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My grandmother and I were remarkably close, so I took her passing very hard. She was approaching her eighty-first birthday, but for someone her age she was the picture of health. Her death came suddenly, and I did not have time to prepare myself emotionally for this loss.
When I was only at the early age of nine, my parents were killed in a multi-car accident on the highway that took the lives of thirteen people. I was always close to my grandmother, so it was only natural that she took me in after the tragedy that shattered my life. My grandfather passed away before I was born, and my father had no other siblings. With no aunts, uncles or cousins, my grandmother became all I had.
Things did not go very well in the beginning. My grandmother lived too far away from my old school, so I had to transfer to a new school in which I knew no one and had no friends. For the first few weeks after the loss of my parents, my grandmother allowed me to stay home with her, but eventually I had to return to class. Being as sullen and withdrawn as I became over the course of the last month, I did not make friends very well at all.
In the beginning things were rough, but they got worse once the other kids started to learn who my grandmother was. Until I told the other schoolkids who I was and where I lived, I was unaware the local children believed my grandmother was a witch. Once the other kids realized who I was, they did not want anything to do with me. They did not want to be my friends, they did not want to play with me, and they did everything they could to avoid talking to me. The few other children who would speak to me only did so to taunt and bully me for being the grandchild of a witch.
I endured this treatment for the rest of the school year and did not let my grandmother know about what was happening. It would absolutely break her heart to hear what the other children had to say about her. As much as I wanted to, I did not get violent with the kids who bullied me because I was afraid that if I did, my grandmother would find out why. Rather than fighting back, I accepted the abuse.
When summer came, I spent my days working with my grandmother in her well-manicured lawn with all its beautiful flowers. She always told me I should go out and play with children in my neighborhood my age, but I managed to convince her that I would rather spend my time helping her around the yard since she did so much to take care of me. If my grandmother suspected I was lying to her, she never let on to that fact. As far as I knew, I managed to keep the truth of how the local children talked from my grandmother.
I managed to carry on this charade until I finished elementary school and moved up to the junior high. The kids in junior high were not as persistent in their taunting of me as the children in grade school, but their hatred and spite ran much deeper and more intensely. These kids were much crueler in their taunting, and much more personal in their insults.
As much as I tried to avoid confrontation, there were two members of the football team and their cheerleader girlfriends who did everything to push me to my tolerance threshold. Just as with grade school, the teachers and faculty at the junior high school witnessed this continual taunting but never stepped in to stop it. They told us in school that, if we were in danger, find an adult. I always knew that was a bunch of bull because adults always turned a blind eye when these kids were tormenting me.
It was early autumn of my eighth grade-year when I was walking home from school. As I often did, I took a trail through the woods behind the school rather than riding the bus with the other children. I preferred the scenery the thick hardwood forest provided to the chaos and bullying which occurred on that big yellow coach. Normally that was my safe space, as the other children tended to avoid this section of the forest, but not on this day.
On this particular afternoon, those two football players thought they would have some fun at my expense. As I approached a very large, familiar tree, the two bullies stepped out from behind it and blocked the path. I was not about to back down from them and run, but I knew I could not take them both on my own. I felt my heart begin to race as tunnel vision threatened to blind me when my adrenalin surged.
The two bullies smiled sadistically as they flexed their muscles and cracked their knuckles when they began to slowly approach me. Both of them were taller than I was, so I tried to tell myself to duck under their swings and hit them low.
Suddenly an intense chill filled the air, and the leaves on the nearby trees began to fall in mass. My vision so focused on my two adversaries suddenly froze and the looks on their faces turned to ones of complete terror. I was not sure what really happened next. I felt something rush past me and the next thing I remembered was waking up on the trail about twenty minutes later.
My two bullies were gone, as were the leaves in all the trees along the forest pathway. I did not know what happened after I felt that force rush past me, but I was sure it had to be something out of the norm. I felt very uneasy, but I was not afraid. I knew anything capable of driving those jocks away could dispatch with me with very little to no effort, but I simply did not feel like I was in any danger whatsoever.
Although I still did not say anything to my grandmother about the stories the other kids told about her, I was beginning to grow curious as to whether or not there was any validity to them. The two football players never bothered me again. As a matter of fact, it almost seemed like they actively tried to avoid any face-to-face contact with me.
The curiosity in me continued to grow as the weeks passed. I thought about what could scare those bullies to such a degree but leave me sleeping peacefully on the ground.
Was it possible my grandmother really was a witch? Was that force I felt rush past me something she called up from another world?
