The Girl in the Ring

Ava and I had planned our trip to the Scottish Highlands for months, a break from the gray cubicles and glowing screens of our tech jobs. We drove from Inverness, past the dark waters of Loch Ness, our car a speck against the vast, heather-covered hills. On the third day, just after crossing into the Cairngorms, we saw a cluster of cars pulled off the narrow road. Tourists, we assumed, drawn by the stark beauty of the landscape. We parked and followed a worn path that led to a clearing where a perfect circle of stones, each about knee-high, stood in the damp, mossy earth. A faerie ring, someone whispered. A woman with silver hair and eyes the color of peat smiled at us. ‘They’re here today,’ she said. ‘You can feel them, can’t you?’ Ava, ever the skeptic, laughed, but I felt a strange vibration through the soles of my boots, like a low hum from the earth itself. Ava insisted on taking my picture sitting on one of the stones, with the rest of the ring circling behind me. I felt a sudden chill, despite the mild August sun. We then drove on, leaving the ring behind, its image saved on my camera’s memory card.

Two weeks after we returned home, Ava came over to my apartment, and we decided to scroll through the photos on my television, a way to relive the trip. We had seen dozens of shots of mountains and lochs, of us grinning in front of ancient castles, when we reached the photo from the ring. ‘I love this one,’ Ava said, and she used the remote to zoom in, to see the details of the lichen on the stones, the texture of my jacket. ‘Wait,’ she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. ‘What’s that behind you?’ She zoomed in closer, on the space just over my shoulder. In the original, it was just a blurry patch of graying grass and distant hills, but as she zoomed, a shape began to resolve. A face, milky white, half-transparent, with hollow black eyes and a mouth stretched wide in a silent, hungry scream. It was hovering just inches from my head.

I laughed, a nervous, brittle sound. ‘It’s just a trick of the light, a bit of lens flare.’ But Ava was shaking her head, her face pale. ‘It’s not, Dana. It’s looking at you. It’s looking at you like it wants to eat you.’ We spent the next hour going through the rest of the pictures, but the face was only in that one frame, at the ring. The strange thing was, in the photos after, my expressions seemed strained, and I noticed a faint shadow clinging to me in several others, a dark patch that followed me as we drove into the Cairngorms, as we walked through the pine forest, as we sat in a pub in Aviemore. I tried to rationalize it, but the feeling of unease grew. That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing that face, those hollow eyes, and I began to feel a cold pressure on the back of my neck, like an icy hand resting there.

A week later, Ava called me, her voice frantic. ‘Dana, I’ve been having nightmares. About that face, coming out of the ground, reaching for me. And this morning, I found this on my mirror.’ She sent me a photo. Written in a strange, spidery script, in what looked like condensation but never evaporated, were the words: ‘You brought me home.’ I tried to convince her it was a prank, but I had the chilling feeling that it was meant for me. I started seeing things out of the corner of my eye, a pale figure crouching in my living room, a hand with too-long fingers disappearing behind my door. The air in my apartment grew thick and cold, and my reflection in the mirror seemed to lag a half-second behind my movements. The face from the photo began to appear in my dreams, not as a static image, but animated, its mouth opening wider, revealing rows of needle-like teeth, and it was crawling towards me.

One night, I woke to find myself standing in front of the mirror in my bathroom. I hadn’t walked there in my sleep, I was just there, as if teleported. In the dim light, I saw my reflection, but it wasn’t mine. It had my features, but the skin was gray and mottled, and the eyes were those hollow black pits. It smiled, and the expression was wrong, a mocking imitation of human emotion. It opened its mouth, and a sound came out, not a voice, but a vibration, a humming that seemed to synchronize with the beating of my heart. I tried to step back, but my body wouldn’t move. I was frozen, trapped in my own reflection. The thing in the mirror slowly raised its right hand, and I felt a matching coldness in my own hand, as if it were reaching through the glass to grab me.

Then I heard Ava’s voice, distant and panicked, calling my name. The trance broke. I stumbled back, my heart pounding. On my arm, I saw a row of small, circular bruises, like fingerprints. I called Ava, and she told me she had been driving to my apartment, that she had felt a sudden compulsion to see me. She was already downstairs. When she came up, she saw my state, the fear in my eyes. She looked at the bruises and then at my camera, which was still on the table, the screen still showing the zoomed-in image of that face. ‘It’s from the ring,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘You sat in it. We both did. We brought something back.’

We decided to research, unearthed old Scottish folklore about the sith, the daoine sith, the faerie folk who could attach themselves to the living, feeding on their energy, eventually dragging them into their world. The guidebook said that sitting in a faerie ring without proper respect, without leaving an offering, could be seen as an invitation. We had taken pictures, and we had taken a piece of the ring with us, in digital form. The face in the photo was the signature of the sith, a claim. The only way to sever the connection, the book said, was to destroy the photograph, and the camera, and to return to the ring and offer a gift of iron and bread.

We drove back to Scotland the next day, a frantic, sleepless trip. We brought the camera and a printed copy of the photo. At the ring, the stones looked different, less benign, the moss had a fungal smell. Ava placed the iron nail and the bread at the center of the ring, while I, with shaking hands, lit the printed photo on fire and placed it on the ground. The flame sputtered blue, and I heard a piercing shriek, not in my ears, but inside my skull. The ground trembled, and the stones seemed to shimmer, as if they were about to move. Then, silence. The fire died, leaving a blackened circle. We destroyed the camera with a rock, and the memory card we buried deep in the earth. As we walked back to the car, I felt a lightness, as if a weight had been lifted. But as we drove away, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was watching us from the rearview mirror. In the corner of my eye, I saw a fleeting shadow among the stones, and I could swear I heard the faint sound of humming, growing fainter as we gained distance.

Back home, I deleted all the other photos from the trip. I couldn’t bear to look at them. Ava and I never spoke of it again, but we became inseparable, as if the shared experience had bound us in a way words couldn’t describe. Sometimes, late at night, I’ll find my hand moving to my neck, to the spot where that cold hand always rested. There’s no mark, but I feel it. And some nights, when the wind howls around my apartment, I think I hear the humming again. And I look at my reflection, and for a split second, I see a pale face, with hollow black eyes, smiling back at me, before it vanishes. It’s watching. Waiting. And I know that wherever I go, a part of that ring is with me, a thread that can never be fully cut.