Текст книги "The Red Tree"

Автор книги: Caitlin Rebekah Kiernan

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

“Yeah,” I answered. “But my favorite was always ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. ’ My favorite story by Kipling, I mean. You know, the one about the mongoose and the two cobras—”

“I never read it,” she said. “But I saw the Disney movie when I was a kid. I don’t remember a mongoose.”

“Rikki-Tikki-Tavi wasn’t in the Disney film.”

“I never read it,” she said again.

And the conversation went on like that for a while, I don’t know exactly how long. Kipling and Disney and what the hell ever, until she stopped and checked her watch, and I stopped and waited on her.

“So, where’s the deadfall?” she asked, and laughed a brittle, skittish laugh, looking up from her wrist and staring down the trail winding on ahead of us. “We should be back to it by now.”

I didn’t answer her, and I also didn’t askhow long it had been since we’d turned back towards the house. I didn’t need to ask to know that we should have already reached the deadfall. I glanced off to my left, and the fieldstone wall was exactly where it ought to be, sagging in upon itself with the weight of all the centuries that had passed unnoticed since its construction, the long decades since the last time this land was farmed and anyone had bothered with the wall’s maintenance. I could hear the little stream mumbling coolly somewhere beyond it.

“Well, we’re going the right way,” I said, peering up through the dappled light, checking the afternoon sun to be sure we were still walking south.“Maybe the trail forked somewhere back there, and we were talking and not paying attention, and we went the wrong way,” she said hopefully, and I nodded, because it was a better story than whatever was running through my head.

“Maybe,” she said, “we went left when we should have gone right, or something like that.”

I looked again at the stone wall, those moss– and lichen-scabbed granite and gneiss boulders, and I could feel her eyes following mine.

“So maybe there are two streams,” she said, and now the brittleness in her voice was edging towards panic. “And those goddamn stone walls are everywhere out here. That doesn’t mean anything, Sarah.”

“I didn’t say it did,” I told her, knowing perfectly goddamn well it was the same wall, and that I was hearing the same stream. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re thinkingit, though,” she said. “Don’t lie to me, because you’re standing there thinking it.”

“You never told me you were fucking clairvoyant,” I said. “Why is that, that you never bothered to say you could read my mind?” the words hard and mean and out before I could think better of it. And probably, at that juncture, I was somewhere past caring, anyway. I had my own apprehensions to worry about, and I was tired of coddling her.

“We’re lost,” she said. “We’re lost out here, and you knowwe’re lost.”

“Seventy-five yards,” I reminded her. “Constance, no onegets lost walking seventy-five yards from their back door to a goddamn tree, walking in a straight line,when you never even lose sight of where it is you’re headed.” And it occurred to me, then, and for the first time, that I couldn’t see the farmhouse, even though I’d been able to keep track of it almost the whole way the firsttime I’d gone to the tree. Even though, as I believe I mentioned in an earlier entry, a quirk of the landscape had, admittedly, made it harder to keep the house in view than the red tree. I walked a little farther down the trail – another ten or twenty yards – and Constance followed me silently; I was grateful that she didn’t ask what I was doing or what I was thinking. But I still couldn’t see any sign of the house. I stopped (and she did likewise, close behind me), checking the sky again to be absolutely certain I’d not lost my bearings, that we were, in fact, still moving roughly due south.

“Next time, just to be on the safe side, how about we bring along a compass,” I said, trying once more to make a joke from something that wasn’t funny, something that might becomefunny – tomorrow maybe, or next week – when we were safely out of these woods. When the inevitably obvious rational explanation had finally, mercifully, becomeobvious. Predictably, Constance seemed to find no more humor in the compass remark than in my earlier failed attempt to get her to loosen up and laugh about the seizures. She glared at me, a spiteful, how– dare-you glare, and then let the canvas tote bag slip from her arm and fall with a thump to the ground between us.

“I’m tired of carrying it,” she said, though I had not asked. “My shoulder’s sore.”

