The Red Tree

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Not this one,” I replied, gazing up into those restless boughs. “This one seems to have ridden out the tempest just fine.”

  “Yes,” she said and smiled. “But don’t think that was all luck, Sarah. It took a lot of blood and sweat to keep her safe when that storm came tearing through. It has always taken a lot of blood and sweat, keeping her safe. Like all doors, she tends to swing open, and so care must be taken to mind the hinges and the latch.”

  And I think I asked, “We are talking about the oak?”

  And I think that Amanda replied, “If that’s how you see her, yes, we’re talking about the oak.”

  I forced myself to make notes in pencil, not long after I awoke, or I’d have lost almost all of this. But even so, I’m having trouble making sense of much of what I scribbled down, half asleep. Partly, that’s because most of the handwriting is illegible, and, partly, because a good deal of what I can read still refuses to yield anything like meaning. I know that I’m filling in some of the gaps. Making some of this up. Approximating. That therapist who wanted me to keep the dream journal, I told her I could not possibly remember my dreams verbatim, and being a writer, it was inevitable that I might invent things as I wrote them out. But she said not to worry. So, right now, I’m trying hard not to worry.

  I stood with Amanda, at the altar beneath the red tree, and the dancers howled and skipped around us. Sparkling embers rose into the sky to meet a grotesquely swollen full moon. The moon was still low on the horizon, and only half visible above the tree. I would call the scene hellish, only, at the time, I don’t believe it struck me that way at all. Only my waking mind would render it hellish in retrospect, measured against my waking values and fears and preconceptions. Dreaming, I wanted to accept Amanda’s invitation and “join the dance,” that perverse “ring around the rosie” and whatever it might entail. I wanted to be initiated into the mysteries of the tree, or into the mysteries that the tree merely represented.

  “What have you brought for her?” Amanda asked, and I felt entirely inadequate, standing there beneath the single glaring white eye of the moon. At first, I was certain that I’d brought nothing at all, no offering to lay upon the slab that I now understood must have been placed at the foot of this tree long before John Potter, long before the Narragansetts. Watching those giant branches moving against the backdrop of the moon and stars and the indigo nothingness of space, I didn’t need Amanda or Harvey or anyone else to explain to me that this ground was consecrated long ages before the Europeans came in their sailing ships, before tribes of nomads wandered across an icy spit of land connecting two continents. Before any man stood here, and before any tree was rooted in this soil, the land was touched and claimed and set aside.

  In the dream, I was wearing the ratty wool coat that Amanda finally gave to Goodwill so she wouldn’t have to see it anymore, so that I’d have to buy a new one. I reached into the coat and retrieved from an inner pocket several pages of Charles Harvey’s manuscript, rolled into a tight bundle and tied off with a piece of green fishing line. I held the pages out so that Amanda could see them.

  “Well,” she said, still smiling, “that’s a start.”

  “I would have brought more, but he never finished writing it.”

  “He couldn’t finish,” she said. “You cannot ever conclude what has no end. It’s like walking the circumference of a circle. You can only get tired and find some arbitrary place to stop.”

  “Do you know how tired I am?” I asked her, and she said that she did, and then she took the rolled-up pages of typescript from my hands. I was glad to be rid of them. I remember, distinctly, being extremely glad that they were no longer my responsibility. And that was the sense I had, that they’d been a responsibility I’d shouldered for a very long time.

  “Stop looking at the sky,” Amanda said. “You’ll go blind, if you don’t look away.”

  And so, instead, I looked down at the altar stone, seeing clearly for the first time all the sacrifices painstakingly laid out upon or near the stone, or set in amongst the roots of the tree, or tucked into knotholes (I have always called these “Boo holes,” after Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird ). There were bloodier things than murdered rabbits, but I do not think it will serve this narrative to describe them in detail. Even that monster Joseph Fearing Olney would have felt himself inadequate before that banquet. And I knew it was a banquet, that there would soon be a feast, of one sort or another.

