The Red Tree

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “No soul,” she said. “No spirit, so no ghosts, right? The brain dies and rots, taking its functions, including mind, with it. So, no ghosts.”

  “Bingo,” I said, and she laughed.

  “Except—and I know how freaky this is going to sound, so bear with me—maybe there’s a sort of cosmic escape clause that allows for the existence of the set of phenomena that people tend to call ghosts and hauntings. And it’s not that ghosts don’t exist, it’s just that most people are mistaken about what they are, or aren’t.”

  I think I blinked and let the metal folding chair rock back on two legs. “Okay, now you’ve lost me,” I admitted, and she laughed again.

  “Oh, Sarah, you’re plenty smart enough to keep up,” she said. “Just give me a second. See, maybe it’s not about souls or spirits at all. Maybe it’s actually something that has a lot more to do with physics and how the universe operates. We know that matter distorts space and time, right? Well, what if there are other ways that space and time can be distorted by matter, perhaps not only by the gravity generated by an object’s mass, but by the behavior or experiences or . . .” and here she paused, searching for some word.

  “It’s an old idea,” I said, letting the chair bump back down to the attic floor. “Events so traumatic that they warp time and space and create what parapsychologists and other crackpots call residual hauntings, I believe. Nonconscious hauntings that work sort of like a loop of videotape.”

  I realized that Constance had stopped smiling, and now she was just sitting there, staring at the walls.

  “Crackpots,” she said, and took a drink of beer.

  I sighed and fought the sudden urge to punch myself in the mouth. “I’m sorry I interrupted you,” I said, instead, but she just shrugged and leaned over the side of the air mattress, setting her bottle on the floor.

  “You said that you were still interested, or I never would have started in on this. I know how it sounds.”

  I apologized again and told her to please continue, to finish whatever it was she had been about to tell me. And then she said she blamed the heat, that if the day weren’t so hot, we’d have gone out to the tree as we’d planned, and this conversation would not have happened, and I wouldn’t think she was a crackpot.

  “I never said I think you’re a crackpot,” I protested.

  She stared at me a few moments, then shrugged and said, “It was fairly implicit, don’t you think?”

  I closed my eyes tightly, seeing yellow-white afterimages of sunlight and restraining myself from blurting some smart-ass quip or another—“Do we have to have our first lovers’ spat before I get to fuck you?” Something equally self-destructive.

  Instead, I told her, “I’m sorry, Constance. I honestly didn’t mean it that way. I think maybe I’m a little drunk,” and I probably was. I opened my eyes, and she was still staring at me. “No, really,” I said. “I was not calling you a crackpot. You’re just gonna have to take my word on that, okay?”

  And she smiled at me and lay down on the air mattress, and I was glad for the smile, whatever it might mean, and glad that those cinnamon eyes were now trained on the sloping attic ceiling and not on me. “Do you want to hear it or not?” Constance asked.

  “I do,” I replied, and she furrowed her brow, making what A. A. Milne might have called a thoughtful face. Only, it was obvious this was a sort of mock-thoughtful face, and I knew this expression was some part of my punishment for having implied she was a crackpot.

  “You have to swear that you won’t just use it as an excuse to make fun of me again.”

  “I wasn’t making fun of you.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut tightly and pointed straight at me with her left index finger. “You have to fucking swear, Sarah Crowe. Otherwise, you’re never gonna hear it.”

  “And that would ruin my day,” I muttered, and her brow grew more furrowed, the thoughtful face edging towards an impatient face.

  “Fine. I fucking swear,” I said, before she could withdraw the stipulation and any chance I might have of hearing whatever it was she was trying to decide whether or not I should hear.

  “Scout’s honor?”

  “Sure. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  “Yeah, that’s better,” she said, smiling again, and the creases wrinkling her forehead began to relax. But she didn’t open her eyes. In fact, she didn’t open her eyes again until she was almost finished telling me her ghost story, as though she needed to try and shut out the sunlight filling up the little attic in order to recall the events in question. I sat in my metal folding chair, smoking, and she lay there on her makeshift bed, while the window unit droned and gurgled wetly to itself. I’ll freely admit, I’ve never been a very good listener, and yet, there was something in the way she stacked the words . . . and I seemed to hang on every one, every syllable, every pregnant pause. Then again, maybe it was only lust and a peevish libido keeping me focused.

