"I'm sure we'll both regret you doing that," Amanda joked. She pushed against his chest and freed herself from his grasp. "But how about I get started on those sandwiches? They won't make themselves, you know."
"Sure. I can put your rock in your room, if you want." It was the best excuse he could give for getting the stone away from her, but she shook her head.
"I'll just toss it on the bed and be right back." Amanda dashed into her room and was gone more time than was needed for a mere toss. He suspected she hid it somewhere in the bedroom where she would notice if it was disturbed. Then she was back and in the kitchen busying herself with the food as though nothing had happened. Amanda turned to him with a smile, but he doubted the sincerity. "Now how many sandwiches, one or two?"
Tony's lunch hour was quickly over, and he returned to his job with his hunger appeased but his curiosity unsatiated. Amanda gave him a goodbye kiss at the door, the entire time feeling that she was mimicking an old sitcom, and waved to him as he went off down the hall. When he'd gone out of sight, she quickly shut and locked the door, and then scampered over to her bedroom. For added peace of mind she locked the bedroom door behind herself and then turned to the room.
Everything was still and quiet inside her small domain. The noise from the streets faded into the inconsequential background, for Amanda had eyes and ears for but one plan. She had several hours alone to ponder the mystery of the strange rock and learn how it had come to be back in her bag. Admittedly she expected to find little source for answers in the small piece of earth, but a fragmentary voice inside her told her there was possibility. She need only grab it to understand the rock and all its implications.
The young woman hurried into the bathroom and tore open the doors to one of the lower cabinets. Inside she found a plastic bag which advertised feminine products for when her period struck her once every month. Her time was nearing, and so she had taken the plastic bag with her to the cabin. It had been dumped out with the rest of her clothing when she made room for the groceries. Amanda couldn't have thought of a better place to keep a male from prying into what she didn't want them to find. She reached inside and pulled forth the round, unassuming stone. Nothing bespoke of uniqueness or abnormality.
Amanda dropped the bag and stumbled out into the main part of the bedroom. Her eyes were ever on the shining object clutched in her hands, and for the first time she was struck with how clean was the object. There was not a speck of dirt anywhere in its few crevices and sloped sides. The rock was a dazzling display of perfect cleanliness.
She knelt down beside the bed and set the object down on the covers. Her eyes wandered over the surface and found nothing strange save for the abnormal cleanliness. She tipped it end over end, forward and backwards, a strange dance of observation and playfulness. There was nothing there to hint at an unusual existence, nor how such a stone of that size could have accidentally slid into her bag.
Then Amanda froze. She'd been startled by a thought, one which caused a shiver of excitement and alarm to course through her body. She couldn't help but wonder if the creature had put the rock in her bag. After all, the bag had been on the floor during the entirety of her erotic encounter. The inanimate had witnessed all that had taken place, and there was nothing to say the sentient monster couldn't figure out how to open and shut the flap.
With a new sense of fear and wonder, Amanda reached up and prodded the stone. Nothing happened save for a tip of its bottom, and then it fell back onto the covers of the bed. She squirmed her body over the sheets and closer to the mystery. Nothing happens save for her feeling utterly foolish. The young woman's shoulders slumped and she stood only to seat herself on the bed beside the rock. She set it into her palm and raised it to eye-level for a closer inspection. Nothing but little tiny pebbles embedded within larger rocks. Then she tossed it over her shoulder. She was waisting time fooling with the hunk of minerals.
Amanda stood and stretched. Whatever spell the rock had on her was broken. The mood in the room shifted to allow the noise outside to enter once more. She had other work to do, and that involved technology, not some ancient piece of forgotten geological history. Without a look back she stepped out into the hall and closed the door behind herself. The rock was abandoned for the computer, and she got back to work studying the newspaper articles as she had done earlier. The afternoon slipped by just as the morning had vanished, but with a change to the weather.
Though the day had glowed with a promise of a perfect night of stars, heavy clouds conquered the sky. Outside people rushed through their last afternoon chores amid the threat from above. The rain started light, only a hint of moisture, but then overwhelmed everyone's expectations with its torrential downpour. Amanda was wrapped in her research, for she'd found some very interesting tales of, ironically, geological investigations of the mountains.
These scientific studies had been done in the early fifties, before the cabin had been shut up for a good half-century. A team of university students led by a Professor Ward had looked into the strange geological composition of Arkaham Mountain. Rather than an uplift in the earth's crest or through a hot spot of escaping earth core, his disciples and he found that the rocks were formed from the center of the mountain as strata, layers of earth built up over time.
Amanda, not being of the scientific mind, was incredibly grateful for a diagram of their discovery. To her it looked like a giant, upside-down cone with layer upon horizontal layer of dirt. The findings also mentioned the unique composition of the rocks they found when gathering for samples. The exterior was as normal as any of the mountains in the area, but digging into the earth only a few feet they found a strange, hard formation. The rock was black with small pebbles and sand embedded into its interior.
