The Red Tree

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Constance’s paint-stained rag was lying on the topmost step, and I picked it up. I shouted for her again, and, again, there was no answer. It occurred to me that a draft might cause the door to swing shut, and I took the time to wad the rag and wedge it firmly into the space between the bottom edge of the door and the floorboards. Also, I went back for my cell phone, which I’d left on top of the television after Dorry called that morning. I’m not very fond of cell phones, and I’ve often threatened to get rid of mine. But suddenly I saw it as a lifeline—a second source of light, a clock, and a means of reaching the outside world (assuming I could get reception down there). I slipped it into my front jeans pocket and went back to the cellar door; that’s when I heard Constance yelling again, and, this time, it was clearly my name.

  And I said something then like, “If it turns out you’re just fucking with me, if it turns out this is a joke, you’re a dead woman, Constance Hopkins.” I said it loudly enough that she should have heard me, but there was no response. The old stairs complained softly beneath my feet, and I went down them quickly. In only a few more seconds, I was looking up, at the dingy yellow-white rectangle leading back into the hallway and the house and the sweltering summer world above. That’s when I almost lost my nerve, and thought maybe it would be best if I called Blanchard and let him deal with this, whatever this was. But what the hell would I tell him? That his attic lodger was lost in the basement, and I was too chickenshit to go looking for her? An absurdity compounded with an absurdity. And if you put it like that, pride wins out. The fear of lasting embarrassment trumps the fear of things that go bump in the cellar, so I turned away from the stairs, playing the flashlight slowly over all those sagging shelves and cardboard boxes, the broken furniture, the rotting bundles of newspapers dating back to god knows when.

  There was no sign of Constance anywhere, and my mind went to the fieldstone-and-mortar archway waiting somewhere up ahead, and the slate threshold and the odd marks or glyphs carved deeply into it. I thought about how far away her voice had seemed to be. Now, the basement around me was, as they say, silent as a tomb.

  “Constance!” I screamed into the darkness. The darkness made no reply whatsoever. “I’m coming!” I screamed. “Just stay where you are and wait for me to find you!”

  Moving quickly as I dared along one of the crooked aisles between the shelves, it didn’t take me too long to reach the arch marking the northern edge of the house. And there was the upside-down horseshoe, just like I remembered, all its luck spilled out long ago. There was the threshold, scarred with occult gibberish, and I shone the flashlight into the gloom packed in ahead of me. I spotted the shelf weighted down with its load of elderly Mason jars and spoiled bread-and-butter pickles. Then I saw the cast-off chifforobe where I’d found Harvey’s manuscript more than a month earlier (only it feels like it’s been three times that long, at least). I took a deep breath, a very deep breath, and stepped across the threshold, passing beneath the inverted horseshoe, and into air so cold and damp and heavy I might well have slipped beneath the surface of some unclean winter-bound pond.

  The muddy ground sucked at the soles of my tennis shoes, but I pushed on, leaving the drawerless chifforobe and the jars of pickles behind me, calling out for Constance and still getting no answer. This far in, the junk and litter abruptly ended, and now there was only a broad, more or less flat expanse of muck and rock, broken by an occasional shallow puddle. The ground here had begun to slope gradually downwards, an incline of only a few degrees, at the most, just enough that I was aware of it. There was no sign of a wall anywhere, in front of me or to either side, and the thought crossed my mind that, maybe, when John Potter excavated for the original foundation, more than three hundred years before I’d ever had the misfortune to set eyes on the house off Barbs Hill Road, maybe he’d stumbled across some sort of cavern. And having thought that, there was really no way not to let my mind wander back to Joseph Olney’s mad visions or the tales of the Parker Woodland cairns. I know enough geology to know that solutional caves can form in granite and gneiss bedrock, as well as in limestone, so it certainly wasn’t impossible. But if that were the case, there was no knowing how far or in what directions this underground space might lead. Besides, if the house was built atop a cave system, wouldn’t Blanchard have at least fucking mentioned it? Wouldn’t he surely have cautioned us not to go prowling around beneath the house?