I simply nodded, not taking the bait, if, indeed, she was baiting me. Instead, I stared back towards the red tree, and for the first time since finding Dr. Charles Harvey’s manuscript, hidden away in the basement, it seemed to me morethan a tree. It seemed, in that moment, to have sloughed off whatever guise or glamour usually permitted it to pass for only a very old, very large oak. Suddenly, I felt, with sickening conviction, I was gazing through or around a mask, that I was being allowedto do so that I might at last be made privy to this grand charade. I saw wickedness. I could not then, and cannot now, think of any better word. I saw wickedness dressed up like a tree, and I had very little doubt that it saw me,as well. Here was William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch—the frozen moment when I clearly perceived what lay at the end of my fork – and the perfect Dadaist inversion of expectation, something, possibly, akin to that enlightened state that Zen Buddhists might describe as kensho. The epiphanic realizations of Stephen Dedalus, only, instead of Modernist revelations I was presented with this vision of primeval wickedness. And I knew, if I did not look away, and look away quickly, that what I saw would sear me, and I’d never find my way back to the house. I thought of Harvey, then, and I thought of William and Susan Ames, and John Potter’s fears of Narragansett demons.

“Listen,” Constance whispered, and her voice pulled me back to myself, and I was only standing on a path in the woods again, staring at her sweat-streaked face, the dread and terror shimmering brightly in her eyes. “Did you hear that, Sarah?”

“We’re going to be fine,” I told her, not acknowledging the question I’d only half heard. “We have to stay calm, that’s all.”

And she held an index finger to her lips, then, shushing me. Speaking so quietly that the words were almost lost in the background murmurs of the forest, she said, “I heard voices. I heard. ”

But then she trailed off, and I could have been sitting at the kitchen window, watching one of the deer, its every muscle tensed and ears pricked. I could have been sitting at the table, waiting for the deer to bolt at whatever I could not hear.

And I realized that Constance was holding my left arm, her hand gripping me tightly just above the elbow.

“I don’t hear anything,” I whispered back to her, despite her silencing finger, despite my head so filled with the view of that awful, dizzying wickedness sprouting from the stony soil.

But then I did,though it was not voices or anything that could be mistaken for voices. From our right, past the fieldstone wall, came the undisputable commotion of something large splashing through the stream. And despite the prickling hairs at the nape of my neck, despite the gooseflesh on my arms and the rush of adrenaline, I opened my mouth to tell her it was only a deer, only a deer or a dog – a wild dog at the very worst. But she had already released my arm, was already off the pathand running, and helpless to do anything else, I followed. I cannot say how long I chased her through those woods, the greenbriers ripping at my exposed face and arms, branches whipping past, my feet tangling in the wild grapes so that it is only by some miracle I didn’t fall and break my neck. As we ran, I was gradually overcome with the conviction that I was not so much trying to catch up with her, as fleeing some unspeakable expression of the wickedness I had seen manifest in the red tree. All I had to do was look over my shoulder to see it. But I did not look back. Like Constance, like the frightened does and fauns, I ran.

And then we were through the last clinging wall of vines, the last bulwark of poison ivy and ferns, dashing wildly across the weedy yard surrounding Blanchard’s farmhouse. I was shouting for her to stop, that we were safe now, that it was over, because that sense of being pursued had vanished, abruptly and completely. She didstop, so suddenly that I almost ran into her, though I know now it wasn’t because of anything I’d said. Constance stood a few feet away, drenched in sweat, wheezing so loudly I might have taken her for an asthmatic. There were tears in her eyes, and blood from what the briars had done to her face, and she was laughing uncontrollably. She pointed at the house, and at first I didn’t see what was wrong with it, what it was that she wantedme to see, what she neededme to see. For a time, I saw only the house, and the house meant only that the ordeal was over and we were safe, and neither of us would ever be so foolish as to go wandering off towards that wicked, wicked tree again. But the relief washed away, rolling easily out from under me, like pebbles on a beach before the towering clouds and indifferent winds of an advancing hurricane.

We were standing on the southside of the house, not far from the frontdoor, despite the fact that we’d been walking, and then running,south, bound for the backdoor. And sure, later we would tell ourselves that, obviously (there’s that word again), in our panicked flight and having forsaken the path, we’d wandered in a half circle, passing east of the house, and then doubling back again without having realized we’d done so. Never mind the questions left unanswered, the inexplicable events that had led to that pell-mell dash.

