Caitlin R. Kiernan - The Red Tree

There was the exact same malice in Constance’s eyes. I mean, exactly the same. It didn’t help, either, realizing that her irises were so similar in color to the cat’s. She glared up from her place on the floor, and there were no iron bars in between us, restraining her, protecting me. But then it passed, the expression, that clarity of purpose or whatever, almost before I could be certain what I’d seen. Her eyes were only her e yes again, sort of distant, distracted, far away, and she glanced back down and shook her head.

“Now, I’ve made you angry at me,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to. I promise I wasn’t.”

“I’m sorry, but I would rather not go back down there,” I said, deciding it was best not to get into whether or not I thought Constance was trying to get a rise out of me. Better not to question her sincerity, so I simply chose to ignore what she’d said, that and the passing, unfamiliar glint in her eyes.

“Then I’ll go by myself. It’s no big deal. I just want to have a look around. It bothers me, not knowing what’s down there, underneath us.”

I took a deep drag on my cigarette and peered at her through the smoke I exhaled. “Why didn’t it bother you before? Why all of a sudden?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. “Maybe it did bother me.

Or maybe I just never stopped to think about it.”

“There’s nothing down there,” I told her again, more emphatically than before. “Just junk. A whole lot of junk, sitting around in the dark, gathering dust.”

“Then I’ll see it for myself, and I can stop wondering about it. I can start thinking about my painting again, and get back to work.”

“You won’t just take my word for it? My word isn’t good enough for you?”

“Sarah, that’s not what I mean. Don’t make this into something it isn’t,” and she sighed and ran the long fingers of her right hand through her tangled hair. It wasn’t pulled back in her usual ponytail, and was dirty enough I could believe she’d not washed it in weeks. “I won’t be long. I’ll go down and see whatever there is to see, and I’ll come right back up. Are there lights down there?”

“No,” I replied. “There are no lights in the cellar.”

“But we have a flashlight, right?”

I nodded, then pointed towards the kitchen with my cigarette. “Yeah. A couple of them. In the drawer beside the sink. The drawer on the right of the sink.”

“You won’t be mad at me?” she asked. “If I go, you won’t be mad at me?”

“No, Constance. I won’t be mad at you,” I lied, an easy lie, given how pissed I was with her already. “I just fail to see the point.”

“So, what was the point when you went, Sarah?”

And I wanted to say I’d only gone into the cellar back in June because I was hot as hell and looking for someplace to get away from the heat, someplace cool to read. But then she would have asked why I did more than read, why I ever went poking about, and then, having found the typewriter, why it was I returned to search for the rest of the manuscript. I knew I had no answer that would satisfy her or convince her not to go down there. So, I didn’t bother. The answer, in both instances, was that I was curious, and my curiosity was no more valid than whatever was eating at her.

I think I was a cunt not to have tried harder to stop her from going into the basement. I know I was a cunt for letting her go alone.

I didn’t tell her about the slate threshold with its array of chiseled symbols, or about the archway dividing the basement. I didn’t mention all that space beyond the arch and the threshold that I’d not had the nerve to explore. I certainly did not mention the nightmare I’d had about finding Amanda down there in a Vernean landscape of giant mushrooms.

My fingers hurt, and I’ve got to take a break. Get something to eat, maybe. Go upstairs and see if I can get Constance to talk to me. I know I can’t, but I need to try, anyway.

She didn’t open the door for me, but she says that she’s alright. The way things stand, I don’t suppose I have any choice but to believe her. Believe her or break down the damn door and be done with it. But I think I’m finished with heroics for the time being. I have to wait until she’s ready to open the door and come out on her own.

Anyway, yeah, I showed Constance where the flashlights were, and I pretended not to hear the cellar door creaking open. I sat there on the sofa, pretending to read A Treasury of New England Folklore . I stared at the pages, reading the same paragraphs over and over again; something about a sea serpent flap in Gloucester Harbor, back about 1817 or so. An assortment of “tall tales”—ghost ships and the ghosts of drowned sailors, Ocean-Born Mary and Caldera Dick and crazy, bloodthirsty Cotton Mathers. Wonders of the Invisible World. But, in truth, I know now that I was sitting there listening, waiting, though I probably could not have said for what. For some sound or sign from below, and when I heard it, I would know. Still, I tried to reassure myself, because I knew there really wasn’t anything beneath Blanchard’s old farmhouse but all the refuse that had accumulated down there over the years — over the centuries, no doubt. Constance would dig about in the mess until she grew bored, and then she’d come back upstairs, and I could say I’d told her so. I could bask in smug vindication, and she’d skulk away to her garret again in a cloud of turpentine fumes. All would be as right with the world as I could reasonably expect.

Only, that’s not the way it went, not at all.

About an hour and a half passed, me sitting there trying to read, and the day seeming to grow hotter, my T-shirt sticking to me. We were out of beer, but I wasn’t about to drive into town to get more, not with spelunker Constance prowling around in the cellar. I was just about to give up on the book and look for something else to read when I heard what I’d been listening for.

It was the smallest sound. Any smaller, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have heard it.

It might have been my name. It might have been something else, the particular words, I mean. It hardly matters, these specifics, because it was plainly a cry for help. It was alarm, and it was dismay, and it was fear. I called out to her, once or twice, fairly certain that there would be no answer, and there wasn’t. I waited until the sound came again, and it wasn’t a long wait. I went to the kitchen, to get the second flashlight from the drawer to the right of the sink. I switched it on and off, checking to be sure the batteries hadn’t gone dead. The casing is blue plastic; the one that Constance took with her is green. She’d left the cellar door standing open, as I’ve said, and I lingered a moment before that low entryway, shining my flashlight across the ten wooden steps leading to the hard-packed dirt below. They seemed steeper than I recalled, the stairs, and the air rising up from that pit was cool and smelled much too stale, too sour, to ever describe as simply “musty.”

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.