Текст книги "The Red Tree"

Автор книги: Caitlin Rebekah Kiernan

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

CHAPTER THREE

July 4, 2008 (2:04 a.m.)

Constance Hopkins was born not far to the south of here, born and raised in some little slip of a once-was town called Greene that I might well have driven through two or three times now, but I’ll be damned if I can recall the place. She says it was originally named Coffin Corner, until the paternal grandfather of H. P. Lovecraft, Whipple Phillips, bought pretty much the whole village back in the 1850s and renamed it after Nathaniel Greene, the Revolutionary War hero. In the Nineteenth Century, Greene was an important stopping point along the railroad, but then Henry Ford showed up and fixed that good and proper. Now I gather it’s hardly even a town at all. I didn’t ask her why the place had originally been named Coffin Corner, and she didn’t volunteer the information, so maybe she doesn’t know, either. Maybe it’s one of those things that nobody remembers. Maybe it’s a memory that’s been entrusted to a crumbling bit of paper in a library book somewhere.

She showed up around two, driving a rented PT Cruiser, and the car was almost the same color as the summer sky. Almost that exact same shade of blue. I walked down to meet her at the footbridge that fords the creek from Ramswool Pond, and, I’ll admit, at the time, I wasn’t thinking about much more than how maybe I should at least make an effort not to be a bitch. Fake it. Affect a neighborly attitude, because it wouldn’t kill me, and the last thing I need right now is Squire Blanchard deciding I’m more trouble than I’m worth. For all I know, this woman can actually pay her rent on time, and maybe she’ll up and decide she wants to lease the whole damn house out from under me. So, yeah, stuff a cork in it and play nice.

She had a bunch of cardboard boxes and some mismatched suitcases, along with an assortment of stuff you’d expect the artist who’s going to take up residence above your head to arrive with. Two huge wooden easels, for example. I introduced myself, and then helped her lug some of her things back to the house, things she didn’t want sitting out in the hot car – paints and art supplies, several rolled canvases, a plastic milk crate of old LPs. I quickly showed her around the first floor, including the bathroom we will now be sharing, and ended up at the steep, narrow flight of stairs leading to the attic.

“Bet it’s hot as fuck all up there,” she said, squinting into the gloom gathered at the top of the staircase, the gloom and the heat crouched so thickly you could almost see it, and I think I just nodded.

“I don’t suppose you’ve got beer?” she asked me. “A coldbeer?”

“I think I probably can fix you up,” I said, and we left her things at the foot of the stairs and backtracked to the kitchen. I’m trying to develop a taste for Narragansett, and there was a whole six-pack in the icebox and two bottles left over from another. I opened one for her, and a second bottle for myself, and pointed at the table and chairs by the window.

“Try to excuse the mess. Try hard,” I said, and she laughed.

I don’t exactly recall now what it was I’d expected from this woman, whatever preconceptions and images I might have formed of her in my mind’s eye. But whatever it was, Constance Hopkins entirely defied and negated my expectations. I think I’d call her striking even if I weren’ta lesbian. And I think I’d call her beautiful, too. Not the sort of beauty you see these days, touted in magazines and on television. That calculated, cookie-cutter glamour of the dull that so many people seem, increasingly, to gravitate towards. Hers is not the sort of face that would ever get lost in a crowd, and sitting here now, I’m not at all confident I can explain what it is about her that leaves me with this impression. Her eyes have some odd, drowsy quality about them – unfocused, distant – but it’s nothing that suggests a lack of alertness. They’re a very particular shade of reddish brown. Maybe I’d call it cinnamon. Or rust. I don’t think I’ve ever seen eyes like hers before. That color, I mean. Her complexion is pale, but not at all pasty. Her hair is jet black and straight, and she was wearing it pulled back in a long ponytail. Sitting there, drinking beer with her, talking, I noticed there’s a very small chip out of one of her upper incisors. I wanted to ask her how that had happened, but I didn’t. Maybe later.

