The Orchard (1986)
Charles L. Grant (1942-2006)
Readers unfamiliar with The Orchard may prefer to read these notes only after reading the collection.
The Orchard presents four interconnected novellas. Each in some way relates to a blighted orchard on the outskirts of Oxrun Station, CT. Whatever exists in the orchard, reaching out in myriad ways to affect the protagonists, is inexplicable: or, at least never explained. Yet the orchard’s effects in four cases capably fill the reader with a creeping dread.
Grant allows us to parse the orchard as culprit; but also four -- or more -- human minds.
Prologue
The Orchard’s prologue is a first-person description of the accursed field, radioactive with menace for visitors.
If there had ever been a farmhouse, substantial or not, it is gone—roof, walls, and foundation; if there had ever been a barn, a shed, outbuildings of any kind, they are gone as well, battered into the rocky soil or turned to wind-chased ash in the aftermath of a fire. No fence. No well. Not even a rutted road a wagon might have taken from the markets in the village. And the field that might once have been the site of high-growing corn, perhaps a green bed of alfalfa, perhaps lettuce rows or cabbage, is derelict now, and has been so for at least a century, if not more. Grasses whip-sharp and thin fill the furrows that are left, shrubs dream of being trees, and here and there for color an evergreen that has escaped being cut down for indoor use at Christmas. Dogs never run here, and cats seldom prowl, leaving the brown and green landscape to the insects and the crows.
To get there is easy: you cross Mainland Road, climb down and up a wide drainage ditch, then hunt for a decent gap in the wild thorned hedge that hides the land from the highway, and Oxrun Station beyond. Once through, and into the field, it remains a matter of not tripping over dead branches from trees you never saw, of avoiding the burrows that look to snare your ankles, of dodging the occasional hornet and slapping at gnats when the sun is near to setting.
Burrs cling to trousers, twigs snap under heels, and winter-raised rocks look to rob you of your balance.
Every so often, from somewhere just on the other side of my peripheral vision, I thought I saw a rabbit, stock-still, ears pricked, but turning showed me nothing but hillocks and tangled weeds. I even imagined a fox charging through the grass toward its den, pursued by a black hound—and that’s when I decided that old man Armstrong, whoever he was, was right in leaving this place. It didn’t hold dreams and it didn’t hold nightmares, but in spite of the noise of the traffic behind me and the growl of an airliner stalking the blue above, it created images behind my eyes that I didn’t want to see, didn’t want to explore.
I shivered for no other reason than it felt right at the time, pushed my hands deep into the pockets of my worn denim jacket, and pushed on, using my knees to hack through those overgrown places I couldn’t go around, telling myself for slim comfort this was the way the pioneers had done it, this was how it was when the village was born.
How nice for them, I thought glumly; no wonder they’re all dead.
By the time I had gone a hundred yards, I felt as if I had been lifting weights all my life without benefit of pause, and I was damning those pioneers for coming here at all.
Our narrator walks the Armstrong property with Abe Stockton, Oxrun Station police chief. Stockton descends from the Station's pioneer settlers.
He has in fact, told me a lot of things over the two decades I’ve known him, much of which I’ve used in one form or another to chronicle the village’s time, none of which he’s told to anyone but me.
Which was why, now, we were going to the orchard.
“You gotta see it to believe it,” he said to me yesterday afternoon, between prolonged bouts of coughing that turned his pale face red and tore his lungs apart. “Nothing I say is gonna make sense until you see it for yourself.”
“But I have,” I told him, thinking of the work I hadn't done and had to get back to soon before the creditors decided to set up camp on my lawn. “I’ve been there a couple of times, as a matter of fact.”
“Not with me, you haven’t.” And that sealed it; I was going.
“My Mary's Asleep” begins with narrator Herb – a poetic soul, but obese – mooning over Mary, a friend in their suburban campus social circle whom he loves. Poor sap.
I don’t remember whose idea it first was, but after enduring nearly a full month of final-exam threats from cackling professors and sadistic young instructors who knew all the right words to set terror on our heels, it didn’t matter. We had to get away. It was Friday, and we had to try to pretend we really didn’t give a damn, that it was all going to be a snap and graduation with honors was only a matter of killing the next year without getting arrested.
