The Red Tree

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  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.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  August 2, 2008 (9:12 p.m.)

  I honestly believed I was finished with this journal. Over the past six days, I allowed myself to start believing that. Certainly, I’ve wanted nothing more to do with it, or with Harvey’s manuscript, or that goddamn tree. And those six unrecorded days were remarkable only in their consistent, unwavering sameness. I read, watched television, and took a couple of long drives, one as far as Providence. Constance stayed in the attic, appearing only rarely, once more distant, and taciturn, and stained always with paint. I began to imagine this is how the remainder of the summer would proceed. And possibly the autumn, as well. Just yesterday, I sat here and thought how July seemed like some long, thoroughly ridiculous nightmare, but that now it was finally over. Two days ago, I packed Charles Harvey’s unfinished book back into its cardboard box and put it at the bottom of the hall cupboard, under some spare blankets. I had planned to do the same with his typewriter, but, for whatever reason, had not yet gotten around to it.

  And then, late this morning, I opened the back door, the kitchen door (I can’t recall why), and found neon green fishing line tied about the porch railing near the bottom step. It was drawn taut, suspended maybe a foot above the ground, and led away into the briars and goldenrod and poison ivy, north, towards the red tree. I stared at it for a few minutes, I think. It seems now it took me a moment to fully process what the fishing line signified. I was startled that it was so very green, and couldn’t recall ever having seen that sort of fishing line before. And then I was shouting for Constance, and when she didn’t answer, I went back into the house. I went directly to the attic stairs. I knocked and asked her to please open the door. Then I tried the knob and discovered that it was locked. I banged on the door again, hard enough to hurt my knuckles. But no response came from the attic, and the door remained closed.

  I very briefly considered breaking it down. I’m pretty sure that I could have, but then I admitted to myself that Constance was not behind the door. That she was not in the attic, or, for that matter, anywhere else in the house. Standing there on the narrow landing at the top of the stairs, in the darkness and the heat, I admitted to myself that the only place I would find her was at the other end of the length of green fishing line tied to the back porch. For a minute or two, I permitted myself the luxury of pretending that there was no way on earth I was going after her. It was only seventy-five yards, after all, from the house to the tree, and she’d taken precautions, done her little Hansel and-Gretel trick with the nylon line. If she’d wanted me along, she would have asked me. Constance Hopkins is a grown woman, and she can damn well look after herself. I thought each of these things, in turn, and then I retraced my steps and stared at the fishing line stretching away into the weeds and underbrush. I called her name a few more times, shouting loudly enough that people probably heard me all the way up in Moosup. And then, suddenly, the whole thing felt absurdly like a replay of the episode in the basement, and I stopped calling for her.

  It was cloudy, and we haven’t had much of that this summer. Even so, the air was very still, oppressive, and I could tell the day was only going to get hotter. Even if it rains, I thought, the heat will only get worse.

  I hesitated, lingering there on the porch, and then I took what I prefer to think was, realistically, the on
ly course of action left open to me. I could hardly have called Blanchard or the police, could I? Even now, I don’t know what else I could have done, except maybe go inside and wait to see if she eventually found her way home. And I couldn’t do that, even though that’s what I wanted to do. I’ve known Constance less than a month now, but, in that time, we’ve shared a bed, and we’ve shared the experience of living in this house on this godforsaken plot of land. I’d gone into the basement and brought her back. I’d washed the filth from her skin and hair, and she’d played nursemaid after my last fit and read Bradbury to me. More importantly, perhaps, we’d tried together to reach the tree, and together we’d become lost, when getting lost was all but impossible. All this went through my head, I know, in only a matter of seconds, and then I left the porch and followed the trail of fishing line leading away from the house. I didn’t call her name again, and I didn’t look at the tree first. I just went.