“You smoke?” she asked, and nodded at the ashtray on the table, near Dr. Harvey’s typewriter. It was half-full of butts and ash, because I hadn’t emptied it in a couple of days.

“Yeah, well. I wasquit, you know, but now it seems like I’m not so quit anymore.”

“So you don’t mind if I smoke?”

“No, I don’t mind in the least,” I replied, and she fished a pack of Camels out of the bulging leather shoulder bag she carries for a purse. The Camels and a pink disposable Bic lighter, and she offered me one of the cigarettes, which I gladly accepted. She lit it for me, and then sat staring silently out the kitchen window for a minute or so. It was a silence that was beginning to grow uncomfortable, when she said, “I like your books. The novels. Your short stories are better written, though. But, I never would have guessed that you wrote any thingon something like that,” and, with her cigarette, she pointed at the antique typewriter. Suddenly, I was flustered, disarmed, whatever you want to call it, left feeling as though I ought be simultaneously thanking her for the compliment (as it happens, I like my short fiction better, too), apologizing for the old dreadnaught of a typewriter, andexplaining that I normally work on a laptop. Instead, I just nodded and took another long drag on my own cigarette.

“We don’t have to talk about it, Sarah, not if you would prefer not to,” she said.

“Well, then,” I replied. “In that case, I would prefer not to, thank you.”

“I know how it goes,” she told me, and sort of half smiled. “Or, how it doesn’t come,as the case may be.”

“So, you drove all the way from Los Angeles?” I asked, changing the subject, though I’d already asked her that same question outside, and she’d already answered it. And never mind that Blanchard had told me she was driving; it was something to say, words to fill in empty space, misdirection, and the only thing I could think of.

“I like to drive,” she said. “I hate planes. Even before 9/11 and all this security crap, I hated planes. When I go somewhere, I want to seewhere it is I’m going, all the places I pass through on the way there. You know what I mean?”

I told her that I did, even though I suspected I actually didn’t understand, at all. I’ve always despised long drives, ever since I was a kid and it was my father’s idea of Sunday afternoon recreation. Just driving. Driving nowhere at all. Back before the oil crisis in ’73, when gas was, what, thirty or forty cents a gallon. Constance Hopkins smoked her cigarette and watched the window, watched the bright, shimmering summer day outsidethe window, and I smoked mine and watched her, trying hard not to be too obvious about it. Trying not to stare. Trying hard. I asked her how it had gone, the drive from LA, and she shrugged and smoke leaked from her nostrils.

“Fine, except for the fucking breakdown in Gary.”

“Indiana?” I asked, immediately wishing that I’d said nothing at all, becoming all too acutely aware that my questions and replies were suffering from my unexpected fascination with this woman whom I’d expected would be nothing but an inconvenience.

“Yeah, Indiana. Only Gary I’ve ever had the misfortune to be stuck in. Car blew a head gasket or cracked a cylinder or something of the sort, and there was a mix-up getting a replacement. Added an extra day, waiting around while they sorted it out.”

“But otherwise?”

Constance looked away from the window, those drowsy red-brown eyes shifting towards me, and she nodded. “Fourteen states in less than a week. My second grand tour of Flyover Country. May I never, ever have to do it again.” She crossed herself, then smiled and took another sip of her beer, before setting the bottle down on the table. And, turning back to the window, as though the unexpected had become the order of the day, she said the very last thing I was prepared to hear.

“So, I suppose you know all about that old tree out there?” and she smiled again and jabbed an index finger towards the kitchen window. I laughed out loud, a nervous, somewhat unsettled laugh, I suppose, and realized that my bottle was empty, and my mouth had gone very dry.

“Not like it’s some sort of big secret,” she said, sounding amused. “Just part of that whole local legend scene, the crap you know by heart cause you grew up hearing it all the time. Well, if you grew up around here, I mean,” and she paused long enough to tap her cigarette against the edge of the ashtray. “Mercy Brown and the plague of consumptive vampires, all the phantoms, witches, ghost towns, shunned pastures, the haunted cemeteries, and whatnot. The usual New England spookfest. Hell, there’s even supposed to be some sort of swamp monster lurking about in a bog up around Gloucester or Chepachet.”

