A Strange Stone in Red County

Darius frowned as he read the words written in red ink upon his door:

Daríus. Ekki trufla heimili okkar.

Með kveðju,

Svartálfarnir

That was the whole of it: his name, followed by some words in a language he did not understand, with no additional context. Who had done this? A member of that damned “Trees of Anarchy" group? He had been hounded by squadrons of organized tree-huggers before, but their warnings had never been so cryptic. Usually, their slander was as clear and as vehement as possible.

Perhaps it was just a prank.

The script was elegant and looked vaguely old fashioned- as if their author had travelled forward in time from some medieval monastery. If it was a joke, whoever pulled it put a lot of work into their calligraphy.

Darius stood there for a few minutes, wondering idly what lengths protestors and pranksters would go to and how to remove ink from a wooden door (or how it had been applied in the first place). Then, abruptly, he took a quick picture with his phone and turned to walk to his truck.

He had a job to do, and regardless of how anybody felt it was like his father had said: “There’s no getting in the way of progress.” True, his father had been a hard man. He had to be, growing up poor and Black during the era of Jim Crow would do that to you. His mother had been hard too for the same reasons. Yet he had learned from them; Darius did not bend like a frail tree in the wind.

About thirty minutes later he arrived, ahead of his crew, at the work site. The plot of land was large, at least nine acres in either direction, and rested neatly beside the border of Red County. There wasn’t much that Darius could imagine anyone making a fuss over. The land was hilly and uneven. The rocky soil was blanketed in grass, poison-oak and thorny shrub. Short, thin trees grew together in tight formation throughout the plot, interlocking their branches and, in combination with the thorn-studded bushes, forming a near impenetrable wall opposing all would-be trespassers.

Luckily, he had brought his chainsaw. His crew would be arriving soon as well, armed with tractors, bulldozers, stump-grinders, mulchers, woodchippers, backhoes and whatever else was needed to prepare the earth for the new homes of future gentrifiers.

Darius opened his truck door and walked out, letting the autumn air greet his brown, solemn face. The sun was still in the process of rising, its rays casting a romantic aura onto the treetops. When he was a child, he mused, he would have found this place an Eden. The poison-oak would have been jungle creepers, the tops of the birches a rainforest’s canopy. It would have been nice to have been around something green, he mused. Green didn’t pay the bills, though.

He turned and walked back towards his truck, grabbing his chainsaw from the backseat. With one mighty tug he pulled the cord to turn it on.

It did not turn on, however.

Well fuck me. There was no time to go home and grab another; his crew would be arriving shortly. Darius sighed, put on his hard-hat and protective goggles, and proceeded to prepare for his team’s arrival.

One by one they came, like a legion of termites, orderly and eager for work. They emerged from their vehicles already dressed in their protective gear, knights suited in armor and prepared for battle.

Yet Darius’s earlier luck continued. Any useful vehicle ceased to be operational once it entered the periphery of the lot. The tractor stalled. The bulldozer had developed a gas-leak. An axe-blade fell off its handle. Their bowsaw came apart.

“What the fuck is going on?” Darius demanded, to no one in particular, after the first few minutes of technological mutiny.

“You think it’s that “Trees of Anarchy” group?” asked Mikey, one of his men. “Maybe we should have gotten that impact statement.”

“You think this was them?” retorted Carl, “Half of this shit was working just yesterday, and we both checked our tools this morning! How they pull all this off in one night, without anyone knowing? Most of those fucks are just teenagers, they can barely drive, let alone sabotage a tractor!”

“I don’t see any other explanation,” Mikey offered as a rebuttal.

The other men had begun to gather around Darius in a sort of aimless, expectant fashion. He supposed they were expecting him to take charge. Unfortunately, he was dumbfounded. “I don’t fucking believe it,” he muttered. “I don’t fucking believe it.”

“Don’t sweat it boss,” another man spoke up. His name was Zeke, and he was the oldest among them; Zeke was the only one there who sported gray hair on both his head and his chin. He spoke with the air of authority that came with a wrinkled and venerable face such as his: “They say this part of town’s bad luck anyway.”

“What you mean?” asked Carl.

“I mean that’s why nothin’ was ever built over here in the first place. Every time someone buys up the land to do something with it, nothing happens. Projects get stalled, things go sideways and the place gets sold to someone else, or just sits there. Been that way for as long as I lived here anyway- the whole plot’s bad luck.”

“Ain’t no such thing as luck.”

“Yeah, that’s what you kids think. Ain’t no such thing as God, or angels or devils to you neither. Well, my pops said before that this land wasn’t even bad luck, he said the place was cursed, and that some devilry was worked here. He used to have a shop right down the way, and whenever he walked by here at night he would see things in the trees, strange lights and whatnot, and hear things too. He said he once heard a man laugh like he was right behind him, but when he turned round, no one was there.”

