuscript has languished in the basement of a farmhouse for half a decade. Then again, this all supposes there’s something here worth saving. But I suspect I’m hardly qualified to make that call, and the same is likely true of Dr. Harvey’s disinterested daughter.
The Red Tree Page 7