1
The Chepachet Public Library was something right out of a Norman Rockwell painting. The small, stone building was well over 150 years old, with ivy crawling up the sides like ancient weeds. The place even smelled like an artifact, Erik thought, as he opened the heavy oak door and stepped inside.
The library itself was smaller than many executive offices Erik had seen, and as he looked at the two men standing behind the reference desk he wondered why it took two people to run the place. He’d met them both before on a previous trip, though, and had taken an immediate dislike to them. When he’d asked them to order his book for the library, they had given him a hard time. The acquisitions guy, it seemed, didn’t read fiction and, therefore didn’t order any.
“What do you read?” Erik had asked.
“Magazines,” he had snapped, and walked away.
The director, a thin, fragile-looking man, always looked like he was going to cry, and when he wasn’t crying he was constantly whining about something. He hadn’t been much help either about ordering the book.
This time he avoided the two and went right to the reference shelves. They didn’t even acknowledge him, and Erik understood why the library was always empty. Although the library in Foster was a good five miles further down the road, it was well worth the investment of time to deal with librarians who actually liked helping people.
But this time he knew the information he needed could only be found here, in the local village vaults. He found the section on local history and began his search.
Most of the published history books weren’t much help, except for some pictures of the village from the past century. He found a couple of pictures of the old library-it really hadn’t changed in the last hundred years, and Erik suspected that Jane Austen was still catalogued under “new fiction.” He found some old pictures of the village, and even of some of the woods along Route 102, where the new road had been cut. He also found some pictures of the Narragansett Indian tribe, and one of Dovecrest. Although the picture was a hundred years old, Dovecrest looked exactly the same. It must be his father, Erik thought, but the name in the caption was clear enough. It had to be a misprint.
He rummaged through the ancient card catalogue-although the library system was on computers, no one had bothered to computerize the local records. Erik did ask the director about that.
“Oh, we haven’t gotten to that yet. We’re too busy cataloguing the video tape collection.”
“Won’t the videos be obsolete now that people have DVD players,” he’d asked, but the director merely shrugged and went on to complain about the burning pain in his stomach, so Erik merely threw up his hands and went back to the musty card catalogue.
One entry referred to a vertical file on Chepachet history, which Erik couldn’t find anywhere. With a sigh, he went back to the reference desk.
Both the director and his partner were glued to their computer screens and wouldn’t acknowledge him, so he went around the desk and stood in front of them. He couldn’t help noticing that the director was fooling around on E-Bay looking at lace curtains. Your tax dollars at work.
“Ah, you’re not supposed to be back here,” the director said. “It’s employees only.”
For emphasis, he pointed to a sign on the wall.
“I need to find the vertical files on local history,” he said.
“Ah, those don’t go out.”
“I know they don’t go out,” Erik said, as if speaking to a child. “I don’t want to take them out. I just want to look at them.”
“What for?”
“What is this, twenty questions? Not that it’s any of your business, but I’m doing research for a story I’m writing. I need to see the files. This is a library, isn’t it?”
Erik made a silent vow to speak to someone on the town council about this idiot.
“Ah, yeah. It’s just that no one ever looks at those files.”
“Well I want to look at them.”
The director looked at him for a moment, then decided Erik meant business and was likely to cause trouble if he didn’t get what he wanted.
“Ted, could you show this guy the vertical files and open them? I’m kind of busy right now.”
The dwarfish man scowled and walked off into the stacks of books at the rear of the library. Although both of these men were in their early thirties, they acted like old men-like trolls, Erik thought, guarding their little treasures under the bridge. God forbid that anyone would actually want to
The vertical file was exactly that-a tall, green metal filing cabinet filled with files-most of them misplaced. When the librarian opened the door, it kicked up a wad of dust that must have been fifty years old.
“Let me know when you’re done so I can lock it back up,” Ted said, then shuffled back to his computer.
The files seemed to be in random order, and most weren’t even labeled. Erik pulled out a packet of old photographs of the World War I veterans’ reunion filed with an old
After going through half of the top drawer, Erik was just about to give up when he came across a photograph and an article from the
“Ancient Altar Stone Found by Youth” the title of the article said. Underneath the title was a reprint of the photograph in the file.
The photo was of a huge black stone, an altar stone, set in the center of a clearing in the forest. Although the size was difficult to judge in the picture, the thing looked to be about eight feet long, three feet wide, and raised about three feet off the ground like a bed. What really troubled him, though, was that the thing was a deep, shiny black, like obsidian. It looked exactly like the rock that Todd had described.
The article went on to say that two boys had been playing in the woods and had found the rock. The boys had found George Fleming, the reporter and editor for the local newspaper, and he had accompanied them and had taken the photograph. Fleming speculated in the article that the stone might have been an ancient Viking stone-the Vikings had visited Newport and other areas along the East Coast, so why not here?
Behind the article, though, Erik found another one from the same writer and the same paper, proclaiming the whole thing a hoax. In the article, Fleming apologized for making up the story and involving the boys. The altar didn’t exist and never had existed, he said.
Erik frowned and made photocopies of both the articles and the pictures. He’d have to show this to Todd-and maybe to Dovecrest and the Sheriff as well.
2
Erik stopped at Burger King on his way home and brought lunch for everyone. He found Todd in his room coloring on a loose leaf notebook.
“What ya doing, Sport?” he said.
“Nothin’,” Todd replied.
“Well it looks like you’re doing something.”
“I’m just coloring a picture.”
Todd looked over his son’s shoulder at the drawing, and his heart chilled. It was a picture of the black rock in a field with a full yellow moon overhead.
“Is that the rock you saw?” he asked.
“Yeah. That’s it. But nobody believes me.”
“I believe you, Todd.”
“No you don’t. You’re just saying that to make me feel good.”