“Bullshit.”

“Alright, enough,” interjected Darius. Zeke’s ramblings had woken him from his stupor. The situation was going off the rails; it was time to take charge. “Look, nothing’s working today. Clearly, we have to check all the equipment before we get started and make sure it hasn’t been tampered with- just to be safe.”

“All the equipment?” asked Mikey. “That will take all day.”

“Better that then one of us getting hurt. Alright y’all, let’s get to it.”

Their fortunes did not improve throughout the day. More problems were uncovered, and the issues with their equipment proved so varied and so numerous that the work dragged on hopelessly until, eventually, Darius gave in to his exhaustion. He let his crew call it quits for the day. They could start again tomorrow, and besides: he had decided to make a date with a cold glass of liquor.

“I don’t get it. I really don’t. It just doesn’t make any sense.” Darius grumbled, eyes closed and resting on his pillow.

“Well, I for one think you’re not giving this ‘Trees of Anarchy’ group enough credit,” answered María. She was lying next to him, mostly naked, with her nose in a book as she always did after sex.

“They’re just a bunch of college kids from the suburbs. I doubt they have it in them to pull something like this. I mean we really got sabotaged.”

“Regretting not getting that environmental impact statement?”

“We didn’t have time. The job needs to get done, quickly, and I don’t have a trust fund to fall back on if I don’t get paid- not like them kids.” He grunted. “I don’t think those kids did this anyway. I think it was whoever wrote that shit on my door. That’s not the kinda move those teenagers would pull. Besides, I don’t see what’s so special about the land in the first place. Why would they care?”

“Hm. Show me that picture again."

Darius reached over to his nightstand, grabbed his phone and, after a few touches on its screen, passed it to María. She looked at it and frowned thoughtfully. Then she took out her own phone and began to type something. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“Putting this into google translate…they have this ‘detect language’ thing. Hold up. Yeah, here we go. It looks like some of the words are…Icelandic.”

“Icelandic?”

“Yeah, give me a second. L.O.L. What the fuck.”

“What, what does it say?”

“I typed it all in, I had to double check my spelling, but yeah this is what it says.” She passed him the phone and Darius looked at the screen. The translated message read:

“Do not disturb our home.

Regards,

The Black Elves.”

“Their home? The ‘black elves?’ What the fuck is this about?”

“I don’t know, but either it’s activists trying to scare you away from your job, or a bunch of bored kids playing a prank. I don’t know which one it is, but I have to say that I admire their creativity either way.”

Darius sighed. “Damn kids playing viking and screwing with my equipment. What did I do to deserve this?” he paused. “Am I a bad person? Last I heard, there weren’t any endangered species living on the plot. There’s no historical landmarks or monuments. What am I doing that’s so wrong?”

“Destroying one of the last undeveloped pieces of land in the city? Building a home for gentrifiers?” María looked up at Darius and, when she saw the expression on his face, her tone softened. “What they don’t see, though, is that you’re just a man doing his job and trying to survive. You don’t mean to hurt anyone. You have a good heart, you care about your team, you’re a nice fuck…”

Darius grinned. “Damn right,” he replied. María smiled and put her head on his shoulder.

That night Darius dreamt he was sinking into the earth. The more he struggled, the less he could move, and soon the dirt was swallowing his neck and head and pouring into his mouth…

When he woke up the next morning, he kissed María on the forehead and put the images he had seen in his sleep behind him. As he walked out and shut the door, he noticed that the words from the day before had been erased. Instead there was a new message:

Ef fólkið þitt kemur aftur þá munu þeir spýta út lirfum.

Með kveðju,

Svartálfarnir

“Now how the hell did they pull that off?” he asked himself. He stood there for almost a full minute, but as no one answered him he eventually pulled out his phone, took another picture and went into his truck.

It was a warm, sunny day for autumn, but Darius felt as if he could not feel the heat of the sun. There was a coldness creeping through his car, seeping into his flesh, chilling even his bones. He pushed it out of his mind.

He had a job to do. There was no stopping progress.

By midafternoon, the team had repaired much of their tools. The tractor and the bulldozer would be out of commission for a few more days, at least, but the chainsaws and some of the lesser equipment were working like before.

“Let’s take a quick lunch,” he announced. “We’ll start on these trees in thirty.”

Darius walked over to his trunk and pulled a PB&J out of his glove compartment. He sat eating with his door open, listening to bird songs with an unfamiliar pang of guilt he attempted to ignore.

While he was thus occupied, a part of his awareness drifted over to another debate between Zeke and Carl. They were good friends, despite the way they went for each other’s throats in arguments, and thus he was unperturbed by the intensity of their conversation.

“We fixed most of everything, so much for bad luck huh?” chided Carl.

“Shit, we ain’t out of the woods yet. I’m telling you this place is baaad luck.”

