Good morning all. Slow start tonight. Didn’t sleep well and am fighting the urge to crawl back into bed for a few more hours. Let’s see if resistance is possible with a writing prompt. Shall we begin?
Not my best effort. My brain is a little more awake though. So that is something.
Monday, July 12th: The rock proved much larger than we expected.
The rock proved much larger than we expected. Sally hit it when digging down and called the rest of us to help her find the edges. We thought we could dig around it, pry it up and then figure out where to put the fence post, infilling any space that made the hole too wide.
We scraped away dirt in all directions and soon found ourselves moving from a tight cluster to a few feet apart. The surprise came when we found that the stone had squared off edges. It was a large stone with worked edges.
“Nothing that straight occurs in nature,” Sally said.
“And it certainly doesn’t have a corner like this,” Sam added. We all stopped out digging to look at him. Sure enough, he found a corner. It met in a sharp right angle. He began tracing the edge with his shovel so that we could get the parameters of it.
With his like tracing the edge we realized we didn’t have too much further to go, and dug with a fury, anxious to see what it was we uncovered. Thus far it was the most exciting thing that happened to us since our arrival and we all wondered what the perfect rectangle of stone was for.
Most of us thought it covered something and thoughts ranged from a root cellar from a long ago burnt out building to a secret passageway. Sam thought the secret passageway would lead to a hidden chamber deep in the earth. As we continued to dig he expounded on the sort of evil rituals that could take place in the chamber. When we uncovered the surface we had a rectangle of stone roughly three feet wide by five feet long. The edges ere straight lines and the corners sharp.
It was then that we realized we had to dig around the edges to see how deep it was. We rested, refueled with water and then got back to digging. This time, down around the corners to see how deep the stone went.
By the time we reached the bottom of the stone, we were spent. We also realized that there was no way we were moving this stone. It was a block that was three feet deep. There was no way we were moving it without mechanical aide.
As we worked, the light grew dim and shadows lengthened. We reckoned that our work day was about over and all trouped back towards the house to try and figure out what we were going to do next. The list of what we could do was short. It mostly involved adjusting the fence line so that we could continue to fence in the property around the giant stone.
Once we figured that out, speculation returned as to what the stone actually covered. It was tantalizing to think about it and talk held us as we put our tools away for the day, washed up, fixed and ate dinner and then went to bed. Normally there would be some time sitting up and watching television or reading or even playing games. Not today. Today we were so tired out that once bed time came we all lay down and conked out.
It wasn’t until about three in the morning, when the explosion sounded, that any of us stirred.
Ten til Midnight 