  “Back when I was in high school, just after I got my license, I used to drive out to the Cliffwalk in Newport whenever I could. Usually, I went alone. In the summers, I’d try to find the days when the tourists weren’t so bad, but it’s Newport, and so that’s always a crapshoot.”

  I exhaled smoke and cleared my throat. “Constance,” I said. “I know I’m interrupting you again, but . . . I’ve never been to Newport, and I have no idea what this Cliffwalk thing is. Keep in mind I’m just a dumb redneck from Georgia and this will go better.”

  She sighed very loudly and shook her head in disgust or disbelief. “The Cliffwalk,” she said, speaking very slowly now, the way one might talk to a small child with attention issues, “is a trail leading along the cliffs, over on the east side of Newport Island, behind Salve Regina College and all those great fucking mansions that people like the Vanderbilts put up back in the 1890s. You have heard of the Gilded Age, right? The fallout of the Second Industrial Revolution? John D. Rockefeller, Silas Desvernine, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, all those guys?”

  “I think maybe I heard of it once,” I said, not bothering to smile because her eyes were shut. I took another drag on my cigarette.

  “So, behind the mansions,” she continued, “there’s a pathway. It was just a dirt trail back when, a long time ago, kept clear by the Indians and the colonials and then the Victorians and whatnot. It runs on for miles, and in some places the drop to the sea is seventy feet or more. But over the years, hurricanes took their toll on the path, and finally, I think, the Army Corps of Engineers came in sometime in the seventies and paved it and repaired all the storm damage, fixed the walk up all nice again. Better than new, I’m sure.”

  “Our tax dollars at work,” I said.

  “It’s nice,” Constance said. “Maybe I’ll take you sometime. Anyway, so I used to drive out there, back when I was sixteen, seventeen, hoping there wouldn’t be crowds of sightseers. And one day it was foggy and sort of cold for summer, so there was hardly anyone, and I pretty much had the place to myself. July 21, 1995, so that’s what . . . thirteen years ago?”

  “Almost,” I told her, counting on my fingers. “Sixteen days from now, it’ll have been thirteen years.”

  “Fine, so twelve years, eleven months, and spare change. And there I was, alone at the Forty Steps, down at the end of Narragansett Avenue—”

  “What are the Forty Steps?” I asked, and she shook her head again, so I added, “A Georgia redneck, remember?”

  Constance made an exasperated sound, and somehow managed to roll her eyes without opening them. “At the east end of Narragansett Avenue, on the Cliffwalk, there’s a granite staircase leading down to a sort of balcony above the sea. Used to be, the steps were wooden, and back in the Gilded Age, the Irish servants from the mansions would gather there for dances and socials and whatever the Irish immigrants called such things. There’s a Gaelic word for it. . . .”

  “Céilí,” I volunteered, and she nodded.

  “Ten points to the ignorant redneck dyke from Georgia,” she laughed
. “Yeah. Well, so they had their parties at the Forty Steps, to blow off steam, back in the 1880s and 1890s and so on. Nowadays, though, the old wooden steps are gone, and there’s a sturdy red granite staircase enclosed by walls made from blocks of limestone and mortar, so it’s a lot safer. It was still new, in 1995. There’s a name engraved on each step, the name of the person who ponied up the dough to pay for that particular step. It cost something like three thousand dollars a step. And then, from the little balcony—which is probably two-thirds of the way down the cliff—it’s, I don’t know exactly, but I’d guess another twenty or thirty feet down to the rocks and the sea. Far enough you wouldn’t want to fall.”

  “Or jump?” I asked. And Constance frowned, and I thought for a second she might even open her eyes.

  “Or fucking jump,” she said. “Far enough that if you didn’t die outright, you’d be pretty busted up. I used to sit there on the limestone wall of the balcony, because it’s a good view, and there are lots of fossils in the limestone. That rock didn’t come from anywhere around here, but I don’t know where it did come from. Also, there’s a sea cave, below the south side of the balcony, and it’s great to just sit there and watch the water rushing in and out again. But that day in July 1995, I was just coming down the stairs, and I looked up, off towards Purgatory on the other side of the harbor, and for a second I didn’t see her, just the sea and the far shore—”

  “Didn’t see who?” I asked.