Carl snorted. “I told you, ain’t no such thing as luck. Luck ain’t anymore real than fairy godmothers or Santa Clause. If you want to get something done, you either do or you don’t. Sometimes things happen you can’t control, sure, but that don’t mean you need to get all superstitious about it.”

“It ain’t superstition. It’s an elder’s wisdom.”

“Elders my ass! What you ever see that I didn’t?”

“I don’t know. I just got a feeling. You ever just get a feeling, like some place ain’t right?”

Carl laughed. “No, and I ain’t scared of this place or of any curse either. I’m telling you, there’s no such thing as curses. That’s just fairy-tale shit for…” Carl stopped suddenly.

“Carl?” Zeke asked, “You okay?” Darius looked up. Carl had fallen to one knee and was clutching his stomach with both hands. His eyes were wide, and he was retching.

Darius jumped up and walked over. “Carl?” he asked as well. He knelt until they were level with one another. Carl had a fear in his eyes that Darius had never seen in a grown man; he had the expression of someone cornered and pleading for life. He put a hand on Darius’s shoulder and opened his mouth to speak.

“H…help,” he whimpered. Then he gagged.

A little maggot wriggled from out of his mouth and dropped onto the ground. Zeke screamed. The rest of the crew left their lunches where they were and came running, but they each froze the moment their eyes met with the scene before them.

Carl had tears in his eyes now, and more maggots were falling from his mouth as he gagged. They came out in little clumps, like forkfuls of noodles, writhing and white. “Call an ambulance!” Zeke screamed. “Call a fucking ambulance!” No one moved; it was as if they were all transfixed, hypnotized by the spectacle of their crewmate dragging himself along the ground, sobbing as fly larvae dispersed from between his lips. “Darius, call the fucking ambulance!”

Hearing his name snapped him out of it. Darius whipped out his cell and dialed 9-11. As soon as he had informed the operator what was happening, he passed out to the sound of Carl’s sobs as the last of the maggots exited his mouth.

That evening, Darius spent nearly an hour looking up Icelandic letters and words, attempting to transcribe what had been written on his door into google translate. After some time, he believed he correctly deciphered the message. In English, it read:

“If your people come back, they will spit out larvae. Regards, the Black Elves.”

~

After a quick dinner, Darius made himself a cup of coffee and rolled three blunts filled with sativa. The coffee was to stay awake and the cannabis was for the same purpose, as well as to calm his nerves.

He put on his jacket and hat and then got comfortable on his porch. Darius did not live in a mansion, and his home was not luxurious, but his house was still his house. He meant to protect it. María had called him a couple times, but he had not answered.

His father’s pistol was tucked away beneath his shirt.

Somebody had to answer for what happened to Carl that morning. He could not explain it; no one could. After they had watched the convulsing, sobbing Carl get loaded into the ambulance bed, they stood in silence for some time before Darius softly said: “Let’s go home.” Nobody uttered a goodbye.

A cold gust of wind made him shiver. It would be a long night, but he would wait.

The hours of nine, ten, eleven and twelve went by without incident. He listened, for the first time in a long while, to the chorus of crickets that lived in his front yard. An owl hooted nearby. He had forgotten any owls lived there. Maybe he had never known.

It turned one. The wind picked up intensity. Darius began to shiver, and he pulled his coat tighter. This is stupid. What am I doing? A gun?

The sound of a woman softly singing words he did not understand interrupted his thoughts. It was the loveliest voice he had ever heard, despite possessing a slightly mournful quality. Its melody and richness warmed his blood. The euphoria it brought on was slight at first, but it steadily grew until he was transported; the steps beneath his feet began to vanish, Darius began to soar, and he opened his soul up wide, letting the night and the dark pour in…

In a few moments more he saw her as well. She was a tall woman, as lovely as her voice- if not more so. Her skin and her long, flowing hair, however, were an implausibly milky white, and her eyes were the hue of blood. They burned with intensity, boring through his flesh and setting his soul aflame. Her whole body glowed faintly with a pale iridescence, and she wore a long, sweeping blood-red gown, embroidered with patterns of gold and made of some fine material he could not identify.

The stranger continued her melody. Darius sat entranced; he could not have moved, or reached for his gun, even if he had wanted to. He was held to the spot by the image of this visitor, whose beauty should not have been able to exist besides such strangeness. Her voice was honey; the whole of his body trembled with pleasure.

The woman smiled, though not kindly. She raised her right hand, pointed at him, and spoke: “Veikindi. Níu dagar.”

After she had spoken this, she did not close her mouth but let it hang open. A white-colored moth flew out, and then another. More came; singly at first and then two, three, four and five at a time. The woman began to sing once more, even though her lips did not move. As if on cue, there was a swarm; hundreds of moths poured out of the woman’s mouth, making towards his head as though it were a beacon of light. Darius threw his hands before his face, attempting to swipe them away, but it was futile. There were too many. He could see nothing but the flapping of wings and the twitching of antenna. Their legs tickled his skin. He screamed.

