The Red Tree

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  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 ke
ep 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 her eyes 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 sku
lk 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.”