The Red Tree

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  But, I will admit, hearing her “ghost story,” I couldn’t help but be reminded of what I thought I saw in a chert quarry in the sweltering summer of 1977.

  Sitting here now, pecking at the typewriter of the late Dr. Charles Harvey and watching the clock hung above the kitchen sink, I’ve just remembered something Isak Dinesen wrote. Well, I’m sure I’m not recalling it exactly, so this is a paraphrase—God made the world round, so we wouldn’t ever be able to look too far ahead. Something like that. And I’m thinking, maybe it isn’t nearly round enough, and what would be the point of limiting how far ahead we can see, when we can see so far back the way we’ve come? It’s too late at night for thoughts like these, and the pads of my fingers are feeling tender. Sometimes, these days, that’s the only way I know that it’s time to give up and go to bed, when my fingertips get sore from slamming at these keys. Anyway, Constance and I have rescheduled our picnic at the “Red Tree” for tomorrow, assuming the weathermen are right and the day’s really going to be cooler, like they’re predicting. I hope so. I need to get out of this house for a few hours.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  July 6, 2008 (7:54 a.m.)

  No coffee yet, and only one cigarette, and it only half smoked. If I were any less awake, sitting upright wouldn’t be an option. There was a very minor absence seizure last night, late; Constance had come downstairs to bum a cigarette, and she had not yet gone back upstairs when it happened. No big deal. I faded out for a few seconds, but she made a huge fuss over it. Can’t wait until she’s unlucky enough to be around for one of the big ones, if that’s how she’s going to react to the petit mal episodes. She brewed a pot of tea, and kept asking if she could look at my pupils, and if maybe I smelled oranges—stuff like that—and sat with me a while, though, of course, it was entirely unnecessary. I told her it was unnecessary, but she insisted. It must have been almost four in the morning before she climbed back up into her garret and left me alone to try and sleep. And I really didn’t do much better than try. My head filled itself with all the sorts of unease that comes on nights like that, the unanswerable questions, the heavy thoughts to needle me and keep me awake. My health, the book, money, and also the story that Constance had told me about her ghost, the “ghost” she claims to have witnessed in Newport years ago. So, even though it’s probably not fair, I’m going to blame her for the nightmares that came when I finally did doze off. It was almost five a.m., and the sky was going gray. I’m still not accustomed to how early the sun rises here, compared to Atlanta, and I really hate when it catches me off my guard like that. But I was sleeping before genuine daylight came along, thank fuck, or I wouldn’t have gotten even the lousy couple of hours that I managed.

  The house is so goddamn quiet. Mist over Ramswool Pond. Birds singing. Little sounds I can’t identify. And these noisy fucking typewriter keys. Constance said not to worry about it, that, after her time in LA, she could sleep through an earthquake (and, in fact, she has, she tells me), but I still find myself trying to strike the keys with less force, endeav oring to somehow muffle that clack-clack-fuckity-clack of die-cast iron consonants and vowels against the paper and the machine’s carriage. The intractable guilt of the insomniac typist—sounds a bit like a stray line Ezra Pound might have wisely persuaded Eliot to cut from The Waste Land.

  But the reason that I’m sitting here at the kitchen table (if I need a reason), painfully uncaffeinated, squinting at Dr. Harvey’s accursed typewriter by the wan light of eight ayem, are those nightmares I’ve already blamed Constance for summoning. Just another set of bad dreams, sure, in a parade that’s never going to end until I’m dead and buried (and, oh, what a happy thought, that death may come with nightmares all its own: unending, possibly, an afterlife of perpetual nightmares). But I can’t shake the feeling that there was something new there, and I want to try and put down some of what I recall before I lose it. It’s already fading so goddamn fast, so quit stalling and get to it, woman!