And now I look at the clock on the wall and see I’ve been sitting here the better part of three hours. My eyes hurt, I have a headache, and I feel like every bone in my body has been pummeled using a sock filled with pennies. No more of this tonight. I’ve set down the broad strokes, and I probably shouldn’t have done even that much. I’m going to have another beer, a handful of ibuprofen, and go the hell to bed.

July 7, 2008 (8:33 p.m.)

I sat down after dinner and read back over what I’d typed out last night. I even read a few bits of it aloud to Constance, which was, all things considered, rather ballsy of me, I think. She listened, but didn’t offer much beyond the occasional frown or shrug. Since yesterday, her mood has seemed to grow increasingly sour, and tonight she is distant, uncommunicative. I can’t be sure if she’s angry at me, or angry because she’s embarrassed, or just plain angry. Maybe some combination of the three, and understandably freaked out, in the bargain. Anyway, after I read the pages, I considered trying to make a more detailed and more coherent account of the experience. But, on the one hand, I don’t think I’m up to it, and on the other, what I wrote last night – for all its considerable faults – is likely far more honest and interesting in its immediacy than any carefully considered, reasoned version of our “lost picnic” (Constance’s phrase, and I take it as a reference to Lindsay’s novel) than I would produce tonight, more than twenty-four hours after the fact. I’ve had too much time to think about something that seems pretty much impervious to explanation. I mean, to any explanation that does not assume or require a violation of the laws of physics or recourse to the supernatural. And I think our stroll through the woods has taught me how deeply committed I am to a materialist interpretation of the universe, even when the universe deigns to suggest otherwise.

I woke this morning to find Constance sitting on the porch, smoking and staring into the trees and undergrowth at the edge of the front yard. There was a sketchbook lying open in her lap, and an old coffee mug of charcoal pencils on the porch rail. But the paper was blank. Near as I could tell, she’d drawn nothing. She didn’t seem to notice me until I said her name, and repeated it a second time; even then, when she turned and looked at me, there was something about her eyes, something about her expression, that made me wonder if she understood I was addressing her.

“How about some breakfast?” I asked, yawning and scraping together half a smile or so.

Constance blinked at me, like maybe she was having to work to remember my name. After a few seconds, there was a faint glimmer of recognition, and she turned away again. She took another drag from her cigarette and looked back towards the yard and the woods beyond.

“Sarah, I don’t feel like cooking for you today,” she said.

“That’s not what I meant,” I replied, caught slightly off guard and determined not to begin the day with an argument. “How about I cook something for the both of us. I think there are still a few eggs in the fridge.”

“I’m really not hungry,” she said.

I started to go back inside and leave her alone with her thoughts, whatever they might be. I’m sure that’s what I shouldhave done. There was nothing I had to say that she wanted to hear, and I’m not quite so dense that I couldn’t see that. But, just as our inexplicably failed bid to reach Dr. Harvey’s red tree seems to have caused Constance to withdraw, so it has left me somewhat less content with my own company than usual.

“So how about I make you a cup of joe?” I asked. “Or tea? Or, hey, fuck it, what about a beer? A cold Narragansett wouldn’t be such a bad way to start things after yesterday.”

“I’m fine,” she said, grinding that last syllable and sounding anything but, and she stubbed out her cigarette in a ginger Altoids tin she’s taken to carrying around with her. She popped the butt inside and snapped the tin shut.

“Constance, you know, some things, no matter how long you sit and stare at them, they just stay weird. You don’t always find a library book—”

“Don’t you patronize me,” she said, and, looking back, it was probably for the best that she interrupted me when she did. I just wish I’d have had the presence of mind to keep my mouth shut to start with. Constance glared at her Altoids tin, clutched tightly in her right hand, and I was beginning to think she was going to turn around and throw it at me. I suppose I’d have had it coming.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” she continued, slipping the tin into a pocket of one of the black smocks she wears when she paints. “And don’t try to tell me there’s no point obsessing over it, because I know you’re doing the same goddamn thing.”

