The nightmares that he had begun to suffer after his first visit to the tree grew more intense, and, in his writings, Olney claims that it was in the dreams, during his sleeping reunions with Bettina Hirsch in a cavern he believed to exist beneath the oak, that he was instructed by “dire beings” to commit the murders. He writes, on November 5th, 1922, following the first series of slayings:
“I cannot say what they are, these bestial men and women I have glimpsed in that hole. I cannot be sure, even, if they are beast or human beings, but suspect an unholy amalgam of the two. At times, I think they look like dogs born of human mothers, and at others, the human offspring of wolves. Below a high ceiling formed of earth and stone and the knotted, dangling roots of that evil tree, these crossbreed demons caper and howl and dance about bonfires, singing songs in infernal tongues unknown to me. Their eyes burn like embers drawn from those same fires, and she [Hirsch] insists that I watch it all, in order to see and fully comprehend the horrors of her captivity. They have their turns at her, both the male and female horrors, raping her, slicing her flesh with their sharp teeth, torturing her in ways I cannot bring myself to write down even by the light of day. And she tells me, again and again, that her freedom may be gained in only one way, by my making certain sacrifices of flesh and blood to these monsters. In exchange for the fruits of my sins, in time they will release her, and we can walk together beneath the sun. They require only the heads and, occasionally, other organs of the poor wretches I am driven to slaughter. As I have said already, I do not deliver these foul offerings during the dreams, of course, but in my waking hours. All must be buried about the circumference of the great oak, at a depth of not more than three feet. From these shallow graves, the demons retrieve their prizes, and then, during the nightmares, I have watched what they do with my gifts. Bettina says I must not waver in my determination, that I must remain strong, if she is to be given back to the surface, like Persephone after her abduction to the underworld by Hades. I understand. I do understand. I tell her this always. But I can see the fear in her face, and I can see, too, that she is becoming like her jailors, that she is slowly taking on aspects of their terrible form. She says this is because they force her to join in their feasts, and so she has become a cannibal. I tell her I am doing their awful work as quickly as I dare, but that I must be cautious, lest I am found out. If I am caught, she will never be freed.”
Indeed, it is difficult, when reading Olney’s journals, not to feel great sympathy for this man, driven to commit murder dozens of times over by these nocturnal visions of his beloved’s torment and imprisonment. To pick up on his allusion to Greek mythology, this mad-man has become a latter-day Orpheus charged with freeing his Eurydice, though by means incalculably more horrendous than those set forth by Virgil and Plato. In his fractured mind, Joseph Olney was left to choose between, on the one hand, becoming a monster himself and, on the other, allowing the monstrosities from his deliriums to slowly transform his dead lover into one of their own. Albert Fish might have claimed that he was charged by God to kill children, but in Fish’s claims there is not this conviction that another’s damnation hangs in the balance. I am, obviously, not here arguing that Olney’s crimes (or those of any such killer) can be justified, only that, if these “confessions” are genuine, that I cannot view him as an unfeeling fiend. He writes, repeatedly, of the almost unendurable remorse he feels after each kill, and on two separate occasions, he went so far as to write out letters of confession that he’d intended to mail to newspapers, and another he considered sending to a Roman Catholic bishop, in which he asked that someone “well trained in the dark arts required when combating evil spirits” be sent to intercede on his and Hirsch’s behalves. At no point does Olney seem to derive any sort of gratification from his activities.
There’s what seems to me a fairly glaring contradiction in all this. First, we have Bettina Hirsch described as “a willing party to it all,” intent upon her former lover’s induction into this bacchanalia of the damned. But,then we have her beseeching Olney to commit multiple murders because “. her freedom may be gained in only one way. certain sacrifices of flesh and blood to these monsters. In exchange for the fruits of my sins, in time they will release her. ” (Though, Harvey also says that Olney wrote he was told to murder by the “dire beings” he imagined lived below the tree.) I have no idea whether Harvey recognized these contradictions or not, and I have even less idea why I’m worrying over it all.
The last two days, Monday and Tuesday. I don’t even see how I can hope to write coherently about the last two days. They have come and gone, and they have changed everything, utterly, and yet, I understand, it is not a change of kind, but merely one of degree. Constance and I should have run. We should be far away from this place, but we’re not. We are here. I did try to get her to go. I tried even after she went back upstairs and locked herself in tight behind that attic door. But I’m getting ahead of myself, and, besides, maybe Constance knows something I’m too damn thick to fathom. It may be that it’s too late to leave, and it may be that it was too late weeks ago. Possibly, it was too late before I ever laid eyes on this house and the tree and Constance Hopkins, or even before Amanda’s death.
I find myself saying and writing things I would have found laughable only a few days ago. Maybe Constance knows all this stuff, already. She’s at the head of the class, the bright pupil, perhaps, and I’m sitting in the corner with my pointy hat, my nose pressed to a circle drawn upon the wall.
I am alone down here, in the stifling, insufferable heat (though a thunderstorm is brewing to the west, I think, and maybe there will be some relief there), and she’s upstairs. I am alone, but for my shabby, disordered thoughts and whatever mean comfort I can wring from the confidences I divulge to this typewriter, to the onionskin pages trapped in its carriage.
Thunder, just now. But I didn’t see any lightning.
What I’m going to write, this is how I remember it. This is the best I can do. It is, by necessity, a fictionalized recalling of the events. Of course, it’s been that way through this entire journal (and I must surely have said that already, at least once or twice or a hundred times). I cannot possibly remember even a third of the actual words, what was said and by whom and when, every single thing that was done and cannot now be undone. But that’s okay. That’s fine and dandy. I just have to get the point across, the broad strokes — the essential truth of it — putting some semblance of these things down here, so that they are held somewhere besides my mind (and, presumably, Constance’s mind, as well). My excuse for an “entry” yesterday, the long excerpt copied from Harvey’s manuscript, that was me avoiding this, sitting down to do the deed and then losing my nerve. But still needing, desperately, to type something, almost anything, even if it was something terrible that only made it that much more impossible to “look away” from what is happening here. At least, it forced me to not look away, all that shit I retyped about lunatic Joseph Olney and the women’s heads and limbs and livers and all that he buried around the oak. Looking back, it seems remarkably masochistic, but, then again, Amanda did always insist I am the sort who takes a grand, perverse pleasure in causing herself discomfort.