“All right,” she’d said. “But if I break my neck, you’re to blame.”
I think I told her to get bent, go fuck herself, something like that. Words that only made her laugh harder, her laughter echoing off the tunnel walls as she vanished from sight. That day, the tunnel entrance struck me as an open mouth — the most obvious analogy possible, I suppose. Specifically, I thought of the gaping, open mouths of predatory water things, like snapping turtles and anglerfish, lying in wait for a curious, tasty morsel to come along and have a look inside before those jaws slammed closed. I stood there shivering, while the miserable English sky drizzled, waiting for the tunnel to snap shut. Areyou superstitious, Sarah Crowe? Maybe just a little?
Anyway, the memory of Amanda mocking me that day was enough to get me moving again and through the cellar archway, past that horseshoe, that rust hourglass. The temperature seemed to drop a good ten degrees, and the hard-packed dirt floor gave way to a somewhat muddy, uneven floor, with native rocks showing through, here and there. I shone the flashlight at the ceiling. It was a foot or so lower than in the basement proper, and countless roots and rootlets had penetrated from above, giving it an ugly, hairy appearance.
There was a rough-hewn stone threshold, too, dividing those portions of the basement to the south and north of the archway. It wasn’t granite or schist or phyllite or whatever, but some dark, slaty rock that reminded me of the older headstones I’ve seen in local cemeteries, the picturesque ones dating back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I kneeled down for a better look, playing the incandescent beam over the stone. I’m going to have to go back with my camera and get some photographs. The damned thing is inscribed with an assortment of crude designs. At first glance, I thought I was just seeing graffiti. Maybe something Blanchard’s kids or grandkids had done, or something done, who knows, a hundred, two hundred years ago by someone else’s kids. But I quickly recognized a few of the symbols, that they weresymbols. Astrological, alchemical, Cabbalistic — really a nonsensical jumble, which put me in mind of the hexes you can still see painted on barns in Pennsylvania’s Dutch Country. The planetary symbol for both Pluto and Jupiter, various presumably Christian crosses and Hindu swastikas, letters from the Hebrew alphabet, a pentagram — a hodgepodge, as though either some verysuperstitious person had decided to cover all of his or her bases, or, more likely, a teenager armed with a book on the occult. And yeah, sure, I can admit that it gave me the creeps, and yeah, I can also admit I had second thoughts about exploring the darkness beyond the horseshoe-guarded archway. I’m a big girl, and I can admit when something gives me the heebies. And when I’m being silly. But there was Amanda, the fucking ghost of Amanda, my goddamn memories of her standing in the maw of the Morewell Tunnel, laughing at me. I turned away from the threshold, turning, I noted, towards Ramswool Pond, and let the light play across this newfound vacuity below the old farmstead.
I do not believe, at this point, that I was still searching for Dr. Harvey’s manuscript. I think, more likely, I was only trying to show myself that Amanda had been wrong all along. That day in Tavistock, and all those other days and nights. I was notafraid of the dark, or of the hunger of abandoned places, or, for that matter, of anything else that she might have accused me of. That she is dead (there, I’ve said it, I’ve writtenit), and so would always have the last laugh as regards all these little grudges and jabs, hardly seemed relevant. It was not in vain, because if I was proving something to Amanda, I was also proving something to myself. Jesus fuck, Amanda. No one we knew ever believed that there was anything between us but the sex and some virulent allure, my dirty dishwater circling the drain of you. Not a very pretty comparison, but maybe it’s the best we’ll ever deserve, either one of us. Anyway, I went into that stinking, muddy darkness because, once upon a time, she thought I was a coward. Two little girls bickering because neither of us ever learned to love, and this was my latest chance to give you the finger, Amanda, posthumous though it may be.
The ground made a soft, squelching sound beneath my sneakers, and I slipped once or twice, almost falling. I hastily looked over the contents of the shelf nearest the archway, which held very little besides row after row of ancient canned goods (mostly cucumber pickles, I think, but the fuzzy clots of mold in the jars made it hard to be sure) and disintegrating bales of The Farmer’s Almanacand Field and Stream. I paused, shining my light north, towards the place where the darkness ought to have ended in another wall, probably earthen. But the batteries were getting weak, and the beam would not penetrate that far, however far that might be. And this is when I saw the grimy chifforobe missing all its drawers, sitting just a few feet farther in, and on top of it was a cardboard box, not so different from the manuscript boxes I get from Staples or Office Depot. I grabbed it, suddenly wishing to be anywhere at all but that slimy hole in the world, wanting to be outside, beneath the summer sun again. Better the sweat and glare and stifling, relentless heat than that clinging damp and darkness. I tripped climbing the stairs and have a nice yellow-green bruise on my left shin to show for it. I’m sure, if Amanda hada soul, and if it somehow survived her body, she was cackling at panicked, fraidy-cat me from whichever afterlife or underworld she’s consigned herself. I bolted the basement door behind me, and sat down on the floor. I actually kicked the cellar door hard, two or three times, leaving muddy footprints that I’m gonna have to wash away. I thought for a moment I was going to knock the goddamned thing off its hinges. It was all anger, the force behind those kicks — anger at my own kid fears and my memories and Amanda’s suicide and the goddamn overdue novel I’m not getting written. I lay on the floor a while, grateful for the muggy kitchen, the stagnant air that did not stink of mold. I lay there until my heart stopped racing. And then I sat up and looked inside the box.
It was taped shut, but most of the adhesive had dried out long ago, and I didn’t need a knife to get it open. Inside was page after page of the same onionskin paper I’d found in the Royal’s carriage, and so there I was, returned fucking victorious from my own personal katabasis, Hecate back from the bloody bowels of hell with rescued Persephone, what the fuck ever. I’d done the deed, and now I held the prize, and seeing it there, my fury quickly, calmly, melted away. Not caring that my dirty fingers would leave smudges, I lifted the first page from the box, and then the second, and then the third, reading over them as quickly as I could. After maybe ten or fifteen minutes, I finally had the presence of mind to get up and carry the box to the kitchen table, where, after half a decade, I reunited it with Harvey’s typewriter.
I got a beer from the refrigerator (because, already, the heat was feeling a lot less welcome than I’d imagined it would be while I was still in the basement) and then sat down to reread, more carefully, those first few pages. The first was simply a title page — THE RED TREE by Dr. Charles L. Harvey and all that. The usual. The second page was occupied by two epigraphs, one from Thoreau, the other from Seneca the Elder. Neither meant very much to me, but perhaps they will later, once I’ve had a chance to get through the manuscript. The third page was blank, but the fourth bore the heading — CHAPTER ONE: THE CURSED ACORN — only THE CURSED ACORN was crossed out