  I stopped and looked back over my shoulder, back the way I’d come, aiming the flashlight towards the brick archway and the chifforobe. But the beam revealed nothing behind me now except the otherwise featureless plain of mud and stones and pools of stagnant water. I’ll admit, it isn’t much of a flashlight, but I knew I couldn’t possibly have gone more than twenty or thirty yards past the slate threshold. Thirty yards at the most. And that was the last straw, I suppose, not being able to see the archway, and the panic I’d managed to keep at bay since descending the stairs started closing in on me.

  I dug the cell phone out of my jeans and flipped it open. It chirped at me, just the silly little tone it makes when opened or closed, but, in the darkness, the sound was loud and unexpecteded, and it startled me. I almost dropped the flashlight. The phone’s colorful display screen glowed cheerfully in my hand, informing me that it was 2:23 p.m., and I cursed myself for not having noted the time before entering the cellar. The phone was showing two bars, so I figured I could at least get a call out, if it came to that. I saw the battery was low, so I closed the phone and put it back into my pocket, then pointed the flashlight north again. The mud and darkness seemed to go on that way forever, sloping very gradually, almost imperceptibly, in the direction of the red tree and Ramswool Pond.

  For the first time, I shone the flashlight up, sweeping the beam along the ceiling of the chamber, the space, the cavern—whatever I should call it. The word abscess comes to mind, with all its various connotations. At any rate, the ceiling was maybe fifteen feet above me, and, near as I could tell, appeared to be composed mostly of stone, though I noted that, in places, the roots of trees and smaller plants had broken through. Which got me to thinking—if I had found a cavern exposed when the foundation was dug back in the 1700s, such a broad hollow at such a shallow depth, what the fuck was keeping it from simply collapsing in upon itself and creating a huge sinkhole behind the farmhouse? I shone the light to my left and right, but still saw no evidence of a wall to either my west or east, respectively. It seemed impossible to me, and still seems so now, that the ceiling could have supported its own weight (not even taking into account the trees and such). I tried not to dwell on it. At least, I thought, I could easily follow my muddy footprints back to the archway and the cellar proper, and took all the solace in that thought that I could scrounge.

  Belatedly, I began to count off my steps, and, probably, it was more to have something to occupy my mind than anything else. I kept walking north, towards the place where the pond and the red tree waited, shining the flashlight ahead of me, occasionally calling out to Constance. I’d not heard her since entering the cellar. My shouts echoed down there, the way voices echo in empty buildings, or large enclosed spaces. The way voices echo inside abandoned warehouses, or in cathedrals, for example.

  When I’d counted thirty or so steps—counting silently to myself to avoid that unnerving echo—I stopped again, and, again, I shouted for Constance. The gradient was becoming steeper, and another odor had been added to the dank stink of the place, the smell not of rotting plants and not of mildew, but of rotting flesh. I suppose it might well have been nothing more than my imagination grinding away in the darkness. As it was, I was trying hard not to consider the possibility that the same bizarre violation of physics that had plagued our “lost picnic” was now at work, belowground, the same warping of distance and time that Olivia Burgess claimed to have experienced when she visited the tree in October 1957. That possibility was plenty enough morbid without adding to it the faint reek of death. And the air was growing noticeably colder. My
breath had begun to fog. Of course, it was so awfully humid down there—the dew point would have been so high—it would not have had to have been that cold in order to see my breath. Unless I’m misremembering the science about relative humidity and dew point and the condensation of moisture, which is always a distinct possibility.