We decided to have our picnic on the deserted Armstrong farm, in the shade of the orchard that didn’t grow anything anymore.
What the hell—we were in college and didn’t know any better.
Grant's horror stories follow protagonists from their wrong-readings of reality. Will they live long enough to learn better? Herb will not, though in the week after the visit to Armstrong's orchard, he and his college friends will achieve a level of higher confusion and tragedy indistinguishable from abject and Aickmanesque undecidability.
“Heraldry which reaches to the onset of modernity is a zoology. Unicorns support royal arms and wait in wardrobes.”
--George Steiner, “Of Man and Beast”
"I See Her Sweet And Fair" is a powerful work of erotic horror. The acknowledged and unacknowledged carnal desires of its teenage women and men, and of adults old enough to be their parents, shatter several families.
Detective Brett Gilman of the Oxrun Station P.D. is living a life of multiple, overlapping frustrations and miseries. His relationship with teenage son Leslie is poisoned by sexual jealousy. His romantic life is split between two masterful women. And Leslie has become the prime suspect in the killing of two young women. No wonder Gilman daydreams about joining the French Foreign Legion.
Trouble is again met in Armstrong's orchard. When -- on separate nighttime visits -- Leslie and Brett are lured there, a shape-taking is imminent at the treeline and the edge of moonlit vision.
High school student Amy Niles, a survivor of the disaster depicted in “My Mary's Asleep,” entices Brett to the orchard. Their encounter braids the taboo and erotic.
“I wanted, when I was a little girl, to put my head in a unicorn’s lap, or have a prince climb a tower and save me, or have some movie star come up and take me away in his limousine.” Another laugh, cold and without mirth. “Miss Quarell says I have to be careful what I dream...."
As close as the length of a finger, she looked into his eyes and he dared not look away. A hand pushed away a trailing lock of her hair, and her lips began to twist into a one-sided smile.
“He’s afraid of you, you know.”
“Who?” he said, his voice harsh and strained. Closer, and he could feel her naked stomach push gently against his belt.
“Leslie, who else? He thinks you’re going to arrest him because you think he’s a killer.” She giggled, and her tongue brushed pink across her lips. “He wants to run away, Mr. Gilman. And he wants me to go with him.”
He grabbed her waist angrily to shove her aside; she clapped her palms to his cheeks, pulled his face down, and kissed him hard, thrust her hips into his before twisting away
“He’s not yours anymore,” she said, starting to run. “He isn’t. He’s mine.”
Miss Quarell -- Denise, a local banker -- is one of Brett's two second-wife choices. Her secret tutelage of both Amy and Leslie is the bedrock of crisis in "I See Her Sweet And Fair."
Her own orchard showdown with Brett begins:
“I dreamed and dreamed so goddamned hard,” was the whisper out of the dark, out of the fog, “that it came just like it should have, and it put its head in my lap.”
(It is worth noting that young Amy's dream was to rest her head in a unicorn's lap, while Denise's dream is to have the unicorn in her own lap.)
“Didn’t you ever wonder,” Denise said, kneeling just out of reach, “why all the pictures, all those tapestries, show men hunting them with weapons, why dogs had to be used if they were so gentle?
"I See Her Sweet And Fair" is a textured and nuanced novella. Grant's mastery is confirmed by the fact that a unicorn (as deus ex machina) is a terrifying shock revelation, one that perfectly meshes in the narrative's logic. Originating in dreams and wishes, it fulfills teenage and adult desires in a purely negative way. Only Oxrun Station's first female cop, Victoria Redding -- not coincidentally, the other candidate to be the next Mrs. Brett Gilman -- can break its pattern of impaling Denise's sexual rivals.
Like the immersions of sex itself, this climax is more mind-over-tulpa than mind-over-matter.
“The Last and Dreadful Hour” takes place in the uncanny interval between the end of a late cinema showing at the Regency Theater and the audience going out into the real dark to return home.