The young woman paused her reading and leaned back in her chair. She'd just read the exact description of the strange rock on her bed. This proved that the stone had come from the mountain, but how was the question she most wanted answered. She read on, and found an interview with the professor for the newspaper yielded a strange proclamation from him:
With such an interesting study at his fingertips, Professor Ward found it had been impossible to continue the work for the planned two weeks. When asked why, he had a very strange explanation.
"There was something bothering the students, scaring them, if you will. I can't understand it myself, as I saw nothing to frighten me, but even my most eager assistant demanded we leave the cabin earlier than planned. Perhaps there was something in the air, and finals are coming up in many of their other courses. Perhaps next year we can explore the mountain more, but for this season we've been scared off." When asked to expand on his comment, he was at a loss for words for a moment until he shrugged. "There's something not quite right up there, but like I explained, I hope to have another team up there next year to solve this mystery."
Amanda shrank back from the hints of horrible possibilities within the professor's statement. Reading between the lines, she recognized the horrible oppression the mountain caused to all those who traveled up its slope to that lonely cabin. None could ignore the creeping sensation of something terribly wrong with everything atop that mountain, but most especially that possessed cabin. It was as though the thing itself had taken the hewn logs and wide chimney as its own, and meant for no outsider to intrude on its solitude.
The young woman jumped when a noise hit the window. She turned her head to find rain splattering against the panes. Her heart was pattering so hard that she reached up and clutched her hand against her chest. There was a smile on her face, but it was shaky and empty of pleasantness.
"Come on, Amanda, just a small storm. Nothing to be afraid of." She glanced down at the clock on the computer. Four in the afternoon. She still had an hour until Tony got back. Maybe this was the perfect time to be thinking of what to cook for dinner.
Thump.
Amanda froze and her eyes popped open.
Thump.
She slowly turned toward the
bedroom door. Being alone in the apartment, she hadn't bothered to shut it. Now she regretted that decision.
Thump.
Amanda knew she was alone. There was no way anyone else could be in there with her, or could there?
Thump.
The sound was growing louder and closer, creeping its way down the hall. She swore it'd come from her bedroom, but right then she couldn't think about anything but finding a weapon.
Thump.
It was almost at the doorway now, and the defenseless maiden wrenched her eyes from the entrance and looked around the room. There had to be something in there with which to defend herself. Then time ran out.
THUMP.
Amanda screamed when something rolled into the doorway. She jumped from the chair and shoved it in front of her as a pathetic barrier against the unknown. There were wild expectations floating in her mind which all finished with her body lying broken and bloodied on the floor. However, none of them involved what she noticed on the carpet.
Her pet rock lay there in the doorway, unassuming and not at all intimidating. Amanda's eyes glanced behind it to the hallway beyond. No shadow moved beyond the confines of the room, nor were there any more noises. The rock had caused the heavy thumps along the floor, and now it lay still as though it had never moved. No one was there, and yet the rock was there. Surely they couldn't be mutually exclusive. Someone had to have rolled the stone into the room.
Amanda took no chances. She rolled the chair off its pad and onto the carpeted floor. The way was fraught with halting progress, as every few inches the wheels became caught in the fibers, but in a minute she was at the doorway. She hugged her shoulder against the door which swung into the room, and glanced down the hall. There was only darkness, but she noticed the door to her bedroom was open. She knew she'd shut it after leaving the room.
With the entry to her bedroom open, faded light from her windows streamed down the hall. The passage was enveloped in the soft illumination of the overcast sky, and distorted by the rain which continued to pelt the glass. The only sounds which came to her ears were of the water incessantly pleading for entrance into the apartment, and the heavy thumping of her rattled heart. She was starting to wonder if she shouldn't go with Tony on his excursion in a few days. Being alone in the apartment, and no doubt any apartment, was driving her to an imagination overblown with noises and frights which she found impossible to overcome.
There were also strange marks in the carpet. At perfect intervals of two feet starting from her bedroom door, there followed a trail of round indentations in the fibers. She squinted her eyes and couldn't help but notice the indents perfectly matched the size of the rock, but she couldn't fathom how the thing had jumped such a distance other than with the assistance of someone else.
Then Amanda sought to provide herself with comfort, and so she flicked on the light in Tony's bedroom. The false sun on the ceiling drove back some of her fears as a stream of light spread out into the hall, but she found her mind was still uneasy. To remedy the situation Amanda sought more extreme measures. She cautiously stepped out into the hall with the intention of turning on all the lights in the apartment. This would also put her on equal footing if any intruder planned to sneak up on her, which she still feared was the case.
She started with the front of the apartment close to the door, for she half-expected some maniac to come running out of her bedroom wielding a machete. There the lights were quickly turned on and nothing showed itself to be out of the ordinary. She could see no signs of a break-in, nor did she hear any shuffling of feet nor shadows stretching out from the hall toward her.
Amanda set a quivering hand down on the knob of the front door. With all those absences of the dangerous and abnormal, yet she still felt something was horribly wrong. The sensation was as though something was scratching at the back of her mind, telling her to flee while her sanity still survived. She hardly knew when the knob in her hand turned, but suddenly the door was swinging open toward her.
A shadow stood in the doorway.
