This meant she was either being held somewhere and kept from calling me, or she was in some faraway place that didn’t have phones. I wasn’t sure which was worse.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Finch said. “I might’ve found something.”
He crouched down to show me the Blogspot page pulled up on his phone, titled “Tripping Through the Dandelions.” I squinted at the photo of the blogger, someone named Ness, and groaned. She was in her early twenties, and had a pretty clear style obsession with Neil Gaiman’s Death. She also looked suspiciously similar to the grad student who’d accosted my mom at Fairway a while back, demanding information on Althea.
We moved to a stoop so we could read it together. His fingers were warm, sliding a moment under mine as I grabbed for one half of the screen. The post he’d pulled up was titled “Searching for the Source: Day 133.”
My research into and quest to find the home of trailblazing feminist author and recluse Althea Proserpine proved fruitful on its 133rd day, as I suspected it would. 1 + 3 + 3 is 7, a meaningful number to any reader of fairy tales.
I rolled my eyes so hard I saw my brain. Then I kept reading, because, hey, we were desperate.
I have long believed the Hazel Wood is as much a state of mind as it is a place. And ever since I had the good luck of studying Althea’s work under Professor Miranda Deyne, it has been clear to me that her work bubbled up from a spring fed as much by magic as by mind. I was unsurprised to learn that the Hazel Wood exists on no map, and is as estranged from Google Earth as true magic is from most university English programs today—hence the sad dearth of contemporary Proserpine scholarship.
As detailed in my post on August 11, I recently tracked down the author of Althea’s well-known Vanity Fair profile. Though she moved some years ago to an assisted-living facility, she was still quite sharp. Through her daughter she revealed she was never allowed access to Althea herself, conducting her interviews instead by letter and several odd phone calls. I went in search of the piece’s photographer, who was admitted to the Hazel Wood, hitting a dead end when I learned of his death overseas in 1989.
Althea’s first and second known marriages ended in widowhood, and she had one daughter, Vanella Proserpine. Little is known of Althea’s early life beyond that she was the only child of parents long dead. Vanella has no apparent fixed address and rejected my attempts to start a fruitful dialogue. This is unfortunate, considering what she may be able to offer to the criminally underpopulated field of Proserpine study.
I scoffed forcefully. “Ellery, I remember this chick. She’s a nut!”
“A nut who might’ve been to the Hazel Wood. Keep reading.”
I grabbed the phone and scrolled through more background and a few veiled pleas for funding, stopping short at this:
Armed only with the knowledge that the house is in upstate New York; that, according to Vanity Fair, it’s a five-hour drive from New York City and a ten-minute drive from an unnamed lake; and that it’s located just outside a township of fewer than 1,000 inhabitants as of the year the profile was written, I set out to find the Hazel Wood. I was accompanied as ever by my chauffeur and fellow graduate student, Martin.
There are recurring themes in Althea’s work that are disturbing to anyone who knows of her supposed self-imprisonment at her estate: of displacement, of abandonment and assault, of a sort of supernatural identity theft, and, naturally, of incarceration. The vessel of this imprisonment changes—the body, the tower, the marriage, the cave—but close reading has led me to believe Althea was foretelling her own incarceration—not merely a spiritual but a physical one.
Yes. I have come to understand her not as recluse but as prisoner. I believe she’s being held in the Hazel Wood against her will. Martin agrees, but takes a pulp-fiction perspective: he imagines her held in place by creditors, or by some original teller of the tales she has made her name on (a theory I do not subscribe to). Of course, Martin has never read the stories firsthand, nor has he sat at the knee of Professor Miranda Deyne and labored to unpack them. I believe the backstory given by Althea in the Vanity Fair article is smoke and mirrors, just one more fairy tale told by a master of them—a master who has plugged herself into an ancient source of odd fables that feel like just one corner cut from the fabric of a much larger and stranger world.
I believe it is a force from that very world that holds her prisoner. The true aim of my quest, which I have avoided revealing when it seemed too far from my grasp, is to reach and rescue Althea Proserpine from whoever, or whatever, it is that binds her.
Martin and I left New York City on Wednesday, driving five hours north to start, then looping around area lakes. I admit we hoped for some clue to carry us forward, knowing that, otherwise, we were looking for a tiny pea beneath an enormous mattress. We both had a powerful sense of the Hazel Wood as being surrounded by trees …
“Because it’s called the Hazel Wood, hack!” I couldn’t help yelling aloud.
We both had a powerful sense of the Hazel Wood as being surrounded by trees, and nosed Martin’s Honda around many a large and isolated home in the wooded areas just beyond the state’s numerous lakes. The Honda took the brunt of several canine attacks, and I’ll admit I was surprised by how quickly New York’s upstate homeowners are willing to pull a gun on a scholar who seeks only information, and whose independent study relies on grant money and donations. (Click here to learn more.)
On the third day—as I expected, owing to the importance of the number 3 in fairy tales—our luck changed. We stopped for breakfast at a diner owned by a woman who’d heard tell of an author who lived nearby, though she didn’t recognize the name Althea Proserpine.
I scrolled through an extended rant on how unfortunate it was that every waitress and pancake-flipper in every truck stop from here to Mars haven’t heard of my grandmother, who was, let’s face it, a one-hit wonder whose book went out of print shortly after she went off the grid for good. Then there was this:
Our instincts told us to turn down a dirt path lined with cherry trees blooming very much out of season. When, ten minutes later, we reached a pair of tall, green-metal gates, we knew we’d found our destination: the gates were decorated with a stylized hazel tree. I ordered Martin to park the car somewhere out of sight, though we didn’t see any cameras. When we exited the car, the air felt balmy—by my estimation, it was a full twenty degrees warmer than it had been when we left the diner.
We looked through the gates, but could see nothing beyond a stand of trees about thirty yards in. As we circled the estate on foot, we discovered that cunningly placed greenery around the entire perimeter kept us from seeing inside. Martin attempted in several places to scale the fence, but discovered it was impossible.
We had no breadcrumbs to mark our path out of the forest, and when I pulled up the map on my phone, it showed our location as being in the center of the Bering Sea. Martin’s told him we were on the grounds of Memphis’s Graceland. Was it a cosmic joke, or a sign that we were on the edge of something bigger than we imagined? Somewhere, I was sure, Althea—or her captor—was laughing at us.
Finding no way in, we had to leave the wood. I’m writing this now from my motel room, a forty-minute drive from the Hazel Wood. Tomorrow we’re getting onto the grounds, by hook or by crook.