The Circle

There used to be a house at the top of this hill. I know it, and yet I’m not sure why I do. It’s as though my head is filling with memories that aren’t my own. Someone--not me, but a small part of me--remembers the house. It was tall and narrow, built of gray wood on a gray stone foundation. When the winds were strong, and they always were, the upper stories swayed and moaned. The windows were glassless--perhaps they had glass when the house was new. I can’t remember. Things used to happen there, things that made people afraid to pass by the hill at night, but I can’t remember what they were. I only know that they had something to do with the house, or the hill.

The house is gone now. Nothing remains of it but a few crumbling slabs of stone, green with mold and weeds. The cracks in their faces look like letters: in the moonlight, the hill looks like a graveyard.

Another part of me, separate from the one who remembered the house, remembers this hill before it was built. There was a church, small and white, which no one ever attended: it was pulled down and the wood burned to white ashes. That wasn’t the first church built on this hill, but I can’t remember what the other ones were like.

There was something here even before the churches, something ancient. My memories call it a Circle, but they won’t tell me anymore. I only know that the Circle was here long before the churches and the house, and before there was a Circle, there were tombs.

I try to pursue that thought further, but my mind becomes blurry, discordant. For the first time, I realize I’m not alone. Two figures--tough they both wear long cloaks, I know that one is a man and the other a woman--stand on the stone slabs before me.

They are both old, so old that they don’t seem to belong to the same world as the stones and the house and the church and the Circle. The woman is older than the man, but not by much. She is thinking: a breeze stirs the hem of her cloak, and the voices in the wind tell me she has been thinking a lot lately. Whatever her thoughts are, they make her feel weak.

The man isn’t thinking. He sits down on the dead grass and twists the clasp of his cloak in a way that tells me he is afraid. He tries to remember something and can’t.

With a flick of his wrist, he opens his cloak and lets if fall to the ground. His face is gray like the stone, and his eyes are dull and dark.

The woman glances at him reproachfully. “What?” he says, laying back on the grass. “What good are cloaks when there’s no one to see us?”

“You never know who might be watching.” Her voice is low and sad, like wind in the branches of a willow.

“Whoever is looking for us won’t be fooled by hoods.”

The woman sits down on the stone beside him and folds her hands in her lap. She is thinking again. The man rests his head on her knee and closes his eyes.

“Does the earth here feel strange to you?” he asks. His voice would be too soft for me to hear if it weren’t for these memories that aren’t my own.

“Yes,” she says. “It feels hollow.”

“Or hallowed.” He turns his face towards me, but his eyes are still closed. “Are any of them coming tonight? It feels so cold here.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

“Only two of us, where there should be nine.”

“No.” The woman leans over to rest her cheek on the top of his head. “There will only be eight.”

The wind is picking up, blowing her hood and his hair so that both their faces are obscured. The air smells stale, as though it’s been walled up in a tomb for centuries, or millennia. The dust from the grass flies up in the air until everything is gray. I taste it in my mouth, smell it in my breath, feel it whipping against my skin, I need to close my eyes to keep it out...

When I opened them again, the dream was over, and the pillow was wet beneath my cheek, and I was trying to remember what the woman said that made me wake up crying.