  “Hercules did not slay the child of Typhon and Echidna,” Amanda said, speaking very softly. She bent down and lifted a white votive candle from the altar stone. “In severing that immortal head, he only set the Hydra free, so that she could take her rightful place in the Heavens.”

  “Echidna,” I said, and the word brought to mind nothing but those spiny little egg-laying mammals from New Guinea. Amanda nodded, and with the candle, she set the pages I’d given her on fire. Some of the ashes settled across the altar, while others rose upwards, like the embers of the bonfire, becoming lost in the swaying branches of the red tree.

  And Amanda said to me, “And again she bore a third, the evil-minded Hydra of Lerna, whom the goddess, white-armed Hera, nourished, being angry beyond measure. . . .” Then she paused, the flame having burned down very near to her fingertips, and she dropped the smoldering remains of my offering onto the stone with everything else. “Only, Mother Hydra was not evil-minded, though I well imagine Hera was angry,” Amanda said, but did not bother to elaborate.

  And around me, the dream moved like the tumbling colored beads or shards trapped inside a kaleidoscope’s tube, and I tumbled with them. The night passed away, and Amanda was replaced by Constance, and the scene at the tree by the attic of Blanchard’s farmhouse. The din of the dancing creatures was replaced by the commotion from the air conditioner, which was making much more noise than usual. Constance was sitting on her inflatable mattress, and I was sitting nearby in a chair. She said that she was pretty sure the AC was on its last leg, that it was about to blow the fan or an evaporator coil or something of the sort.

  “I sounded like that the time I caught pneumonia,” I said, and she laughed.

  “I thought you’d be at the tree,” she said, and jabbed a thumb in the direction of the oak. Bright moonlight shone in through the attic windows, and the same sort of votive candles that had burned at the altar were scattered about Constance’s garret. “I thought they’d have you out there for the festivities. Way I had it figured, Ms. Crowe, you’d be the guest of honor, or the main course.”

  “Is it that sort of feast?” I asked, and she shrugged.

  “Wasn’t that how it went, when those boys caught up with Sebastian Venable beneath the blazing bone sky? Wasn’t he finally devoured for his sins by vengeful Mediterranean urchins, while poor Catherine watched on?”

  “That’s not how it ever seemed to me,” I said. “To me, it always seemed that Sebastian merely consummated his desires. He’d looked upon the face of god, when he and Violet took their cruise to the Galapagos Islands—”

  “The part of the play with the predatory birds and the baby sea turtles,” Constance said, and I nodded.

  “Sebastian was only seeking after release, having seen too much, and that day the boys at Cabeza de Lobo were only providing that release.”

  “It means ‘head of the wolf,’ ” she said. “Cabeza de Lobo,” and I told her that I already knew that.

  “Well, you’re a smart cookie. Not everyone would,” she replied, and then added, “But yes, I think it’s exactly that sort of a feast.”

  “They never proved that Olney was a cannibal,” I said. “Not like old man Potter. They had no real evidence that he ate from any of the women he killed. And he denied it.”

  This conversation, there was so much of it. It went on and on while the air conditioner wheezed and choked and sputtered. And at some point I realized that, while I was still wearing my old wool coat, Constance was completely naked. I hoped she would invite me into her bed again
. She sat there like some heathen idol, some Venus made not of marble but living, breathing tissue. Her legs were open, revealing the wet portal of her sex, and she didn’t seem to mind that I stared, but, like Amanda, she warned that I could go blind, if I looked too long or too closely.

  “I thought that only worked with masturbation and the sun,” I protested.

  “Moonlight is merely reflected sunshine,” she said, “and every star is another sun.” Then, as I watched, her skin changed, or I noticed for the first time that it had been meticulously painted with a pattern of overlapping oak leaves. And, before my eyes, the painted leaves turned from summer greens to rich shades of red and brown. And they began to fall, slipping off her body and settling onto the mattress all around her. I remembered the kanji tattooed above her buttocks:

  and for a while, I could only watch the spectacle of the leaves drifting down from Constance’s shoulders and breasts and face. It was too beautiful to turn away from, and like Harvey’s Quercus rubra, somehow too sublime, too terrible. I realized that the air in the attic had lost all its characteristic odors—turpentine, oils and acrylics, linseed oil, gesso, stale cigarette smoke. Now there were only the faintly spicy smells of autumn.