“I won’t,” I said. “I wasn’t trying to.”

“You know what I think?” she asked, and then told me before I could reply. “I think you could go inside and pack yourself another picnic lunch right now and head back to the tree alone. I think you could do that, Sarah Crowe, and you wouldn’t have any trouble whatsoever finding it, or finding your way back here again, afterwards.”

I shrugged, wishing I hadn’t left my own cigarettes inside, but not about to ask Constance for one.

“You know,” I replied, getting a bit pissed, but doing my best not to let it show. “Me not patronizing you, that would have to include my telling you how crazy that sounds, right?”

“Yeah? So why don’t you try it, Sarah? If it’s crazy, what have you got to lose?”

“Look, I’m going to make a pot of coffee, and maybe when I’ve had three or four cups, when I can see straight, maybe then we’ll continue this conversation.”

And I was already stepping across the threshold, back into the house, already pulling the door closed, when she said, “You won’t do it, and you won’t do it because you’re scared. But I wish you would, Sarah. I wish you’d try going back without me.”

“Okay. So, maybe I will,” I said, knowing full well I wasn’t about to do any such thing. “But first, I’m making coffee, and getting something to eat. And you are more than welcome to join me, if you should happen to get tired of sitting out here not drawing whatever it is you’re staring at so intently.” And I shut the door, quickly, before she could get another jab in or possibly raise the stakes of her silly little dare. Hey, old lady, I’ll even screw you if you’ll just try to find the tree again without me. Sure, give it another shot, and, if you make it back, I’ll throw a pity fuck your way.I went to the kitchen and wrestled with the temperamental old percolator that came with the place, and I listened to NPR and had a bowl of stale Wheat Chex without milk, because the carton of “Rhody Fresh” had gone over. Constance didn’t join me, though halfway through my second cup of coffee, I heard the front door slam, heard her stomping upstairs to her garret. When I was done, I tried valiantly to occupy my mind by doing a half-assed job of cleaning the kitchen and the bathroom. Both badly needed it, though the work did little, if anything, to distract me. I kept stopping to stare up at the ceiling, wondering what Constance was doing overhead in the air-conditioned sanctuary of her attic, if she was painting or sketching or just lying on the futon beneath the chugging window unit, worrying at her memories. Or I’d find myself sweat-soaked and gazing at a sink filled with dirty dishes and sudsy water, or at the toilet brush, and realize that I’d spent the last five minutes standing there, thinking about the tree, playing back over the events of the day before. No less guilty than my housemate of trying to see past what hadhappened to anything else that would make more sense and not leave that cold, hard knot in my guts.

When Constance finally didreappear, it was late afternoon, and I was lying on the sofa in the den, intermittently dozing and trying to concentrate on Alice Morse Earle’s unutterably dry Customs and Fashions of Old New England(1893), which I’d brought home from the library in Moosup a few days before. She slipped into the room without a word and sat down on the floor not far from me. There were a few fresh-looking smears of paint on her smock, and she was accompanied by the pine-sap smell of turpentine. There were motley stains on her hands and fingers, too, several shades of blue and green and red.

After a moment, she cleared her throat, so I closed my book and dropped it to the floor beside the sofa.

“We still on speaking terms?” she asked.

I rubbed at my eyes, and watched her a moment or two before answering. “It would be damned inconvenient if we aren’t,” I said.

“Good,” she smiled, guarded relief creeping over her face. “I shouldn’t have said those things. I know I shouldn’t have.”

“Yeah, well, we both saw some seriously freaky shit. Not exactly the sort of thing you tend to forget overnight. And, besides, I really should have had enough smarts to leave you alone this morning.”

She picked up Customs and Fashions of Old New Englandand stared at the spine. “You were actually reading this?” she asked.

“No,” I told her. “Not actually.”

Constance set the book back on the floor between us and, with her left index finger, traced invisible circles and figure-eights on the black cover.

“I’m never at my best when I’m afraid,” she said.

“Not many people are,” I replied. But it sounded trite, maybe even condescending, and I sighed and shut my tired eyes. Orange and yellow ghost images floated about in the incomplete darkness, a swirling, leftover smutch of four-thirty sunlight generated by my confused retinas.

