Phillip walked off the path, to the left. Twigs and sticks crunched under his feet. "Come this way."
"Don't stray too far. I don't want to get lost."
"I know these here woods pretty well, Michael. You just stick with me and there'll be nothing to worry about." Deighton didn't catch the joke.
The path we traveled was carpeted with slick leaves and scattered pine needles, making the going a bit slow, which didn't matter much to me, as I'd intended on a leisurely stroll with mother nature and this was as close to pure nature as you could get (putting aside the errant soda can or beer bottle whose labels were as colorless as Phillip's chest hair). My guess was that we'd traveled about a quarter-mile now, more than half of that on flat land. Eventually we stopped for a breather.
"You mentioned that you had something to show me," I said.
"Yep..." Phillip took a mouthful of water, smacked his lips, then changed the subject. "You've any idea where we are?"
"Forgot my compass, Phil."
"That way's north," he said, pointing. "About four miles from here is the town. If you walk in any westward direction you'll end up in someone's back yard. If you go south, well then you'll get nothing but forest...probably forty miles worth."
Something shifted in the woods about ten feet away. I felt a bit of a scare in my heart, then peered watchfully ahead. Phillip hunkered down and I followed suit. He placed an index finger across his lips (which still had the cigar between them) and pointed. I looked back and saw it. To the right, nestled amidst a patch of ferns, a spectacular doe. Its felt was smooth and nutty, eyes wet and wide and cautious, mouth gnawing fruitfully on a sapling. This was a hunter's dream come true, I thought, and I savored every moment by admiring this tiny yet exquisite slice of God's creative pie. Man, what a rush.
And then, in a leap, it was gone.
Phillip stood up, groaned some. "Oh...that was a treat."
"Is that what you wanted to show me?" I asked jokingly.
He smiled, trudged forward. "Follow me."
W
e walked perhaps another quarter mile. My legs tightened up as a few more short inclines made themselves present—the result of a lack of exercise, I thought—and I made a
point to heed my own advice one of these days. I looked good, but I needed to start jogging again.
Neil Farris took to a daily ritual of jogging. Lot of good it did him.
The passage twisted downwards, cutting in and about some very old pines, then the trees fell away in a spot home to a mass of tangly undergrowth. Roots rose up from the ground like tentacles, reaching to trip up the path. The ground here was spongy and the mud came up to my ankles at one point. But then the path rose again, and the pines reclaimed the territory, as did firmer ground. The canopy of branches here was thin and had a difficult time blocking the sun's rays which were now lancing down from directly overhead. Sweat jeweled on my brow. My heart rate was that of a runner's.
"So where are we going?" I asked Phillip. I realized, suddenly, that he'd taken me to the proverbial 'middle of nowhere'.
"Almost there," he answered, wherever 'there' was.
Middle of nowhere
.
We culminated another small hill, then came back down into a rather large clearing within a circle of ivy-shrouded oaks. I was taken with awe, my senses overloaded with surprise and bewilderment. The scene before me was unbelievable.
I described it as a
circle
of oaks because that's exactly how this area was shaped, leading me to believe that this place had been not been some casual fluke of nature; it was too perfect to have not been influenced by the hand of man. Here was a rather large area, the diameter perhaps sixty or seventy feet across the open center, the pines standing like soldiers around the perimeter. Yet, despite the oddly cut-out area, I couldn't help but find distraction with something even more incredible here, something extremely...ominous.