No, that had to be impossible. My grandmother was the most loving, forgiving person I ever knew in my tragedy-stricken life. There was simply no way I could believe she had any dealings with beings from the underworld, or afterlife, or from wherever such diabolical things came. I was sure it would break her heart if she knew what I had to endure because of the vicious rumors about her, but I felt as though I should protect her from knowing exactly what the local kids thought.
When I finally arrived home after school that day, my grandmother had me some hot cocoa and cinnamon rolls ready and fresh. There was nothing inherently odd about this, but whenever she made me such snacks, she always had it ready for me as soon as I made it home. Today, I was at least twenty to twenty-five minutes late, but she still had it ready right when I walked in the door.
How could she have known I was going to be late? Was she just keeping my snack warm for me as she waited for me to get home?
Trying to push such thoughts out of my head, I made my way over to the kitchen table. Giving my grandmother a kiss on the cheek, I took my seat and began consuming the cocoa and cinnamon rolls. While I was eating, my grandmother asked me how my day went. She asked me this every day, and every day I lied to her and told her that everything went fine. I still did not know if she believed me, but if she did not, she never made any pretense that she thought otherwise.
Over the years, I could not help but wonder why all the local children believed my grandmother was a witch. I could not really dig very deep into it without asking my grandmother. The other kids probably had no idea why they treated her as they did. They just knew the kids before them talked cruelly of her, so they simply followed suit like children will. I knew any inquiries I made from anyone on the subject would serve to do nothing but make the rumors worse, so I continued to live in ignorance.
The summer before I began high school, I decided to go to the library to see if I could find anything in old newspaper clippings that might explain everything. My search was not an easy one, and I did not find anything to help me on my first visit. Even with the help of the directory, I uncovered thousands of articles that potentially contained the information I sought. It was going to take me multiple visits which I would have to spread out over a period of time in order to avoid arousing my grandmother’s suspicion.
It was on the Saturday before my first year in high school that I finally found my first clue as to what could be going on in this town. After countless hours of searching, I located an article about the disappearance of two children which occurred almost half a century ago. I found other articles about missing persons, but this one was different than those I read thus far. This article led me to other articles following this case over the period of two weeks.
These children were playing in the park in the center of town under the supervision of their parents. The parents sat at a nearby picnic table as the kids played in the sandbox. The adults turned their attention from the children for a brief moment as they involuntarily reacted to the sound of a car backfiring. When the parents turned back, the children were gone.
At this time, the northern edge of the park adjoined the forest that still fills up a large part of this region. There was nowhere else in the park where the children could have gone and not be visible to someone there. The parents of the two children began to shout for them as they frantically searched the park. The forest was simply too far from the sandbox, one hundred and fifty feet according to the police report, but the four now hysterical parents could not find them.
The police soon arrived on the scene, and very quickly a search of the rest of the park and the forest began. Volunteers came from neighboring towns to help in the search, but after four days of searching the children were not located. Although the search continued, it appeared as if it was going to become less of a rescue mission and more of a recovery mission.
It was the middle of the summer. The creeks and streams that meandered through the forest were virtually, if not completely dry. At this point, the fear was they would succumb to dehydration if they were still alive. More people joined the search, and the search area was expanded in a desperate hope the children were still alive.
On day seven of the search, two volunteers from a neighboring town heard the faint sound of a small child sobbing. That part of the forest was very rocky and consisted of a series of stone ridges. While the ridges were not enough to hinder the searchers, it did make locating the crying child difficult. After hours of searching, the two volunteers found the four-year-old boy hiding in a crevasse between two massive boulders. The volunteers carried the boy to the closest road, and one of them went for help.
A physical examination of the boy found that, aside from a few scrapes and bruises, he seemed perfectly fine. He showed no signs of dehydration or malnourishment. When the searchers found him, the boy was wearing nothing but his shirt and shorts. His socks and shoes were nowhere to be found.
It baffled the authorities as to how the boy could get to such a rocky location wearing no shoes but have so few abrasions on his legs. The crevasse in which the volunteers found the boy was almost ten miles away from the park where he disappeared, and he would have to pass through two large, dry creek beds to get there.
As confounding as the boy’s location was, it was his story that truly terrified everyone. The boy was only four, so it was natural that his story be a disjointed one. He told the authorities that he and the other child were playing in the sandbox when the thin man came to talk to them. The child was able to describe the thin man in great detail and he did so consistently. If the thin man was nothing more than a figment of the boy’s imagination, the description would change each time he told it.
He described the thin man as being so tall, the two children only stood as high as its knees. The thin man’s body the boy described as being no more than a foot wide, but his arms were long enough for him to reach down and take the children by the hands. The thin man told them he only wanted to learn about them and assured them they were in no danger from him. The child said the thin man led them into the forest, and the next thing he remembered was waking up in a patch of grass near the crevasse in which he was found.
