The Stone

Leeland Thomas was a short, stout man with a gruff beard and piercing blue eyes. His sandy auburn hair and round face was the only commonality he ever shared with his estranged father. He longed to know the man when he was a child, always wondering how alike they were. But today, three days past his 40th birthday, as keys jingled in his pocket with every step towards the only thing his late father had left him, he only wondered why his father left his mother and him for this shit-hole. He told himself he was only here to see if anything inside had value before listing the property for sale and saying goodbye to a man he never truly knew for the last time. He wouldn’t admit that a part of him was here to understand him, he couldn’t.

As he entered the house he was assaulted by the stench of stale cigarettes and mildew. Any and every surface was covered in papers piled up. Old mail, notebooks and newspapers swallowed what used to be a couch, a kitchen table and kitchen counters whole. The notebooks stuck out to Leeland as they seemed to take up the majority of the space. He picked one up and examined it, the front was plain except for a date written largely on its front with permanent marker. He opened it and realized it was a journal. The date was only two months prior to his fathers passing.

December 20th 2003, I’m close. I know it. I can feel it in my bones. And the owl knows too. She’s been haunting my dreams and I see her watching me go into the cavern. But I’m almost there. I found a new-

Leeland closed the book. Just ramblings of a crazy man, he thought. He moved on and investigated the rest of the house eventually finding a room to stay for the night. He’d taken off the weekend to go through his fathers things before returning to his life. Not having spoken to or heard from his father in thirty-five years he wondered why his father even left him anything. After settling into a room upstairs he found himself still drawn to the notebooks. There was a room off of the entryway and living room that had an old oak desk, it seemed to have the most notebooks piled on it. He sat down in the dusty old chair, moved an old coke can full of cigarette butts into a waste basket under the desk and grabbed the cleanest looking notebook off the pile. The permanent marker date was only two week before his fathers passing. And upon grabbing it an envelope fell to the floor.

The envelope looked new, it wasn’t even sealed. Leeland picked it up and pulled the paper from inside.

Dear Son,

If you are reading this then you are here. And I am sorry. I’m sorry I left you and your mother. I know you will never understand. I have no excuses but I might, if you’ll listen, have an explanation. Your mother and I married young, I loved her and I still do. I hope if you take anything from this that you understand that. I loved her and you so much. But I had a problem. I’m sure your mother told you but I gambled and I owed a lot of people money. So I ran. I didn’t know what else to do. I was only making things worse for your mother. So I ran and I came here. This land was owned by my father. I didn’t know him much as you didn’t know me. But it was a safe place to go, or so I thought. I came here and found that he had built this place around a cavern and around some belief that there was a stone that could offer things unimaginable to the finder. Stuck out here, hiding from my past, I decided to go searching for what he had been looking for. As of this letter, I have not found it. But I feel like my days are numbered. I left you this house and this land as my father did, but I want you to burn it. Please, son, do not stay here. Do not go looking for the stone. It will consume you. Just burn the place, bury the cavern and move on from this. I’m sorry to have brought you here at all. But it needs to be done. Do not get lost like we did. Sell the land and make a life for yourself. I hope you already have, but take this as a gift and do not let it be a curse. I beg you. Please.

Yours,

Robert Thomas Jr.

Leeland crumpled the paper in his hand, anger filling inside of him. How could his father have left him over something so trivial? And he stayed away because why? He lost his mind trying to find some godforsaken stone? In his rage he swung his hand across the oak desk, throwing all of the notebooks onto the floor, but in the midst his hand hit something hard and heavy. Buried under the notebooks appeared a hardcover book, its pages yellowed from time. Leeland picked up the book and wiped a layer of dust off its cover. The words on the front appeared more like symbols, so he opened it and again was met with strange symbols that resembled no language he knew. Why would his father have this strange book?

His weekend turned into a week while Leeland organized and went through his fathers journals. From what he had read his father was probably crazy…possibly crazy? He believed in aliens and believed they had come to earth and left behind a stone that could control time and space. According to his fathers records it was left behind by an alien race that used it to power their ships to move through space in a way that time wasn't relevant. But from his fathers journals, it could also be used in a way to manipulate time. As much as a machine would use it to jump through space faster than the speed of light, a human could jump through time, back and forth, with it. A man who hated his past could use this stone to fix it, or get glimpses of the future and use that to his benefit. It could give him means in which he had never known but always wanted. Although he couldn't read a world of it, the strange book Leeland had found was filled with hand drawn images of a jagged crystal like stone. This must be what his father had been searching for.

Leeland had to figure out what he wanted with the information he gathered from his fathers journals. Did he want to see his father as a crazy lonely old man or was there some truth in what he believed? Towards the end of his fathers journals he wrote more and more about a barn owl on the property. It seemed to have haunted his father even at night as he slept. His old man appeared to have been slowly losing his mind. It saddened Leeland, but assured himself this was what his father chose. It was not and never had been Leeland's fault.

He had been there two weeks now, going through his fathers notebooks, referencing the ancient book he’d found. He hadn’t bathed or shaved, his beard had grown a bit unmanageable but he no longer cared, nor could he do much about it since there was no running water at the farmhouse, having been shut off after his fathers passing and with no intention of keeping the house, Leeland didn't bother to have it turned on. But that didn’t matter, after going through his fathers notebooks, he had to know, had to at least look into the cavern his father wrote about. Why had it consumed him to the point of writing about it every day for years? Why did it keep him from returning to his family?