“What I said about you going back out there alone, I know I wasn’t making a lot of sense.”

“It’s okay, Constance. Really. Don’t worry about it.”

“But I want to try to explain,” she said, and I opened my eyes. “I don’t like people thinking that I’m scared, but it’s worse when they think I’m crazy.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” I said, and she lifted her finger off the cover of the library book and glared up at me, looking more confused than anything else. “You knowwhat I meant,” I said, and there was undoubtedly more exasperation in my voice than I’d intended there to be.

“I know what you said.”

“I saytoo much. You’d think anyone lives this long, she’d have figured that out by now. Regardless, you don’t need to explain anything to me. I don’tthink you’re crazy. I was half asleep and just mouthing off.”

“I never should have come back here,” she said. “I should have stayed in Los Angeles.” And this time I didn’t reply. I lay there on the sofa, rubbing my eyes and waiting for whatever it was that she would or wouldn’t say next. There was a noise outside, the wind or an animal poking about, but nothing unusual. Still, Constance turned her head away, turning towards the direction from which the noise seemed to have come. It wasn’t repeated, and after a while, she asked, “Have you read the whole thing? All of it?”

“Lord no,” I said, assuming she meant the library book. “I’ve hardly started it. Frankly, I don’t know why the hell I brought it home. Good House keepingin the age of Cotton Mather.”

“I wasn’t talking about this,” she said impatiently, and tapped the cover of the library book with her knuckles. “I mean Chuck Harvey’s manuscript. Have you finished reading it?”

“He didn’t even finish writingit,” I replied.

“Yeah, I knowthat, but have you read everything he did write?”

“No,” I told her, sitting up, and wondering if she’d be up for a drive to the beach, thinking it would do us both good to get out of the woods and away from this house for a little bit. Hell, I even thought about volunteering to spring for a room in Stonington or Mystic (because, after all, that’s what credit cards are for). “I haven’t. I’ve read, I don’t know, maybe half of it.”

“But you do intendto finish it before you take it to that woman at URI, right?”

“Maybe it would be better if I didn’t,” I sighed, not sure where she was headed, but already pretty certain she’d say no to a night away from the house.

Constance had gone back to drawing her invisible curlicues on the cover of the library book. “Well,” she said, “that’s up to you. But I need you to promise that you won’t get rid of it before you let me read it all.”

“You think your answers are waiting in there somewhere?” I asked, trying to remember if we had anything for dinner or if I’d have to drive into town.

“Just promise me that, alright?”

“Sure. No problem. I promise, cross my heart and hope to die,” and after that, she seemed to relax a bit.

“Scout’s honor?” she asked.

“Not fucking likely,” I laughed and had a go at combing my hair with my fingers.

“Oh, I was a Girl Scout,” Constance said. “Troop 850. I had my first taste of weed on one of the camping trips.”

“No shit? The Girl Scouts have a marijuana merit badge?”

She laughed, but we didn’t talk very long, and after a while she vanished into her garret again, saying that she wanted to get back to work. She came down for dinner (Velveeta grilled cheeses and Campbell’s Soup; at least I didn’t have to go to the store), but didn’t stick around long afterwards. Maybe I’ll do the beach thing by myself tomorrow, and hope that the tourists aren’t as bad on Mondays, that their numbers have declined since the Fourth.

July 8, 2008 (2:24 p.m.)

Earlier today, I was going through one of the boxes of books I brought up here with me from Atlanta, one of the few that didn’t go directly from the old apartment into storage. Comfort books, I call them, a hodgepodge of familiar volumes that I’ve read again and again and again, some of them since childhood. My personal take on Linus van Pelt’s blue security blanket, I suppose; the bookworm’s dog-eared solace. So, I was sorting through the box, only half remembering having packed most of what was in there, and at the very bottom was a big hardback, The Annotated Alice,with all Martin Gardner’s marginalia and John Tenniel’s illustrations. It was a Christmas gift when I was only eight years old, and I guess that would have been 1972. Yeah, ’72. I didn’t ownmany books as a child, and certainly not hard-backs. My father, a high-school dropout, said it was a waste of good money, paying for books when there was a library right there in Mayberry (though I suspect he himself never set foot in it). Anyway, my mother found a used copy of The Annotated Aliceat a yard sale sometime in the autumn, and then gave it to me for Christmas that year. You can still see where $1.25 was penciled in on the upper-righthand corner of the title page, and she tried unsuccessfully to erase it. The book was printed in 1960, so it was already, what, twelve years old when she gave it to me. And Jesus, how I loved that book. There are long passages that I committed to memory, that I can still recite.