Power fails during a late September thunderstorm. The theater interior goes dark, not just the faux dark used for film showings. We never learn what film the audience was watching. The real drama, in fact, only begins imposing itself when attendees realize all the exits are sealed. Through the front doors, there is only blackness beyond the range of rain-washed gutters.
Ellery Phillips, two-time loser in life and local bookstore manager, is our point of view character. Through him we meet another attendee, young Toni Keane. We last met Toni in “My Mary's Asleep,” when she was part of the ill-starred finals-week picnic of assorted Oxrun Station undergraduates.
"I haven't seen you for a while," [Ellery] said quietly, feeling the dark on his back, watching the two men swaying away with their burden.
[Toni] looked up at him and, after a long moment's study, smiled sadly. His hand was taken in hers, and he felt the cold there in her long, soft fingers, as he felt a cold he hadn't noticed before filling the auditorium, seeping through the walls from the storm outside. It made him shiver and hunch his shoulders, and she tightened her grip briefly before letting him go.
"I've been around," she whispered.
"Busy with the new semester?" and let her pull him slowly up the aisle toward the light.
She shook her head. "I didn't go back."
"What? No kidding. Well, why not, Toni? I thought you were doing so well."
She stopped and faced him, eyes hidden in shadow, features blurred. "Things are different, Mr. Phillips," she said, in a quiet voice, a low voice.
He wasn't sure what to say, didn't know what she meant and called himself a damned fool for just standing there and smiling.
Then she tilted her head to one side, her lips slightly parted, colorless, and dry. "Have you ever been to the orchard, Mr. Phillips?"
"Huh? What are you . . . what orchard?"
"There's an orchard. On the other side of Mainland Road, on the old Armstrong farm. Some of it's dead, some of it's not."
He shifted to step around her, to move up the aisle back to the others. He hadn't the slightest idea what the hell she was talking about, but he was afraid she had changed too much for him to know her.
"It's really nice there," she said, still whispering, taking a sidestep to block him. "I had a picnic there once."
"Picnics are good things," he told her, wincing at how inane he must sound. "I used to go on them myself when I was younger." Thinking: She's on something, that's why she's not in school anymore. What a hell of a thing to happen to such a nice kid. A hell of a thing. "But I have to admit I've never-"
"It's cold there," she said. "Really cold."
He looked over her shoulder for someone to help him, and unconsciously pulled his raincoat closed against the chill that still worked the theater.
"Toni, look, why don't we-"
"Be careful," she whispered then. "I wasn't kidding before. Things are different now, Mr. Phillips. Things aren't ever going to be the same."
And before he could move away, she leaned against him and kissed his cheek, released his hand, and ran away.
The half dozen people trapped in the theater confirm -- beset by confusion and panic -- there are no alternative exits. Ellery and record store owner Katherine Avalon also confirm their numbers are dwindling.
This threat within the homely surroundings of a small-town theater is well done. Grant again focuses on confusions of perception, often frankly sexual.
The propulsive and grim arc of the story recalls no-exit plots of TV shows like The Twilight Zone's "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" (1961) and films like Dèmoni (1985).
The connection to Armstrong's orchard in “The Last and Dreadful Hour,” however, amounts only to coincidence. The only audience member to have visited the orchard, Toni, quickly comes and goes. None of the other characters have visited the orchard.
“The Last and Dreadful Hour” respects the Aristotelian unities of time and place. It ends, however, as an apparent conundrum. The mystery is only compounded when we read these paragraphs in the book's Epilogue:
One of my closest friends here is Callum Davidson-close because we're neighbors, and friends because we share a similar love for old and new movies, primarily the bad ones he shows late Friday nights for a group of like-minded fools who love to laugh at disasters and beautifully bad lines.
The night of the storm that knocked the power out of the village for almost eight hours he closed the theater after the first show. Two days later, Iris and Paul Lennon, the owners of Yarrow's Bookshop, advertised in the Station Herald for a new manager, and the day after that, Melody Records and Tapes had a new clerk behind the counter.
Which begs the question: exactly what kind of ghost masquerade did we see enacted in “The Last and Dreadful Hour”? Last and dread-full, indeed. And about the characters: from whence and to where?
"Screaming In The Dark" is a very effective hospital horror story.
