The Red Tree Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  EDITOR’S PREFACE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  PONY

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  EDITOR’S POSTSCRIPT

  THE END

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY

  “[Caitlín R. Kiernan has] a gift for language that borders on the scary. Deeply, wonderfully, magnificently nasty.”—Neil Gaiman

  Praise for the Novels of Caitlín R. Kiernan

  Daughter of Hounds

  “Kiernan’s handling of underworld figures is impressive, and this book proves she’s as adept at writing crime as she is dark fantasy. . . . A thrilling page-turner that also features the depth, complexity, and unflinching willingness to contemplate the dark that we’ve come to expect from her books.”—Locus

  “A hell-raising dark fantasy replete with ghouls, changelings, and eerie intimations of a macabre otherworld. . . . The complex plot springs abundant surprises . . . on its juggernaut roll to a memorable finale . . . an effective mix of atmosphere and action.”—Publishers Weekly

  “Kiernan’s storytelling is stellar, and the misunderstandings and lies of stories within the main story evoke a satisfying tension in the characters.” —Booklist

  “Caitlín R. Kiernan pays homage to Lovecraft in the scary Daughter of Hounds. There is a sense of the foreboding Gothic that creeps out the audience and the antagonists who set much of the pace seem freaky and deadly. Reminiscent of Poppy Z. Brite’s darkest thrillers, Ms. Kiernan provides Goth horror fans with a suspense-laden tale that keeps readers’ attention.”—Midwest Book Review

  “Kiernan’s writing is what really makes the book special. . . . [It’s] best described as ‘What if John Bellairs had written Pulp Fiction?’ Erudite discussions and entrancing descriptions intertwine with snappy, punchy dialogue that is as often as not laced with Tarantino-esque rhythmic profanity. All of this adds up to a pretty explosive and captivating read . . . highly recommended.”—Green Man Review

  “Readers who like their Lovecraft armed to the teeth, dressed in black leather and ready to rumble had best get crackin’ on down to the bookstore before said beings yank this title off the shelves.

  “Kiernan more than most has a handle on what Lovecraft did and did well. Kiernan knows how to conjure the outside, the ancient, those forces that are so different from us so as to cause madness. She started her journey into an unknowable past with Threshold, and with each successive novel she’s become better and better at conjuring both the actions and the emotions—or lack thereof—of those who encounter it. To my mind, Daughter of Hounds is her best yet, one of those novels where you can pick it up and open it to almost any page and find yourself immersed in images that summon the outer darkness into your snug little life.

  “But Daughter of Hounds does a lot more than just bring on the deep chills. Kiernan’s really, really furious this time around. Kiernan is always good at the slow-burning prose, the kind of coiled power that one might imagine comes from swallowing fishhooks. Daughter of Hounds displays her skill at creating a densely layered and carefully orchestrated plot, chockablock with lots of hideous monsters and scenes of incipient madness. . . . Her work does bring to mind the sorts of terror that are eating up our world, bit by bit, bite by bite.”—The Agony Column

  “Kiernan has a superb hand in writing detailed and extremely heart-pounding fight scenes and I admit to not being able to stop the pages from turning. The descriptions of the areas in which the readers found themselves were astounding and the meticulous bits of flavor given to the simplest of tasks were mind-bending.”—Book Fetish

  Murder of Angels

  “I love a book like this that happily blends genres, highlighting the best from each, but delivering them in new configurations. . . . In Murder of Angels, the darkness is poetic, the fantasy is gritty, and the real-world sections are rooted in deep and true emotions. Lyrical and earthy, Murder of Angels is that rare book that gets everything right.”

  —Charles de Lint

  “[Kiernan’s] punk-rock prose, and the brutally realistic portrayal of addiction and mental illness, makes Angels fly.”

  —Entertainment Weekly (A-)

  Low Red Moon

  “The story is fast-paced, emotionally wrenching, and thoroughly captivating. . . . Kiernan only grows in versatility, and readers should continue to expect great things from her.”—Locus

  “Low Red Moon fully unleashes the hounds of horror, and the read is eerie and breathtaking. . . . The familiar caveat ‘not for the faint of heart’ is appropriate here—the novel is one of sustained dread punctuated by explosions of unmitigated terror.”—Irish Literary Review

  Threshold

  “Threshold is a bonfire proclaiming Caitlín Kiernan’s elevated position in the annals of contemporary literature. It is an exceptional novel you mustn’t miss. Highly recommended.”—Cemetery Dance

  “Threshold confirms Kiernan’s reputation as one of dark fiction’s premier stylists. Her poetic descriptions ring true and evoke a sense of cosmic dread to rival Lovecraft. Her writing envelops the reader in a fog concealing barely glimpsed horrors that frighten all the more for being just out of sight.”—Gauntlet Magazine

  Silk

  Winner of the International Horror

  Guild Award for Best First Novel

  Finalist for the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel

  Nominated for the British Fantasy Award

  “[Kiernan’s] tightly focused, unsparing, entranced gaze finds significance and beauty in the landscape it surveys.”—Peter Straub

  “A remarkable novel . . . deeply, wonderfully, magnificently nasty.”

