He was sixty-six years old in the autumn of 1887, a surveyor who had spent forty years holding a theodolite, and his right thumb was bent slightly inward from the pressure of the brass screw. He spoke English carefully, German more easily, and Pennsylvania Dutch the way a man breathes. He was not a superstitious man. That was the first thing you had to understand about Obadiah Reinhardt.

He believed in property lines and the slow turning of seasons and the steady work of measuring what could be measured. So when he told me on the porch of his house in Lancaster County in the spring of 1912 that the Pine Barrens of New Jersey were not a place a Christian man should walk after the leaves had turned, he did not say it the way superstitious men say things. He said it the way a doctor tells you a wound has gone bad. In the late summer of 1887, a railroad concern out of Camden hired him to survey a parcel of land deep inside the Barrens, near a settlement that no longer exists on any map I have ever seen.

The settlement was called Eberly’s Crossing. Three families lived there at the time, all of them Pennsylvania Dutch by descent, all of them moved over from the Lehigh Valley in the 1850s to work a small bog iron operation that had since closed. The railroad wanted the parcel for a spur line that was never built. My grandfather was hired because he spoke their language and because he was known to be honest about boundary lines.

He took the train down on the 2nd of October. He was supposed to be there for ten days. He came back on the 23rd. When I asked him as a young man why it took so long, he looked at me and did not answer for what felt like a full minute.

Then he said, “The work took ten days. The walking out took thirteen. ”

He arrived at Eberly’s Crossing on the 3rd of October, 1887. Three houses, a barn shared between two of them, a smokehouse, and a small stone meeting room used for prayer on Sundays.

The bog iron works had been closed for nearly twenty years. The forge was still standing, but the roof had fallen in on one side. The families lived on what they grew, what they hunted, and a small annual stipend the railroad paid them for quiet caretaking of the parcel. Nobody else lived within nearly seven miles in any direction.

The closest town with a post office was Chatsworth, and you had to walk it, because there was no proper road, just a sand path the rains turned into a ditch from November through April. The head of the largest family was a man named Lebrecht Hummelstein, forty-eight years old but looking sixty, short and thickset, with a face like a piece of split oak. His wife, Wilhelmina, was thirty-nine, quiet and hard-working, still wearing the white prayer cap of the old country. She kept the kitchen, the garden, and a small flock of black-feathered chickens she called by name.

The other two families were the Schönfeldts, Otto and Friederika, and the Pretz family, Reinhardt and Maria. Eight adults in total at Eberly’s Crossing in October of 1887. No others. I want you to remember that number.

Eight. Otto Schönfeldt was fifty-one that autumn, a wiry man with a great red beard going gray at the chin, a wheelwright in the old country who now did most of the heavy carpentry. Friederika, his wife, was forty-seven, taller than her husband, with hands so strong she could open any jar. She kept the garden’s herb beds: sage, hyssop, rue, mint, and a few small plants in their own row near the fence that my grandfather did not recognize.

He asked her about them once on the second day. She said only, in German, “Those are for the door frames. ” He did not ask again. He noticed later that there were small bunches of dried herbs nailed above each doorway in each of the three houses, and above the doorway of the smokehouse where he slept.

Replaced each spring, he learned later. The herbs were a part of the keeping. Reinhardt Pretz was the youngest of the men, only thirty-six, with one weak leg from a fall in the bog years before, and he walked with a thick stick of black cherry wood. His wife, Maria, was thirty-three, the daughter of the first family that had lived at Eberly’s Crossing, the one that had figured out the bell, the one that had built the circle of stones at the forge.

She had been born there, grown up there. She knew the rules the way a person knows the alphabet. She was the one, my grandfather later understood, who had taught all of them how to do it properly. She had quiet eyes and a careful way of speaking and a slight, almost permanent frown, as if she was always listening to something just past the edge of the room.