“Chepachet?” I asked, and she shrugged.

“Sure. Not all that far from here.”

“Well, okay, but the tree was news to me. Want another beer?” I asked her, and she glanced at her bottle, still almost a third full, but gone warm, and she nodded. I stood and walked across the room to the icebox.

“Old man Blanchard didn’t bother mentioning it, before you signed the lease?” she asked.

“No. Must have slipped his mind,” I said, opening the bottles and returning to my seat, handing one to her. “I had no idea I’d rented a house on a haunted farm. Or that the last tenant here was writing a book about the tree, then went and hung himself from it.

”“Ah, yeah. Thatwould be Chuck Harvey,” Constance said. “Took a couple of classes from him, when I was an undergrad at URI. Again, not exactly a big fucking secret. I always did think the dude was, you know, sort of out to lunch.”

I let my eyes stray towards the window, towards the huge green canopy of that tree moving slowly in the afternoon breeze, recalling my walk the day before and how I’d found absolutely nothing the least bit out of the ordinary about the oak. How I’d almost dozed off on that big flat stone at its base.

“He was writing a book about it when he died,” I said again.

“Really? I never heard that part of it. I don’t think it made the news.”

“So this happened before you moved out to LA?”

“Yep,” she nodded. “I only went out there late last summer, near the end of August. No idea what I was thinking, really. I knew someone from college who wanted to split the cost of an apartment in Silver Lake, and there really wasn’t anything here tying me down. But Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, I swear to fuck, Los Angeles is the worst. It’s like someone decided to build a concentration camp for ass-holes or something, hoping the earthquakes and wildfires would clean up the gene pool.”

I told her I’d never been very fond of the place myself, and she started in explaining to me about the friend from college, another painter, and how this girl had gotten mixed up with a heroin dealer, how it turned out the roommate was a junkie herself. After all manner of drug-related Sturm und Drang,Constance had decided it was time to get out, and so here she was, drinking Narragansett Beer with me at the kitchen table. “I think they’re all probably in jail by now,” she told me. “In jail or dead. I’m just glad to be away from there, clear and free of that bunch of jerk-offs and needle freaks. Maybe now I can get back to work.”

And here she stopped and squinted at me through a gray veil of cigarette smoke. “So, he was writing a book, yeah? About the red tree? I wouldn’t have guessed there was enough material there for a whole damn book.”

I shrugged and pointed to the manuscript box. “Well, he seemed to think so. I found it in the basement. Rather, I found what there isof it. He died without finishing it.”

She took a last puff from her Camel, then crushed the butt out in the ashtray. “No shit? I thought that was maybe something youwere writing. It just got left here, after he died?”

“That would seem to be the case, though I’ve talked with someone at the university who’s taking it off my hands next week. Someone who used to work with him, I think. He has a daughter, but she doesn’t seem to want anything to do with him.”

“Didn’t know that, either,” Constance said. “In school, we always assumed he was gay.”

“Maybe he was. He was certainly divorced.”

“Weird shit,” she sighed, and sipped at her beer. “So, Sarah Crowe, tell me. Are you the sort who believes in ghosts and cursed trees and the like?” she asked. “Does it make you nervous, all these skeletons in the closet?”

“No, I do not believe in ghosts,” I replied. “ OrRhode Island vampires, orswamp monsters. I’d be lying, though, if I said learning about Harvey’s suicide didn’t. ” and I trailed off, searching for words that wouldn’t be taken the wrong way, because suddenly I found myself caring about this stranger’s opinion of me. “It was unsettling,” I said. “And then, finding that manuscript, hidden away down in the basement. ”

“You think Blanchard intentionally hid the manuscript?”