  —Neil Gaiman

  “A daring vision and an extraordinary achievement.”—Clive Barker

  NOVELS BY CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

  Silk

  Threshold

  Low Red Moon

  Murder of Angels

  Daughter of Hounds

  The Red Tree

  ROC

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, August

  Copyright © Caitlín R. Kiernan, 2009

  All rights reserved

  “Pony” was previously published in Tales from the Woeful Platypus (Subterranean Press, 2007).

  Epistolae morales ad Lucilium transl
ation copyright © Sonya Taaffe, 2009

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Kiernan, Caitlín R.

  The red tree/Caitlín R. Kiernan. p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-10198-8

  1. Manuscripts—Fiction. 2. Trees—Fiction. 3. Psychological fiction. [1. Rhode

  Island—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PS3561.I358R43 2009

  813’.54—dc22 2009015105

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Dr. Richard B. Pollnac and Carol Hanson Pollnac,

  for making this novel possible.

  In memory of Elizabeth Tillman Aldridge (1970-1995).

  Sic transit gloria mundi.

  “The true harvest of my life is intangible—a little star dust caught, a portion of the rainbow I have clutched.” Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or, A Life in the Woods (1854)

  “If ever you have happened on a grove set close with ancient trees grown beyond the common height, the pleaching of their branches one upon the other screening out sight of the sky, that loftiness of forest and solitude of place and sense of wonder at so dense and undisturbed a shade out in the open, will convince you of the presence of a god.”

  Seneca the Elder, Epistolae morales ad Lucilium (CE 64)

  EDITOR’S PREFACE

  I have visited the old Wight Farm and its “red tree,” there where the house squats ancient and neglected below the bogs that lie at the southern edge of Ramswool Pond. So, I have been. I have seen it for myself, but just once. Having accepted the task of editing The Red Tree for posthumous publication, it seemed, somehow, like a necessary pilgrimage. A sort of duty, required of me if I were to gain any insight at all into Sarah Crowe’s state of mind in those last months of her life. So, I went, and I even went alone.

  I made the drive up from Manhattan in the spring, many months after receiving the typescript. The day was bright and crisp, a cider day in late April, the sky laid out wide and blue, and the land just beginning to go green with the first signs of spring. There was nothing the least bit foreboding about that day, but already my expectations had been colored by the pages of a suicide’s long ordeal and confession, and by the “secret history” of the Wight place that Sarah had discovered in yet another manuscript, this one having purportedly been left behind by the farmhouse’s previous tenant, a man who, as it happens, had also died there, half a decade before her arrival. The day of my visit fell, almost precisely, one year subsequent to Sarah’s arrival at the farm in April of 2008.

  I will endeavor to keep this brief, as it is not my story being told here. I am, at most, that story’s reluctant caretaker.

  After an early lunch in Providence with a college acquaintance I’d not seen in some time, I took Route 6 west out of the city, past North Scituate, then, at the intersection with State 102, I turned south, through Chopmist and Rockland, crossing the Ponaganset River where it spills into the great gullet of the Scituate Reservoir, then drove on to Clayville and the Plainfield Pike. At the Providence- Kent county line, I turned northwest onto Moosup Valley Road. I was unfamiliar with this part of the state—I largely still am—and allowed myself to spend an hour or so looking about a couple of cemeteries in Moosup and the old church (ca 1864-1865) now claimed by a congregation of the United Church of Christ. I also had a look about the Grange Hall and the Tyler Free Library (the latter, ca 1896-1900), before continuing on to the intersection with Barbs Hill Road, just west of town.

