But now, let us return to a number of similar occurrences here at the Wight Farm, some of which are clearly linked to the “red tree.”
Jesus, it’s got to be some kind of neurotic me sitting here transcribing this outlandish manuscript, a suicide’s obsession. Has it become my own obsession? In touching and reading these pages, in my trip to the tree and my exploration of the vast basement below the house, have I become infected by this same idée fixe? Has Constance’s “coyote” only exacerbated it? Did Harvey see coyotes of his own? I wonder. I need to stop and cook dinner, for myself, and for Constance, if she will come downstairs long enough to eat. But first, my dream from last night.
It’s nothing much, and anyone can see that it was plainly inspired by what Constance said, and what I later read in Harvey’s typescript.
I was outside, out back behind the house, not far from the steps. There was an amazing moon in the sky, the sort I always think of as a harvest moon — low and huge and a luminescent yellow orange, rising over Ramswool Pond and the red oak and everything else. I smelled smoke, and wondered if there was a forest fire, and I remember hearing a raucous chorus of birds — catbirds, robins, mockingbirds, jays — and thinking it was strange to hear so many song-birds at night. The air was cold, and my breath fogged. I turned to go back inside, and that’s when I spotted the pale figure of a woman crouched in the weeds at the edge of the yard. There was a very large dog with her. I won’t call it a coyote or a wolf. It just struck me as a very large dog. It licked her face, and, in return, she licked at its muzzle, and I realized then that the two of them — this woman and the dog — were lovers, and I felt suddenly ashamed, as though I’d been caught spying on some especially private moment.
The woman stood up, and though I think she’d been clothed when I first saw her, she was now entirely naked. The dog sniffed at the space between her thighs, and she stroked the top of its shaggy head. I started to say something, but then I saw the way her eyes shone red in the night. She was watching me now, and I realized that she looked a great deal like Amanda, but also a lot like Constance. Her face was the perfect amalgamation of their two faces.
She spoke, finally, and it surprised me, because I think perhaps I had assumed she was feral and so probably had never learned to talk. At least, not any language of men. The hound stopped snuffling her crotch and pricked its ears, listening as she spoke.
“There is another shore, you know,” she said, “upon the other side.” And in my dream, I recalled that earlier dream, me and Constance on the beach with the tempest at my back, and that she’d said those very same words.
The woman with the dog smiled then, and the teeth that filled her mouth were inhuman things. Then she turned and disappeared into the woods, though her companion peered at me a while longer before it also turned away and followed her. I woke sweating and disoriented, and I knew that I’d been crying in my sleep.
What she said, what Constance said in the earlier dream, I knew it was familiar. I googled it this morning. It’s Lewis Carroll, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,a line from the “Lobster Quadrille”:
“What matters it how far we go?” his scaly friend replied.
“There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Excerpt from ms. pages 108-14,The Red Tree by Dr. Charles L. Harvey:
Some authorities on the subject of criminology, in general, and, in particular, serial killers, consider there to be only two well-documented cases of “authentic” mass murderers dating from the 1920s. Earle Leonard Nelson, popularly dubbed “the Gorilla Killer” and “the Dark Strangler,” was a necrophile who killed more than twenty people (including an infant) between early 1926 and June of 1927. The notorious cannibal and pedophile Albert Hamilton Fish (also known, variously, as “the werewolf of Wysteria,” the “Gray Man,” and “the Brooklyn Vampire”) may have been far more prolific, if one trusts Fish’s own outrageous claims, which would place the number of children he murdered and/or sexually assaulted near four hundred by the time he was arrested in September 1930.
However, I have found no book on the phenomenon of serial killers that records the events at the Wight Farm between 1922 and 1925, even though they were reported at the time in local papers and are easy enough to verify by recourse to police and court records. And yet there seems to be a sort of cultural amnesia at work regarding the affair, and I have been unable to locate printed references to the bizarre murders committed by Joseph Fearing Olney (1888–1926) published any later than April 1927. The final accounts concern his suicide by hanging while awaiting trial for the killings, and the general consensus seems to have been that by taking his own life, Olney, in effect, confessed to the crimes and proved his guilt beyond any reasonable doubt. What follows here is merely an overview of the case, and the reader is referred to Appendix C for a much more complete account. [Of course, keep in mind Harvey never got around to writing those appendices. — SC]
Born in Peace Dale, RI, to the recently widowed wife of a Presbyterian minister, it is difficult to learn much about Joseph Olney’s life prior to his arrest by police in Foster on December 12, 1925. However, we do know that he was an exemplary student hoping to pursue a career in medicine, and that he briefly attended college in Boston before he was forced to leave school for financial reasons. Afterwards, Olney returned home to Peace Dale, where he worked in the same mill that had employed his paternal grandfather, and he remained with his mother until her death in 1918. Olney received only a very modest inheritance, primarily his parents’ small house on High Street.
In the winter of 1919, at the age of thirty-one, Joseph Olney sold the house and took a train west, first to Denver, then on to San Francisco, and then south to Los Angeles, living in cheap boardinghouses and occasionally working at odd jobs. An examination of his personal effects shortly after his arrest indicated that he’d spent part of this time attempting to write an obviously autobiographical novel about the life of a bright young man condemned by circumstance to follow in his father’s unremarkable footsteps. It is unclear whether any portion of this manuscript survived at the time of Olney’s arrest, and the title is not known. But he did manage to finish and sell two short stories during his years in California, both crime tales placed with the successful pulp magazine Black Mask(“Midnight in Salinas,” March 1920; “The Gun in the Drawer,” August 1920). He’d written several other stories in this vein, none of which were to see publication.