The Lattice of Buried Stones

I turned twenty-two on the third of March, but I’ve felt older since that night in the Copperhead Hollows. My grandmother, a woman who read weather in spider webs and kept a Bible with pressed violets between the pages, always said I had ‘the sight.’ I dismissed it as her quaint way of explaining my knack for finding lost earrings and predicting rain. But I learned what she meant when I was seven, swimming in the algae-clogged waters of Lake Castor. A cold hand closed around my ankle, pulling me under just long enough to swallow murky water. My mother said it was a cramp, but I still feel the perfect circle of bruises around my ankle for weeks after.

At sixteen, my cousin Dale and I did something foolish. We’d heard tales of the old Holloway place, a farm swallowed by the forest after the family vanished in the 1920s. The locals said the barn still stood, its roof a skeleton of ribs, and that at midnight you could hear the sound of a rocking chair creaking on the porch, even though the house was gone. We were bored and we wanted proof. We found the foundation stones, and in the center of where the kitchen must have been, a neat square of lighter earth, as if the soil had been recently turned. Dale said it was a root cellar, and we dug.

We uncovered a metal box wrapped in oilcloth. Inside was a child’s shoe, a tarnished locket with a faded photograph of a woman with severe eyes, and a bound notebook with pages that crumbled to dust at the touch. But at the bottom, wrapped in a scrap of red flannel, was a small, smooth stone, perfectly oval and black as obsidian. It was warm, like it held the heat of the sun even in that damp ground. I took it. Dale didn’t want it, said it gave him the creeps. He died the following summer, drowned in the same lake where I had my first experience. The police called it a tragic accident, but on the night of his funeral, I found the stone in my pocket, warm and humming, even though I hadn’t carried it in years.

For a long time, nothing happened. I moved to the city for work, a mundane life of spreadsheets and fluorescent lights. But the stone would appear in my coat pocket, on my nightstand, even in the bottom of a cereal box. It was never cold. I started having dreams where I was walking through endless corridors of dirt, walls packed tight with roots that pulsed like veins. At the end of a tunnel, I would always see a faint light, and in that light, a figure that was not a man, but wore a coat of stitched hides and had eyes like burnt holes in a blanket. It never spoke, but it would point. And when I woke, I’d always find the stone in my hand.

Last winter, I was driving back from a job in the northern counties when my windshield wipers froze and the engine coughed into silence. The road was a black ribbon through a pine forest, and I was miles from any town. I stepped out into a snowfall that swallowed sound, and I could feel the stone in my pocket, vibrating like a captured moth. It was then I noticed the trees were not pines, but gnarled oaks, and in the open space between them, there was a stone structure that had not been there a moment ago. It was a square pit, lined with granite blocks, and in its center, a staircase descending into darkness. The stone in my pocket grew so hot it burned through the fabric.

This is where I have to stop trying to rationalize. You might think I was dying of hypothermia, that I was hallucinating, and maybe I was. But what I experienced was real. I descended those steps, not of my own volition, but pulled by the weight of the stone in my chest. The walls were lined with bones arranged in a lattice pattern, femurs and ribs woven together like a basket. And at the bottom, there was a chamber, and in that chamber, a man sat on a throne made of antlers. He was old, so old that his skin had the texture of bark, and his eyes were the same burnt holes as in my dreams. He held the twin of my stone, and he spoke in a voice that came from the ground itself, says, ‘You have returned what was taken. Now you must take my place.’

I ran. I scrambled up those stairs, the bones cracking under my boots, and I emerged into a bright, snowy morning. The stone was gone from my pocket. The forest was still pines. I found my car on the side of the road, engine cold, and when I tried the ignition, it started. I drove home in a stupor and have not slept since.

I am writing this in a motel room, the curtains drawn, because I can hear the lattice of bones cracking behind the walls, and in the mirror, I see the reflection of the antler throne. It’s in my left eye now, a small dark pupil where the iris should be, and in that eye, I see the chamber, and the figure is gone. I know he is here, waiting for me to take his seat. And the stone, I can feel it growing again, in the hollow where my kidney used to be, warm and humming, telling me it’s time to go back.