Like “The Last and Dreadful Hour,” it can be read as an allegory of involuntary premature burial. Protagonist Michael Kolle, bedridden with a broken leg in Oxrun Station's hospital (seldom full, always fully staffed), is a new-in-town journalist. Like bookstore manager Ellery Phillips, he is a two-time loser in life, and Marc Clayton – a friend who runs the Station Herald newspaper– is doing him a favor. Or enabling him: in horror fiction friendship, love, and "enabling" are often indistinguishable. As in life.
As "Screaming In The Dark" begins, Michael gets a visit from Cora Keane, a younger newspaper colleague. (Cora is Toni Keane's sister -- Toni having been on the doomed picnic that opens “My Mary's Asleep” and subsequently vanished from the benighted Regency Theater in “The Last and Dreadful Hour.”) Kolle overhears a story involving the hospital's children's ward, where a death and a disappearance are being hushed-up, and sends Cora on a snooping mission.
At the same time, Rory Castle from the children's ward becomes Kolle’s roommate. Which seems, for a hospital, like a very laissez faire attitude toward housing.
Kolle has recovered enough for crutches when the orchard reaches out.
Music from the next room until a nurse turned it down; an orderly shambling behind a broom and a bow wave of dust.
"Hey," she said suddenly, and pushed a hand through her hair. "If I'm gonna get what you want, I'd better move it, huh?" She reached into the basket and grabbed an apple, shined it on her breast and kissed it, and winked. "I picked this one myself," she said as she tossed it into his lap. "I didn't think you wanted all that garbage they spray on them in the store, y'know? They even have artificial coloring, for god's sake."
He didn't wince when it landed on his groin, didn't say anything about organic versus cheap. He only picked it up, saw himself in the red that was deeper than a mirror, and winked back as he took a bite.
"Pretty good, huh? An apple a day, right?"
"I should have had one before." She looked away, and he raised an eyebrow. "You have trees in your backyard?"
It was sweet, juicy, with a slight afterbite.
She grinned and walked to the door. "Are you kidding? My father can barely grow grass. No, it's from the orchard. You know it, on the other side of Mainland?"
He thought, and shook his head. "I'm still new, I guess."
"That's all right. I only found out about it when my sister dragged me on this really gross picnic last spring. Jesus." Her mouth twisted in disgust. "Kids, you know what I mean?"
"Yeah," he said solemnly. "Pains in the ass."
A laugh, a blown kiss from her palm, and she cautioned him not to eat it too fast. With the food he was getting now, he'd probably throw it up. Then she was gone, and he lay there with the bed cranked up and the bed beside him empty and the apple turning warm as he turned it over in his hand.
He slept, woke just before dinner, and jumped when he saw someone standing beside him. It was Rory, huddling in his bathrobe, and he'd been crying.
Michael repositioned the bed up so he could sit without strangling, realized he still had the apple in his hand, and laid it on the table.
"Mr. Kolle?" the boy said, wiping a sleeve under his nose. "Mr. Kolle, I want to go home."
But this only prefaces.
Wailing in the hall, and the crack of snapped bone, the thud of collisions and the rainsplash of blood.
No, he thought, as best he could think through the fire in his brain; and he took a step toward the bed, lost a crutch, and fell. He landed on his side, his cast striking the floor in time to his scream, the scream driving off the pain as he crawled for the footboard and pulled himself to the boy's side.
"Rory!"
Grabbing an arm and yanking, digging his nails into the wrist and yanking again.
"Rory, wake up!"
No, he thought again as he climbed onto the mattress and stared down at the boy, who was shaking, not trembling, so that the flesh of his cheeks quivered and his arms flopped about and his ankles drummed the sheet until Michael clamped them down with the weight of his legs. Then he slapped him. And again. And the skullcap seemed to bulge while the noise in the hail rose to a keening, and held there, and held, until Michael slapped the boy again and drew blood at his mouth.
And no a third time. Imagination wasn't real, and monsters weren't real and a little boy in a small hospital couldn't create them just because he was afraid of what he didn't understand.
More gently: "Rory."
And there was silence in the hall.
