The Worn Grove

I haven’t touched the slate since that night. It’s buried beneath a pile of tax returns and old magazines in the crawlspace under my stairs, wrapped in three layers of garbage bags. I heard that if you leave something like that in the open, more of them can ride through the scratches. I don’t know if that’s true, but I don’t want to test it.

It’s funny, the things you notice when you’re trying not to think. The house is on a quiet street in the middle of a town that’s too old for its own good. The oaks line the sidewalks like tired sentinels, their roots buckling the pavement. Since the slate came home, the streetlights have been flickering at odd hours, and I catch clouds of something like breath fog drifting through my kitchen even when the windows are shut. And always, always the sensation of being watched—that prickle at the back of my neck, the feeling of a presence just over my shoulder, turning away before I can see it.

I’ve always been too imaginative. As a kid, I could close my eyes and see whole worlds behind my lids, hear music that wasn’t playing. My mother called it a gift, my father called it a phase. Now, with the slate humming its silent hum in the crawlspace, I’m not so sure. Because the images in my head are starting to align with things I shouldn’t know.

Last week, I read an old parish record in the library, just for something to do. It mentioned a burned-out chapel that used to stand on the edge of what is now the county landfill. And that night, I dreamed of a man in a ruined cassock standing in a field of ash, and he spoke a name—Casimir—which turned out to be engraved on a bent iron key I found in the basement drain. I never put the key there.

Yesterday, I was peeling potatoes for a stew, mindless, when my hands froze. A vision overtook me, stronger than any before. I was on a beach that wasn’t any beach I’d ever seen, the sand black like obsidian. A tall figure stood at the waterline, his face half in shadow. He was talking to a woman with hair the color of wet straw, and he said, ‘When I first came here, the earth was a garden, and I walked among you like a brother. But you chose to bow to the tree, not to me.’ The woman didn’t answer. She just stared at the horizon, and I knew she was part of me, the part that had always felt drawn to the falling, the part that found comfort in the idea of a proud rebel.

I tried to shake it off. I went for a walk in the grove behind the old mill—the place we used to play as kids, before it got fenced off. The trees there are gnarled, with trunks that twist like they’re trying to escape their own bark. And as I walked, I realized the leaves were not rustling. There was no wind, but the air felt like static. I saw a shape between two birches—tall, thin, with arms too long. It didn’t move, but it was watching me. I ran.

Now the lights are dimming again, even in the daytime. The fog is thicker, and I can feel something in the crawlspace, pressing against the bags. Last night, I heard a voice, low and patient, seep through the floorboards. It said, ‘You brought the key, didn’t you? You’ve been listening.’

I haven’t been sleeping. The slate is just a piece of polished black stone, with scratches that look like a map of a place that doesn’t exist. But I know now that the woman on the beach was me, and the figure was something older than the dark. And the key in my pocket—I know what it opens. The chapel. The one that burned. The one that’s still there, if you walk far enough through the grove, past the fence, past the ‘No Trespassing’ signs, to where the trees are so thick the light never reaches the ground.

I’m going to go there tonight. I don’t know why, but I can’t stop. The story of the falling has always called to me, and now I think it’s calling for me. The slate is hidden, but it doesn’t matter. Some doors are opened by the mind alone.

As I stand at the edge of the grove, the fog rolling out like a breath, I see the shape again—waiting between the birches. And this time, it points deeper, to a glimmer of light that shouldn’t be there. I take a step. Then another. The grass is cold under my feet, and the key grows warm in my pocket. Behind me, the streetlights all flicker out at once.

I don’t think I’ll be coming back.