  I was walking by the sea, maybe one of the nearby stretches of Rhode Island coastline that I’ve visited—so, it’s no great stretch to understand why I’m blaming the tale of the “ghost” of the Forty Steps. I assume the tide was rising. It seemed to be rising, but I have spent far too little of my life by the sea to be sure. The surf was rough, the waves coming in and crashing against a beach that was more cobbles and pebbles than sand. The air was filled with spray. My feet kept getting wet. Well, I mean my shoes, as I wasn’t barefoot. My shoes kept getting wet, and my socks, because the foamy water was rushing so far up the beach towards the line of low dunes that stretched away behind me. The sky was the most amazing thing, though, and maybe if I weren’t so asleep I could find the language to do my memories of it justice. Maybe. Then again, maybe the demeanor of that sky is forever beyond my abilities to wordsmith. I know a storm was approaching, but no usual sort of storm. Something terrible, something magnificent rolling like a cumulus demon of wind and rain and lightning over the whitecaps, sweeping towards the land, and no power in the cosmos could have waylaid or detoured that storm.

  At the library in Moosup, a while back, I read part of a book about the Great Hurricane of 1938, the fabled Long Island Express, and maybe that’s what was in back of my sleeping conjuration of this advancing line of towering thunderheads. The colors, they’re still so clear in my head, a range of blue and blacks, violets and sickly greens bleeding into even sicklier yellows, and that does not even begin to convey those clouds. This was an angry, bludgeoned sky. A bruised sky. A sky bearing the contusions of some unseen atmospheric cataclysm.

  I stood there, the polished stones slipping about beneath my wet feet as though they were imbued with a life all their own (and I wish I could recollect that line from Machen about the horror of blossoming pebbles, but I can’t, and won’t do it a disservice by trying). The wind and the spray swirled about me, plastering my clothes and hair flat, filling my nostrils and mouth with all the salty, living flavors and aromas of a wrathful sea. And as the gusts blown out before that storm howled in my ears, I realized that I was not alone, that Constance had followed me down to the shore. She was saying something about her former roommates, the Silver Lake junkies, but I couldn’t make out most of it. I told her to speak up, and, instead, she grew silent, and, for a time, I thought I was alone again.

  The sea before me was filled with dark and indescribable shapes, all moving constantly about just below the waves, not far offshore at all, and occasionally something slick and black—like the ridged back of an enormous leviathan or the bow of an upturned boat—would break the surface for a scant few seconds. Smooth, scaleless flesh scabbed white-brown with barnacles and whale lice, or there would be a glimpse of writhing serpentine coils, or of tentacles, perhaps . . . there would be something festooned with poisonous spines as tall and broken as the masts of a sunken whaler cast up from the depths after a hundred and fifty years lying lost in the silt and slime.

  And I felt myself leaning into the wind, and I felt the wind bearing my weight, the resistance of that stinging gale force pushing against my body. I could only wonder that it did not lift me like a kite or a dead leaf and toss me high, tumbling ass over tits, into the air.

  Behind me, Constance remained taciturn, and as the storm’s voice grew ever greater in magnitude, ever more insistent, seeming intent upon devouring all other sound, her silence began to wear at my nerves. For whatever reason, her not speaking had become more corrosive than the salt and the lashing blow. As the storm chewed at the shoreline, so her refusal to speak ate at my nerves. And I turned to her, then, and she was standing naked, only a foot or so behind me, her clothing ripped away by the hurricane (if it was a hurricane). Jesus, I need to get laid, because—despite the horrors of the dream—I woke horny from this vision of her, and writing it down, I’m getting horny again. Amanda always said I was easy. I never really argued with her on that point. But, anyway, there’s Constance standing buck-naked on this pebbly, shifting beach while the battered, choleric heavens as
sailed her pale and unprotected flesh. In that moment, I wanted only to throw her down on the sand and fuck her. I can admit that. Let the tempest take us both, but at least I could go with a goddamn smile on my face. In that moment, or those moments, I wanted to feel my lips against her lips, wanted the heat of her body pressed against my own, wanted to explore every seen and unseen inch of her with my hands and tongue and—yeah, it’s obvious enough to see where that was headed.

