Caitlin R. Kiernan - The Red Tree

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I have spread my dreams beneath your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Outside, the sky continues to brighten. The sky is the color of blueberry yogurt. Harvey’s unfinished manuscript is still in its box, here beside the typewriter. I’ve read the first two chapters. And that probably wasn’t so terribly bright of me, not after I figured out what his book is about, but curiosity and cats and all that. My dreams be damned, how would I not read it?

Look at this. Two and a half pages already, and I’ve managed not to get to the point. I have managed to skirt the point, to dance around the periphery of the point. Stop writing about dreams, Sarah, and writing about writing about dreams, and just write the dream.

The sky is going milky.

I cannot recall the beginning of it, but I was back in the basement with my flashlight. I know that I wasn’t looking for Harvey’s manuscript, because I clearly recall setting it down on one of the sagging shelves of pickles or machine parts or whatever, so I’d have a hand free. I was on the other side of the archway, past that odd threshold and its preposterous array of glyphs. I was somewhere past the threshold, trying to locate the north wall of the basement, pacing off my steps, one after the other, doing my best not to lose track and have to start over again. I realized that I must have walked very far beyond the house, and the footing beneath me grew increasingly wet. There were stagnant pools of black water standing here and there, pools whose depth it was impossible to judge, and I did my best not to step too near any of them. They seemed. unwholesome. Yes, that’s the word. Of course, truthfully, the whole damned place seemed unwholesome, as if I had somehow stumbled into an actual gangrenous abscess in the ground, a geological infection that had hollowed out this cavity below and within Blanchard’s land.

Here, where the pools of water began, there were far fewer shelves, and all of them contained nothing but antique books, volumes swollen from the moisture, their covers warped and spines splitting open like overripe berries. I did not stop to examine them, to learn any of their titles. I didn’t want to know, any more than I wanted to approach those motionless obsidian puddles. And this is when I realized that I was not alone. I heard footsteps first, and looking over my shoulder, I saw Amanda. Only, in death (and she was dead, of that I am certain) she had taken on aspects of various of her photomontages, the sick fantasies of her pervert clients. She had the ridged and lyre-shaped horns of a male impala sprouting from her skull, and her eyes were as black as the pools of stagnant water. When she came closer, I could see that her cheeks and the backs of her hands were flushed with tiny scales that appeared to shimmer with some internal light all their own.

“Changed your mind, did you?” she asked, and when I nodded yes, she laughed — and it was so much her laugh, in no way distorted by the dream. It was simply Amanda laughing, and I was grateful to hear it again. And then she asked, “So, was it inquisitiveness, or was it peer pressure? Or maybe you just got to thinking I wouldn’t want to fuck a woman who was afraid of the dark.”

“I am not afraid of the dark,” I replied, a little too emphatically. “It isn’t safe down here. They seal these places for a reason.”

“So, you’ve come to save me?” and she laughed again, but the sound was neither as pure nor as welcome as before. “Are you my Lancelot? Are you the kindly huntsman come to rescue me from all the big bad wolves?”

And I told her no, it wasn’t anything like that, that I was only trying to find the north wall of the basement, because I knew it had to be there somewhere. I explained that if there were no north wall, then there’d be nothing to hold back Ramswool Pond. And since the basement clearly wasn’t flooded, it stood to reason the wall was there somewhere.

She shrugged and pointed at one of the puddles, not far from her muddy, bare feet. “You never can tell,” she said, “what goes on down below. Given any thought to where these fuckers might lead?”

“They’re mud holes,” I replied, growing impatient with the argumentative ghost of my argumentative lover. “They don’t lead anywhere.”

She smiled the sort of smile that maybe dead people commonly smile, and said, “You always were a woman of unfounded assumptions, Sarah.”

And around us, then, suddenly there were fireflies, and swirling motes of unidentifiable bioluminescence that seemed to make the darkness no less dark. The ceiling of the basement was draped with more than roots, I saw, with the sticky silken threads of larval glow worms, and I imagined there were zodiac constellations drawn in the arrangement of their deadly lures. Amanda held up her arms, as though she’d summoned this swarm, as though she worshipped or made herself an offering to it. And the basement had, I saw, grown into a cavern, something straight out of A Journey to the Center of the Earth, and forests of oyster-colored mushrooms the size of redwoods towered all around us. I heard the crashing waves of a not-so-distant sea, and Amanda sat down on a rock, and, slowly, she lowered her arms.

“So, what. You think this is usual?” she asked me, or some question very near to that, and I turned, trying to see the way back to the arch, and, past that, the foot of the stairs leading to a place that was only a basement.

“I don’t know what I think anymore,” I lied.“Perhaps you ought to put it back,” and I knew she meant the manuscript, Harvey’s manuscript, without having to ask.

“Perhaps you’re not ready for this.”

“That’s not for you to say,” I told her.

“And the typewriter, too,” she continued, as though I’d not even spoken. She did that a lot, when we were both alive. “It can’t be healthy, Sarah, having it around like this, working with it, a thing that has recently borne such strange fruit.” And if her allusion was lost on me in the dream, it’s not lost on me now.

The impala horns abruptly dropped from her head, and where they’d been nothing was left but two bloody stumps. She sat looking at them, the horns, and her expression was not so much sad as wistful, I think.

“Kind of makes you wonder,” she said, nodding at the shed horns. I waited for her to elaborate, but she never did. And I saw then that a variety of pale fungi had begun to sprout from her flesh, from her jeans and T-shirt, not so much devouring as simply augmenting, and I knew that, in this dream, I was neither a knight-errant nor a woods-man who saves lost girls from hungry wolves. nor from parasitic toadstools and yeasts, molds and agarics. I had already told her that, but as I watched Amanda’s body slowly, steadily bloom with the progeny of unseen spores, any doubt I might have harbored in this regard vanished.

There was more, what seems like hours and hours more, a roiling tumble of nonsense and phantasmagoria, a flight through that subterranean forest to the shores of Verne’s Mare Internum, his Liedenbrock Sea, perhaps. It may be I sailed a plesiosaur-infested ocean, or maybe I only sat on that alien shore, gazing up at a sunless, electric sky. But, however it proceeded, I don’t think I’m up to writing the rest. Whatever I might remember of the rest. The compulsion that drove me from my bed to this chair and the typewriter of Dr. Harvey has deserted me.

Since coming here, I have written two dreams, and damned little else, and in each one, of course, I encounter you, Amanda. In each one, I have no say in what becomes of you, so, in that respect, at least these are true dreams. Then again, in each one, you seem somehow imperiled, when I find it hard to believe there was ever any threat to you beyond your own penchant for self-destruction. So, paradoxically, the dreams may also be lies. Or both things are equally true — a particle and a wave, as it were — and I’m only being narrow-minded. A woman of unfounded assumptions, a woman of either-or.

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