  “I am absolutely sure that she wasn’t there when I first looked up,” Constance went on, ignoring my question. “And then she was. Like someone throwing a light switch, like a magic trick. She just . . . appeared.”

  “Or you simply didn’t notice her for a second or two.”

  “I’ve tried hard to believe that, over the years, Sarah, but it’s not the truth. The truth is, I looked down those granite steps at the balcony, and one second she wasn’t there, and then, the next, she was. That’s the truth, whether you believe me or not. That’s what I saw.”

  “But . . . you know . . . whatever you saw is not necessarily what happened. Optical illusions—”

  “I won’t finish this story if you’re not interested,” she said. “I mean, if you’d rather argue, we can do that.”

  “I’m not trying to start an argument.”

  “Then just shut up for a few minutes and listen. It wasn’t an optical illusion, or a mirage, or whatever. Yeah, there was some fog, but I know what I saw. She looked a little older than me, no more than twenty, say. She was wearing a dress and boots, and my first thought was this was one of those Society of Creative Anachronism types, or some sort of goth or something, because the clothes were tailored and the boots. . . . It was like seeing a postcard or an old photograph from the Nineteenth Century. And she had this antique-looking pistol gripped in her right hand, and the barrel was set against her temple. She was looking out to sea, and so her back was turned to me.”

  And at this point, I have to admit, Constance had my attention, and I just sat there listening, staring at the smoldering tip of my Camel.

  “I stopped where I was, there on the steps, and for a minute or two, I just stood there, watching her. Her finger was on the trigger, and I could hear that she was crying. Well, sort of sobbing, softly. I almost couldn’t hear it over the breakers. And then I took another step or two towards her, though she hadn’t seemed to notice I was there, and I said, ‘The fall will probably kill you. The gun . . . I really don’t think it’s necessary.’ Something to that effect. And she turned around, turned and looked straight at me, and her face . . .” Here Constance trailed off and was silent for a while.

  Finally, I said, “You can tell me the rest some other time, if you’d rather.”

  Her eyes still tightly closed, she shook her head and took a deep breath, as if summoning some necessary courage, as if filling her lungs with the requisite will to finish her story. She breathed out slowly, and, sitting there, I thought of Lamaze classes and childbirth and of taking a very deep breath before a dive into cold saltwater.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “So, anyway, she turns and looks at me, this woman with her revolver and her dress that looks like she just stepped out of a Merchant-Ivory film. And the look on her face, Sarah, I knew, then and there, that expression was exactly what people mean when they say someone looks like she’s just seen a ghost. The woman lowered the revolver, letting her arm go limp at her side, and very slowly, very carefully, without ever saying a word, she climbed down off the wall onto the balcony. And vanished.”

  “Vanished . . .” I said, not meaning to sound skeptical, but sounding it anyway.

  “Just gone, Sarah. The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than a minute. Two minutes, at the most.”

  “And there were no other witnesses?” I asked.

  “No, no one. I walked over to the wall, and stood there a long time, staring down at the sea sloshing against the boulders. It’s all charcoal-colored shale there, and the sea foam looks so white against it, and the sea is so many shades of green and blue, and I remember seeing strands of kelp in the surf that day, down there below the Forty Steps. There was no one else, just me and a few cormorants and gulls.”

  She paused again, but this time I didn’t say anything. Just sat listening to the wheezy AC and the birds outside the old house far from the sea, but maybe not far enough. When she started talking again, Constance opened her eyes, but she didn’t look at me. She lay there, very still, staring at the ceiling.

