Blanchard called at some ungodly hour this morning and woke me up to tell me he’s letting the upstairs, the attic, out to some artist from California. What the fuck? I think I actually said that to him. He pointed out that the lease permitted him to do so, that, as it happens, I’d only rented the downstairs portion of the house. I asked him to hold on while I read through the lease, and yeah, the bastard’s telling the truth. It’s right there, which is what I get for not bothering to read the things I sign before (or after) I sign them. He offered to let me out of my lease, like I have anywhere to go. I declined. I half think he wants me to leave. Likely, I’m just being paranoid, but maybe I shouldn’t have brought up the subject of the dearly departed Dr. Harvey. The woman arrives next fucking week. So much for solitude.
I have now typed everything from the notebook. It comes to sixty-five pages, all stacked neatly on the table beside me and the bottle of Jack I’ve been working on since yesterday. From here on, I’ll keep this journal — which is what it seems to have become — on the dead man’s typewriter and give my pens a rest. I had to drive all the way to Foster to get paper, a pack of five hundred sheets. So, I cannot type more than five hundred pages. Oh, and the woman, this painter from California, is named Constance Hopkins. My luck, she’ll be straight. Watch and see.
Spent most of the day in the basement, hiding from the heat and trying not to think about the imminent arrival of the dreaded attic lodger. Also, I got to thinking that just maybe, when Blanchard stowed the old typewriter and the envelope of ribbons down there, possibly he did the same with the anthropologist’s unfinished manuscript. So, hours spent picking through all the moldering junk. I tried to be systematic, beginning at the shelf where I found the typewriter. It wasn’t there, just empty Mason jars, cardboard boxes of grimy machine parts, a busted electric fan that surely must have dated back to the twenties, a plastic milk crate filled with bundled copper wiring, three broken claw hammers, and so forth. I moved from one slouching plywood and cinder-block shelf to the next, venturing deeper into the basement than I ever had before. After about an hour and a half, I came across a low archway of fieldstones and mortar, and realized it marked the northern periphery of the house, below the kitchen table. I shone my flashlight through the arch, and it was clear that more shelves, more boxes, more indistinguishable mountains of refuse, lay on the other side. I thought about giving up the search and heading back to the stairs. Surely, Blanchard would have put the manuscript near the typewriter, had he decided to keep the thing (which was beginning to seem unlikely). I lingered there at the place where the house ends, where the merely dank basement seemed to give way to a genuine clamminess. There was a draft, air that was not cool, but cold, cold and unpleasantly damp, leaking through the archway, and I spotted a rusty iron horseshoe mounted on the keystone. A few of the nails had come loose, and it was hanging down, not up, and the first thing I thought of was Blanchard’s question on the phone—“You’re not a superstitious woman, are you?” or however he phrased it. The remaining nail had a distinctly square head, so I’m guessing that horseshoe’s been up there quite some time. There was a red-brown ghost of rust on the granite from when it had hung with the two ends pointing upwards towards the ceiling, so the overall impression was of something like an hourglass. I thought of the red bellies of female black widow spiders, and tried to recall if they live as far north as Rhode Island. And then I remembered when Amanda and I went to England (a sort of working vacation), how she’d laughed at me because I wouldn’t follow her into some damned abandoned railway tunnel that she wanted to explore. I chickened out and let her go in alone. I looked it up online, the tunnel, before I started writing this entry; it was, in fact, the Morewell Tunnel at Tavistock in West Devon (N 50° 31.154 W 004° 09.997). It had been a passenger rail, closed down since the 1960s, and was overgrown when we visited. There was a gate you had to scale to get inside — to trespass,as I’d pointed out to Amanda. She made clucking noises and scrambled nimbly over the chain link.
“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.Are you 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 were symbols. 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 very superstitious 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.