  But then she did speak, after all, and her voice—though she spoke so, so softly—had no trouble whatsoever reaching my ears over the din of the storm.

  “You went to Greece,” she said, “and what you remember most is a dead turtle?”

  And in that moment, all my lust was transmuted to mere anger by the alchemy of human emotion. She was not Amanda, and I had never told her my Grecian sea turtle lie. This was a far greater intrusion than her arrival at the farm or her showing up uninvited in my dreams. This was some manner of mnemonic rape, I think, or so it seemed to me then.

  “I never told you about the turtle,” I replied, struggling to stay calm, doing a lousy job of it.

  “You went all the way to Greece,” she continued, staring past me, staring out to sea. “And then you wrote a book about it. But you left out that thing that made the greatest impression upon you?”

  “There never was a fucking turtle,” I told her. “That was just a lie, because . . .” and I trailed off, as the whys of my old lie were really none of her business. “I just made it up. And I’ve never told you about that night, about Amanda and the turtle and The Ark of Poseidon.”

  She wiped saltwater from her flushed cheeks and smiled a sad, broken sort of smile. “Lady, you wear your past right out in the open, where anyone can see, if they only bother to look. So, don’t blame me for seeing what you’ve put on exhibit.”

  Behind me, the bludgeoned sky was suddenly lit by a flash of lightning so brilliant, so blinding, that it seemed to sear our shadows into the beach, like those photos you see taken after the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The sand will melt and turn to glass, I thought, waiting and bracing myself for that seven-thousand-degree fireball. But it didn’t come—no atomic pressure wave, no flames, no air superheated by X-rays to instantly vaporize the fragile shells of me and her. Only a thunderclap rattled the world, and then, as the rumble echoed across the land, Constance leaned forward and gently kissed me on the cheek.

  “When I was a kid, Sarah, I always wanted a Lite-Brite,” she whispered in my ear, and not one single syllable was lost to the jealous, wailing storm, “but it never happened.”

  “You are a thief,” I replied, not whispering. “You are a thief of memories that were never yours,” and she laughed at me. There was nothing cruel in the laugh, nothing spiteful. It was more the way you might laugh to lighten a tense mood, to put someone at ease, to make a moron feel less like a moron because she or he is so goddamn dense they can’t see whatever obvious truth is staring them in the face. And it only just this second occurred to me—presumably waking me—that it did not occur to the dreaming me that Constance could have learned these things simply by reading the journal I’ve been keeping on Dr. Harvey’s typewriter. So, is this the subconscious expression of some unsuspected paranoia on my part? Is my sleeping mind fretting that I’ve never made any attempt to hide these pages where no one else can see them, or over my having written all this down in the first place?

  “Two billion trees died in that storm,” she said. “Think about it a moment. Two billion trees.” Before I could ask her which storm she was talking about, if maybe she meant the blizzard that brought her into this world like a lion, I saw that she was crying. Only, she wasn’t crying tears, but, rather, diluted streaks of oil or acrylic paints bled from the corners of her eyes, paint in all the shades of that awful storm, as though it had somehow gotten into her and now was leaking out again.

  She wiped at her face, smearing the paint across her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose. Then Constance was not speaking, but singing to me, and while the music was a mystery, I knew the words at once—“ ‘What matters it how far we go?’ his scaly friend replied. ‘There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.’ ”

  And because this is a dream, and because dreams appear even less fond of resolution than waking life, I woke. I woke horny and covered in sweat and gasping, nauseous and my chest aching, any number of panicked thoughts rushing through my mind—a heart attack? Another seizure? Maybe the seizure to come along and end all my fits once and for all. And too, I had not yet passed so completely beyond the borders of the dream that I did not still fear that hurricane bearing down upon me, bearing down to scrub away the shingle and me and Constance and two billion fucking trees. But, no need to worry, right? Because there is another shore, you know, upon the other side.