The little girl was never located.
This incident occurred more than a year before my grandparents moved to this town, so I knew there was no possibility my grandmother had anything to do with it. Although I felt better knowing the sweet old lady who was raising me was innocent of this, it did make me begin to wonder if there was actually something out there in those woods. I could not help but wonder if this had any connection to what happened with my bullies and me on that forest pathway.
Attempting to avoid the forest, I rode the bus to school for the first couple of weeks. The more I thought about it, the less the idea of something supernatural or paranormal in the forest frightened me. I spent a lot of time over the last four years in these woods and never encountered anything abnormal. There was only the one incident with the jocks who waited to ambush me. I knew there was a rational explanation for what happened, even if I could not provide that explanation.
It was not long before I once again used the forest trails to make my way home from school. The high school was in a different location from the junior high, but it did not take me long to become familiar with the new walking trails. Getting home now took me approximately ten minutes less than it did the previous year as the high school was a bit closer to my grandmother’s house.
At least I did not have to pass through that same area of the forest where I had the encounter during my eighth-grade year. Ever since that incident, I shied away from that specific section of the woods. Although I finally began to feel comfortable in the company of the trees and the animals that roamed the area, I still felt very uneasy approaching too near that area. As large as this forest was, it was not difficult for me to avoid that one section.
I continued going to the library as often as I could, generally telling my grandmother I was going there to do my schoolwork. The library provided reference materials I simply did not have at home. My excuse for using the public library instead of the school library was because there was more information available at the larger public library. In that I was telling the truth as the school did not have a newspaper morgue, but I did lie to her by telling her it was for school.
It was not until the last few weeks of summer before I found another incident in the town that seemed to defy all explanation. This one happened only one week before my grandparents moved into the area and involved two identical homes. Both houses, even though they were separated by miles both caught fire at the same time. No cause was ever determined for either one of the home blazes, but that was not what made these cases so strange.
Both houses faced the same direction. Somehow, the east side of one house burned while the west side of the other house went up in flames. There was no damage at all, no smoke damage or anything in the unburnt portions of the homes. When the two pictures were compared together, it was very obvious where the fire stopped on one house, it began on the other. It was if somehow these two houses became one, burned down, then split back into separate buildings.
No cause for either fire was determined. No one was injured as the residents of both homes happened to be on vacation at the same time. Authorities investigated the fires as arson, but there was simply no evidence the blazes were intentionally set. As a matter of fact, the fires could be attributed to nothing the investigators could find.
Once the houses were repaired and the families were finally able to move back in, they began to report strange occurrences in and around their property. Over the course of the next year, both families reported strange noises, missing items around the house and the feeling they were never alone inside their homes. Although there were never any incidents of physical injury, the families could no longer take the psychological torment and moved outside of the region. The two houses remained unsold for decades, until finally someone purchased them both, tore them down and rebuilt new homes in their place.
It made no sense to me that people would call my dear old grandmother a witch when all these paranormal occurrences happened before her arrival. I began to wonder if it was something of a case of mistaken identity. Perhaps the local children thought my grandmother was someone else, someone who may be a bad person of a sort. Being children, they never bothered to learn if they had the right person or not.
As the next few months passed, I continued my weekly visits to the library. I looked through decades of newspapers, and while I did find many strange happenings in and around the town, all of them happened before my grandparents arrived. There was nothing I could find in the periodicals that would explain why the locals chose to target my grandmother the way they did.
I was determined to show my grandmother as the loving woman she was. These horrible rumors concerning her being a wielder of the dark arts were going to stop one way or another. I could not let this behavior continue, so I had to find something that could prove me right.
During the snowy months, there was very little for me to do around the yard to help my grandmother. I finally finished going through every newspaper ever printed in this town, so I turned my research to the history section. There were not many books on the history of this region, but there were a few.
I was quite shocked to discover that, at one point in time, this town almost disappeared. Following a harsh summer in the early 1800’s, a rash of livestock disappearances plagued the ranchers to the point many of them began to leave. Hundreds of livestock went missing during this one summer, but there were no witness accounts that could help explain this phenomenon.
It started when the sons of one of the shepherds noticed several of their sheep missing, even though the boys saw the congregation of them only minutes before. The boys searched the area for the missing sheep, but they never found any trace of them. One of the boys eventually ran to a neighboring pasture to seek out assistance in searching for the missing livestock while the other remained behind to keep an eye on the rest of the flock.
When the boy returned with several others, they found the remainder of the flock still gathered where it was. The young teenager who remained behind with the flock was no where to be seen. The others yelled out for the boy as they frantically searched the nearby area, but no trace of the boy could be found.
Hunters came in from around the region as the belief was that a bear or perhaps a pack of wolves took away the young man and the five missing sheep. There was no blood or tracks to be found, but the searchers continued to work under the assumption some wild animal must have taken the boy and the small group of sheep.
Despite all the volunteers joining in on the search, there was simply no sign of the teenager or the missing sheep. In total the hunters killed one black bear, one brown bear and two wolves. Unfortunately, when the bellies of the animals were opened so the hunters could examine the contents, no trace of human or sheep remains were found. None of these animals were responsible for the disappearances.
The young men in charge of moving the flocks of sheep from their fenced in areas to the grazing fields began carrying firearms with them. With no other explanation available, the people of the area continued to function under the assumption wild animals were responsible for the recent situation. I could not help but wonder if it was the thin man who took the young shepherd and those sheep, but that would mean this thin man was at minimum two hundred years old.
Six months after everyone gave up on ever finding the missing boy, someone spotted an emaciated figure walking along the road that passed through the center of town. It was dark, but the woman was sure she recognized the boy. Screaming for help, the woman ran to the young man. His weary eyes seemed sunken deep in his skull and he was so malnourished he seemed like nothing more than a walking skeleton.
Quickly some of the townspeople placed the young man into the back of a cart and rushed him to the doctor. For nearly a week the physician attempted to help the boy, who still had not said a word since his shocking appearance. He did not seem to have any major wounds, although he did have some scrapes and cuts. His skin was pale-gray and red hives began to develop over his entire body.
For the entire week, the boy’s mother never left his side. His father tried to spend as much time with his son as he could, but without his wife and son helping, he was too busy tending to their crops and livestock. Unfortunately, by noon on the eighth day the young man succumbed to his condition and passed from this world.
Only days following the death of the poor young man, his mother grew ill. She developed a fever and in less than a day she began to vomit anything she tried to eat. The town doctor found some others to help with the family’s livestock so the worried husband and grieving father could help tend to his wife. She was unable to drink more than a few sips of water at a time, and her becoming dehydrated was a serious concern.
Two days after the woman fell ill, her husband and three other people in town began to experience the onset of a fever and vomiting. Fear gripped the town and everyone began to limit their contact with others as much as possible out of worry of contracting this illness. Eight days after becoming sick, the woman passed away.
Over the course of the next two months, nearly a third of the population died from the strange sickness. Fearing for their lives, half of those who remained moved out of the region. They even left their livestock behind because of the possibility of the animals already being infected. Those ranchers who did remain behind eventually divided the abandoned livestock once they saw none of the animals contracted this disease. It seemed to only affect people.
It took nearly eighty years for the town’s population to become what it was before the sick boy came staggering back into town. By the turn of the twentieth century, there were none of the town’s original inhabitants remaining. Their descendants remembered the stories and shared them with the newer residents who moved into the area over the years. The stories of the plague that ravaged the town soon became more myth than history, and the town continued to grow to the size it was today.
I could not find any more than this in the history books, and I already went through every newspaper clipping produced in this region for more than a century. Growing frustrated with this seemingly endless search, I began to think I would never find an answer to my question. I wanted to know why many of the locals thought my grandmother was a witch, and I was convinced it had something to do with a specific occurrence that I had yet to discover.
Eventually I turned my reading focus to the legends and mythology of the region. If I could not find something in more recent literature, perhaps I would find something from the myths of the Indians who once inhabited the area that might help explain the strange happenings. With the history books and newspapers, I researched from the most recent times and into the past. This time I decided it would probably be more prudent to start as far in the past as I could and work my way forward. I hoped this might produce better results than my previous research.
The oldest books I could find were written by settlers after learning the myths and legends of the original inhabitants as the natives had no written language of their own. The first books I read discussed the stories of the natives as if they were no more than fairy tales, but as time progressed the settlers began to take the stories more seriously. The Indians warned the European settlers to stay out of the region as they believed it belonged to the spirits. Not buying into what they thought to be nothing more than pagan beliefs, the settlers ignored the advice of the redskins and began to colonize the area anyway.
By the first winter, nearly a dozen families built homes and began grazing their livestock on the land. The season was too late for planting by the times the homes were built and the livestock was driven into the valley, so the settlers would have to subsist on what grains they brought with them and on the livestock until the planting season returned.
It was late in the month of November when a sudden and unexpected blizzard hit the region covering most if it in four to five feet of snow. The wind caused the livestock to drift, and many of them began to wander out of the area completely. The men of the budding village took turns heading out in small groups on horseback to round up the animals that wandered off.
After several weeks of rounding up the missing livestock, some of the men were driving the animals back to the pastures when they came upon a terrifyingly gruesome sight. According to the account of the men who survived, the trees came to life and had lying on the ground in front of them three cows whose bodies were splayed open like something performed a dissection on them.
Terrified at the sight in front of them, the men began to fire their weapons at the animated trees. The creatures moved so fast, the men did not have time to react. Before they knew what happened, two men lay dead on the ground, one with his horse, and another man was missing completely. The description the men gave of these walking trees made me wonder if these were possibly creatures of the same species as the thin man or if they were something else altogether.
Over the next few centuries reports of strange lights, sounds, and unearthly beings occurred on a fairly regular basis. Finally, I found a map of the entire region encompassed by the forest that was drawn several hundred years ago. Although the years changed the tree lines and altered the courses of the multitude of creeks and streams meandering through the area, I did still recognize many of the landmarks on the ancient map.
Although many strange, archaic symbols were located all over the parchment map I could not find any legend to interpret what the symbols meant. There was still a lot of material for me to examine, and I was sure I would find the meaning of these glyphs at some point. The more I learned about this region, the more I wondered what was actually happening here. I wished I could make a copy of the map so I could examine it at my leisure, but no such method to do so was available in town.
Since I could not make a copy of the map, and the town library would not allow the parchment to leave the building, I began searching through anything I could find that might lead me to a smaller version of the map of which I could Xerox for later examination. I wondered if the librarian would allow me to bring in a camera with which I could make a better image of the map, but I did not know if such things were allowed.
When I could not find another copy of the large parchment map in any other books, I knew I would either have to take a photograph or study it only while I was in the town library. I worried too much time spent studying old myths and examining every detail on that centuries old map would serve to do nothing more than rouse additional suspicion on both me and my grandmother.
For the time being, I made drawings of some of the symbols on the map in my notebooks in hopes I could find out more about them later. I tried as best I could to maintain accuracy of the locations of the glyphs on the map, but I did not have the artistic talent to do this very well. Somehow, I was going to have to try to sneak a camera into the library and get a clear photograph I could examine in greater detail. Until I could make that happen, I worked on deciphering the map as best I could.
Fortunately there were other reference books where I was able to locate some of the symbols and find out a bit behind their meaning. What truly baffled me was that I found these symbols or glyphs were not taken only from Indian lore. Some of the symbols I found on the map were associated with cultures on the far side of the world. It made no sense to me how such glyphs developed all across the globe could have a place on a map made several hundred years ago. It was impossible for me to accept all these civilizations made a combined effort on this previously unknown continent to compose this ancient map.
As I uncovered more and more of the meanings of this odd selection of symbols speckling the map, what I discovered confounded me on a whole new level. Nearly half of the symbols I found meanings for in other reference books from other cultures translated to doorway, opening, tear, crack, portal or some other such aperture. Things went from confusing to absolutely baffling as I obtained this new information.
How could it be possible for civilizations separated by oceans and centuries all made a contribution to this ancient parchment map? What was it about this area that seemed to be a magnet for strange happenings?
I could not fathom what this all had to do with my grandmother or why anyone would associate her with things that happened hundreds of years before she was even born. As far as I was aware, I never had any family other than my grandparents who lived in this area, and as far as I knew we had no connections here at any point in our family history. None of this made any sense to me, but I was sure if I continued searching, I would eventually find something to explain this all to me. For now, I would have to continue to investigate until I could somehow begin putting this all together.
I was on my way home from the library, cutting through the forest as I always did when I noticed something out of the ordinary. There seemed to be a large congregation of birds gathered in the tops of three trees positioned in a triangular pattern. The birds chirped, screeched and cackled at something that seemed to be positioned between the trees. From my current location, I could not see what had the animals so upset. If it were a predator, I would think they would simply fly away. Instead, they acted almost as if they were trying to protect something.
Pushing through the fear the noise and intensity of the situation instilled in me, I began to slowly move forward in the direction of the birds in hopes I could see what had them so upset. As I crested a small hill, I began to see what looked to be small glowing green orbs which seemed to appear and disappear randomly. I was now close enough to see the birds filling the trees were ravens, and it was obvious whatever this was occurring below them was what had them in such a panic.
My instincts told me to run away as fast as my feet would carry me, but something in the back of my thoughts told me I needed to be a witness to what was happening. With my thoughts captivated by the strange blobs of faint green light, I did not take note of how much time passed as I continued to watch on. Eventually the orbs began to slow in their motion and appeared to take up set positions at random heights above the ground.
To both my shock and horror I saw what I could only describe as bone plated tentacles begin reaching out of the spheres of light. They flailed wildly as if they were trying to gather the ravens from the trees, but the black birds stayed far enough outside the reach of the tentacles to remain safe. When this tactic did not seem to work, the tentacles began gripping the edges of the green orbs in what appeared to be an attempt to create larger apertures.
Something was reaching into my world from another, and it seemed to be desperately trying to pull its way through to this side. I felt like I should do something. I felt obligated to stop this demon or whatever it was from coming through from its world to ours, but I had no idea what I could do. I looked around for anything that might be of use, but there was nothing with which I could fight away some dark horror such as this.
Suddenly, several dozen ravens took to the air flying around the tentacles almost as if taunting them. The small group of birds grouped together on the ground in a heap, and a second later the heap rose to stand less than ten feet from the cluster of orbs. I could not believe what I saw. The black mass rose to take on the shape of a person draped in a cloak made of black feathers.
The small figure withdrew something from its pocket, but I could not see what it was. Whatever the object was, it was small. It looked like it might possibly be a stone or figurine of some sort, but from this distance, I could not say for certain. The cloaked figure held the object in front of it as it began to walk closer to the orbs. The coloration of the glowing spheres began to turn from green to purple, and the appendages emerging from them began to thrash and writhe about in pain. In less than a few minutes, the bone-plated tentacles withdrew back from where they came and the illuminated orbs vanished from sight.
What happened next brought into question everything I believed and everything I did not believe. The figure gracefully turned around to face me and the face was immediately recognizable to me. I was looking at my sweet grandmother standing there adorned in what appeared to be nothing more than feathers. She smiled at me as she always did, then exploded into a mass of birds. The birds nestled in the trees noisily took flight and joined those ravens that only moments ago were the caring old lady who raised me since I was orphaned.
In an absolute panic, I ran through the forest with every bit of speed I could muster. I did not know what to think about this strange happening. It was next to impossible for me to even fathom in any way that my grandmother was involved in witchcraft, but I saw her right there with my own eyes. At least I thought I did.
Could it even be possible for my sweet grandmother to be a practitioner of the dark arts? How could she form from a mass of ravens only to explode into a frenzy of the black birds before flying away?
Never in my life would I expect her to be involved in whatever was going on here, but I could not get over what I saw so clearly myself. As the shock of the situation began to fade, an intense wave of terror washed over me. I turned toward home and began to run as fast as my legs could possibly carry me. Even though I was probably more familiar with this forest than anyone in town, I still almost tripped twice first on a rock embedded in the trail and again on a large root that crossed the path. I knew these obstacles were there, but in my frantic flight I failed to pay attention to them.
Still unable to comprehend what I saw, I thought perhaps it was some sort of omen warning me my grandmother was in danger and needed my help. All I could think about was getting home to make sure that she was alright. The more I considered the possibilities, the more I began to panic.
By the time I reached my grandmother’s house, my side ached so intensely I could barely stand. Pressing my hand against the painful area in an attempt to alleviate the agony, I staggered the rest of the way to the house and up the stairs of the back porch. Sliding open the glass door, I staggered into the house and began looking for my grandmother. Although I never set one foot in the basement in the entirety of my life, I felt an incredible urge to open the door and climb the stairs into the darkness below.
Although there were no windows down there to allow in even a minute trace of light, I could see a faint illumination coming from below. Carefully and as quietly as I could, I descended the stairs into the cluttered basement. Old furniture, boxes and all sorts of things filled the room, but there was a clear pathway to the far wall. Hanging from that end of the basement was a large black curtain around the edges of which I could see multicolored lights radiating. My fear began to mount as I considered the possibility my dear old grandmother was exactly what everyone said she was.
She always told me to stay away from the basement as the lighting was low and there were many obstacles which could be dangerous in the dark. Never once did I consider she might be up to something nefarious down there in that cluttered room underneath the house. Taking care not to bump into any of the multitude of heaps of old furniture and other junk, I slowly crept my way toward the thick curtain hanging against the stone blocked wall.
I stopped a few feet short of the curtain as my heart pounded in my chest. I could hear my pulse in my ears as the intensity of the situation increased. My imagination conjured a barrage of terrible thoughts of what evil things my grandmother could be doing in there, and my body froze in absolute terror. Never would I ever guess my grandmother could be up to something so nefarious, but the evidence seemed to be mounting against her.
Unsure of how long I stood there trying to muster the courage to pull the curtain aside to see what was transpiring within, I nearly jumped out of my own skin when I heard my grandmother call my name. She knew I was there. I tried to be as quiet as I possibly could, but clearly I was not being quiet enough. She called my name again and told me to join her on the other side of the thick linen curtain.
Reluctantly, I slowly pulled back the thick cloth to reveal a stone doorway concealed behind it. The blocks making up the arched doorway and the rest of this wall appeared to be something constructed long ago, long before the rest of this old town existed. The wall was about six feet thick, and I could see multicolored lights emanating from the room on the other side. Until my eyes began to adjust to the sudden increase in illumination, all I could see was a radiant blur at the end of the short tunnel.
The room at the other end began to come into focus as I slowly stepped my way forward. When I made it through the opening on the other side, I could see my grandmother standing near the center of the room. The chamber was massive, much larger than I would ever expect. The oval shaped room was easily two hundred and fifty feet across and was surrounded by a four-foot ledge. Four wide sets of stairs led from the ledge down to the unbelievable display covering the floor of the ancient chamber.
It was difficult to comprehend what I saw from where I stood at the top of the nearest staircase as I looked down at my grandmother below. The floor of the chamber was a single slab of granite bedrock. To me what was absolutely confounding was what was carved into the speckled granite. An intricately detailed carving of the entire town and the surrounding forest region cut directly into the bedrock filled the entire lower section of the chamber.
This was not possible. The details etched into the granite floor were as the town appeared today, and I did not understand how anyone could do such intricate work while keeping everything up to date. If this place was even half as ancient as it appeared, it simply was not possible what I saw was real.
My grandmother stood across the room to my left, and she seemed to be holding several small objects in one hand. Her eyes scanned over the stone model of the town as if anticipating something. When I cleared my throat, my grandmother knew I was about to ask her to explain to me what was happening and held up one finger telling me to hold my thoughts for a moment.
Suddenly a wide grin spread across her lips as she pointed her wrinkly finger at the engraving of a large pond located about a mile behind the high school. I watched as the stone comprising the surface of the pond turned to actual water. Right there in front of my eyes, I watched the pond turn blue and the surrounding trees turn green as they waved in the blowing wind.
My grandmother began walking across the incredibly detailed carving and her feet passed through the graven obstacles as if they were not there. Her bare feet fell even with the ground of the carving, but they passed through the buildings, trees and everything else represented.
It appeared as though she carried in her palm a small black stone, an acorn and a bottlecap. As she drew closer to the now blue water, I saw a rift begin to form over the north end of the pond. At the same time, the bottlecap in my grandmother’s hand began to glow. Although the blindingly bright rift was small, I could somehow see through it to another world on the other side. The strength of the illumination was intense and did not allow me to see anything clearly, but I could make out the silhouettes of several centipede-like reptiles slithering their way to the opening.
When my grandmother reached the pond, she bent down and began to insert the glowing bottlecap into the rift. As soon as she did, the tear in space rapidly dimmed until I could see it no longer. The bottlecap was gone.
“Are you a witch?” I asked my grandmother.
With a chuckle, she turned to look at me and said, “No, not a witch.”
She began to make her way to where I stood near the entrance to the chamber as she continued, “Witches make deals, sell their souls for power. Witches crave magic that benefits their own life.”
“If you aren’t a witch, what are you?”
“I never really thought about what I would call myself,” she explained. “Perhaps a ‘gatekeeper.’”
When my grandmother reached the bottom of the stone staircase, I took a few steps down and held her by the hand as I assisted her climb. Once she reached the top of the stairs, my grandmother began to explain everything to me. It was quite difficult for me to digest what she said to me, but I knew my grandmother well. I did not think she would lie about something as strange as this.
“This region, everything represented by the map on the floor of this room is not grounded firmly in this reality,” she explained as she waved her hand about the chamber. Hundreds of thousands of years ago an unknown civilization discovered this weak spot between worlds and somehow developed a method by which these openings could be sealed.”
Was that what the glowing green orbs swarming with the bone plated tentacles I saw were? Was that what the rift I saw appear above that pond was? Were these openings into other worlds?
The sweet old lady who raised me for the past few years led me out of the domed chamber, through the arched stone hallway and into the basement of the house. Retrieving a flashlight resting on top of a box, she turned it on and led me behind a large stack of boxes and other old junk. I was shocked when she turned the light onto several large stacks of books, scrolls, maps and other such materials.
“When your grandfather and I bought this house, we were completely unaware of what was hidden in the ground. Shortly after we moved here, strange things began to happen. It was not until we searched this basement and found all this that we understood what was happening.”
“We did not know this one piece of property carried with it the burden of tending to the fractures between dimensions until we began to read through the material I now turn over to you,” she said.
I really hoped she was not saying what I thought she was saying. To me it sounded like she intended for me to one day take this obligation upon myself, but I had no desire to carry the burden on such responsibility. My grandmother continued to speak, so I kept my mouth shut for the time being and listened.