“Sorry, no,” I said, shaking my head. “Just a figure of speech,” and see there what I mean about being careful of the words I choose, because I hadn’t meant that at all.

“Don’t you wonder, though, why he didn’t just toss it out, burn it or something?” Constance Hopkins asked, and now there was a faintly mischievous glint in her lazy eyes. “I mean, why saveit? Why go to the trouble to stash it away in the basement?”

“You got me,” I said. “I don’t write mystery novels.”

“No, that’s right. You don’t, do you?” And as quickly as it had appeared, the glint faded from her rusty eyes. She lit another cigarette, and offered another to me, but I declined.

“How about you?” I asked, and, with hindsight, I see that the question was not merely an act of reciprocal curiousity, but a response to what had felt like a challenge or taunt from a woman almost fifteen years my junior.

“What about me what?”

“Are you,Constance Hopkins, the sort who believes in ghosts. or cursed trees, for that matter? Are you the sort who goes in for all this Fortean nonsense?”

She peered back at me through a thick cloud of smoke, looking confused. “Fortean? You just lost me.”

“You mean to say, you’ve never read Charles Fort, king of the cranks, archenemy of all that is rational, self-professed defender of so-called damned phenomena excluded by orthodox science? Rains of blood, fish and frogs falling from the sky, unexplained disappearances, mystery animals, and what have you?”

“Sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “Not ringing any bells.”

“No problem,” I replied. “It’s probably for the best. Anyway, you haven’t answered my question.”

“Do I believe in ghosts?” she smiled.

“Yes. That’s the one.”

She continued to smile, and I did my best not to stare at that chipped tooth while she seemed to gaze through me, at least through the surfaceof me. Finally she nodded, very slightly, her smile widening just a bit, and shrugged.

“It’s complicated. Maybe we should come back to that question another time,” she said. “I expect I ought to wander upstairs and see just what I’ve gotten myself into,” and she looked at the ceiling.

“Sure,” I replied. “No hurry,” but there was an odd and unmistakable pang of disappointment, that she hadn’t answered the question. For a moment, I thought she was going to leave the table, but then she started talking again, and the conversation turned to more mundane affairs – just how much she dreaded going up those stairs to the attic, because she knew what a dump it would be. How there was a sleeping bag and an air mattress out in the car that would have to do, as far as bedding was concerned. How she hoped we didn’t both freeze to death when winter came around.

“I try not to think about the winter,” I said, truthfully. “I’ve never lived anywhere cold in my whole life.”

“Sometimes,” she said, “it’s not so bad. Though it tends to get colder here than it does nearer to the sea. Sometimes, we get mild winters.”

“Other times?”

She winked, and then blew a series of perfect concentric smoke rings before replying. “Well, I was born during the Blizzard of 1978. It snowed for thirty-three hours straight, drifts fifteen feet high some places. Hurricane-force winds all across Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, but the worst of it was right here in Providence County. It was a hell of a mess, and a lot of people died. My mother used to say, ‘You came in like a lion, Connie, riding on that wind.’ ” She laughed then, and I think I laughed, too. I know I was regretting not having accepted that second cigarette.

“People still call you Connie?” I asked, preferring not to contemplate all the many ways a person can die in a blizzard.

“Only once,” she said and winked again. “And now, if you will excuse me, I really shouldget off my ass and meet my garret. I assume we share the kitchen?”

“Looks that way,” I said, and then I offered to help with the stuff we’d left sitting at the foot of the attic stairs. She shook her head and told me it wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle on her own. She thanked me for the beer and promised to exchange the favor soon, then glanced down at the box containing Dr. Harvey’s manuscript.

“Before you unload that thing, could I maybe have a look at it?” she asked.

“Sure, though I’m planning on having it photocopied at the library, so it’s not like there’s a rush.”

She chewed at her lower lip a moment, then said, “Sarah, if you don’t mind, I’d sort of like to read the original. You know, the actual artifact. Reading a copy wouldn’t be the same, somehow.”