  I walked fast, and it took me hardly any time at all to reach the deadfall marking the halfway point between the house and the red oak. I discovered that the fishing line had been looped several times around one of the sturdier of the fallen pine branches, one that’s not so rotten. From there, it turned west, towards the fieldstone wall and the creek, just as I’d expected it to do. I stopped only long enough to catch my breath and wipe some of the sweat from my face. There was a tick crawling on my pants leg, and I flicked it away. Somewhere nearby, a catbird mewled and warbled, its voice sounding hoarse and angry. I looked up and spotted it, perched fairly high in the limbs of a small maple, and it occurred to me that from that vantage, the bird would likely be able to see both me and Constance. So, it could be fussing at either one of us, or both.

  I followed the line through the wide breach in the stone wall, and then down the bank to the creek. Here, the nylon had been looped securely round and round the base of yet another tree, before continuing north again, following the stream a little ways. I disturbed a huge bullfrog hiding in a patch of ferns and skunk cabbages at the edge of the stream, and it jumped high into the air and landed with a splash, darting away into the tea-colored water. The ground is pretty soft down there, quite muddy in places, and my shoes left very distinct prints in the mossy soil. But mine were the only prints I saw. The only human prints (I think I also saw a raccoon’s). Somehow, Constance had walked over the very same ground as me and managed to leave none at all. Sure, she might weigh a few pounds less, but not enough that she wouldn’t have left behind footprints. Anyway, I soon found the next tree that had been used to anchor the fishing line; it turned east, heading straight back up the steep bank on the far side of the deadfall. I decided that I’d find Constance first; she had to be close now. I could worry about the missing tracks later on.

  The bank was more difficult to climb than I remembered it being, or I was more careless, and twice I slipped and almost tumbled backwards into the stream below. The second time, I scraped my left elbow pretty badly. In the confusion, I briefly lost sight of the fishing line, but immediately spotted it again at the top of the bank. It had been wound about the base of another white pine, and now resumed its path north, leading me directly to the red tree.

  Whatever distorting force or trick of distance had prevented Constance and me from reaching it on the sixth of July did not repeat itself. Other than my growing sense of dread, and the fact that I couldn’t find her footprints at the creek, there was nothing even the least bit disquieting or out of the ordinary about the walk from the back porch to the oak. And I suspect maybe I was beginning to let my guard down. I found the end of Constance’s lifeline tied to a sapling maybe ten feet away from the red tree. The plastic spool that had held the fishing line was lying nearby, and I picked it up. It’s lying here on the kitchen table as I type this. McCoy “Mean Green” Super Spectra Braid, thirty-pound test, eight-pound monofilament diameter, 150 yards. I suppose she picked it up on one of her trips into Moosup or Coventry or Foster. It hardly matters. The label on the spool reads, “Soft as Silk, Strong as Steel.” Part of the price tag has been pulled away, but I can still see that the spool cost $14.95.

  These details mean nothing, I know. I know that. I am only trying to put off what came next. That is, I’m only putting off writing it down. Consecrating it in words. But it is so simple. I’d bent over to retrieve the spool, and that was when I saw the spatters of blood dappling the dead leaves, and also dappling the living leaves of creeper vines and ferns and whatever else grows so near the base of the oak. The blood was thick and dark, and had clearly begun to coagulate, but was not yet dry. And what still seems very strange to me—seeing it, I didn’t get hysterical. I didn’t freak out. In fact, I felt as though some weight had been lifted from my mind, a weight I’d carried for a long, long while. Maybe, it was only relief, relief that, seeing the blood, I no longer had to wonder if something was amiss. I can’t say. But I looked up, towards the gnarled, knotted roots of the enormous tree, its bole so big around that three large men could embrace the trunk and still have trouble touching fingertips. And spread out above me, its heavy, whispering boughs, raised against the cloudy sky. And, even though I’d seen it up close once before, and dozed in ignorance beneath its limbs, I looked upon it now as though I was seeing the red oak for the first time. And I wondered how I ever could have mistaken it for anything so uncomplicated and inconsequential as a mere tree.

