Mario and Millicent Kent (p. 122)
The U.S.S.M.K. said she’d been amusing herself beating her way through one of the brambly thickets Mrs. Incandenza had—when she’d still spent time outdoors at all—planted to discourage part-time employees from short-cutting up the hillside to E.T.A., and had come upon a Husky VI-brand telescoping tripod, new and dully silvery-looking and set up on its three legs, right in the middle of the thicket. For no visible reason and with no footprints or visible evidence of path-beating anywhere around except the U.S.S. Millicent’s own.
Context
The book's uncanniest piece of camera equipment: a brand-new telescoping tripod standing assembled in the middle of a thicket, no reason, no footprints, no camera — optics apparatus as apparition, planted (in Avril's own anti-trespass shrubbery) on the dead filmmaker's grounds. The raw explains nothing; the scene digest's forward-read — that it joins Stice's moving furniture and the tunnel object-displacements as wraith/surveillance furniture — is inferred, not stated here. What the raw does supply is the dread-shape itself: the instrument of filming, erected and waiting, with nobody behind it.