“Of course,” I replied, because, after all, I haven’t actually worked out when and where I’m supposed to meet the woman from URI to hand it over. “Truthfully, I’ve only read about half of it myself. But yeah, no problem. You can take it now, if you’d like.”

“Later will be fine,” she said, then thanked me again for the beer, and for helping her carry the stuff up from the car. After she left, I sat here, wondering how long it would take me to get used to the sound of footsteps overhead. And now it’s almost four o’clock in the morning, and the birds are yelling their heads off, and it just occurred to me that the clack from these noisy goddamn typewriter keys might be keeping her awake.

July 4, 2008 (9:39 p.m.)

Not much to report, really. I thought of taking the car and driving somewhere there would be fireworks – Foster, or all the way down to Westerly or Watch Hill, maybe even Mystic – not so much because I give two hoots for Independence Day, but just to mark the passage of time, to stay oriented (or reorient myself) to some sort of calendar beyond my own reclusive rhythms and the inevitable progress of the summer towards autumn. I even went so far as to look online for potential destinations, places where fireworks displays were scheduled and so forth. But then Constance asked me to help her with the last few boxes from the rental car, and she started telling horror stories about traffic and drunken tourists and asshole college students, and I dropped the idea. Earlier, just after dark, I did hear some distant concussions, from the south, I think, so I’m afraid that’s it for my Fourth of July this year.

It’s really not so bad in the attic, aside from the heat, which was almost intolerable before we set up a little window-unit air conditioner that the Mexicans seem to have left behind. But it’s clean up there, and roomier than I remembered, and Constance seems happy enough with the space. I sat with her a while, and we talked and drank more Narragansett beer while the attic cooled down around us. I don’t think I could ever get used to that single, long V-shaped room, those steeply slanting walls meeting overhead like the hull of a capsized boat. Nothing very remarkable about the conversation, nothing worth putting down here, except that she claims she’s bi, that she’s had a couple of girlfriends, so maybe. well. I can’t be blamed for wishful thinking. Sure, I was already thirteen when she was born, but what the hell.

Later, she wanted to take a nap, and so I found myself downstairs again, looking over Dr. Harvey’s manuscript for the umpteenth time. Not so much reading it, as scanning what I’d read already. To be honest, the thing is a mess. There are chapters, but after the first, these divisions seem more or less arbitrary, and there’s almost no effort at presenting any sort of chronological history of the origin and traditions surrounding “the Red Tree” (it would be too kind to call this writing “non-linear”). Also, often, the author veers off into subjects that are, at best, tangential. The nearest thing I can compare it with are the writings of Charles Fort – which, I should note, are mentioned on that page I discovered in the typewriter’s carriage, and are also liberally cited in other portions of the manuscript. I haven’t read Fort since college, but I recall his rambling, unfocused style gave me fits. Anyway, here’s an example of what I mean – the tangents – from Chapter Two (ms. pg. 112). Right in the middle of a discussion of one of the better-documented episodes involving the tree, a series of murders dating from the 1920s, Harvey pauses to discuss an unrelated haunting:

Here I should like to mention the purported haunting at Portsmouth Abbey, which is said to have followed from the slaghter [sic] and mass burial of some thirty to sixty Hessian soldiers during the Revolutionary War. The largest land-based battle of the conflict occurred on August 29, 1778, at Portsmouth, Rhode Island, near a stream now known as Barker’s Bloody Brook (or the Bloody Run), a stream that flows through the Portsmouth Abbey grounds. Indeed, the very name of the brook is tied to this battle, as the waters were said to have run red for days afterwards, polluted by blood, so great was the loss of life. The precise location of the Hessian burial is uncertain, though most do agree it was beneath the boughs of a large willow tree, long ago cut down. The dead soldiers are said to rise from a great depression marking the grave site, often referred to as the “Hessian Hole” (again, reports vary on the location of this sunken area marking the grave). Spectral sightings are said to be especially likely on foggy nights. One wonders if director Tim Burton was aware of this tale when crafting his popular 1999 retelling of Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820). It should be noted that there is no actual archaeological evidence that the mass grave is anything more than legend, and a recent survey of much of the battleground by Salve Regina University (Newport) failed to turn up any burial matching the description of the infamous “Hessian Hole.”

