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No.
Fine. Then I’ll write it down.
I went to the attic, immediately after finishing the entry this morning. Twice, I called out for Constance, and twice, no one answered me. I knocked, to no avail, and so I knocked again, and harder. There was a moment of serious déjà vu,a moment when it might still have been Saturday morning, after I discovered the fishing line leading away from the back porch, but before I followed it to the red tree. Then I tried the knob, and found that it turned easily in my hand, and the spell was broken. The door was not locked against me, and I couldn’t help but recall what both Amanda and Constance had told me in the dream— Like all doors, it tends to swing open, and so care must be taken to mind the hinges and the latch.
A door, a tree, a hole for a white rabbit and a middle-aged novelist. Six of one, half dozen of the other.
In a another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.
The rabbit hole went straight on like a tu
We speak in whimsy, or to children, and it all appears so uncomplicated, no matter how outlandish or monstrous a given scene may be. Me, I can’t even seem to manage the tongue of madness without constant recourse to the perspective of reason, though I know it’s long since ceased to be pertinent to my situation and circumstances.
I turned the knob, and the attic door swung open wide. And the cool air that I am so used to greeting me when Constance opens her door wasn’tthere to greet me. And instead of the smell of painting, there was a dank, shut-away odor, and, beneath that, the heady stink of decaying vegetation. I covered my mouth with my hand, with my right hand, and stepped into the attic. I left the door standing open.
The rabbit hole went straight on like a tu
The attic was not dark, but, as usual for so early in the day, brightly lit by the sun shining in through the small, high windows. Constance told me more than once that the morning light was one reason she was happy with her garret. So, I can’t dismiss what I saw there as a trick of shadow, an illusion created by a chiaroscuro conspiracy of half-light and poor eyesight. I ca
There was no one in the attic, no one but me, and the floor, and every other horizontal surface, was hidden beneath a thick blanket of green oak leaves. They were identical to the three I found in my room in July, and identical to those that grow on the tree near Ramswool Pond. They were not the least bit brittle or wilted. They appeared to have come freshly from the tree, or from some other tree of the same species. I didn’t scream. I didn’t even gasp. I think that I was expecting something,even if I could not have said what form that something might assume. I bent down and picked up one of the leaves, as though I needed to touch it, to holdit, to inspect the fine network of veins embedded within the pith, in order to verify that the leaves were real. But I must have known they were. I must have known that on some intuitive level as soon as I saw them, even if it took a bit for my conscious, doubting mind to catch up. The sunlight shone through the leaf, making it appear to glow.
So far as I can tell, none of Constance’s belongings had been removed. The leaves covered over everything — her bed, the floor, her portable stereo, the books, clothes that had been left lying on the floor, the few pieces of furniture that Blanchard had supplied, everything.
Words fail. I’ve been sitting here staring at the typewriter, and at my reflection in the dressing table mirror, for the last fifteen minutes, trying to compose the next sentence in my head. Trying to find the words. Outside, birds are singing as though this were any other day. I can pick out the songs of catbirds, cardinals, jays, wrens, a crow or two farther away. And, of course, this isany other day.
First, I saw the leaves.
And then I saw the canvases. There were seven of them, arranged about the attic on seven wooden easels. They were not particularly large canvases, measuring maybe two feet by a foot and a half. All seven were blank, except for a single strip of paper that had been pi
She took down a jar from one of the shelves as she passed; it was labeled “ORANGE MARMALADE,” but to her great disappointment it was empty: she did not like to drop the jar for fear of killing somebody, so managed to put it into one of the cupboards as she fell past it.
The first strip of paper read simply, “By Evil, I mean that which makes us useful.”
I admit that I stared very closely at that first canvas, unable to accept its blankness as genuine blankness. I could not stop thinking of Constance’s hands and arms and face and her black smocks, always smeared with paint. But no matter how carefully I inspected the canvas, it was completely empty, save the newspaper clipping. The coarse fabric had not even been given a primer coat that it might eventually receive and hold paint.
The next canvas was the same, only the clipping read, “Places with white frogs in them.”
And on the third easel, standing very close to Constance’s leaf-covered air mattress, was a blank canvas and a clipping that read, “Good in our experience is continuous with, or is only another aspect of evil.”
I am not,by the way, recounting these lines from memory. I would never have remembered a third of them. There was (too conveniently, I thought) a stenographer’s pad lying open on one of the windowsills, and a sharpened No. 2 pencil. Both were partly hidden beneath the oak leaves, but when I happened to spot them — halfway through the canvases — I backtracked and copied the text into the notepad. It’s lying here on the dressing table beside the typewriter.
The strip of paper affixed to the third canvas read, “Angels. Hordes upon hordes of them.”
I lingered, reading that line aloud several times, not wanting to proceed to the fourth, and my mind drew co
There were doors all round the hall, but they were all locked; and when Alice had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every door, she walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to get out again.
At the fourth easel, which was set up in front of the south-facing dormer, was a scrap of newsprint reading, “Or the loves of the worlds. The call they feel for one another. They try to move closer and howl when they get there.” The fifth canvas was placed so that it faced the wall, and I had to turn the easel about myself to read what had been tacked to it: “I have seen two of the carcasses, myself, and can say definitely that it is impossible for it to be the work of a dog. Dogs are not vampires, and do not suck the blood of a sheep, and leave the flesh almost untouched.” Among the bits of paper on the canvases, this one is conspicuous, not only for being the most wordy, but also because someone had bothered to note its source. Written in sepia-colored ink in a spidery hand, I read, “ London Daily Mail,Nov. 1, 1905.”