That was the last thing he remembered.

He awoke on his front porch as the sun rose. His coffee had been drunk, and two of three of his blunts had been smoked. “Shit,” he whimpered. Then he vomited.

Once he had finished wiping his mouth, he stood and looked at his door. Again, the words from the day before had vanished and been replaced with a new message in bright red ink:

Veikindi í níu daga. Ekki koma aftur.

With the help of his phone, Darius translated the message: “Sickness for nine days. Do not come again.”

The stomach virus came suddenly. It was terrible; María had to stay away, work had to be delayed. For nine days Darius writhed in agony, barely able to keep food down, hot with fever and plagued by nausea and indigestion. There was a recurring pain in his abdomen that felt like someone was clawing their way out from inside him and ripping apart his intestines.

The sickness had not just affected him, either; it had afflicted half his crew. When he called Zeke to check in on the third day, the man sounded shaken. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me,” his crewman had told him, “I feel like I’m falling apart.”

“Don’t worry,” Darius reassured him, “we’re going to be okay. Someone probably caught a virus a little while back and spread it to the rest of the crew. Give it a few days, get some rest and see a doctor if you need to. You’re gonna make it, old man.”

“Yeah well, thank you. I sure as hell hope that land isn’t really cursed.”

“Me too.” Darius laughed meekly as he said it, but there was no real humor in his voice. He was lying about the virus, though. No doctor had been able to tell what was wrong with him. His body was reacting to something, but the staff at the hospital couldn’t say what. They had found no discernable cause for his symptoms.

They said it was mystery.

Those nine days passed slowly. Each day the pain grew worse, until Darius could scarcely leave his bed. He vomited constantly. He struggled to feed himself and to get himself water. At night, as his stomach revolted against him, his pain mingled with hatred.

The last message did not disappear from his door, and he did not have the strength to attempt to remove it.

On the ninth day, the sickness vanished. Darius woke refreshed. His sudden health was odd, but he was grateful nonetheless. The day before his employers had called; they had wanted to know about his progress and he didn’t have it in him to lie.

His employers had not been pleased.

So, with a renewed vigor, he dressed himself, made a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of coffee, grabbed his hat, scarf and pistol, and walked out his front door. He turned as he left to see if there was a new message. There was:

Ef þú setur fæti ofan á heimili okkar verður þér haldið föngnum í níu ár.

Darius did not bother translating it. He walked into his truck and drove the thirty minutes to the work site, arriving just before sunrise. Immediately, he took his axe from his backseat. An axe was simple. All you had to do was to make sure the blade was firmly attached; other than that, it could not be tampered with. He checked the handle and walked onto the grassy dirt, cutting aside swaths of poison-oak and marching to the point of highest elevation within the plot. From there, he came upon a thick birch. It would do as good as any.

Darius checked the horizon. The sun was just beginning to reach it. He lifted his axe.

For a moment he stood there, unmoving. He thought of Carl vomiting up maggots. He thought of the moths swarming his face. He thought of his nine days of sickness, lying in bed.

“Fuck you,” he said aloud to no one in particular.

He brought down his arm.

The axe never made it to the tree.

Where Darius stood, seemingly a few moments before, there was now only a large rock of peculiar shape. It looked sort of like a man, if maybe a child got drunk and attempted to sculpt one from solid stone.

His crewmen came by shortly after his disappearance to search for him, as did the police, María and some of his family, but Darius was never found.

The crewmembers and a few of the locals questioned the appearance of the stone, but no one seemed to entirely remember if it had been there before. Regardless, it did not seem especially important. The housing development was scrapped, and nothing else was done with the lot.

The stone stayed. Moss grew on it, then vines. A pair of crows made a nest in one of its nooks. Children and teenagers who came by at night, the former to play and the latter to smoke or drink, continued the legend of the lot’s curse. It was circulated through town that the stone, and indeed the whole plot of land, was haunted. It was even said that, sometimes, you could almost discern a man’s voice from inside the solid stone and, if you put your hand to its surface, you could feel a slight, barely perceptible tremor- reminiscent of a heartbeat.

For nine years the rock stood there, mostly silent and devoid of human contact. Then, on the ninth anniversary of Darius’s disappearance, the stone vanished. As no rational explanation could be found, the incident was simply ignored.

To this day though, if you go by the lot at dawn or dusk, or during the witching hours of the night, you may see strange lights flickering through the trees. There are voices too, voices of men and women singing and laughing- occasionally with a hint of melancholy. A select portion of those who lived there have heard and seen these things, though only an even smaller portion of them would admit it. One or two, who had belonged to his circle, even maintained that one of those voices sounded exactly like Darius’s.

They were not wrong.