Dan Poblocki - The Stone Child

Nearly a month after finding the statue in the woods, he began writing what would become his first novel, The Rumor of the Haunted Nunnery. After he finished, Nathaniel typed it up to send to agents and publishers. To his surprise, one of them wanted it, and shortly thereafter, it was published. He was thrilled that people were finally reading something he’d written.

He wrote all of the books using the pendant. On the first page, he wrote the title and his name. Below these words, he drew the Hebrew symbol. On the next page, he began the tale. If someone were to ask why he wrote the books that way, he wouldn’t have been able to provide a logical answer. It was something he just had to do-as if the silver pendant, or the statue in the woods, or something was providing unconscious instruction. But the process worked. When he used the pendant to write, he became especially inspired. He felt that if he questioned why, it might all go away, so he stopped asking questions. For a while.

As the books continued to sell, Nathaniel began to read reports in the newspapers of strange occurrences in Gatesweed. Several pets had disappeared under mysterious circumstances. A few children claimed to have seen unusual animals wandering through the woods near Nathaniel’s driveway. Several people actually asserted that these animals had attacked them. A twelve-year-old boy named Jeremy Quakerly vanished from his bedroom in the middle of the night. Finally, the body of an elderly schoolteacher was found in the middle of a cornfield on one of the county roads past the mills. The incident was ruled an accident, but a rumor spread throughout Gatesweed that on the death certificate, the coroner had listed the cause of death as a fall from a great height. She had died in her bathrobe.

Nathaniel heard some people claim that these reports echoed what he had written in his stories, but he convinced himself they were coincidences. Or he attempted to, at least. Nathaniel understood that any writer has his share of critics, so he tried to ignore the cruel looks and harsh whispers that followed him in town.

He sometimes wandered through the woods behind the apple orchard, exploring the clearing where the mysterious statue stood. There, he contemplated his fortune. Was there validity to the rumors? What was he actually doing when he used the pen to write his stories? Was the legend of the archangel’s key actually true? Other than the fact that the piece of metal could write on paper, did it actually hold mystical properties like the scholars said it should? After all, a pencil could write on paper too. Nathaniel would stand at the edge of the statue’s clearing and shake his head in disbelief. He told himself that this world was meant to remain mysterious. Deep down, though, he believed it was easier to choose ignorance.

Everything changed one afternoon, years later, when I wandered near the Nameless Lake. Of course, I’d seen the small body of water before, having used it as a set piece for the end of The Rumor of the Haunted Nunnery. That day, I stepped onto the pebbly shoreline, allowing my boots to send small ripples out into the water, something I hadn’t done before. Some time later, several dogs leapt from the water and chased me halfway through the woods. By the time I’d made it home, my mind was racing. I couldn’t fathom what I’d seen. All the reports I’d read in the newspapers, all the unsolved crimes I’d dismissed as coincidence-the missing pets, the strange wild animal attacks, the child’s disappearance from his bedroom, the schoolteacher’s death-came flooding back. People in Gatesweed had whispered for years that I was responsible for the odd happenings around town. Now I’d seen it with my own eyes. Apparently, at least, my monster lake-dogs were real.

How could that be? All my doubts about the pendant were suddenly half erased. If the legend of the key was real, was it possible that using the pendant to write my books had somehow made the dogs appear in the woods behind my house? Was it possible that some of the other monsters from my books were real too? If the stone child supposedly marked a place where the fabric between the worlds is thin, maybe I had caused the fabric to rip? If that was true, was I responsible for everything that had happened?

I immediately went and hid the pendant in my basement. I needed to get away from it for a while, stop writing, take a break and think about everything.

Several days later, I was lying on my couch for an afternoon nap when I heard a noise that sounded like papers being shuffled. I realized that something was standing in the doorway to my kitchen. At first, I thought it was something in my eye, a piece of dust or an eyelash, but when I rubbed there, nothing happened. A dark patch filled the space where there should have been a stove and a sinkful of dirty dishes. I sat up as the dark patch took form. It was an old woman. Shadows swirled around her body like smoke. Her hair lapped at her face in waves as if a slight breeze blew through my house. Her mouth did not move, but I heard her voice clearly. It was old and reminded me of dust.

The Woman touched the door frame in which she stood. The door grew and the kitchen behind it disappeared into the flickering glow of an unseen fire. This place was no longer my house. I heard wings flapping and insects scuttling through the shadows. The walls grew dark and dripped with moisture.

The Woman’s eye sockets were black holes, but they focused on me intently.

“ Who are you?” I asked. She didn’t answer me, but somehow I knew her. “Lilith?” I whispered. She smiled but said nothing to confirm my suspicion. Still, I understood what she wanted from me. She wished for me to release her-like I had released her children, I realized now.

“ If I write you into a story, will you exist here, like the dogs that chased me through the woods?” I stumbled in my thoughts, afraid of the answer to my question. I remembered the reports of the unsolved crimes. I was terrified by the possibility of my own unwitting guilt. “Like-like the others I wrote about? ”

She showed me the statue in the dark woods. The stone child glimmered, filling the clearing with cold blue radiance. In a burst of light, a pack of dogs surrounded the statue. With their eyes glowing red, the dogs dashed into the shadows. All at once, I saw images of other monsters manifesting in the clearing beside the illuminated girl. I now understood completely how the portal worked. As I finished each story, the statue glowed, the gate opened, and the creatures emerged.

The Woman spoke. “The key plays games with me.” Her dark voice jabbed into my chest, like a needle and thread. “Lost and found. Years passed. It brought you here to me. You have written the stories of my children. Now that they have all come through the gate in the woods, it is time for you to begin another story… mine.”

“ And if I don’t?” I dared to speak.

The woman’s face changed-in it I saw myself locked in a dark room, water rising from the floor below; I saw myself in the middle of a haunted city, pale faces staring at me through grease-smudged storefronts; I saw myself falling into a pit as wide as the ocean and blacker than night, from which rose the steady screaming of a million tortured souls. The Woman reached out to me and laughed, her voice rising like a flurry of ravens swirling into a dark, dead sky.

I woke up on my couch. Sweating. My chest hurt. I was breathing hard, and my legs felt heavy. The Woman was gone. My house looked the same as always. I wondered what had just happened. Had I been dreaming? Was I going crazy?

I sat on the couch and contemplated my predicament. If I didn’t listen to her, would she haunt me forever with such visions? If what I had seen was not a dream, as the evidence overwhelmingly suggested, then I was, in fact, guilty for releasing the monsters, the legendary Lilim, one at a time from their purgatorial prisons. Simply holding the pendant had equipped me with the unconscious knowledge of how to use it. I was certain now that the pendant had brought me to Gatesweed in the first place. When I used the pendant to write my stories, it acted like a key. Each story had opened a door in the woods, where the stone child held her empty book, like she had when she stood beside Eden ’s gate. This new door led to places where the monsters were real. No wonder the old Romanian woman had wanted to get rid of the pendant! How many cursed hands had it passed through over the years? To realize I held such power in my fingertips was more terrifying than my worst nightmare.