The clearing was crowded with stones, and I'm not just talking a few random rocks and pebbles. These were great slabs of non-indigenous stone, each of them rectangular in shape and fitted into some odd configuration as though the whole had been constructed as some sort of altar or temple. I thought to myself,
This baby is old
, and I couldn't help but think of Stonehenge, or Easter Island. Some of the stones stood on end as high as ten feet, some only went a few feet in the air but were no less menacing. Others lay flat on the forest floor seemingly situated at complementary angles. I imagined that if one viewed the entire structure from above, some brand or pattern would make itself present. Of course, to attempt such a feat would be impossible because, despite the large circular clearing in which these slabs of carved stone were erected, the trees here had still found a way to extend their branches out to close out the sky. This forced the surrounding shrubs and smaller trees to compete for precious sunlight, and kept this miraculous work of ancient art a secret. Even more
amazing was how nature itself appeared to have conformed to the ancient monuments: a perfect carpet of leaves and pine needles blanketed the floor around and about the stones, and yet not one leaf or needle lay
atop
of them. It was as though someone had meticulously tended to the area, passing through every so often with a dustbuster or broom to take away any leaves or needles littering the smooth-weathered surfaces. But that wasn't the case, of course, and the more I gazed at the stones, the more I came to assume that there might be some incredible harmony at work here: the forces of nature toiling gracefully alongside some deeper metaphysical power. It sounded a bit kooky but I just couldn't see humans being involved here, with the
evenness
of this place. It was too isolated. Too spooky. Too perfect. Too...I could go on and on.
The whole picture...it looked feigned—although this could never be the subject of some Grandma Moses piece depicting any other part of Ashborough. No. This was something for the imagination of Michael Whelan, or Frank Frazetta. Yet...still...imagined this landscape was not.
This was real
.
"This is amazing," I said, sounding like I meant it. I walked across the center of the area, pacing from stone to stone, checking out their smooth surfaces and the crude enormity of them all. A quick count had me estimating the amount of stones to be about thirty.
Jesus,
I thought.
How did they get here?
"I knew you'd like it," Phillip said, sitting down on one of the stones and lighting his cigar.
"This is incredible," I said, tilting my head in attempt to make out some sort of purposeful pattern in their layout. I tried not to get too crazy about it though, local town historians had probably studied this scene for years without finding any answers to their ancient function, design, or intent.
Although the stones exhibited no flutterings from above—at one point I saw a leaf seesawing lazily down from the canopy and magically divert its path to avoid a stone before alighting on the ground—some had had their fare share of crude carvings, and the largest stone which lay flat and detached from its brethren in the middle of the configuration possessed a multitude of brown Rorschadt-like stains.
Blood
.
I paced over and gathered a closer look at the stains, touched them, wanted to smell them—doctor's intuition setting in—but stopped myself from doing so. They were as dry as the rocks themselves but didn't look as old. Common sense told me that over time they would have eroded and faded away regardless of the stones' porousness. Which meant the blood stains—if that's indeed what they were—hadn't been there very long. That unnerved me.
Looks like an ancient altar of some sort.
I turned to face Phillip but he'd gotten up from his spot. The trail of smoke from his cigar showed that he'd moved beyond the circle of stones. I could see him trembling, restless with deep lines of tension creasing his aging face. I thought:
he's tormented about his wife.
Given the dire circumstances I'd be too, and again I told myself, despite Phillip's constant reminders, that Rosy Deighton had not been a victim of cancer (I still hadn't located her file and resigned myself to the fact that one didn't exist). My conscience told me that she'd been attacked by an animal, more than likely a dog or two. Or three. Like Neil Farris.
So what?
I thought, trying to minimize my concern. Regardless of
how
Rosy's afflictions were obtained, they had been endless and traumatic and gruesome and would always be till death do they part. I offered Phillip a nod of reassurance and he knew where I was coming from. He winked back, puffing on his cigar.
"How old are these?" I asked. One of a half-million questions rolling around in my mind.
He shrugged his shoulders. "Don't know for sure. Thousand years, I guess. Let me show you something else."
We walked to the outermost area at the opposite end of the structure beyond the perimeter of the circle. A very large stone stood perpendicular to the others, ten feet away at the edge of clearing. Crabgrass hugged the bottom in bunches, errant ivies snaking about it like lanyards. On the face of the stone were a series of Hieroglyph-like carvings, illegible pictograms that decorated the upper half of the ten-by-six foot stone.
Had anything like this ever been discovered outside Egypt?