Amanda screamed to the fullest capabilities of her lungs. She reeled back and would have fallen to the floor if the person, for it was a human, hadn't grabbed her by the wrist. They righted her and took a step into the light of the apartment. It was an older gentleman, about sixty, with gray hair and a kind smile on his face. His eyes reflected his inward emotions and it showed he was worried about her.
"You all right? I thought I heard someone screaming in here a few minutes ago."
"I-I'm fine, I think." Amanda couldn't find her bearings. Her mind was swirling with panic, relief, and the oppression of horror which hung over her like a dark cloud.
Before she knew what was happening, she felt herself swaying from side to side. Then her legs buckled and she fell forward into the man's startled arms.
"Whoa, there! What's gotten into you?" The stranger lowered her to the floor where she couldn't fall as far and looked into her face. "You look like you could use a stiff drink. Anything in this place you can take?"
"N-no, I'm fine. I just need some water." Amanda knew she had nearly fainted from the shock to her system.
"All right, but don't go collapsing on me again. My old ticker won't be able to put up with it if you died on me." He meant to make a jest, but his words only caused alarm for the young lady. The stranger noticed his folly and clasped her hand in his own. "It's only a joke, miss. I don't think you're going to be kicking the bucket on anyone any time soon."
"Y-yes, I know. Too young to die and all that." Right then Amanda didn't feel too young to die. She felt her head pounding and her body aching from the strain of her trembling fear.
"Well, let me get you that water. Maybe that'll help." He had some trouble removing his hands from her grip, for her fingers had wound their way around his wrists. His lips pursed together at her quivering body. "You want me to call an ambulance or the police? You look like you've been scared half to-well, scared bad." Her pallor worsened at his suggestion, and he tried to get her fingers off of him. "Let me just go call the police and they'll get here in a few minutes, all right? I can stay with you until-"
"Oh no, please don't call them." Amanda couldn't explain what happened to her, not to anyone. They wouldn't believe her, and she'd be caught up in a mess of trouble when they found out she'd been seeing a psychologist. They'd assume the worse and take her away for a mental breakdown. She took a deep breath. Her worries were spiraling out of control. Maybe she was really going mad. Either way, she tried to act as sane and calm as she could manage for this stranger. "I just need some water and...and maybe your help. I-I heard some noises in the back of the apartment and I thought it sounded like someone was in here with me. Do you think you can help me search the place?"
At her words his eyes glanced passed her and toward the bedrooms. Now he was the one who was worried.
"I suppose I could, but wouldn't you rather have the police look through the place?"
"No, well, you see this isn't my apartment, it's my boyfriend's. If he came back from work and found a bunch of officers looking through everything, I don't think he'd be too happy with me." The stranger gave her a funny glance, and then she realized how terrible suspicious that sounded. He probably thought Tony was hiding a stash of weed somewhere in the closets and Tony would beat her if the cops took it away. "I just don't want to get the cops involved, okay? I might have just been hearing things, because I didn't see anyone and there's that storm outside."
On cue the wind picked up and the rain knocked harder against the windows. Amanda jumped at the noise, and then weakly smiled at the stranger.
"See? Just me being all spooked. I don't like being alone when it gets dark."
"Well, I'll help you search, but you have to let me go so I can get my gun. If there is somebody in here, I want to be prepared."
"Oh, right, I'm so sorry." Amanda quickly agreed to his small demand and released him. He stood up to leave, and Amanda had to control the urge to cling to his c
lothes.
"You wait right here and I'll be right back."
In a thrice he was gone, and she was alone again. Her eyes watched the hall outside for his return, but her ears were attune to the sounds inside the apartment. Nothing but the rain pounding on the windows caught her attention.
Thump.
Amanda's heart skipped a beat. She pulled her hands against her chest and slowly turned toward the hall. Back in the deepest depths of the apartment, the light in Tony's bedroom was off. She hadn't turned it off.
"All right, let's get this going, shall we?" The booming voice of the man caused her to jump. Sweat trickled down from her forehead and over the side of her face. She wiped away the streams with a shaky hand. The stranger noticed her demeanor had worsened, and he knelt down in front of her.. "Something happen?"
"I just...I just thought I heard something again. Might have been hail hitting the windows, though." He glanced to the back of the apartment, and his eyes wandered over the lit hall.
"I haven't seen any hail outside, just rain."
"Yes, well, maybe it was just my imagination again." She managed a raspy cough of laughter, but he wasn't quite buying her act. Instead he held up his gun with the barrel facing up at the ceiling.
"How about we go see if it was?"
The man stood and crept over passed the kitchen to the mouth of the hall. He leaned from side to side inspecting all angles of the passage, and most especially Tony's room to his left. Then he stepped over to the open entrance and looked inside. Amanda couldn't handle the man going in there alone, so she scrambled to her feet and was at his side in a second.
"Is anything in there?" she whispered.
The man jumped in the air and swirled around, and Amanda screamed when he pointed the gun at her. They stood there for a moment with their eyes bulging and his hand quivering on the gun. Then his arm dropped to his side and his shoulders drooped. He reached up and wiped the sweat from his own brow.
"You need to be a little louder, miss. I thought you were someone sneaking up on me."