He heard it when he heard the beeping in the room and saw the boy's shaking calm and finally end.
"Michael?" It was Janey.
"Michael?" It was Carolyn.
"I'm sorry," they said, "but you'll have to go to bed."
He looked over and saw them standing in the doorway, not changed, just as always, with a wheelchair between them and faint smiles on their lips. For a moment he couldn't move, then he looked down at Rory, who was smiling in his sleep, the bandage cap on his hair white and untorn. A finger to the boy's cheek, an apology, and he crawled off, waited for the chair to take him, and leaned back and sighed.
"Am I crazy?" he asked as they wheeled him from the room.
When Kolle talks to his boss via telephone:
Feeling the first sting of another headache, and looking over his shoulder when he heard a scratching in the hall.
"Mike, I have an idea. It won't be a Pulitzer, but it might do you some good. Just hear me out before you say yes or no, and don't jump to conclusions."
A distant scratching, a nail drawn along the floor from the bottom of an old push broom, a child walking with a stick he held to the wall.
Michael pulled the receiver away from his ear, listened harder, leaned back in order to peer through the door.
Marc kept on talking, almost urgently now.
The scratching, louder. And no one complaining.
"Damnit, Mike, are you listening to me?''
The scratching stopped.
Making faces and rubbing his temples as the headache grew stronger.
"Kolle, are you there?"
Footsteps now, from the other direction, heavy and uneven, a man on a bad leg, or a man on a false one. Step-tap, a deep breath; step-tap, and a sigh.
"Michael!"
"I'm here, I'm here," he said, cupping his hand around the mouthpiece, staring at the door.
"Well, did you hear anything I said?"
Step-tap, a deep breath; step-tap, and a moan.
"Jesus Christ," Michael whispered.
"Mike, what the hell's going on?" Clayton demanded. "Did they give you something? A sedative?"
"Marc, I need to get hold of Cora, okay? She didn't give me her home number and I need her here, now."
Step-tap, and silence.
The nightwind soughing in the pines.
He was watching a dim glow grow brighter up by the front of the building when something Clayton said made him turn from the door. "What? Say that again?" And he could hear strained patience in a long exhalation.
"I said, 'Cora who?' "
"Cora who? C'mon, Marc. Cora from the paper, the kid, who else?" The cord wrapped around a finger, the base sliding along the table. "She said ... she told me you said she was supposed to work with me."
"Mike, I . . ." Clayton stopped and cleared his throat. "Mike, I don't have any Cora working for me. Never did."
"You're kidding."
The room brightened, whitely.
"In fact, the only Cora I know is Cora Keane."
"Then it must have been her."
"Not likely, Mike. She committed suicide after her sister disappeared."
"Now wait a minute," he said. "Wait a minute, let me get this straight. Are you telling me-"
The dial tone stopped him, and stopped completely when he tried to regain the connection....
It's a great moment, certainly a high-point of old-style dramatic revelation, and Grant does not spare the blood, thunder, and heat-lightning to prepare us for his crescendo.
The Orchards's Epilogue is an economical and carefully executed slingshot ending.
Judge Alstar and his wife, for example, still live over on Raglin, and though I’ve shared an occasional drink with them at the Mariner Lounge, they don’t talk about the nephew who some say is dead and others say has run away and still others whisper has a home in an asylum. What he does talk about is the tomb the boy made out of a block of solid wood, the promise and talent it exhibits, the uncanny way it has captured the image of a girl the boy loved and lost. He won’t show it to anyone; he keeps it in the cellar.
I went to Amy Niles’s funeral because she was one of the few in the village who knew my work and read it, and I was saddened by her passing and by the closed coffin at the viewing. Brett was there, too, with his second wife, Victoria, and the day after the service he handed in his resignation and they moved back to her home, someplace in Vermont.
Les, I understand, is on a scholarship at Yale….
And finally:
Rory Castle and his pals play in my front yard now and then.
Grant's epilogues do not “tie-up” loose ends and aporias in these collections. They do not provide ironic punchlines or crescendos. Instead, they make the half-glimpsed and half-suspected unconscious of the novellas even stranger.
Jay
1 May 2024