  The road is kept up moderately well, as there are many homes and farms spread out along its length, but it does change over from asphalt to “tar-and-chip” almost immediately. The turnoff to the Wight Farm is located just past a small pond, no more than a sixth of a mile from the north end of Barbs Hill Road. Surprisingly, unlike many of the assorted side roads, driveways, and footpaths, it isn’t gated. I’d rented a Jeep Cherokee for the trip; otherwise, I’d never have made it much farther than the Blanchard place. The Blanchard family has owned the Wight Farm since 1979, and I’d cleared my visit with them the week before, explaining that I was editing Sarah Crowe’s final book and needed to see the house where she’d lived while writing it, which also happened to be the house where she’d died. Mr. Samson Blanchard, her former landlord, was neither as curious nor as suspicious as I’d expected from my scant, secondhand knowledge of the Yankees of western Rhode Island. I gave him my publisher’s contact information, but, later, I’d discover that he never even made the call. I credit this, in part, to the fact that the Blanchards suffered virtually no media attention following Sarah’s death. And, oddly (or so it seems to me), there is little evidence that local teens and other curiosity seekers have targeted the Wight Farm for nightly visitations, vandalism, or, to employ the vernacular of folklorists, “legend-tripping.”1 Indeed, given local traditions of ghosts, witches, and even vampires,2 I find the general absence of “urban myth” surrounding the farm nothing short of remarkable.

  The afternoon was growing late as I bumped and bounced my way along the narrow, winding path leading south and east through the woods to the Wight place. I couldn’t drive the whole way, as the road dead-ends and there’s a turnaround less than two hundred feet from the house itself. I parked there, then crossed an alarmingly rickety wooden bridge on foot. It fords the unnamed creek that flows out of Ramswool Pond, joining other streams off towards Vaughn’s Hollow, before finally emptying into Briggs Pond after half a mile or so. Most of the trees here are oak, of one sort or another, interspersed with white pine, hickory, and red maple, and they threw long shadows across the clear, slow-moving water. The weedy banks were thick with reeking growths of skunk cabbage, the fleshy, purplish flowers open to attract bees and stoneflies. I noted the fading daylight, the late hour, and so walked quickly on to the house itself.

  I wish I could say that during the two hours I spent poking about the place I felt some disquieting supernatural presence, a demonic or preternatural threat, or that I witnessed anything at all I am now unable to explain. I’m sure, if I had, this would make a far more interesting and satisfying preface to what follows. But the truth is, I didn’t. Beyond a general air of loneliness and the dim melancholy that such locales have always elicited from me, I didn’t feel much at all. I had honestly expected to find the visit unnerving, and had even considered delaying it a week until my husband could accompany me.

  Mr. Blanchard had mailed me the keys to the house, and I went inside and walked through all the rooms of the house, one by one. It was still furnished with an assortment of antiques and junk, just as it had been when Sarah took up residence there. I saw the manual typewriter she’d produced her manuscript on, the same typewriter that had supposedly been used to type out the older manuscript she’d eventually found. I went up to the small attic, which, according to Sarah, was used that summer as a studio by the painter Constanc
e Hopkins, before Hopkins returned to Los Angeles.3 The house was cold and dank and smelled musty, but no more or less so than any very old house built on such boggy land would after standing uninhabited for so many months.

  I did not enter the enormous basement, as I’d forgotten to bring a flashlight, and Blanchard had not gone to the trouble and expense of having the power turned on just for the sake of my brief visit. However, I will say that I very much wanted to go down those flimsy stairs and see how much truth there was (or wasn’t) to what Sarah had written about the space below the house. It seems, to me, to lie very much at the heart of the matter. I stood at the basement door, and I even opened it, gazing down into that solid, formidable darkness, smelling the fetid air wafting up from below. But I am not the least bit ashamed to admit you couldn’t have paid me enough to make that descent alone. The basement is a mystery I will leave for someone else to answer, some more intrepid soul, a would-be Lara Croft or Indiana Jones.

  After the house, I peeked into the sagging, dilapidated barn, and a couple of the other outbuildings, before following one of the fieldstone walls seventy-five yards or so to that enormous red oak4 that had formed so much of Sarah Crowe’s fatal obsession. Along the way, I noted that a break in the wall, mentioned repeatedly by Sarah, had recently been repaired. Far more than the house and the surrounding landscape, the tree, and what I found near it, made an impression on me. To whatever degree she might have hallucinated, imagined or exaggerated her experiences at the Wight Farm, I can say with certainty that she did not overstate the imposing presence of this one tree. It stands at least a hundred and thirty feet tall, and at the base its trunk is easily six feet in diameter,5 dwarfing all other trees in the vicinity. I will not here waste time describing the tree itself, as Sarah’s manuscript does a far better job of that than I ever could. The branches seemed very stark that day, very grimly drawn against that April sky, despite a cheery spray of new leaves coming in. But, again, I’d cite my expectations, more than any objective attribute of the tree itself, as the source of this impression. Here and there, names and dates had been carved into the bark. The oldest that I spotted was from 1888 (which Sarah also mentions), but there may well have been much older graffiti that I missed.