“And the rock throwing…someone’s just throwing rocks at the house?” I asked.
“Yes, the house. Sometimes the barn. Sometimes the worker’s quarters. I know Miguel has heard it.”
“Where do they sleep by the way? I don’t think I saw it earlier.”
“There’s a small house behind the big barn. It’s hidden by some trees, privacy you know. Nothing fancy but they all get their own rooms. Well, Shan and Miguel. Bird lives in town.”
I nodded and looked at Dex for feedback. I had no idea if I was asking everything I should. He sensed my gaze and brought his eyes off the display screen to meet mine. Then he paused. His eyes shifted left, fixed on a point past my shoulder.
I immediately felt afraid. I opened my mouth to say something but he slowly shook his head, keeping his eyes on the spot. I turned my head and looked in to the dark kitchen behind me. I couldn’t make out anything but shadows.
I looked back at Dex and at Will. Will had his ear cocked, listening. Dex raised his finger and motioned for me to stay quiet. He picked up the camera and aimed it at the kitchen.
I looked again. Still, I saw nothing. So I listened. And then I heard it. A small tap at the kitchen window. Followed by another tap. I felt very uneasy.
It was as if someone stood outside the window and tapped a single finger on the pane. It was low, quick and sporadic. It could have almost been a tree branch bumping in the wind but there was no tree.
RATTLE.
We were surrounded by a wall of sound, the taps, clattering, rattling of rocks falling on the roof and flying at the windows. The sound was deafening.
“Holy shit!” exclaimed Dex. He jumped up and ran for the kitchen.
I looked at Will, confused and scared. “These are the rocks?”
His eyes were wide. “They’ve never been this loud.”
He got up and went after Dex. Naturally I couldn’t sit alone at the table while this storm of sonic violence engulfed the house, so I got up and ran over to join them in the kitchen.
Dex switched the night vision on the camera and was aiming it at the window, which was physically being shaken. You could see stones bouncing off the glass and ricocheting back into the darkness.
“This is unbelievable,” Dex said, barely audible, and beckoned for me to join him by the window. Though the rocks seemed to be coming harder, being beside him felt safer than hanging in the kitchen doorway with my back exposed to the depths of the lonely house, so I scuttled over and sandwiched myself between the two men.
Up close, you couldn’t see anything. It was a hailstorm of rocks. But only a few were actually hitting the window. It seemed like a cloud had opened up above the house with the roof taking the brunt of it.
“So this isn’t normal?” I yelled above the noise.
“No!” Will shouted back. “It’s never this bad.”
“We’ve made it angry by being here,” Dex said cryptically.
“It?!” I cried out. What the f**k was “it?” A rock shower was not the work of a poltergeist. Opened cupboards were the work of a poltergeist. I didn’t know what the hell we were dealing with.
“I think you’re right,” Will said.
“This could just be a freaky science thing,” I tried to reason. “Sometimes frogs fall from the sky. I read it in a book.”
OK, I was really making myself sound stupid but it was true. In that Charles Burlitz’s World of Strange Phenomenon book, there were a ton of cases where things were sucked up somewhere and fell down somewhere else.
Dex nudged me in my side and pointed out at the moon which sat above the black mountaintops.
“Clear sky. The falling frogs, and the corn that fell in Colorado in the 1980’s, was usually linked to a weather pattern.”
The sound tapered off. The rocks on the roof became less and less. They ceased to hit the window. It looked like the stone storm was dying off. I slowly let out my breath, my ears still listening to the peculiar sounds.
I turned my head up at Will, “Is that-”
CRACK!
A huge rock hit the window, cracking it. I nearly shit myself. We all stepped backwards.
“That’s not good,” Will managed to say. Dex focused the camera on the window, but his eyes were jetting about nervously.
“Yeah, maybe we should-”
BAM! CRASH!
A rock went sailing through the window right for Dex and I. Without thinking, I leaped to my left, colliding into Will and felt the flying glass flicker against my skin.
Will caught me and steadied me. I saw the rock hit the ground and roll across the kitchen and against the fridge. Dex was to my right, crouched with the camera and his hand over his head for cover.
“We need to get out of here,” I croaked.
“I’ll go get Sarah,” Will said and hurried out of the kitchen.
I knelt down beside Dex and put my hand on his shoulder, just as another rock came crashing through at the spot where Will had just been.
“Jesus Christ!” I yelled and gripped Dex’s shoulder instinctively. “Are you OK?”
He nodded and took his arms off his head. His eyes were wide, panicked. I’m sure I looked the same.
“What now?” I said.
“We go outside,” he said. Determination settled on his jaw.
“What?”
He stayed crouched and grabbed my arm and shuffled us quickly out of the kitchen. Once in the dining room, we looked up the stairs. Neither Will or Sarah were there.
“We can’t go outside,” I hissed. “That’s where the rocks are coming from you moron.”
“Are they?” he asked.
I didn’t even know how to respond to that. “What about Will and Sarah?”
“They’ll be fine, we need to get this on camera.”
And with that, Dex was off and running out the front door, pulling me along with him. The outside air was like stepping into a freezer. Gone was the sweltering heat and blinding light of day. Now it was dark as hell and cold as the depths of a cave.
We ran a few feet away from the house and looked around us frantically. Shoes would have helped. A flashlight would have even better. I could still hear rocks hitting the side of the house but so far no more glass being broken.
“Run over there!” Dex yelled and gestured the camera to the side of the house where the kitchen was.
“Are you f**king kidding me!? You go over there!”