  Regardless, for whatever reason, I found this is where I was unwilling to go any farther. Thirty or so paces past where I’d begun counting my footsteps. I’m not even sure it was any sort of conscious decision; I simply could not bring myself to go any deeper into that place. I stopped and shouted for Constance, and my voice sounded enormous. But, when I once again shone the flashlight to my left and right, I found rough granite walls only ten or fifteen feet away on either side of me, and when I pointed the beam at the ceiling, it was near enough that I could have reached out and touched it, despite my strong impression that the northward slope here was, if anything, a few degrees more acute than when I’d first noticed it. I stared at the walls a moment, and then at that ceiling. The stone did not look like the stone of a natural cavern, but appeared to have been hewn with picks and chisels. Quite some time ago, by the look of it, as the marks left on the granite by iron tools were faint, faded by time and erosion. But they were unmistakable. Someone made that passageway.

  That’s when I heard something behind me, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I almost screamed. I turned quickly around, expecting anything at all, but there was only Constance, standing a scant few yards away. She was naked, though almost every inch of her bare skin was smeared with the ocher mud, a yellowish shade of ocher leached, I guess, from the minerals in the gneiss or granite. Her long hair was matted with mud, tangled with it, and, by the flashlight—if only for an instant—her eyes seemed to glimmer iridescently, the sort of predatory eye shine I would have seen, say, from that cougar at the Birmingham Zoo, or from a coyote or feral dog prowling about our garbage cans. She said something then, though I honestly have no idea what. It was barely more than a whisper.

  I said something, as well, but it wasn’t a reply. I think it was only her name. I must have sounded relieved, and perhaps surprised, as well. I must have sounded breathless. I remember realizing that I was sweating, despite the chilly air.

  “I got lost,” she said, speaking louder now, but only slightly louder. I am sure that is what she said, but the next part was, I am equally sure, not in English. At the time, it sounded to me like German or Dutch, or even a mix of the two. She said it twice, seeming to take special care to enunciate unfamiliar syllables. Later, trying to recall the details before I sat down to write this, I became convinced it was German that she’d spoken to me, and that what she’d said was something close to “Irgendwo in dieser bodenlosen Nacht gibt es ein Licht.” Or, if it was Dutch, instead—“Ergens in deze bodemloze nacht is er een licht.” Both would translate the same—“Somewhere in this bottomless [or unending] night there is a light.”

  Constance has since told me that she neither speaks nor understands German (or Dutch). Moreover, she has no memory of my having found her down there, much less anything she may have said. She tells me she remembers going down the stairs, and that she remembers finding the fieldstone archway and the chifforobe, before she became disoriented.

  Anyway, I think I said something about the cold, then, that she must be freezing, that we had to get her back upstairs, something of the sort. I won’t even pretend to know precisely. I expect I said the sort of thing one says after finding a lost friend underground. And Constance shook her head and frowned, like there was something she needed me to understand, and I wasn’t listening. Or I was too thick to grasp her meaning. And that’s when she raised both her arms, which had been hanging limply at her sides. And I saw the leaves she was clutching. They were green, and not the least bit wilted. She might have picked them from the boughs of the red oak only moments before.

  “Sarah, do you see?” she asked, and there was more than a hint of urgency in her voice. “Do you see it now?”

  “Where did you find those?”

  “You’re not listening to me,” she sighed.

  “We have to go,” I said, unable to take my eyes off those fresh green leaves. “Where are you’re clothes? We have to get you out of hear.”

  “My clothes?” she replied, as if she hadn’t quite understood the question.

  “Yes. You’re clothes. Your naked, Constance. Where are you’re clothes?”

  And I am absolutely certain off what she next to me. Letting the oak leaves slip from her fingers and settle about her feet, sunk in too the sticky mud too her ankles, Constance Hopkins said, “The men took them, Sarah. The men with the hammers, they took them away.”

  I open my mouth to ask, I think, what she meant, what the fuck she was talking about, and that when I haerd another sound behind me. From the chance inn her express sionn I coulll

  July 25, 2008 (5:17 p.m.)