Today, I lifted the book out of the box, and it fell open to pages 184-85, a little more than halfway through, just past the beginning of Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. On page 184, the Tenniel woodcut shows Alice entering the mirror above the fireplace, and on the opposite page, she’s emerging from that othermirror in the reversed world of the Looking-glass House. Hidden in between these two pages – and Alice’s act of passing from one universe into its left-handed counterpart – was a folded sheet of wax paper, and pressed between the two halves of the wax paper were five dried four-leaf clovers, and also a tiny violet. I removed the wax paper and closed the book, setting it aside. Seeing the pressed clovers and the single faded violet, there was such an immediate flood of memories. I don’t know how long I sat there holding those souvenirs and crying. Yeah, crying.

Amanda and I used to joke that it was her superpower, finding four-leaf clovers. I’ve never been any good at it myself, but she could stand over any given patch of clover, and, within only a minute or two, without fucking fail, spot at least two or three. And here were five from some spring or summer afternoon that I could not recall, only that shehad found them for me. I picked the violet. I can’t even remember now what led to the preservation of these particularclovers. I mean, if I’d saved every four-leaf clover Amanda ever found and gave to me, I’d have hundreds of the things. I didn’t even put them in the book, so I can only assume that Amanda did. For some reason lost to me, or never known to me, thesewere special. Maybe if Amanda were still alive, she’d know why. I could have picked up the phone and called her, and she would have laughed and told me, would have described that morning or evening, the circumstances that made these matter so much more than all the others.

I’ve spent so much energy casting Amanda as the villain, even though I know perfectly well that’s bullshit. It’s easier to recall the constant bickering, the minute wounds we inflicted upon each other, her low blows and my cheap shots, and incidents like her taunting me outside the Morewell Tunnel, than to tell the truth. The truth is so much more inconveniently complicated. But here were these five clovers and the violet stashed inside this book I’ve cherished since I was a kid, undeniable evidence that it wasn’t all hurtful, no matter how “toxic” her therapist might have deemed our relationship. Here was proof that a moment had existed when she loved me enough to put these tokens of good luck, which came so easily to her, but always eluded me, where she knewI would always have them.

I sat on the living room floor, and held the wax paper, and cried until my sinuses ached and there was nothing in me left to cry. I was terrified that Constance would come downstairs, and I’d have to try to explain, but she didn’t. And then I put Amanda’s keepsake back between pages 184 and 185, closed the book, and returned it to the bottom of the cardboard box.

July 9, 2008 (5:33 p.m.)

In Chapter Five of Harvey’s manuscript, he relates an apparently well-documented incident from 1957 that bears an unnerving similarity to what happened to Constance and me on Sunday afternoon. An unnerving similarity, or a remarkable similarity, or both. This is new territory for me, and so I’m not entirely certain what adjectives are most appropriate. In all honesty, I’d pretty much resolved to stop reading the manuscript. I’d decided, before Sunday, to let Constance read it and satisfy whatever morbid curiosity motivates her, then deliver it to the sociologist in Kingston. The thing has begun to make me nervous, and before Sunday, I would have said it makes me nervous in no way that I can lay my finger on. Now, I can lay my finger on page 242, and point to the precise source of my unease – or one of the sources, as I am beginning to see that it all fits together somehow, even if I cannot yet fully articulate the extent of the nature of this interconnectedness.

