My nightmare woke me at five or so, and it was still early morning when I got to Ackerman's Field. The Androscoggin was beautiful-it looked like a long silver mirror instead of a snake, with fine tendrils of mist rising from its surface and then spreading above it in a, I don't know, temperature inversion, or something. That spreading cloud exactly mimicked the river's bends and turns, so it looked like a ghost-river in the sky.
The hay was growing up in the field again, and most of the sumac bushes were turning green, but I saw a scary thing. And no matter how much of this other stuff is in my head (and I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge it might be), this was real. I've got pictures that show it. They're foggy, but in a couple you can see the mutations in the sumac bushes closest to the stones. The leaves are black instead of green, and the branches are twisted...they seem to make letters, and the letters seem to spell...you know...its name.
[He gestures to the wastebasket where the shreds of paper lie.]
The darkness was back inside the stones-there were only seven, of course, that's why I'd been drawn out there-but I saw no eyes. Thank God, I was still in time. There was just the darkness, turning and turning, seeming to mock the beauty of that silent spring morning, seeming to exult in the fragility of our world. I could see the Androscoggin through it, but the darkness-it was almost Biblical, a pillar of smoke-turned the river to a filthy gray smear.
I raised my camera-I had the strap around my neck, so even if I dropped it, it wouldn't fall into the clutch of the hay-and looked through the viewfinder. Eight stones. I lowered it and there were seven again. Looked through the viewfinder and saw eight. The second time I lowered the camera, it stayed eight. But that wasn't enough, and I knew it. I knew what I had to do.
Forcing myself to go down to that ring of stones was the hardest thing I've ever done. The sound of the hay brushing against the cuffs of my pants was like a voice-low, harsh, protesting. Warning me to keep away. The air began to taste diseased. Full of cancer and things that are maybe even worse, germs that don't exist in our world. My skin began to thrum, and I had an idea-truth is, I still have this idea-that if I stepped between two of those stones and into the circle, my flesh would liquefy and go dripping off my bones. I could hear the wind that sometimes blows out of there, turning in its own private cyclone. And I knew it was coming. The thing with the helmet-head.
[He gestures again to the scraps in the wastebasket.]
It was coming, and if I saw it this close up, it would drive me mad. I'd end my life inside that circle, taking pictures that would show nothing but clouds of gray. But something drove me onward. And when I got there, I...
[N. stands up and walks slowly around the couch in a deliberate circle. His steps-both grave and prancing, like the steps of a child playing ring-a-rosie-are somehow awful. As he circles, he reaches out to touch stones I cannot see. One...two...three...four...five...six...seven...eight. Because eight keeps things straight. Then he stops and looks at me. I have had patients in crisis-many-but I have never seen such a haunted stare. I see horror, but not insanity; I see clarity rather than confusion. It must all be a delusion, of course, but there can be no doubt that he understands it completely.
[I say, "When you got there, you touched them."]
Yes, I touched them, one after the other. And I can't say I felt the world grow safer-more solid, more there-with every stone I touched, because that wouldn't be true. It was every two stones. Just the even numbers, do you see? That turning darkness began to recede with each pair, and by the time I got to eight, it was gone. The hay inside the stones was yellow and dead, but the darkness was gone. And somewhere-far off-I heard a bird sing.
I stepped back. The sun was fully up by then, and the ghost-river over the real one had entirely disappeared. The stones looked like stones again. Eight granite outcroppings in a field, not even a circle, unless you worked to imagine one. And I felt myself divide. One part of my mind knew the whole thing was just a product of my imagination, and that my imagination had some kind of disease. The other part knew it was all true. That part even understood why things had gotten better for awhile.
It's the solstice, do you see? You see the same patterns repeated all over the world-not just at Stonehenge, but in South America and Africa, even the Arctic! You see it in the American midwest-my daughter even saw it, and she knows nothing about this! Crop circles, she said! It is a calendar-Stonehenge and all the others, marking not just days and months but times of greater and lesser danger.
That split in my mind was tearing me apart. Is tearing me apart. I've been out there a dozen more times since that day, and on the twenty-first-the day of the appointment with you I had to cancel, do you remember?