Just After Sunset

And hungry. That’s when I’d wake up, drenched with sweat. Sometimes screaming.

Then, in early December, I got a letter at the office. It was marked PERSONAL with a small object inside. I tore it open and what fell out onto my desk was a little key with a tag on it. The tag said A.F. I knew what it was, and what it meant. If there’d been a letter, it would have said, “I tried to keep you out. It’s not my fault, and maybe not yours, but either way this key, and all it opens, is yours now. Take good care of it.”

That weekend I drove back out to Motton, but I didn’t bother parking in the lot at Serenity Ridge. I didn’t need to anymore, you see. The Christmas decorations were up in Portland and the other small towns I passed along the way. It was bitterly cold, but there wasn’t any snow yet. You know how it’s always colder just before the snow comes? That’s how it was that day. But the sky was overcast, and the snow did come, a blizzard that very night. It was a big one. Do you remember?

[I tell him I do. I have reason to remember (although I don’t tell him this). Sheila and I were snowed in at the home place, where we’d gone to check on some repair work. We got squiffy and danced to old Beatles and Rolling Stones records. It was pleasant.]

The chain was still across the road, but the A.F. key fit the lock. And the downed trees had been hauled to one side. As I’d known they would be. It was no good blocking the road anymore, because that field is now my field, those stones are now my stones, and whatever it is they’re keeping in is my responsibility.

[I ask him if he was frightened, sure the answer must be yes. But N. surprises me.]

Not much, no. Because the place was different. I knew it even from the end of the road, where it T’s into 117. I could feel it. And I could hear crows cawing as I opened the lock with my new key. Ordinarily I think that’s an ugly sound, but that day it sounded very sweet. At the risk of sounding pretentious, it sounded like redemption.

I knew there’d be eight stones in Ackerman’s Field, and I was right. I knew they wouldn’t look so much like a circle, and I was right about that, too; they looked like random outcroppings again, part of the underlying bedrock that had been exposed by a tectonic shift, or a withdrawing glacier eighty thousand years ago, or a flood of more recent vintage.

I understood other things, too. One was that I had activated the place just by looking at it. Human eyes take away the eighth stone. A camera lens will put it back, but won’t lock it in place. I had to keep renewing the protection with symbolic acts.

[He pauses, thinking, and when he speaks again he seems to have changed the subject.]

Did you know that Stonehenge may have been a combination clock and calendar?

[I tell him I’ve read this somewhere.]

The people who built that place, and others like it, must have known they could tell time with no more than a sundial, and as for the calendar-we know that prehistoric people in Europe and Asia told the days simply by making marks on sheltered rock walls. So what does that make Stonehenge, if it is a gigantic clock/calendar? A monument to OCD behavior, that’s what I think-a gigantic neurosis standing in a Salisbury field.

Unless it’s protecting something as well as keeping track of hours and months. Locking out an insane universe that happens to lie right next door to ours. I have days-many of them, especially last winter, when I felt pretty much like my old self again-when I’m sure that’s bullshit, that everything I thought I saw in Ackerman’s Field was in my own head. That all this OCD crap is just a mental stutter.

Then I have other days-they started again this spring-when I’m sure it’s all true: I activated something. And in so doing, I became the latest baton carrier in a long, long line of them, maybe going all the way back to prehistoric times. I know that sounds crazy-why else would I be telling it to a psychiatrist?-and I have whole days when I’m sure it is crazy…even when I’m counting things, going around my house at night touching light switches and stove burners, I’m sure it’s all just…you know…bad chemicals in my head that a few of the right pills will fix.

I especially thought that last winter, when things were good. Or at least better. Then, in April of this year, things started getting bad again. I was counting more, touching more, and placing just about everything that wasn’t nailed down in circles or diagonals. My daughter-the one who’s going to school near here-again expressed concerns about how I looked and how jumpy I seemed. She asked if it was the divorce, and when I said it wasn’t, she looked as if she didn’t believe me. She asked if I’d consider “seeing someone,” and by God, here I am.

I started having nightmares again. One night in early May I woke on my bedroom floor, screaming. In my dream I’d seen a huge gray-black monstrosity, a winged gargoyle-thing with a leathery head like a helmet. It was standing in the ruins of Portland, a thing a mile high at least-I could see wisps of cloud floating around its plated arms. There were screaming people struggling in its taloned fists. And I knew-knew-it had escaped from the standing stones in Ackerman’s Field, that it was only the first and least of the abominations to be released from that other world, and it was my fault. Because I had failed in my responsibilities.

I stumbled through the house, putting things in circles and then counting them to make sure the circles contained only even numbers, and it came to me that I wasn’t too late, that it had only started to come awake.

[I ask him what he means by “it.”]

The force! Remember Star Wars? “Use the force, Luke”?

[He laughs wildly.]

Except this is a case of don’t use the force! Stop the force! Imprison the force! The chaotic something that keeps driving at that thin place-and all the thin places of the world, I imagine. Sometimes I think there’s a whole chain of ruined universes behind that force, stretching back untold eons in time like monstrous footprints…

[He says something under his breath that I don’t catch. I ask him to repeat, but he shakes his head.]

Hand me your pad, Doc. I’ll write it. If what I’m telling you is true and not just in my fucked-up head, it’s not safe to say the name aloud.

