“What if it’s me, Sarah?” she asked. “What if doesn’t want me getting close?”
I stood up, my back popping loudly, painfully, and I took her arm. “Let’s go back,” I said again. “It’s just a tree. It doesn’t want anything, Constance. We’re hot and confused and scared, that’s all.”
She nodded slowly, and didn’t argue. I held her arm and softly urged her back the way we’d come. She took a bottle of water from the canvas tote bag, twisted the cap off, and when she was finished, passed it to me. The water was warm and tasted like plastic, but it made me feel just a little better. I remembered the sandwiches and apples and all the damned granola bars she’d packed; if we were lost, at least we wouldn’t starve right away.
“Come on,” she said, returning the water bottle to the tote. “I don’t want to be out here anymore. I need to be home now.”
“That makes two of us. But, please, do me a favor, and let’s not try to make a footrace of it, alright?”
“Fine. You go first,” she replied, and the tone of her voice, her voice and the circumstances combined, there was no way I could not think of some adolescent dare. An abandoned house, maybe, a door left ajar, hanging loose on rusted hinges, opening onto musty shadows and half light.You go first. I dare you. No, I double-dog dare you.I was always a sucker for dares.
“If you keep your head, when everyone about you is busy losing theirs,” I said, and began walking south again, following the trail back to the house.
“Who said that?” she asked, and pulled her arm free.
“I’m paraphrasing,” I replied.
“So who are you paraphrasing?”
“Rudyard Kipling,” I told her, though, at the time I was only half sure it was Kipling and not Disraeli.
“The same guy that wrote The Jungle Book?” she asked, and I knew Constance was talking merely to hear her own voice, to keep me talking, that she was busy trying to occupy her mind with anything mundane. “Mowgli and Baloo and Bagheera, right?”
“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 ask how 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 thinking it, 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 know we’re lost.”
“Seventy-five yards,” I reminded her. “Constance,no one gets 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 first time 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 become funny — tomorrow maybe, or next week — when we were safely out of these woods. When the inevitably obvious rational explanation had finally, mercifully,become obvious. 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 more than 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 allowed to 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.