I will assume Harvey felt justified in making this digression from his discussion of the murders of 1922–1925 because the Hessian Hole story involves a tree and a bloody brook, vaguely echoing some elements of the “Red Tree of Barbs Hill Road.” Anyway, I realized that I wasn’t really sure how far back the legends surrounding the tree extend – because of Harvey’s haphazard attention to chronology – only that the oldest accounts predate the story of William Ames and his wife by more than a century. I sat down on the floor with the manuscript, and spread the pages out around me, trying not to think about Constance upstairs, napping beneath the air conditioner while I sweated below. Or the possibility that she might be napping in the nude. It would appear that the earliest account Harvey was able to locate regarding something amiss with a tree in the wilderness south of Moosup Valley dates to the years following the “West Quanaug purchase” of 1662 (and I confess that I am almost entirely ignorant of local history, so I’m taking Harvey’s word on this stuff). He writes (Chapter One, ms. pg. 29):

It seems to have begun in the decades after the acquisition of roughly fifteen square miles of land from the Narragansett sachems Awashouse and Newecome, generally referred to as the West Quanaug purchase. “West Quanaug” (or, alternately, “Westconnaug” is an English corruption of the Narragansett “Wishquat noqke”). Three men were instrumental in the purchase: William Vaughn of Newport, Robert Westcott of Warwick, and Zachariah Rhodes of Pawtuxet. The Westconnaug Company was organized in June 1678 to see to the tract’s subsequent apportion. A surveyor was not appointed until 1707. The West Quanaug purchase may be seen as the second major acquisition in an expansion authorized in 1659 by the Colonial General Assembly, encouraging Providence settlers to “buy out and clear off” all Indians west of the Seven-Mile Line. Following the resolution of disputes over ownership between the aforementioned Providence Proprietors and the West Quanaug Company (October 28th, 1708), both were eager to place settlers on the new land, largely to help resolve a persistent boundary dispute with Connecticut.

Though the first deed issued by the West Quanaug Company, to John Potter of Warwick, dates from 1714, family tradition has it that Mr. Potter, in fact, took up residence in a small cave along the east bank of the Moosup River as early as 1704, where he then lived until the construction of a house. Though this story may be purely anecdotal, appealing to a romantic ideal of the pioneering spirit, a much later entry in John Potter’s journal (Special Collections, Providence Athenaeum), dated May 15, 1715, makes reference to “the red indyen dread of an olde trees’d haunted by the divel Hobbamock, an enimy to all good, who appeareth there by night.” Potter then relates a story of the Narragansett’s offerings of freshly killed game left at the base of the tree, as Hobbamock was “s’d by the heathens to be appeas’d above al else by the shadding of blood.” In this entry, indulging his imagination, Potter even supposes that occasional human sacrifices may have been made to “the daemon, so great ware theire fear of this malevolent thinge.”

In Part 1 ofThe Origin and Development of Religious Belief(1878), the prolific English scholar and folklorist Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould writes, “New Englanders supposed Hobbamock to be the arch-fiend of the Indians, because the myths told of him represented him as malevolent; but, in fact, he was their Supreme Oki, or God.” So, regardless of Hobbamock’s proper place in the pantheon of the Narragansett people (a redundancy, as “Narragansett” translates, literally, as “The People”), it is consistent with the contemporaneous impression of Native American mythology that John Potter would have regarded (and probably distorted) this being to conform to the popular impression of the time, that Hobbamock was an Indian devil. This same being was also known as Cheepie (chippe, meaning alone, separate, secluded, or apart).

