I understood other things, too. One was that I had activated the place just by looking at it. Human eyes take away the eighth stone. A camera lens will put it back, but wont lock it in place. I had to keep renewing the protection with symbolic acts.
[He pauses, thinking, and when he speaks again he seems to have changed the subject.]
Did you know that Stonehenge may have been a combination clock and calendar?
[I tell him Ive read this somewhere.]
The people who built that place, and others like it, must have known they could tell time with no more than a sundial, and as for the calendarwe know that prehistoric people in Europe and Asia told the days simply by making marks on sheltered rock walls. So what does that make Stonehenge, if it is a gigantic clock/calendar? A monument to OCD behavior, thats what I thinka gigantic neurosis standing in a Salisbury field.
Unless its protecting something as well as keeping track of hours and months. Locking out an insane universe that happens to lie right next door to ours. I have daysmany of them, especially last winter, when I felt pretty much like my old self againwhen Im sure thats bullshit, that everything I thought I saw in Ackermans Field was in my own head. That all this OCD crap is just a mental stutter.
Then I have other daysthey started again this springwhen Im sure its all true: I activated something. And in so doing, I became the latest baton carrier in a long, long line of them, maybe going all the way back to prehistoric times. I know that sounds crazywhy else would I be telling it to a psychiatrist?and I have whole days when Im sure it is crazy even when Im counting things, going around my house at night touching light switches and stove burners, Im sure its all just you know bad chemicals in my head that a few of the right pills will fix.
I especially thought that last winter, when things were good. Or at least better. Then, in April of this year, things started getting bad again. I was counting more, touching more, and placing just about everything that wasnt nailed down in circles or diagonals. My daughterthe one whos going to school near hereagain expressed concerns about how I looked and how jumpy I seemed. She asked if it was the divorce, and when I said it wasnt, she looked as if she didnt believe me. She asked if Id consider seeing someone, and by God, here I am.
I started having nightmares again. One night in early May I woke on my bedroom floor, screaming. In my dream Id seen a huge gray-black monstrosity, a winged gargoyle-thing with a leathery head like a helmet. It was standing in the ruins of Portland, a thing a mile high at leastI could see wisps of cloud floating around its plated arms. There were screaming people struggling in its taloned fists. And I knewknewit had escaped from the standing stones in Ackermans Field, that it was only the first and least of the abominations to be released from that other world, and it was my fault. Because I had failed in my responsibilities.
I stumbled through the house, putting things in circles and then counting them to make sure the circles contained only even numbers, and it came to me that I wasnt too late, that it had only started to come awake.
[I ask him what he means by it.]
The force! Remember Star Wars? Use the force, Luke?
[He laughs wildly.]
Except this is a case of dont use the force! Stop the force! Imprison the force! The chaotic something that keeps driving at that thin placeand all the thin places of the world, I imagine. Sometimes I think theres a whole chain of ruined universes behind that force, stretching back untold eons in time like monstrous footprints
[He says something under his breath that I dont catch. I ask him to repeat, but he shakes his head.]
Hand me your pad, Doc. Ill write it. If what Im telling you is true and not just in my fucked-up head, its not safe to say the name aloud.
[He prints CTHUN in large capital letters. He shows it to me, and when I nod, he tears the sheet to shreds, counts the shredsto make sure the number is even, I supposeand then deposits them in the wastebasket near the couch.]
The key, the one I got in the mail, was in my home safe. I got it out and drove back to Mottonover the bridge, past the cemetery, up that damned dirt track. I didnt think about it, because it wasnt the sort of decision you have to consider. It would be like sitting down to consider whether or not you should put out the drapes in your living room if you came in and saw them on fire. NoI just went.
But I took my camera. You better believe that.
My nightmare woke me at five or so, and it was still early morning when I got to Ackermans Field. The Androscoggin was beautifulit 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 dont know, temperature inversion, or something. That spreading cloud exactly mimicked the rivers 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 Im perfectly willing to acknowledge it might be), this was real. Ive got pictures that show it. Theyre 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 stonesthere were only seven, of course, thats why Id been drawn out therebut 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 darknessit was almost Biblical, a pillar of smoketurned the river to a filthy gray smear.
I raised my cameraI had the strap around my neck, so even if I dropped it, it wouldnt fall into the clutch of the hayand 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 wasnt 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 Ive ever done. The sound of the hay brushing against the cuffs of my pants was like a voicelow, 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 dont exist in our world. My skin began to thrum, and I had an ideatruth is, I still have this ideathat 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. Id 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 stepsboth grave and prancing, like the steps of a child playing ring-a-rosieare 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 crisismanybut 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 cant say I felt the world grow safermore solid, more therewith every stone I touched, because that wouldnt 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 somewherefar offI heard a bird sing.