F. Wilson - Secret Circles

Jack had known it was only a matter of time before he‟d start complaining. He was kind of surprised he‟d held off this long.

“Shouldn‟t be too much farther now. According to the photo, we should hit a clearing any …”

He stopped and stared as he spotted an open area dead ahead.

“… minute.”

The clearing hadn‟t surprised him, but what stood in its center stopped him cold.

Weezy pushed past him, then stopped, saying “Oh my-god!” over and over.

Jack couldn‟t speak. The Pines were full of secrets and surprises, but this … this was over the top. Way over.

3

“What is it?” Eddie said from behind.

“Some sort of … pyramid.”

At maybe fifteen feet tall, it had nothing height-wise on the ones in Egypt, but

this was definitely a pyramid, and unlike any Jack had seen or heard of. He wondered if anyone alive today had ever laid eyes on it. Weezy finally stopped saying, “Oh my god!” and the three of them approached the pyramid. The closer they got, the odder it became.

As Jack neared he noticed it wasn‟t solid. Huge, elongated triangular stones stood in a circle, their bases buried in the sandy soil with their pointed ends jutting skyward and leaning toward each other.

“Look like Godzilla pizza slices,” Eddie said.

A typical Eddie comment. If he wasn‟t thinking about video games, he was thinking about food.

But his comment hit the mark: the structure did resemble half a dozen giant petrified pizza slices, crusts down and arranged in a circle.

A three-foot-high wall of headstone like rectangular slabs ringed the whole thing.

They marched around it in silence. One of the triangular megaliths was broken halfway up, but the undamaged points of the remaining five met and leaned against each other at the pyramid‟s apex.

“Notice, Weez? Six sides … just like our little pyramid.”

The gleaming black artifact they‟d found in the mound back there would have fit inside a softball. It too had six sides—seven if you counted the base.

Weezy nodded but said nothing. She seemed in a daze, incapable of speech or even taking her eyes off the pyramid. Jack thought he knew how she felt: She‟d lost a little piece of the Secret History, but found something much bigger. He felt it too. The strangeness, the ancient, alien feel to the structure.

They came to a broken fence stone. Without a word, Weezy stepped over it and entered the circle. Jack followed but Eddie hung back.

Jack turned to look at him. “Coming?”

Eddie looked uncomfortable. “This whole place is majorly creepacious.”

Jack agreed, but he put on a smile. “Don‟t worry. Weezy will protect you.”

Eddie rolled his eyes and stepped over the broken slab. “I should know better by now to go anywhere with you guys. You find dead bodies, you get me locked up in a police car and chased by the cops, but do I learn? Nooooo.”

“Look, Jack.”

Weezy was standing by one of the leaning megaliths, rubbing her hand over the surface. Her expression was triumphant, beaming vindication. He imagined this was what Percival looked like

when he glimpsed the Holy Grail.

“What have you got?” he said, approaching.

“Look familiar?”

With a trembling finger she traced a circle around a faint indentation in the weather-smoothed surface of the stone. Jack squinted until he could make out the full outline, then he gasped.

Recognition was like a punch in the chest.

“That‟s … that was on our pyramid!”

She nodded and jumped to the next where she again ran her hands over the surface. She seemed about to explode.

“So was this one.”

Then to the next stone.

Her voice shook. “This one too.”

They were connected. No question. “So …” he managed, swallowing hard as he stepped back for a longer look. “Is this based on our little pyramid, or was ours based on this?”

She shrugged. “Who can say? No way they‟re not connected. I mean, they‟re too much alike.

But our pyramid wasn‟t made of stone.”

Right. They‟d given it to Professor Nakamura who‟d had it analyzed at the University of Pennsylvania. No one there could say what it was made of, but it sure hadn‟t been stone. All they‟d been able to say was that it was many thousands of years old—and then it had

disappeared.

Jack stepped up to one of the megaliths and felt its surface. “Granite?”

Weezy moved up next to him. “That‟s what it feels like to me. Except …”

“Except what?”

“There‟s no granite in the Barrens, or anywhere near here.”

Jack never understood where Weezy got all her information, but he‟d learned to believe her.

She wasn‟t a bull slinger.

Eddie joined them, saying, “So that means somebody cut these pizza slices somewhere else, drove them all the way out here, and made a teepee out of them. What for?”

Jack was thinking that “teepee” was a pretty good description when Weezy said, “‟Drove‟? I don‟t think so. Can‟t you see how old these are? I‟ll bet they were dragged here on rollers.”

Jack looked at the stones and tried to imagine their weight, and the work it must have taken to carve each from a block of granite and then transport it here from wherever. He remembered Eddie‟s last question.

“But why ?”

“And look,” Eddie said. “It‟s not even put together right. They left spaces between the rocks.”

“They‟ve probably shifted over the ages,” Weezy said.

Jack wasn‟t so sure about that. He‟d noticed the spaces, but they seemed pretty uniform.

Wouldn‟t shifting and settling over time have resulted in uneven gaps? These all looked to be an even ten or twelve inches apart at their bases, tapering as they went up. That couldn‟t have happened by chance.

He peered through one of the gaps. The empty space within was lit by strips of daylight streaming between the stones. Its floor lay about three feet below ground level under a couple of inches of rainwater. Jack could make out a layer of sandy soil beneath the surface. A stone column, maybe a foot in diameter and four feet high, stood in the exact center of the space.

Weezy and Eddie had moved up to gaps of their own on either side of him.

“It is a teepee!” Eddie cried. “Just like I said: a stone teepee!”

Weezy‟s voice dripped scorn. “A teepee is a place to live, so it needs a doorway—you know, one of those handy openings you use to get in and out? Plus, it‟s supposed to protect you from the weather. This flunks on both.”

“All right, Miss Know-It-All, what is it then?”

Weezy hesitated, then, “I don‟t know. But maybe if I look at it from another angle …”

To Jack‟s surprise, she turned sideways, squeezed through the gap, and jumped down to the inner floor. She landed with a splash. He noticed she was wearing old sneakers. He looked down at his own battered Converse All-Stars. They‟d been soaked before, no reason they couldn‟t get soaked again.

Jack squeezed through his gap—a tight fit but he made it—and eased himself to the floor to avoid splashing Weezy. Cool water filled his sneakers as he looked up and saw Eddie watching from outside. He made no move to join them. Jack was about to coax him in when he realized that even if Eddie wanted to join them, he couldn‟t. No way he‟d fit through the narrow opening.

Or worse, if he forced himself in, he might not be able to get out.