  “A few days later, I went back to Newport, to the public library, and found this book there on local ghosts. I don’t remember the title. Oh, wait . . . yes, I do—The Hauntings of Newport—written by a history professor up at Harvard. Right near the end of the book, there was a story—not really a ghost story, not exactly—about a woman in 1901 who went down the Forty Steps to kill herself. She’d found out that her husband was sleeping around on her, getting it on with the maid or some such, and she’d brought his gun with her. She planned to shoot herself and fall over the edge, let the current carry her body away so that no one would ever know she was a suicide, and she’d never have to face the shame of her husband’s infidelity. Maybe people would just think she slipped on the steps and fell, whatever. But she didn’t shoot herself, Sarah, and she didn’t jump, either. Decades later, when she was an old woman, when her husband was dead, she told all this to a newspaper reporter. She said that she heard someone, right as she was about to pull the trigger, and turned to find this strangely dressed girl watching her, and the strangely dressed girl told her that the gun was unnecessary, that the fall alone would do the job. And then the girl just . . . wasn’t there anymore. That’s precisely how she described it. ‘Then the girl wasn’t there anymore.’ The woman’s name was Anna Turner.”

  There was another silence here, and I stubbed out the butt of my cigarette and set my empty beer bottle on the floor, waiting, because I wasn’t sure if she was finished, and, really, what do you say to something like this? She rolled over on her side, towards me, and the air mattress complained with a rubbery, scrunching noise.

  “I promise, I’m not making any of this up,” she said, and I either nodded or shrugged, I can’t remember which. Constance furrowed her eyebrows again, like someone trying to solve a trigonometry problem, and licked nervously at her lips. “I imagine the book’s still in the Newport library, if you ever wanted to look it up yourself.”

  “Did I say I don’t believe you? I don’t think I did.”

  “No, you didn’t,” and she sat up, reaching for her unfinished beer. She took a swallow, then returned the bottle to the wet ring of condensation it had left on the unfinished hardwood. “What I really think, Sarah,” and here she lowered her voice as if someone might overhear. “About ghosts, I mean—is that there are weak spots in the universe, or thin places in time. In the fabric of time or the quantum foam, whatever physicists are calling it these days. And where these weak spots exist, they essentially act as windows, connecting t
wo moments that otherwise would be separated by months or years or even by centuries. Maybe they only last for an instant or two, maybe a few minutes, then wink out of existence. Maybe, sometimes, they recur at the same place and time repeatedly. It explains what I saw that day, and what I found in the book later on. It explains what Anna Turner saw, and why she didn’t kill herself. You stop and think about it, well, it explains a lot of things that people call ghosts.”

  “It does,” I agreed, lighting another Camel and blowing smoke towards the ceiling.

  “But you don’t buy it?”

  “Well, come on. You have to admit, it does seem rather too convenient, or fortuitous, whatever, that a randomly occurring flaw in spacetime would just happen to manifest at a point that would have allowed you to save this woman’s life that day, the two of you ninety-four years apart.” I took another puff, exhaled, and squinted at her through the smoke.

  “I never said I believe that it’s necessarily a random event. Maybe, somehow, human consciousness plays a role in the process. Perhaps, Sarah, consciousness, like mass, can distort space and time. So, traumatic emotions can act as a catalyst, if certain conditions are just exactly right. Or, maybe, there’s some greater mind—maybe Jung’s collective unconscious, let’s say—that determines when and where these thin spots appear.”

  “Or God, maybe? A beneficent, intervening cosmic intelligence ...”

  “I thought you said you’re an atheist,” she said, scowling slightly.

  “Oh, I am. Through and through. But I also don’t believe in the collective unconscious, so, for me, if you’re looking for potential causal agents for this hypothesis of yours, one’s just as good as the other. Anyway, it would make for a pretty fickle fucking god, don’t you think, since your thin spots seem picky about who they show up to save? Well, unless that’s the random part.”

  Constance laughed then, and that was good, just knowing that my skepticism hadn’t pissed her off. She lay down again, and the talk moved on to other things. Nothing else was said about ghosts or Jung or holes in time, and that was good, too. Because, sooner or later, I might have done something stupid like tell her I do think it’s a crackpot idea. Or, I might have pointed out that her having discovered the account of this Anna Turner woman in a library book only works as evidence in favor of her proposal if I accept that she’s not lying about having found it after the supposed ghostly sighting, instead of having come across it first and then fabricated the story of that day at the Forty Steps to match what she’d read. If I had to bet green folding money, well, I fear that’s where I’d place my wager.