Five down.

The birds are still singing, and I find their voices an odd comfort. But, right now, I’d give four fingers off my right hand for a cigarette and a cold beer. Sweat keeps running into my eyes. It must be at least eighty-five in this room. Eight-five or ninety, easy. I am waiting for a careless spark, and the oxygen in the air will instantly combust, and everything in the bedroom will mercifully be scorched to a cinder.

The sixth easel was on the far side of the air mattress, near a tiny dresser holding most of Constance’s clothes. I checked the drawers; her T-shirts and underwear and sweaters and socks were all still there, though the drawers were also stuffed with oak leaves. The sixth strip of newsprint read, “I can draw no line between imposture and self-deception.”

Which brings us to the end of this taut length of green fishing line, or to the point where Alice finally reached the bottom of her deep well. Seven. The final easel was standing a foot or two from the north dormer window. Before reading the piece of newspaper tacked to it, I glanced back towards the attic door, and was relieved to see that it had not swung shut. The seventh clipping read simply, “Out in open places there have been flows of a red liquid.” So, there.

And if that were all — these seven canvases and their cryptic commentaries — I would suggest the following: Constance brought the leaves in herself, and placed them all about the room, to frame what she’d conceived of as some bizarre minimalist installation. I hadn’t noticed, but so the hell what. I also hadn’t noticed her leaving the farm, leaving me alone here, but, again, so what. I miss a lot, and the past few days, I expect I might have missed more than usual. If this is where it all ended, I couldbe satisfied with such an explanation, and I’d not bother with the handful of unanswered questions. But it didn’tend here. I’m not certain, now, that it will ever end.

First, I saw the oak leaves. And then I inspected the seven canvases, each one bearing a single snippet taken from an old book or newspaper. Otherwise, the canvases were naked. And then they weren’t anymore.

Glancing towards the attic door again, and preparing to leave and go back downstairs, I saw that the change had occurred. I didn’t see it happen. That is, I did not catch the canvases in the act of metamorphosing, assuming that’s what they did. I’m trying, hard, to make no assumptions about process, or cause and effect, as I write this out. But assumptions are inevitable. And again, the shock to my senses that I would have expected to accompany such an event failed to take hold of me. I wasn’t horrified. I was not appalled. I didn’t become perceptibly more frightened than I had been before the seven paintings “appeared.”

I’m not even going to try describe all seven of the paintings. I saw them, and, for the most part, that’s sufficient. They were garish, grotesque things. I remember telling Constance that I know very little about paintings and painters, and that’s true. But these brought to mind the works of Francis Bacon, with whom I am familiar because Amanda was somewhat obsessed with him. But I’m certainly not knowledgeable enough to attempt to describe the style. I did look at the Wikipedia article on Bacon before I began writing this (I also checked my email, but there was nothing new there), and the images it included served to confirm my initial impression that the paintings in the attic are reminiscent of his style, especially Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion(1944), Head(1948), and Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X(1953) — more notes from the steno pad, by the way. I cannot say that I committed those titles to memory. The Wikipedia article states that Bacon’s “. . artwork is known for its bold, austere, and often grotesque or nightmarish imagery.”

I examined only one of the seven paintings from the attic closely. The last one that I’d come to (though it was blank when I reached it), the one propped on the easel near the north dormer window. The one that had, only moments before, held a strip of paper printed with a single sentence: “Out in open places there have been flows of a red liquid.”

The first thing I looked for was the artist’s signature, expecting to find Constance’s. Instead, in minute white brushstrokes I read “B. Hirsch ’19.” I think that I said her name aloud, then — Bettina Hirsch — the painter that Joseph Olney had fallen in love with during his time in Los Angeles, but who’d hung herself on Christmas Day 1920. The woman that had formed the focus of his mania regarding the red tree. The woman he’d done murder for, an unknown number of times, because he believed that she was being held captive by demons who lived beneath the tree.

As for the subject of the painting, near as I could tell it depicted the mutilated body of a woman, and at the time I thought she was meant to have been attacked and mauled by some sort of animal. I don’t know if that was the intention of the artist. The figure was rendered in shades of yellow, orange, and deep red, and she had been placed against a background that was primarily a dark brownish shade of purple. Eggplant, I suppose, or aubergine. Both the woman’s legs and both her arms were missing, and there were only what I took to be bloody stumps. Her jaw was hanging open, as though frozen in the act of screaming. The paint had been applied very thickly to the canvas, almost caked on in places. In fact, I had the impression that there might have been another, older painting hidden beneath the one I was seeing.

And still, I didn’t feel the chill up my spine or the possum across my grave or death breathing down my neck or whatever it is we are taught people are meant to experience under such conditions. I didn’t scream at the sight of a murdered rabbit. Perhaps, by this time, I was in shock, and maybe I still am. However, I did feel a distinct sense of revulsion. There was no fear to it, no dread. One does not feel afraid looking at crime-scene photos, or roadkill, or something left too long at the back of the refrigerator. Seeing it, I felt the need to wash my hands (though I didn’t touch the painting), more than I felt anything.

On my way out of the attic, I paused long enough to inspect another of the canvases, the one nearest to the door. It bore the same signature, but was dated 1917. I cannot say for sure what the artist had in mind, but I was reminded of an immense tree, crowned in crimson leaves, and watched over by a moon (or sun) the color of oatmeal. Bettina Hirsch mighthave placed a series of dancing figures about the base of the tree, or I might have only been seeing a few errant brushstrokes, or something intended as understory, bushes, weeds. But I didn’t look at any of the others. I left the attic and pulled the door shut behind me. I wanted to lock it, but I don’t have the key. I quickly descended the stairs, and for an hour or so I sat on the front porch, half expecting to see Constance emerge from the woods, or come walking across the little bridge over the stream that runs out of Ramswool Pond. I watched for her on the dirt road leading out to Barbs Hill Road.

And now, I think maybe I’ve had a change of heart. I think I do mean to leave this house. I can go to Providence, and it may be that, from a distance, I can begin to sort this out. Or forget it, if that’s possible. Either way, I don’t want to be here anymore.

I’ve just read back over my account of the dream of Amanda and Constance, Monday morning’s dream. And I see that Sarah is up to her old tricks again. Which is to say, I can’t begin to fathom why I bothered to add so much embellishment to what little I could truly remember. Half of it — at leasthalf — is simply made up. I understand why I once fabricated dreams for an insistent therapist, but why bother here? I can’t even say that I was lying to myself. I knew full well what I was doing when I did it. My best excuse would be to claim that it was some sort of defense mechanism kicking in, that I was falling back on the old habit of storytelling as a means of keeping myself calm or giving voice to fear, something of the sort. And having lied, it doesn’t mean that I was necessarily dishonest, any more than “Pony” is dishonest. I am usually at my most brutally forthright when making shit up. That’s the paradox of me. Regardless, seeing it now, all the parts of the dream I didn’tgenuinely dream, I find it annoying. Hell, I find this entry complaining about it annoying.