  Constance found me after the seizure that interrupted the last entry. The thing couldn’t have lasted more than two or three minutes, but there’s no way to know for sure. It’s all pretty much guesswork, figuring out what happened. I struck my chin hard against something, and bit my lip. There’s actually a spot of blood on the page that was in the carriage at the time. I also hit my forehead, possibly on the edge of the table, but I might have hit it against the floor. That’s where Constance found me, on the kitchen floor. Then I spent most of yesterday lying in bed, headachy and feeling hungover, thinking through a fine yellow haze (to employ an old simile I invented while trying to explain the postseizure disorientation and grogginess to Amanda). Anyway, if this wasn’t the worst of the fits I’ve experienced so far, it was surely a close second or third. I should have seen it coming—the stress and lack of sleep, all the crazy shit from the cellar, then sitting here for hours on Wednesday, trying to make some coherent record out of my disjointed memories.

  Constance keeps trying to blame herself.

  She looks at the bruise on my forehead, or the one on my chin, or the cut on my lip, and she says, “I shouldn’t have left you alone.” Or “If I hadn’t gone into the basement, and then you hadn’t had to come after me.” Or “I should have made you rest.” That sort of thing. Whether she’s right or wrong, it’s a pointless, stupid game, and, right now, I haven’t the stomach for this sort of futility and hindsight.

  Looking back over the paragraphs I typed immediately before the seizure, I can see evidence of the mild aphasia that sometimes prefaces the attacks, in the particular pattern of misspellings and typos and so forth. I’ve seen that before, so it’s nothing new.

  My head still hurts like hell, and now Constance is talking to me, telling me to “give it a rest,” and I think I will. More later.

  July 26, 2008 (4:48 p.m.)

  “You should try to get some sleep,” Constance said, gently pressing her left index finger to the ugly plum-colored mark centered between my eyebrows.

  “But I’m not sleepy,” I replied. “I feel like I slept all day yesterday. I’m not sleepy. I’m bored.”

  She sighed loudly and moved her finger to the bruise on my chin, which looks quite a bit worse than the one on my forehead.

  “Does it hurt?” she asked.

  “Yeah, but not so much.”

  “It looks like you were in a fight.”

  “Well, does it look like I won, or does it look like I lost?” and so she told me she couldn’t say for sure, that she’d need to see the other woman. She brushed a strand of hair from my eyes, and I marveled that her hands were nearly clean, most of the oil paint scrubbed away.

  That was late yesterday afternoon, after she had shooed me away from Dr. Harvey’s typewriter and talked me into lying down again. Constance sat on the bed next to me, and whenever I’d open my eyes, the room was filled with the most brilliant buttery light. The bedroom has two windows, one facing south and one facing west, so it gets the afternoon sun (Constance says that’ll help keep it warm in the winter). I’d open my eyes, and she’d be
sitting there, worrying over me, scowling like she does, and there would be the dressing table and the chest of drawers and the ivory walls and all that butter-yellow light washing over everything. There’s a framed Currier and Ives print on the bedroom wall, “The Return from the Woods.” Like the furniture, it came with the place. In that light, I could imagine no other picture hanging on the bedroom wall.

  In that light, her eyes were only a dark shade of brown.

  She was reading to me. It had been her idea. I don’t think I’ve had anyone read to me like that since I was a girl. But, like the light, and like the simpler brown it made of her eyes, it was comforting, and I listened while she read from an old Ray Bradbury paperback I’d brought with me from Atlanta, A Medicine for Melancholy. She has a good, strong reading voice. She was halfway through “The Day It Rained Forever,” and I broke in and told her so.

  “It’s hard to find people with even halfway good reading voices,” I told her, “and most times, when you do, they come off like they’ve been practicing for some sort of slam-poetry thing.”

  “Thank you,” she said, then went right back to reading to me about Mr. Terle and Mr. Fremley, Mr. Smith and Miss Hillgood in that hotel in the desert. The light coming in the west-facing window seemed perfectly suited to the story, and, mostly, I lay still and listened, concentrating on her voice more than the words, watching dust motes caught in that sunlight, rising and falling at the whim of whatever forces govern the movement of dust motes.