Caitlin R. Kiernan - The Red Tree

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.