Chapter 3: Stories Along the Road
Morning light stretched across the kitchen floor, catching the folded road map waiting on the table. Outside, the neighborhood was only beginning to wake.
Saffire stepped into the kitchen, drying her hair with a towel resting over one shoulder. She glanced toward the kettle before looking at Velaerius.
Saf: Good morning, Velaerius. How’s your morning going? Are we still on for our road trip today?
Velaerius smiled.
Vel: Morning, Love. Better now that you’re awake. The weather still looks perfect. Clear skies all day.
Saf: Is the water hot?
Vel: It just finished. I made toast and eggs too.
She looked toward the plates waiting on the counter.
Saf: You cooked?
Vel: I thought we’d need something before spending the day in the forest.
Saffire smiled and reached for her tea.
A few minutes later they sat together at the table, the folded map resting between their plates.
Saffire opened it.
Saf: So, just under two hours. I’ll text Mom before we leave and tell her where we’re going.
Vel: Good idea. Cell service may get unreliable once we’re deeper into the property. I downloaded the route, but we’ll bring the paper map too.
Saf: Definitely.
She finished her tea and stood.
Saf: Give me thirty minutes. I still need sunscreen, extra clothes, and shoes that can survive the forest.
Vel: I’ll take care of the water, blanket, and lunch.
Saf: Perfect.
Thirty minutes later, Saffire returned with her backpack.
Velaerius had already gathered the rest near the door: the folded blanket, lunch basket, bottled water, first-aid kit, and paper map.
Together they carried everything to the SUV.
Saffire locked the house and looked at him.
Saf: Ready?
Vel: I’ve been ready since sunrise.
She smiled.
Saf: Somehow I knew you were going to say that.
They climbed into the SUV and pulled away from the house toward the forest that, for the first time, truly belonged to them.
The city had fallen behind them almost without Saffire noticing.
Traffic lights gave way to longer stretches of road, then to open fields and thick stands of trees. Every few miles another cluster of houses appeared, but even those were becoming less frequent.
Saffire had the paper map folded across her lap and Velaerius’s research open on her phone.
Something made her sit straighter.
Saf: Oh… listen to this.
She began reading aloud.
Saf: “The oldest stories speak of a bare clay hill hidden somewhere within the forest. From its summit, the lights of the distant city could be seen at night, and on clear evenings the whole sky opened above it.”
She slowed.
Saf: “People gathered there after dark. Some accounts call them witches and wizards. Others describe musicians, healers, wanderers… or simply people who came into the forest and did not want to be found.”
The road curved ahead of them, disappearing briefly between the trees.
Saf: “They built fires on the hill. They sang, played instruments and danced until morning. Travelers sometimes claimed they could hear the gathering from miles away, although those who tried to find the hill rarely reached it.”
Saffire looked up from the screen.
For a moment she could see it almost too clearly: a high dark hill rising beyond the trees, fire turning faces gold, bodies moving beneath an enormous sky, music spilling down the slope toward distant city lights.
Saf: That sounds beautiful.
Vel: It does.
She kept reading.
The stories disagreed about almost everything else. Some called the gathering a witches’ sabbath. Some said the people were artists. Others insisted they weren’t people at all, but beings who lived in the forest and occasionally allowed humans to join them.
No two accounts placed Bald Mountain in exactly the same location.
Some claimed it had disappeared.
Others claimed it had never been lost at all.
You simply had to know how to find it.
Saffire looked through the passenger window at the passing trees.
Saf: Imagine finding that.
Velaerius smiled.
Vel: We have quite a lot of forest to search.
She returned to his notes.
There were other fragments buried beneath the legend.
Old aerial photographs showed traces of deliberate geometry beneath decades of growth: paths meeting at sharp angles, triangular clearings, straight rows of trees where no modern landscaping existed. One photograph showed what might once have been flower beds arranged around three intersecting walkways.
No explanation survived with them.
Farther down, she found references to an abandoned hospital somewhere in the surrounding woods.
It had begun centuries earlier under another name and another purpose before eventually becoming a psychiatric institution. The surviving descriptions were unsettling even without the stories that grew around it: massive walls; impossibly narrow windows stretching upward like cuts through stone; other windows long and compressed, as though the buildings had been designed to squeeze the world into unnatural shapes.
After the hospital closed, people still walked out there.
Some came back talking about bells.
Saffire stopped.
Saf: Bells?
Vel: That one appears more than once.
There may once have been a chapel associated with the hospital. Nobody seemed certain where it stood, and later maps showed nothing at all.
Yet for years afterward, people reported hearing bells at dusk.
Not loudly.
Far away.
Somewhere beyond the trees.
Saffire read the next paragraph without speaking.
Then:
Saf: This one I like.
Stories from around the creek were different.
People described hearing music.
Sometimes distant voices.
Sometimes something like a choir.
One account mentioned an accordion drifting across the water late at night. Another described several voices singing together somewhere deep in the woods. People followed the sound expecting to find a gathering, only to reach the creek and discover nothing there except moving water and trees.
Velaerius glanced toward her.
Vel: The descriptions change. The creek doesn’t.
Saffire looked back through the windshield.
The forest no longer seemed like empty land waiting for them.
It seemed layered.
A mountain nobody could locate. Fires and dancers beneath the stars. Geometric paths disappearing beneath roots. An abandoned hospital. Bells from a vanished chapel. Music traveling over dark water long after the musicians were gone.
And somewhere inside all of it was the property they had just bought.
Saffire lowered the phone.
Saf: We really had no idea what we were buying.
Vel: No.
Ahead, the road narrowed again and disappeared into green.
Saffire smiled.
Saf: Good.