On page 242, Harvey writes:

The odd case of Olivia Burgess bears discussing in detail, in part because it was reported in numerous newspapers, not only in Rhode Island and New England, but all across the country. Here we do not have to rely upon the frail pages of antique diaries or local folklore or turn to urban legends where the only sources that can be cited are the inevitable FOAFs. In my files, I have forty-seven separate newspaper and magazine accounts of the Burgess incident, all of them printed between October 17, 1957, and May 2, 1974, including a number of interviews with Ms. Burgess. Though a few of the periodicals in question may rightfully be considered suspect (the December 1963 issue of Fate, for example, and a particularly sensationalized piece in the September ’71 issue of Argosy), most of the reporting is straightforward and often outwardly skeptical of Ms. Burgess’ claims (many of the later accounts appear as “seasonal” Halloween-related pieces, neither taking the story seriously nor bothering to get the facts straight).

On the morning of Thursday, October 10, Olivia Burgess, a widowed 45-year-old native of Hartford, Connecticut, was visiting the Wight Farm as part of research for a book on the history of agricultural practices in pre-Revolutionary War New England. Having been told that there were remains of an old cider press located within easy walking distance of the house, at the base of a large tree somewhere near Ramswool Pond, Ms. Burgess set out on foot, alone, to see if she could confirm or deny the report. By all accounts, in the fall of 1957, the land between the farmhouse and the flooded quarry was still being kept clear, and the walk would surely have seemed a simple enough detour. However, the story she would eventually tell a friend back in Hartford, who urged her to repeat it to a local reporter, was anything but simple.

According to Ms. Burgess, she found the large stone situated at the base of the old red oak, just as it had been described to her by the landowner’s wife. She reported photographing the stone from several angles using a Brownie Bull’s-Eye camera. It was only when she’d finished and had headed back towards the house that her visit to the Wight place took a macabre turn. Olivia Burgess claimed to have become immediately disoriented, though she was certain from the position of the sun and the fact that the tree was visible behind her, that she had to be heading in the right direction. Also, she noted, she soon lost sight of the farmhouse, though it should have lain directly ahead of her, to her south.

“The longer I walked, the farther away from me the house appeared to get. It literally grew smaller as I approached, as though I were experiencing an inversion of parallax or stereopsis. The effect was not only frightening, but I soon became nauseated, almost to the point of vomiting.” Finally, the house vanished from sight completely and Burgess grew “very afraid, because I could still see the tree quite well whenever I looked back towards the pond.” After almost half an hour of trying to reach the house, she retraced her steps to the tree and tried once again to reach the farmhouse, with identical results.

“It was getting late,” she told The Hartford Courant, “and twilight was coming on. I became terrified that I would be unable to get back to the house before nightfall, even though it lay less than a hundred yards away.”

After a third failed attempt to walk back to the house, Ms. Burgess had the presence of mind to try a different tack. Though it was growing dark, she crossed the stone wall west of the tree and walked in that direction until she managed to reach a farm on Barbs Hill Road. She then caught a ride into Moosup Valley, and did not return for her car until the next morning, and then only with the company of a male acquaintance from Foster, as well as an off-duty fireman, the landowner, and another local (unnamed) farmer. She is quoted in the original Hartford Courant article as having said, “I know perfectly well that all four of them thought I was certifiable, and I told them a lot less than I’m telling you. But I wouldn’t go back out to that tree for a million dollars.”

When the film in her Brownie was processed by a photo lab a few days later, all the prints were returned black, devoid of any image whatsoever, as though the film had never been exposed.

There’s quite a bit more of this. In fact, Harvey devotes the majority of Chapter Five to the episode, to various interviews with Olivia Burgess ( néeAdams) and to numerous secondhand sources. He claims (and it does appear, from his account) that Burgess stuck to her story, as first reported, until her death in 1987 at age seventy-five. Some of the later versions of the tale, notably those appearing in Fateand Argosymagazines, took considerable liberties and embellished the story, as though it weren’t bizarre enough to start with. The Argosyarticle states that Burgess found fresh bloodstains on the stone and around the base of the old oak, and the Fatearticle not only claims that she was pursued by a “large black wolflike animal” during her ordeal, but tries to link the episode to both UFO s andthe nuclear accident in Windscale, Cumbria, which happened to occur that same day (and was considered the world’s worst reactor mishap until Three Mile Island).