It is also worth mentioning here that “Hobbamock” was a title bestowed upon high-ranking tribal members, such as the case of a Pokanoket sachem called Hobbamock who was sent, in the spring of 1621, to Plymouth Colony by Massasoit, chief of all the Wam panoag. Hobbamock and his family lived alongside the colonists until he died in 1641.

As we shall see, John Potter’s life would, eventually, become inextricably and fatally linked with the Red Tree, which he first set eyes on, it appears, from a journal entry dated only as August 1716, little more than a year after his first mention of the Hobbamock story. At this time, he notes the presence of an enormous stone believed to have been placed at the base of the accursed oak by the Narragansett and used as an altar. He describes the rectilinear slab as marked by a shallow groove carved into its upper surface, forming a rough circle within which the offerings were placed. This groove, Potter writes, led to a “spout” or opening on the southern edge of the altar stone (which he believed served to drain blood from sacrifices that had collected in the groove). However, though mentioning that the stone was covered with lichen, he fails to make any mention of bloodstains, which one assumes would have been inevitable, unless the Narragansett regularly scrubbed the stone (or Hobbamock’s nocturnal feedings were sufficient to have wiped it clean).

Such “altar” stones are known from other sites in New England, including one from the Mystery Hill megalith site (“America’s Stonehenge”) near Salem, New Hampshire, and another displayed at the Hadley Farm Museum in western Massachusetts. The latter, which is almost identical to that located at the base of the tree, has been identified as a cider press. The Mystery Hill “altar” is suspected of having been carved in either the Eighteenth or Nineteenth Century by local farmers for use in the manufacture of lye soap. Other notable examples of stones quite closely matching that on the Blanchard property may be seen today at Groton, CT, and Leominster and Westport, MA. In each case, the stones are believed by archaeologists to be of relatively recent, non-Native American origin, and to have been used for production of lye, pine tar, or potash, and even the pressing of grapes. Nevertheless, these artifacts have long fired the popular imagination, and appear in such canonical works of pulp fiction as Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” (1929) and Karl Edward Wagner’s “Sticks” (1974).

In this same entry (see Appendix B for the relevant excerpts from John Potter’s diary in full [A shame Harvey didn’t live long enough to actually write the appendices!—S.C.]) the tree described, along with the “altar stone” perfectly match the tree now identified by locals as “the Red Tree,” and I have little doubt that the two are one and the same. He states that “it has an evil feel about it” and that he has begun to consider cutting it down and having the stone broken up. Obviously, this never happened, and as we shall soon see, John Potter would live to regret not following through with his plan to destroy the tree. Despite his apparent loathing of the tree and his belief that the Narragansetts gathered at the spot to summon evil spirits, Potter built his home, in 1707, well within sight of the oak. Indeed, at the time, one can assume that, the land having been recently cleared by Potter for agriculture, the tree would have been more visible from the house than it is now. Records in the Tyler Free Library, the Foster Preservation Society, and the Providence Athenaeum indicate that Potter’s original house burned in 1710, and that Potter rebuilt directly on the foundation stones he’d lain three years earlier. So, given this chance to relocate his house farther from the oak, he once again acted in a way that, at first glance, seems contrary to his notions and misgivings about the tree. However, I believe that, by studying Potter’s diary, we can arrive at satisfactory explanations for these actions, and that in the beginning they amounted to little more than stubbornness and an unwillingness on his part to be perceived as having been in any way intimidated by native superstitions.

Yeah, okay, enough of this already. My eyes are giving out. Didn’t I say I wasn’tgoing to hand copy Harvey’s damn manuscript, that I was going to have it Xeroxed? And here I’ve just transcribed about four pages of the damned thing! But, that said, the upshot is that people have been afraid of this old tree (hidden now, out there in the dark beyond my kitchen window) for almost three hundred years. And the stone I lay down on, and where I almost dozed off below those branches, has (or had) a reputation as an altar used by Indians in human sacrifices. I have to admit, reading back over that part gave me just a bit of a shiver, even if I’m most emphatically notthe sort of woman who believes in ghosts and Rhode Island vampires and bog monsters.