[He prints CTHUN in large capital letters. He shows it to me, and when I nod, he tears the sheet to shreds, counts the shreds-to make sure the number is even, I suppose-and then deposits them in the wastebasket near the couch.]

The key, the one I got in the mail, was in my home safe. I got it out and drove back to Motton-over the bridge, past the cemetery, up that damned dirt track. I didn’t think about it, because it wasn’t the sort of decision you have to consider. It would be like sitting down to consider whether or not you should put out the drapes in your living room if you came in and saw them on fire. No-I just went.

But I took my camera. You better believe that.

My nightmare woke me at five or so, and it was still early morning when I got to Ackerman’s Field. The Androscoggin was beautiful-it looked like a long silver mirror instead of a snake, with fine tendrils of mist rising from its surface and then spreading above it in a, I don’t know, temperature inversion, or something. That spreading cloud exactly mimicked the river’s bends and turns, so it looked like a ghost-river in the sky.

The hay was growing up in the field again, and most of the sumac bushes were turning green, but I saw a scary thing. And no matter how much of this other stuff is in my head (and I’m perfectly willing to acknowledge it might be), this was real. I’ve got pictures that show it. They’re foggy, but in a couple you can see the mutations in the sumac bushes closest to the stones. The leaves are black instead of green, and the branches are twisted…they seem to make letters, and the letters seem to spell…you know… its name.

[He gestures to the wastebasket where the shreds of paper lie.]

The darkness was back inside the stones-there were only seven, of course, that’s why I’d been drawn out there-but I saw no eyes. Thank God, I was still in time. There was just the darkness, turning and turning, seeming to mock the beauty of that silent spring morning, seeming to exult in the fragility of our world. I could see the Androscoggin through it, but the darkness-it was almost Biblical, a pillar of smoke-turned the river to a filthy gray smear.

I raised my camera-I had the strap around my neck, so even if I dropped it, it wouldn’t fall into the clutch of the hay-and looked through the viewfinder. Eight stones. I lowered it and there were seven again. Looked through the viewfinder and saw eight. The second time I lowered the camera, it stayed eight. But that wasn’t enough, and I knew it. I knew what I had to do.

Forcing myself to go down to that ring of stones was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The sound of the hay brushing against the cuffs of my pants was like a voice-low, harsh, protesting. Warning me to keep away. The air began to taste diseased. Full of cancer and things that are maybe even worse, germs that don’t exist in our world. My skin began to thrum, and I had an idea-truth is, I still have this idea-that if I stepped between two of those stones and into the circle, my flesh would liquefy and go dripping off my bones. I could hear the wind that sometimes blows out of there, turning in its own private cyclone. And I knew it was coming. The thing with the helmet-head.

[He gestures again to the scraps in the wastebasket.]

It was coming, and if I saw it this close up, it would drive me mad. I’d end my life inside that circle, taking pictures that would show nothing but clouds of gray. But something drove me onward. And when I got there, I…

[N. stands up and walks slowly around the couch in a deliberate circle. His steps-both grave and prancing, like the steps of a child playing ring- a-rosie-are somehow awful. As he circles, he reaches out to touch stones I cannot see. One…two…three…four…five…six…seven…eight. Because eight keeps things straight. Then he stops and looks at me. I have had patients in crisis-many-but I have never seen such a haunted stare. I see horror, but not insanity; I see clarity rather than confusion. It must all be a delusion, of course, but there can be no doubt that he understands it completely.

[I say, “When you got there, you touched them.”]

Yes, I touched them, one after the other. And I can’t say I felt the world grow safer-more solid, more there-with every stone I touched, because that wouldn’t be true. It was every two stones. Just the even numbers, do you see? That turning darkness began to recede with each pair, and by the time I got to eight, it was gone. The hay inside the stones was yellow and dead, but the darkness was gone. And somewhere-far off-I heard a bird sing.

I stepped back. The sun was fully up by then, and the ghost-river over the real one had entirely disappeared. The stones looked like stones again. Eight granite outcroppings in a field, not even a circle, unless you worked to imagine one. And I felt myself divide. One part of my mind knew the whole thing was just a product of my imagination, and that my imagination had some kind of disease. The other part knew it was all true. That part even understood why things had gotten better for awhile.

It’s the solstice, do you see? You see the same patterns repeated all over the world-not just at Stonehenge, but in South America and Africa, even the Arctic! You see it in the American midwest-my daughter even saw it, and she knows nothing about this! Crop circles, she said! It is a calendar- Stonehenge and all the others, marking not just days and months but times of greater and lesser danger.

That split in my mind was tearing me apart. Is tearing me apart. I’ve been out there a dozen more times since that day, and on the twenty-first-the day of the appointment with you I had to cancel, do you remember?

[I tell him I do, of course I do.]

I spent that whole day in Ackerman’s Field, watching and counting. Because the twenty-first was the summer solstice. The day of highest danger. Just as the winter solstice in December is the day when the danger is lowest. It was last year, it will be again this year, it has been every year since the beginning of time. And in the months ahead-until fall, at least-I’ve got my work cut out for me. The twenty-first…I can’t tell you how awful it was out there. The way that eighth stone kept shimmering