A fucking hot day today. Only a fool thinks she’s escaping the heat of summer by coming to New England. There was rain last night, the first rain in days, but it only seems to have made matters worse. Everything outside the kitchen window is soaked in the scalding-white sun, and the humidity must be at least ninety percent. You live and learn, Miss Crowe, you live and fucking learn.
Two days ago, day before yesterday evening, while trying to escape the heat, I made my first trip down into the cellar of this house. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to do so earlier. The cellar door is just off the kitchen, in a sort of alcove near the hallway that leads to the bedroom and bathroom. It’s an exceptionally small doorway, even by the standards of this place. What do you call the top of a doorframe? I know there’s a word for it. I measured it with a yardstick I found in the attic. Just an inch more than five feet, top to bottom, so I have to stoop a bit to keep from smacking my head. The ten steps down to the hard-packed dirt floor are narrow, and the cellar air is (no surprise) rank, as you’d imagine. Still, there’s no air-conditioning in this dump, and Blanchard won’t spring for window units. All I have are two useless box fans I bought in Foster, and, truthfully, it was a waste of good money, because they only manage to stir the hot air round and round. Sweat soup, I would call it. Anyway, I took a chair down there, one of the chairs from the kitchen table, and a flashlight and the book I’m reading. Fortunately, the cellar ceiling is not nearly so low as the doorway down to the cellar, though I’ve never been claustrophobic. I think that cellar would be a claustrophobic’s nightmare. There are shelves heaped and crammed and sagging with the weight with all manner of junk dating back fuck knows how far — decades, more than a century, I can’t yet say. And then there’s the stuff that’s just been piled directly on the floor. I parked my chair near the foot of the stairs and tried not to think about rats, spiders, and toxic mold spores. I’m guessing it was no more than sixty degrees down there, so it was heaven, really, after the broiling oven that this house becomes every afternoon, every night. I ignored the musty air, the stink like dirt and mushrooms and wet newspapers, though it was genuinely cloying.
Anyway, after only a couple of hours, I grew bored with the novel — it really isn’t very good, worse than one of mine — and started poking around in the refuse. I think maybe an antiques dealer or a historian would have a field day down there. Then again, there’s so much accumulated filth and mildew, deposited in thick, tacky gray strata, perhaps anything of significant value is beyond salvaging at this point. However, I did come across an old manual typewriter buried beneath a bath towel on one of the shelves. The thing weighs, I don’t know, I’m guessing twenty or twenty-five pounds, though it was marketed in the forties as a portable. I found one like it on a website devoted to the history of typewriters. It’s a 1941 Quiet Deluxe portable, manufactured by the Royal Typewriter Company of Hartford (later known as the Royal McBee Typewriter Company) just like Hemingway used at his home in Key West. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” For Whom the Bell Tolls,and Death in the Afternoonwere all written on a Royal typewriter of this very same make and model. I saw one in mint condition online for $475, though the one from Blanchard’s cellar is, sadly, far from mint.
But it doestype fairly well, the keys only sticking now and then. Conveniently, there was also a padded manila envelope stored with it, containing several inked silk ribbons that fit the machine. The envelope is lying here beside me. It was shipped from a company called Vintage American Typers from a P.O. box in Burke, Virginia, to a Dr. Charles L. Harvey at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Rhode Island’s Kingston campus. The Burke postmark is dated January 12, 2003. More than five years ago. There was even a single page still in the typewriter’s carriage, a sheet of onionskin paper, cockled finish and all. I don’t know if you can even still buyonionskin paper. It makes me think of the Oxford English Dictionaryand Bibles and such. Anyway, the page reads as follows:
something distinctly Fortean about “bloody apple” affair, though I have searched through all four of Fort’s books and found no record of the tale in any of them, nor any variant of this phenomenon. Indeed, there is little to go on beyond the article in Yankee(collected in Austin N. Stevens’ Mysterious New England; Yankee Books, 1971), though the legend of the tainted “Mikes” appears well-known locally. This one certainly seems right up Mr. Fort’s alley, young boys biting into shiny red apples only to discover globules of blood at the cores. Also, there is an echo here of H. P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Colour Out of Space,” recalling the poisoned orchards of Nahum Gardner following the fall of a meteorite-like object on his farm. Indeed, Lovecraft might well have known of Franklin’s “bloody apples,” though I can find no direct evidence that he did. The tree from which the apples are said to have grown was purportedly felled by the Great New England Hurricane of 1938, so would have been extant in March 1927 when Lovecraft wrote his story (not published until September of that year, in Amazing Stories; Vol. 2, No. 6, pp. 557-67). In the absence of any document linking the “bloody apples” of the Micah
And yes, it just ends right there, with the name Micah,about halfway down the single-spaced page. However, I was fortunate to discover a copy of Mysterious New Englandat the library in Moosup, and, sure enough, the story is on page 156—“Franklin’s ‘Blood’ Apples” by Joseph A. Owens. It corroborates everything on the typed page, which I can only assume must have been written by the same Dr. Harvey to whom the package of ribbons was addressed back in 2003. A nice little mystery, something to take the edge off the monotony of the last month, yeah? Well, it gets better.
Remember that woman at the store on the Plain Woods Road, the one who thought I had a “right” to know about this place’s previous tenant, but then wouldn’t actually tellme what she was talking about? Well, after finding the typewriter and the envelope of ribbons, after reading that page, I put two and two together, whiz-bang, and figured that she must have been speaking of Dr. Charles Harvey, as I’d already been told by Blanchard that the house’s former tenant had been a professor at URI. It seemed an unlikely coincidence. Thatprofessor pretty much hadto be the same professor who’d written about the blood-filled apples. I googled the guy’s name and discovered that, yes, he did live here for almost three years, 2001 to 2003. Harvey was a folklorist and anthropologist with an interest in urban legends and occultism in the Maritime and New England. Born in Eugene, Oregon, in 1942, he received his doctoral from UC Berkeley in 1969. Dr. Harvey was on an extended sabbatical from the university, supposedly writing a book on the evolution and propagation of “fakelore” in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts when he died here,in Blanchard’s house, on August 7th, 2003. Well, no. Not actually inthe house, but on the property. The obits were sketchy on details, but it seems he hung himself from a tree somewhere within the boundaries of the Wight Farm. He’d divorced his wife years before, and his only daughter lives up in Maine. That’s the stuff I was able to glean from the internet. But I also phoned Blanchard this morning, to tell him I’d likely be a couple of days late on July’s rent (still waiting for that damned check from Germany), and, as tactfully as I could, I broached the subject of Charles Harvey. I made notes during the conversation, pretty much a word-for-word transcript of that part of the call: