road to perdition, part three

13 september 2005

Apparently one of the search engines has satellite maps now, and I was able to track down where we’d been the night before. I had difficulty finding the quarry, or whatever it was, where we saw the standing stones; but I did manage to retrace our steps enough to find the strange field. There was what appeared to be a service road running alongside the railroad at one end of the field, on the side opposite the lights, but what caught my attention were the two large black circles in the grain next to the service road.

I grabbed a notebook and wrote down the coordinates so I could find it again, and went to meet up with Rick and Charles. We cruised around, hung out at the park, basically just killed the day, until Jackie got off work. When we picked her up, I told them what I’d found, and they wanted to see for themselves. We went back to the house and I found the location again. The field, however, looked normal, or at least only slightly altered, with no sign of the marks.

“Are you sure it was here?” Rick asked.

“Yes! They were right there! Look, it even looks a little...off, in the picture.”

“I’m not seeing it.” We argued for a few minutes until I offered to just drive us there so we could check. Having nothing better to do, everyone else agreed, and we piled back into my car and headed out. It took about forty-five minutes, with us stopping for drinks on the way, before we got back to the field. It was after dark, and the fall fog was laying thick on the road. Thick enough that we actually missed the service road and had to turn around and head back. Once we found it, however, we pulled in slowly and watched out the side for any opening in the grain. It didn’t take long before we saw a dark space on the passenger side, and I pulled over.

“Shit, man,” Charles whined. “I dunno about this.”

“You’re gonna do this now?” Rick asked.

“I’m just...it looks pretty dark. Did anyone bring a flashlight?”

“I think I have one in the glove compartment,” I offered, looking to Jackie. She sighed and opened it, pulling out a small maglite. “Yeah, here we go.”

“Great. What do the rest of us use?”

“Are you guys always so prepared for these things?” Jackie asked.

“No, no,” I said, opening my door, “usually we’re also drunk.”

“How you’ve managed to pull this shit off for so long is beyond me. Matteson, you keep your distance.” With that, she stepped out of the car and pulled something out of her pocket. Holding it tight in her hand, she whispered something, and then blew on it. It was then I could see it was a crystal, and it was now glowing like some kind of torch.

“You gotta teach me how to do that!” Rick said, sidling up to her.

“You don’t have half the will for magic.”

“She’s not wrong,” Charles said, hugging close to her. I pushed the button on my flashlight a couple times, then smacked it until it turned on. When I caught up to the others, they were standing in the middle of a perfect circle, probably about thirty feet across, which had been burned into the field.

“So they...have a fire pit?” Rick offered. “Maybe they burn garbage here?”

“There’s no garbage here. Usually there’d be remnants of something.”

“Maybe they burned, I dunno, paper? Only?”

“Why would they have two of them?” I asked, pointing my flashlight at one side of the circle where it overlapped briefly with another, equally large and equally empty circle.

“...efficiency?”

“Do you guys think this was aliens?” Charles asked. We all turned to look at him, and then Rick began to pinch the bridge of his nose. Jackie lowered her crystal and knelt down to touch the ground.

“No,” Jackie said, flatly. “There was magic here. I can feel it.”

“Magical aliens?”

“Would that be better?!” Rick yelled, throwing his arms in the air. “Would you sleep better at night thinking there were alien wizards visiting our farms?”

“At least they’d leave when they’re done,” Charles muttered.

“Can you tell us anything else about it?” I asked Jackie.

“No. Not really. It feels...the magic was recently performed, but it was very, very ancient magic.”

“Awesome. Love ancient magic. Nothing sinister about ancient magic burning giant holes in fields and then having them vanish from satellite pictures. You guys wanna see where this road leads? Maybe it’s related”

“Can I vote no?” Charles asked.

“You can vote whatever you want, but I’m driving.” He groaned and followed me back to the car alongside the others. Once Jackie’s light was out and the car was started, we pulled off into the fog. Once again, the radio went dead. We drove for a few minutes, slowly watching for anything else of note, until we came to a paved road. Ahead, the service road seemed to vanish into a garage. As there seemed little more to find that way, I turned and we followed the paved road around in a wide loop, riding along the edge of the farm, until we got back to where we’d entered the service road. I stopped and looked, and we saw the service road head off in the other direction.

“Please don’t.”

“Please do!” Rick countered, leaning forward and patting my shoulder. I looked to Jackie.

“I’m off tomorrow,” she said with a shrug. I smiled and cut the wheel to head off down the dirt path.

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