  “Did you do that all by yourself?” I asked, meaning the elaborate painting on her skin.

  “Oh, hardly,” she laughed. “Too many spots I could never reach on my own. I had help. But, I don’t think you’re paying very close attention.”

  “That’s what everyone keeps telling me,” I said.

  “Maybe, Sarah, it happens that you can’t see the forest for the trees.” And we both laughed then, because it was such a corny thing for her to have said, even in the interminable, rambling dream of mine.

  “All two billion?” I asked.

  “At least,” she said. The leaves were still falling from her painted body, and I marveled that she could shed so many and not be diminished. I thought how each one must be like a dead skin cell, sloughed off to make room for its successor.

  And then Constance took a piece of powder blue chalk from a fold in the sheets and held it up for me to see.

  “You may need this,” she said.

  “Colored chalk?” I asked.

  “No, Sarah. Not colored chalk. This,” and now she leaned forward, her body rustling like a blustery day in October, and she used the stick of chalk to draw something on the floor between us.

  “I’m never going to be able to remember all that,” I said, and, indeed, whatever she wrote or drew, I’d forgotten it completely by the time the dream ended and I awoke.

  Constance scowled, the way she does. “I can hardly do everything for you,” she said and then pointed at what she’d written on the attic floor. “I can hardly make it any more perfectly straightforward than that.”

  “My memory isn’t what it used to be, that’s all.”

  Constance shrugged, dislodging a few more leaves. She sat up straight again, and she closed her legs, so I could no longer see her vagina.

  “Is it a cipher?” I asked.

  “It’s a door, Sarah. And like all doors, it tends to swing open, and so care must be taken to mind the hinges and the latch. It must be kept locked, and someone has to keep the keys. But I imagine you know that already. Amanda would have told you that.”

  “Her name isn’t Amanda.”

  “No, but that’s what you call her, when you write about her. You call her Amanda. Or Helen.”

  I was no longer in the attic, then, but sitting at the kitchen table, my fingertips resting on the typewriter’s brass keys. I was looking out into the August night towards the red tree, and there was that bloated moon. And there, below the moon, was the flickering glow of the bonfire. I began typing, trying to recollect what Constance had drawn with her blue chalk.

  This is my dream. What I remember of it, and for what it might be worth. I have to leave this room now, and find out whether or not I am alone in the house.

  CHAPTER NINE

  August 4, 2008 (4:28 p.m.)

  She’s gone.

  Or maybe all that I can say with certainty is that Constance Hopkins is no longer here.

  Or, perhaps, simply that I am unable to find her.

  Which is not to say that, upon entering the attic, I found nothing.

  I’m sitting at the dressing table, staring at one of the sheets of onionskin paper held fast in the typewriter’s carriage, and my fingers move hesitantly across the keys. My head is filled to bursting with images, and with the implications and consequences of what I have seen, what I still see, sleeping and awake. But I seem never to have learned the language that I require to describe what is happening to me. If that language even exists.

  I can’t say what’s made me sit down at the typewriter again, unless it’s merely force of habit, or a sense that I am helpless to do anything else, or a delusion that this is better than talking to myself. I almost called someone. Who, though? That’s the catch. Well, the first catch. Who would I have possibly fucking called? Who would have begun to understand the things that need to be said? My agent? My editor? Squire Blanchard? An ex? One of those various people I haven’t heard from since I left Atlanta? A “writer friend” in New York or Boston or Providence or LA or San Francisco? Some family member I’ve not seen in twenty years? I sat on the sofa and held the cell phone for a time, and I opened it twice, but every number I might have “dialed” seemed equally irrelevant.

  I found my car keys, and I considered the undeniable wisdom of driving away, driving anywhere that isn’t here, and never looking back. I suspect that I could probably torch the house without getting much more than a stern “thank you” letter from Blanchard. Isn’t that how these haunted-house stories usually end, with a purification by fire? Isn’t that the handy old cliché?

