Then a voice called to him, at first from a distance, and then closer. Michael’s voice telling him to come down to where he was, closer to the mild trickle of the stream.
“Down here!”
Jonathan sat up. Conner came bounding down from the rock ledge. Jonathan saw him and paused, blinking his eyes, trying to come back to reality.
“Down here,” the voice came again.
They followed the sound of Michael’s voice toward the stream with their rifles. They pushed aside saplings and dense, sharp underbrush.
Michael stood in the center of a large clearing completely devoid of plant life, brushed clean of any fallen leaves or pine needles. The forest seemed to stop dead at its borders; the trees and bushes surrounding it formed the barrier of a perfect ring that reached into the sky. Even the tops of the trees refused to extend into the range of its circumference. Conner and Jonathan approached the center. The air felt thin, as if a portal in the atmosphere formed a single, strange vacuum. Michael stood in the center of an elaborate design formed by rocks embedded in the ground. Jonathan recognized it, a circle of white stones the size of footballs, with parallel lines of rocks running through the middle, crisscrossing in geometric design, an empty space in the center. Michael stood near the center, staring down at the remnants of a fire – ash, soot and blackened pieces of burnt wood. At the far northern end of the clearing was a rock face and, below it, three large, flat stones arranged to form a flat, table-like surface. Above the stone table was written ‘TIME IS A VEIL TO THE SHATTERED WORLD’ in a faded white paint, scrawled with a childlike hand, as if the author had just learned to form letters.
Jonathan’s stomach twisted. Like a ghost from the attic of his subconscious, the grainy black-and-white photo from the newspaper article detailing Thomas Terrywile’s disappearance sent panic coursing through his body. It had been difficult to make out the images in that old report, but the basics were there – a clearing in the woods, a stone altar, symbols that hinted at occult practices.
“What the hell is this?” Michael said. He appeared dumbfounded by it, as if he’d just opened a door and found himself at the edge of a cliff, staring into the drop. “This can’t be possible.” But it was the fact anyone would believe in something enough to make a ramshackle altar in the woods that truly baffled him.
“This far out here?” Conner said. “This can’t be right. Who would go this far?”
“We’ve gone this far,” Jonathan said.
Michael was turning himself in circles now as if he was searching for something.
“Who would travel this far out here to do this?” Conner said.
“It could be old.”
Jonathan thought of that night ten years ago, thought of the box of remains sitting just a few yards away. “Maybe that’s what he was doing up here,” he said. “We thought there was no way in hell anyone would be this far out in mountains at that time of night. Maybe there were people up here. Maybe this is what they were doing.”
“That still doesn’t make any sense,” Conner said.
“These kinds of things never make any sense.”
“They said it to me,” Michael said. “They said it. I didn’t know what they were talking about.”
Conner crossed into the body of the star and took Michael by the arm. “Hey! Hey! Get it together. What are you talking about?”
“In the bar,” Michael said. “Those guys. They said it to me.”
“You said they were saying weird things,” Jonathan said.
“They told me to stay out of the Gulch. They told me something about this place. I don’t know; I can’t remember exactly. It all sounded fucking crazy. I thought they were drunk or high or something. Then he said, ‘Your face looks familiar, boy. I’s seen you before. It’ll be your bodies they’re hauling out of there next.’ That’s when I shoved him.”
Your face looks familiar, boy.
It rang like a deep and terrible bell in Jonathan’s mind. So much familiarity, repetition, motions repeated over years and years, the reappearance of lost children.
“It makes no sense,” Conner said.
“It doesn’t have to make sense to us,” Jonathan said. “If they were out here that night, if they saw us, if this is where they come.”
“You’re just telling us this now?” Conner said. “Fuck this redneck bullshit. There’s no trails leading here. There’s nothing out here!”
“Except for this,” Jonathan said. “They know we’re out here. They could be following us.”
“We would have noticed.”
“Why? Because we’re such expert woodsmen? These guys live up here.”
Michael stepped through the circle and wandered, dazed, to the stone altar set at the base of the rock face. The stones were stained with a rusty brown color. “What does this look like to you?” he said. The stains were thick and circular, with lines that flowed down and over the sides of the flattened stones. “I can tell you what I think it looks like.”
Everything seemed still in that moment. Jonathan looked to the ground where the white stones lay in their terrifying design. He saw something he mistook for rocks but was actually a twelve-inch section of deer spine, the vertebrae still linked together, picked clean and bleached white from the sun. He bent down and nudged it slightly.
“This is…I don’t know what this is.”
“It’s nothing, is what it is,” Conner said. “It’s a bunch of hicks goofing around in the woods, pretending they’re Satanists or pagans or whatever you call the people that do this shit. We need to keep moving. We’ll keep a close eye out behind us for any signs someone is trailing us. It’s doubtful, but we need to get moving.”
They each turned in their respective spaces, took a last look around and then pushed through the underbrush toward their gear and the heavy, black coffin.
Chapter Sixteen
The earth
