This worn and spoken red brick walkway tells me its tales without questions or warning. I have no way to coax it but must be ready to hear it when it decides, not when I am ready. And today, it spoke again, for the first time since the incident.

Not in words, of course. But in images built from emotion. I conjecture it is pure emotion, and my brain, unable to transfer this into words, creates an image as language. But the pictures are so often in such detail that I cannot escape the notion I may be channeling an actual event. But one must be careful. This madness of feeling, and then seeing, or as my friend Alderwon was wont to recommend at one time, of conniving, is all-consuming. Alderwon was steadfast and sane, and I needed that. At first I hid from him my ongoing need for fancy and wild speculation based on nothing other than the whimsy of a flight through the speckled stars in a dream of lucid quality.

But back to bricks. It is the fear I feel the most, or more accurately, with the most ease. And the fear is there today. Indeed, one must ask, is this a statement about me? Am I merely projecting my fears onto this battered path so many have trodden for hundreds of years before I found it buried in my backyard? The route had lain hidden less than one foot below my carrot patch, where the gnarled vegetable invariably came out the ground with a peculiar ninety-degree angle and upended my suspicions.

Alderwon recommended I call the archeology society and get them involved. What, and destroy the one last hope at something magical in one’s life? Are you bats, my dear Mr. Alderwon? Alderwon, the practical. Alderwon, the fearful.

I will not back away when I feel the fear bursting between the cracks from these old blocks of packed mud and tears. Day after day, I uncovered the meandering pathway as it made its way down near the lake. An odd, winding, non-Alderwon path leading to an abandoned well, covered with a large stone top, just beneath the surface. It wasn’t until I moved the stone from the well that the bricks started to speak to me their deep and disturbing emotions, with their gasps and haunted protruding eyes of horror and sadness. Did I choose to feel this? Why didn’t I run away? Did I create this?

Life was easy and relaxed before my quirky carrots afforded themselves a peculiar direction in my pleasant garden of deep dark soils. I had even learned to bake cakes during my time in retirement. It was with great pleasure that I invited friends for a book reading, and tea, and perhaps some storytelling. But the medieval causeway, the river of hardened red earth, changed everything. Good friends know when something is awry. They inquire. They don’t just stay away due to their fears of bringing up subjects of taboo or intensity.

Alderwon was such a friend, annoying as he was, his logic so intact and nearly menacing.

And this is what made it all the more surreal and frightening when Alderwon had come to my house one late afternoon, looking for me, but I was out to market. He chose to walk the ancient primordial pathway, for the first time, without me there sharing with him everything I was feeling, conniving, living. And, for the first time, he felt the emotion himself. Yes, Alderwon, the mathematician, the government servant, the man of chess and geometry.

Imagine my shock and gutted feeling when I found him that evening, moaning in the well, where he had moved the large stone covering its secrets and had fallen in headfirst, but whose boot miraculously saved him when a lace jammed in a notch in the stones above. With more blood to his deficit right brain than ever before, I surmised it somehow balanced him, or at least allowed him to catch a glimpse of something close to God.

The doctor determined he had broken his ankle. I determined he had broken his pact with logic. Alderwon, my good friend, has never been the same. And today the fear in the ground knows this, as keenly as I.