On the bottom were a succession of straight-line markers as though someone many years ago had kept a running total of something important. Sequenced by fives, I easily added up the notches. They totaled eighty-three.
"See those notches?" Phillip asked as I ran a finger in the indentation of one. "Four hundred years ago people used this place to make sacrifices. Each one of those markers represents an event."
"An event?"
He nodded. "Yep, a sacrifice."
"What kind of sacrifices?"
Phillip put his hands in his pockets. "Well, according to legend...
town
legend that is, and I say that because nobody knows for sure how far out beyond Ashborough our little piece of history has traveled over the years. Old Lady Zellis, she'll tell you tales that'll pull your eyes out of your head, and she knows every legend that runs from Ashborough all the way to Blacksburgh and beyond, though she might be the only one. You see, each town has their own personal legend and where they originate is usually where they stay. No one cares much for the next town's folklore, and no one likes to share their stories either. I guess you can call it hometown pride.
"Anyway, there used to be a race of aboriginal people, not Indians, but a different kind of people who lived here in isolation long before the white man came and pilfered it all away. This land had been wholly unoccupied and unferreted by the native folk, and for years our New England forefathers heeded their warning and steered clear."
"Their warning?"
He hesitated, looked me in the eyes, then said, "That all those who tread this land shall fall victim to the savagery of the Isolates."
"The Isolates..."
"This is what the Indians called them, these supposedly underdeveloped aborigines."
A silence grew between us. I took a sip of water and let the story sink in.
The savagery of the Isolates
. I moved my sights from Phillip to that large white slab in the center with the brownish stains. To me it looked like a great dead heart, the surrounding stones the fossilized remains of some long extinct dinosaur. Again it occurred to me that the whole of all these parts seemed much too tended in appearance, very un-ruin-like for something supposedly a thousand years old, and it really bothered me.
"Yep, Old Lady Zellis, she'll tell you the story much better than me, but she's a tough cookie to get a hold of these days, pretty much keeps herself and her home, and if you ask anyone they'll tell you that she's a card shy of a full deck, myself included. But she sure as heck knows her lore, at least that's what all the townsfolk say. I'll never forget the day I met her. She told me all about the Isolates and of this place they used for their rituals. It was thirty-two years ago, right after Rosy and I moved to Ashborough. I was in my twenties and the old lady was even an old lady back then."
Phillip put his right foot up on one of the stones, rested a forearm on his knee. "We'd just moved into our home the week before. It'd been a real cool Autumn evening and we needed some wood for the fireplace so I took off into the woods with my axe in search of a couple of healthy branches. I suppose I could've taken what I needed right away but the crisp air felt good in my lungs so I kept on walking, and in no time I was a few hundred feet deep into the woods. And then like magic, she appeared—Old Lady Zellis.
"I'd already heard some stories about her from the townspeople. Some folks were saying that she was all sugar and spice and others thought she was a real bad apple—rotten to the core. Me, I didn't know her at all so I had no opinion at the time, but upon first glance I'd say there was definitely some hocus pocus brewing up her sleeve. She's one of those kooky-odd types, every town has their share and everyone formulates an opinion about them despite the fact that nobody really knows anything about them. She lives by her lonesome, rarely leaves her house except to spend some afternoons on her porch. Her past, well, it's mostly a secret too, although the townsfolk say that she once lived with her mother, an old gypsy who used to travel up north and trade for wax to make candles. Rumor has it that they used these candles to perform some kind of witchy ceremonies in their basement at night, and to this day if you check out some of the older trees in the woods in her backyard you'll find some crude carvings in the bark just like these. It's told that her mother died when the old lady was just twelve...heh, I've always wondered if she was an old lady back then too! There's a grave in her backyard that's supposed to be that of her mother's. It's right at the edge of the woods, you can even see it from the road. Even nowadays people don't like talking about her, they say that she can see and hear everything you do despite the fact that she stays all to herself, and they'll tell you that she has a bit of darkness in her soul that can delve into your thoughts and spoil the purity of your Christian blood if she discovers you're doing something against her wishes."