“Strange things began happening shortly after your grandfather and I moved to town. It was not until we found all this and the buried chamber that we realized the things that were happening were happening because no one was tending to the map you saw in there on the floor. Starting with the notes of the previous owner, we quickly learned how to close the connections which formed between this world and others. That’s why the people of this town say the things they say about me”
My grandmother then led me to the opposite side of the basement where she had another obscured area where she kept things hidden. Walking behind a large stack of boxes, my grandmother grabbed a large black cloth that appeared to be covering a box or perhaps a table. Pulling the cloth away, she showed me something beyond my ability to comprehend.
“This is the Rubicon,” she told me.
“The Rubicon?” I inquired.
“Yes, you could call it a calendar of sorts,” she explained. “This is how we know when and where the walls between worlds will become too thin so we can be prepared to seal any portals that result.”
The outer casing of the object appeared to be made from sheets of some sort of transparent moonstone. The edges were all trimmed in a strange metal which resembled tiny flakes of gold and platinum suspended in a base of quartz. Inside of the Rubicon were countless two-dimensional rings, each of them covered in a series of glyphs, symbols or other archaic markings. Some of the rings appeared to be made from various metals, but some of them appeared to be etched from ornamental and precious stones. Regardless of the material from which each ring appeared to be constructed, they all somehow existed as two-dimensional objects.
Whenever I turned my attention to a specific ring, I could see it was perfectly round and flat, yet it wove above and below other rings. If I turned my attention to another ring, I could see that one was now flat and perfectly round yet still wove in and out of others. Every ring was flat and round, but somehow they twisted together in ways that should not be physically possible.
What I saw simply could not be. It was like holding a physical Penrose triangle in my hand all while knowing it was impossible for that shape to exist. This display before me was not capable of existing in a three-dimensional world, but there I was staring right at it. It felt like it was trying to show me something my mind simply could not fathom.
I grew dizzy and lightheaded as it felt like the Rubicon was trying to draw my consciousness into it. I think my grandmother could see this was all becoming too much for me because she quickly threw the cloth covering over the box and situated it so nothing of the Rubicon could be seen. As soon as the box was out of my sight, I began to feel my normal self again.
“It can be overwhelming at first,” my grandmother told me.
Following this, we both went back upstairs to the kitchen where my grandmother made me a snack and poured me a glass of juice. She told me to make sure to drink all of the fruit juice she poured for me as she said the sugar and vitamins would help me feel better after almost being pulled into the Rubicon. After I finished my snack, my grandmother sat down with me and told me one day I would have to learn to read the multiversal calendar. That’s when it dawned on me, as my grandmother’s sole heir, this house would one day become mine as would everything hidden in the basement.
Over the course of the next few years I no longer bothered with trying to do any sort of research at the library. The answer I sought there my grandmother cleared up for me when she told me about the burden that came with the ownership of this house. Instead, I now spent my time reading, studying and learning as much as I could from the many-many journals left behind by the previous gatekeepers.
My grandmother was careful to limit my time with the Rubicon until I learned to fend off its mesmerizing effects. It required a lot of patients and a lot of practice before my brain could make any sense of this mystical contraption, but eventually my mind grew stronger and the Rubicon no longer pulled at my consciousness. I could see how it would be very easy for someone staring into the impossible workings of the Rubicon to lose themselves in the device.
Over the course of the next few years, my grandmother taught me how to read the Rubicon, to interpret its symbols until I could predict the time and place when the connections between dimensions would happen. During this time, she taught me how to locate the various items that could close the rifts between worlds. It was not until I was fully proficient in reading the Rubicon and in my selection of possible keys to lock the openings that my grandmother finally allowed me to climb down the stairs in that domed chamber to seal one of the openings for the first time.
It was shortly after my graduation from high school when I came home from the market to find my grandmother asleep in her chair. At first I did not want to disturb her, but something did not look right. After setting the grocery bags on the table, I quietly crept over to my grandmother being careful not to wake her. It did not matter. I could have called her with a bullhorn and never disturb her. With her legs pulled up and wrapped in her favorite blanket, my dear grandmother passed away in the short time I was gone.
More people than I expected attended her funeral, but I could not help but wonder if it was because they were glad she was gone. They seemed genuine in their condolences, but in the back of my mind I could not help but wonder if they were happy the woman they thought was a witch was finally gone. I tried to accept their kindness, but I grew up hearing terrible things, and those things were not easy to forget.
I was the only one who attended the reading of the will. I almost expected to see more locals here hoping to benefit even more from my grandmother’s passing. Everything she had, my grandmother left to me. That included the house and the ancient room past the basement. On my way home, I began to seriously contemplate leaving. I could just take what fit in the car and go. With no one tending to the portals, the people of that town would get what they deserved. With me gone, they would be helpless as there would be no one capable of reading the Rubicon.
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