  I’ve got to end this and get up off my fat ass and make some coffee. It’s almost nine, and I think I hear Constance thumping around upstairs. The typewriter probably woke her, regardless of what she’s been saying. Hopefully, we’ll get our postponed walk in today, out to “the red tree,” if the weather is not too hot and we’re not both too delirious from sleep deprivation.

  July 6, 2008 (10:27 p.m.)

  I’m admittedly at a loss how to write all this down—the events of the past twelve or thirteen hours—but I’m also determined that I will write it down. Some part of me is genuinely frightened, reluctant to put the experience into words, and, still, I find myself driven to compose some account of it. Are we back to writing as an act of exorcism? Wait, don’t answer that question. In fact, no more questions requiring answers, no more questions, just what I am left to believe occurred this afternoon when we tried to visit the tree. We talked about what happened over dinner, which Constance fixed because all I could do was sit here and smoke and stare out the kitchen window at twilight dimming the sky. We talked, but it was an indirect, guarded conversation punctuated with lengthy, uncomfortable silences. I asked her if she’d ever read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, specifically the scene where Eleanor and Theodora get lost just outside the house and stumble upon a ghostly picnic. She hasn’t, and asked if I’ve read Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths.” I have. Of course, I have. We ended up talking about The Blair Witch Project, though that seemed to come uncomfortably near the bald facts of the matter, and so I brought up Joseph Payne Brennan’s short story “Cana van’s Back Yard,” precisely because I had a feeling Constance hadn’t read it. Inevitably, by fits and starts, we came to Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, both the novel and Peter Weir’s film, to Miss McCraw and Mrs. Appleyard and her charges, Irma, Miranda, Edith, and Marion.

  Constance said, “The girl who wasn’t allowed to go on the picnic, because she hadn’t memorized the assigned poem. The one who had a crush on Miranda? Wasn’t her name Sara?”

  I didn’t answer the question, and, thankfully, she didn’t ask it again.

  Yes, I know it’s sort of twisted that we had to resort to fictional metaphors and parallels because we were both too goddamned scared to talk about the thing straight on. But I suppose that’s what I’m trying to do now, talk about the thing straight on. Just write it down. Make it only words. Sticks and stones can break my bones, but . . . I’m starting to think maybe our dear departed Dr. Harvey figured out that words can do more harm than we generally give them credit. You’re stalling, Sarah.

  Yes, I am.

  We didn’t get out of the house until almost noon, and I’m not writing all that. Neither of us had slept very much, and we kept finding little chores that needed doing, little distractions. Hindsight can create all manner of illusions, and here, hindsight might suggest some prescience. You know, the man who misses his flight because he needs new shoelaces or Starbucks takes too long with his frap puccino or what the hell ever, and then he finds out the plane crashed, so surely some extrasensory force or guardian spirit was at work? That sort of thing. But the truth is we were bleary and distracted by exhaustion, and
neither of us was really up to it. She didn’t get much more sleep than I did.

  And she was still worried about me, because of last night’s seizure, and that kept coming up, and whether I was actually well enough for the walk. But the day was much, much cooler than yesterday, and the humidity quite decent, and I assured her that I would be fine. She pointed out that I couldn’t possibly know that, and I reluctantly conceded and told her that I’d learned I couldn’t let this condition turn me into a shut-in. I have no means of predicting these episodes, but I have to live my life, regardless. What I didn’t say was, Constance, please mind your own goddamn business, although, by then, that’s what I was thinking. She’d asked me twice about my medication, had I taken it, should we carry it with us, what sort of side effects do I experience from it, do I tire easily, shit like that.

  “We’re not even going a hundred yards from the back door,” I told her. And there’s the single most damning fact of this thing, right there, the undeniable that I wish I could find some way to deny. We were not going even a hundred yards from the back door.

  “Sarah, it’s just that I need to know what to do, if something happens,” she said, packing a canvas tote bag with bottled water and a couple of apples and the sandwiches she’d made. “And I don’t. I don’t know what’s myth, and what’s for real.”