  There’s a passage from Joseph Conrad that says what I felt in that moment far better than I can possibly hope to articulate on my own. Maybe it’s cheating, cadging the words of another author because I find myself wanting, inadequate to the task at hand. I just don’t care anymore. We could not understand, because we were too far and could not remember, because we were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign—and no memories. Or, again, Thoreau’s “Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night.” Or, finally, in my own faltering language, here, before me, was all time given substance, given form, and the face of a god, or at least a face that men, being only men, would mistake for the countenance of a god.

  There was a great deal more blood. And something broken lying on the stone slab at the foot of the tree. I made myself look at it. It would have been cowardice to turn away, and I hope I can at least say I am not a coward. The rabbit’s throat had been cut, and its belly torn open. The wet, meaty lumps of organs and entrails decorated old Hobbamock’s altar, and there were also a few smears of blood on the rough, reddish-gray bark of the tree itself. My legs felt weak then, and though I don’t actually recall having sat, I remember standing up again sometime later. I cannot say how long I rested beneath the tree, gazing into those gigantic branches, making my eyes return again and again to Constance’s sacrifice. It may have been as long as an hour. It may have been only half that. By the time I left, the dead rabbit had begun to attract a cloud of buzzing flies, and I understood that the insects, and the maggots they heralded, were also there to serve the tree, in a cycle of life and death and rebirth that I could only dimly comprehend.

  Whatever drove Joseph Fearing Olney to murder all those women and then bury choice bits of them beneath the oak, and whatever had finally driven John Potter insane centuries before—whatever it was that had taken Susan Ames and then her husband, and whatever malignancy had at last left Charles Harvey with no choice but to end his own life, I sat there before it, clutching the empty plastic spool that had recently held 150 yards of fishing line. I was sure that the tree would not allow me to leave. Or that, having seen it stripped of any pretense at being merely a tree, I would find myself incapable of walking away. Here was my burning bush, or the Gorgon’s face. Here was epiphany and revelation and, if I so desired, the end of self. So many had been undone before me, and I knew that secret history, and now I also knew the why of the thing.

  But I did find the requisite will to leave the tree. Or it allowed me to leave. I’ll likely never know which, and, likely, it makes no difference.

  By the time
I got back to the house, it was a quarter past two in the afternoon. I could hear Constance moving about upstairs. I considered trying, again, to get her to open the attic door, and I wondered if we’d passed one another somewhere in the woods. If she’d been headed back, following some alternate route to the one she’d marked with the fishing line, as I was picking my way towards the tree. I wondered where she’d gotten the rabbit. And then I went to the bathroom, undressed, searched my skin and hair for deer ticks (there were none), and took a hot shower.

  I still have not seen Constance. I have not heard her come down the stairs. But I was in bed early last night, utterly exhausted, and then I slept late. She might have come down then. She might have stood in the doorway of my bedroom, watching me dream and trying to decide what is to become of the both of us, and by whose hand. She did a messy job on the rabbit.

  August 3, 2008 (3:29 a.m.)

  Three things.

  First, about half an hour ago I reached into the front right pocket of my jeans and discovered there a section of jawbone, maybe two and half inches long, sporting two molars. That the jaw is human is undeniable. One of the teeth even has a gold filling. The bone is stained a dark brown, and there is clay and soil packed tightly into various cracks and into both the severed ends, partially clogging the porous interior. I held it awhile, as the initial shock faded, turning the fragment over and over in my hands, straining in vain to remember having picked it up and put it into my pocket. Then I stopped trying, and set it on the kitchen table next to the typewriter. I assume, in the absence of any other viable explanation, or any evidence to the contrary, that I must have discovered this scrap of jaw while sitting beneath the tree yesterday. That I must have picked it up (and maybe, when I found it, the bone was even still half buried in the ground), dusted it off, and then slipped it into my pocket. The fact that I remember doing none of these things does not strike me as having any bearing, any relevance, on whether or not this is actually what transpired.