  I didn’t telephone anyone. I didn’t drive away. I’m not going to burn the house down and sow the charred ground with salt. And I’m not going after the tree with a chain saw or a hatchet or a can of gasoline. The worst I am capable of is following Virginia Woolf’s example and filling my pockets with stones before walking into the local equivalent of the River Ouse.

  I have gone to the attic, and Constance isn’t there, but I still do not know if I am alone in the house.

  I seem to have been afflicted with some unprecedented calm, something that settled over me while I was upstairs and which shows no signs of abating. Again, I know we’re running counter to the received wisdom, in which our heroine, having glimpsed some unthinkable atrocity, parts ways with her sanity (at least for a time) and runs screaming into the night. Perhaps it’s only that those sorts of books and movies are, too often, made by people who have never, themselves, stood at this threshold. Even Catherine ran screaming, that sunstroke day at Cabeza de Lobo. Couldn’t I at least be as weak as poor Catherine?

  No.

  Fine. Then I’ll write it down.

  I went to the attic, immediately after finishing the entry this morning. Twice, I called out for Constance, and twice, no one answered me. I knocked, to no avail, and so I knocked again, and harder. There was a moment of serious déjà vu, a moment when it might still have been Saturday morning, after I discovered the fishing line leading away from the back porch, but before I followed it to the red tree. Then I tried the knob, and found that it turned easily in my hand, and the spell was broken. The door was not locked against me, and I couldn’t help but recall what both Amanda and Constance had told me in the dream—Like all doors, it tends to swing open, and so care must be taken to mind the hinges and the latch.

  A door, a tree, a hole for a white rabbit and a middle-aged novelist. Six of one, half dozen of the other.

  In a another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.

  The rabbit hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down what seemed to be a very deep we
ll.

  We speak in whimsy, or to children, and it all appears so uncomplicated, no matter how outlandish or monstrous a given scene may be. Me, I can’t even seem to manage the tongue of madness without constant recourse to the perspective of reason, though I know it’s long since ceased to be pertinent to my situation and circumstances.

  I turned the knob, and the attic door swung open wide. And the cool air that I am so used to greeting me when Constance opens her door wasn’t there to greet me. And instead of the smell of painting, there was a dank, shut-away odor, and, beneath that, the heady stink of decaying vegetation. I covered my mouth with my hand, with my right hand, and stepped into the attic. I left the door standing open.

  The rabbit hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.

  The attic was not dark, but, as usual for so early in the day, brightly lit by the sun shining in through the small, high windows. Constance told me more than once that the morning light was one reason she was happy with her garret. So, I can’t dismiss what I saw there as a trick of shadow, an illusion created by a chiaroscuro conspiracy of half-light and poor eyesight. I cannot dismiss it at all, unless I am able (I am perfectly willing) to decide that it was an hallucination. I will not say “only” an hallucination, because I am not so naïve as to believe that what was seen would be any less important or consequential if it were the product of a broken mind and not an accurate perception of an objective, external reality. But yes, the attic was very well lit. Indeed, after the gloom of the stairwell, I found Constance’s room painfully bright, and I squinted and had to wait a second or two for my eyes to adjust.

  There was no one in the attic, no one but me, and the floor, and every other horizontal surface, was hidden beneath a thick blanket of green oak leaves. They were identical to the three I found in my room in July, and identical to those that grow on the tree near Ramswool Pond. They were not the least bit brittle or wilted. They appeared to have come freshly from the tree, or from some other tree of the same species. I didn’t scream. I didn’t even gasp. I think that I was expecting something, even if I could not have said what form that something might assume. I bent down and picked up one of the leaves, as though I needed to touch it, to hold it, to inspect the fine network of veins embedded within the pith, in order to verify that the leaves were real. But I must have known they were. I must have known that on some intuitive level as soon as I saw them, even if it took a bit for my conscious, doubting mind to catch up. The sunlight shone through the leaf, making it appear to glow.