Leeland had searched the property for a cave or mine or anything that resembled what his fathers notebooks spoke of and he had had little luck in finding it. It wasn’t until he went into the old dilapidated barn on the property that he found what he was looking for. The barn's roof was partially caved in and appeared to have not been in use for decades. Upon entering the barn, no one would have thought anything of it. It appeared normal, some stalls on either side, the wood old and worn down and in need of repair. Straw coated the floors and a large area above held old straw in storage. There was an old mower parked on one side and behind that a large pile of straw. This was where Leeland noticed a difference, everything seemed old and untouched but the pile of straw behind the mower. The straw there appeared freshly laid so Leeland moved it. He shoveled, raked and eventually revealed a wooden plank underneath.

Upon lifting the wooden plank, Leeland revealed a hole in the ground. It looked as if someone had dug it out like a tunnel. With a flashlight he peered down into it, but it dropped into darkness, however there was a crude wooden ladder that led down the side of it. Leeland sighed and wiped his brow. Everything that told him not to climb down that ladder was not enough, despite his father's warnings, he knew he had to. He strapped a flashlight to his belt and lowered himself onto the ladder. As soon as his boot touched the first rung he heard a loud scream. It was so deafening that he flung himself up and back onto the barn floor and looked around for where the sound had come from.

Up on the loft of the barn sat a sandy colored owl. Must be the barn owl his father had written about, he thought. Couldn’t be where the scream came from, he assured himself. Owls hoot, right? After a few minutes and no more screams, Leeland figured it was his own anxiety and lowered himself back down the ladder. The ladder stretched downward for what seemed like an hour, Leeland was not used to the physical effort it took to carry his own weight down. The climb down seemed to take forever and Leeland let out a sigh of relief when his boots finally touched the ground.

After lighting his flashlight again, Leeland took a good look around his surroundings. Upon first inspection it looked like a small cave, stalactites hung from the ceilings and a smell of damp earth penetrated Leeland's nostrils. Nothing out of the ordinary except for some red and yellow flags. The kind that you would normally see in your yard during construction or installation of something underground. These though, Leeland knew, marked previous paths his father had taken. He had mentioned them in his notebooks.

Following what he had read in his fathers journals, Leeland took the path to the left, the one lined with yellow flags. He followed this until it split again, red and yellow flags signaling which way to go. As he continued through the cavern, going through spaces that became so narrow he felt glad he didn’t have a fear of tight spaces. At some points the path seemed like a dead-end but upon further investigation it just continued into smaller spaces, some so low Leeland would have to crawl on his belly. He wondered, with his chest to the ground, a cave wall pressing against his back, his arms pulling himself forward, how many times his father had been through the cavern himself. Over thirty years, how close did he get to what he was searching for?

After following the yellow flags for an hour or so, Leeland squeezed himself through one last tunnel and he came into a large opening where he could hear running water. He remembered this from his fathers journals. This was the last place he had searched. His father said this was where he thought the stone was. Probably hidden under the small pond the flowing water filled. Leeland shined his light throughout the space and saw the pond his father referenced. He laid the flashlight down against the side of the cave, illuminating it enough that he could find his way to the pond. He then strapped a headlamp he’d found among his fathers things in the farmhouse to his head, took a breath and dove into the pond.

His blood froze, he hadn’t expected the water to be so cold, it took his breath away and he had to surface. The water felt like a thousand needle’s penetrating his skin. Did his father do this in his old age? There was no way, he thought. Leeland wanted to climb back out of the water but something told him not to give up. In that moment he was torn between the question of whether he was fulfilling his father's dreams or proving his father was wrong all along. Either answer sufficed, he thought, but no answer was not enough. He'd come this far already he planned to see it through. So he took another breath and ducked beneath the water's surface.

It was almost immediate, the headlamp reflected on something on the floor of the icy pond. Leeland pushed through the pain of the freezing water and upon reaching the stone, he had to hold in a scream of satisfaction. He had found it. It was a silver, crystal-like structure laid on the bottom of the pond. Like nothing he had ever seen before and the images in his father's book did not do it justice. It was magnificent. Being no more than the size of his head, it had three distinct points, jutting up like appendages of a weird stone creature. Leeland grabbed it and to his surprise it felt like it weighed at least fifteen, maybe twenty pounds. But he was determined, there was no way he was leaving this cavern without it. He surfaced once more for a breath before diving back down to retrieve the stone.

Leeland struggled with it between the icy pond waters and the weight of it, but he managed to get back to the surface with the stone. He shoved it onto the edge of the pond and then pulled himself up, gasping for air and shivering from the freezing waters. He did it. He had found the stone his father and grandfather had spent their lives looking for. Screw you, he thought, as he stood up. His father warned him not to go looking for it, but here he was right next to the damned thing. He smiled, a sort of smug retribution to his father before grabbing the stone and heading back the way he had come. He had to stop himself from thoroughly examining it because he felt if he didn't get dry soon he would surely die alone in the cavern from hypothermia.

Shaking, weak and cold from his efforts to get the stone definitely made it harder to get back. The stone definitely felt as though it's weight increased as he dragged it along the narrow spaces back through the cavern. It definitely made the trek back more difficult but he made it. Back at the opening to the cavern, Leeland tied the stone to his back using some old rope left at the bottom of the ladder. This was too easy, he laughed as he ascended the ladder. Did his father really want him to ignore the stone and move on or did he just not want him to do what he couldn't?

Light shined down from the opening of the tunnel in from the dilapidated barn. Leeland was more than halfway up before the scream reverberated down into the cavern from above. With his frozen fingers, barely gripping the wooden ladder, the noise made him jump and he lost his grip. Mere feet away from the surface, he fell. At least fifty feet, the stone still strapped to his back, he landed square on it. And as he lay on the floor of the cavern unable to move. Leeland peered up at the end of the tunnel where the sandy colored barn owl looked down upon him as it let out one last scream before he faded away.

The End.