My grandfather was put up in the smokehouse, cleaned and aired out for him with a cot and a small iron stove. He started his work the next morning. The parcel was about 1,400 acres, mostly pitch pine and white cedar swamp with a few clearings where the bog iron had been worked a generation before. He set his first transit point on the morning of October 4th, drove his stake, and began measuring his way north and west.

He was alone in the field. The men of Eberly’s Crossing helped where they could, holding chains, cutting brush. But they did not like to go more than a mile or so from the houses. He noticed that on the very first day.

He thought it was just the way they had been raised, cautious people in a hard country. He found out later it was something else. The first three days were ordinary. He took his measurements, made his notes, returned each evening to the smokehouse.

Wilhelmina sent him supper in a covered iron pot: beans, potatoes, a piece of salt pork on the second night. On the third evening, Lebrecht came and sat with him while he ate, and they spoke a little in Pennsylvania Dutch about the weather and the railroad and the shape of the work to come. Then, just as Lebrecht was getting up to leave, he stopped at the door and said, in German, “Do not be in the trees after the bell. ”

My grandfather asked him, “What bell?

” There was no church in Eberly’s Crossing, no bell tower, no bell of any kind that he had seen. Lebrecht looked at him, then he said, “You will hear it. ” And he walked out. That night my grandfather lay awake on the cot for a long time.

He could hear the wind in the pines and a fox somewhere far off. He did not hear a bell. He told himself the man had been speaking metaphorically, perhaps about the dusk, perhaps about some custom of the settlement he did not yet understand. He went to sleep.

On the fourth day, in the late afternoon, he was working a clearing about two miles north of the settlement when he heard it. He was bent over the transit, sighting through the eyepiece, and a sound came across the trees from somewhere he could not place. A single, low, brassy tone, like a handbell, but deeper and held for too long, as if the thing that struck it had not lifted away. He straightened up.

He listened. The sound stopped. He noted the time in his field book: 4:22 in the afternoon. He packed his instruments and walked back, not running, but faster than usual.

He reached the smokehouse just as the sun was going down. Wilhelmina was at his door with the iron pot. She did not say anything about the bell. She just looked at him, and at the trees behind him, and went back across the yard.

That evening Lebrecht came again. He sat down on the empty crate my grandfather used as a chair. He said, “You heard it. ” My grandfather said, “Yes.

What is it? ” And Lebrecht said, in his careful German, “We do not know what it is. We know what it does. ”

He said, “The bell rings between four and five in the afternoon, not every day.

Some days it is silent. We have been here since ’51. In all that time, we have learned only this. When it rings, you must be inside a house with a closed door before the sun goes down.

And you must not open the door, no matter what you hear, until the sun has been up for one full hour the next morning. ”

My grandfather asked, “What happens if you do not? ”

And Lebrecht said, “My brother stayed out one night in ’63. We found his clothes in the meeting room, folded on the table.

He never came back. ”

My grandfather said that when Lebrecht spoke those words, the man did not look frightened. He looked like somebody describing a long illness in the family, a condition you live with, a thing you organize your day around. And that, my grandfather said, was somehow worse, because it meant the thing was old, and it was settled, and it was not going to be solved.

The next day he kept working. He had a job to finish, but he was careful. He kept his pocket watch in his hand all afternoon. He turned for home at 3:30.

He was inside the smokehouse with the door barred by 4:10. The bell did not ring that day, nor the next. He worked through the 7th, the 8th, the 9th. He almost let himself believe it had been a single occurrence, a trick of the wind, something the families had built a story around because they were lonely people in a lonely place.

But there were small things in those quiet days that he noted and tried to explain. On the morning of the 7th, he came out to find his transit, which he had set down on the bench outside the door the previous evening facing the house, turned around. The eyepiece was facing the trees. He told himself he must have turned it himself and not remembered.

He was tired, sleeping poorly. But he wrote it down in his field book that evening in pencil with a small question mark beside it. On the morning of the 8th, the chickens were all facing the same direction, standing in the yard in a loose circle, all looking outward, away from the center. They did not move.

They did not scratch. They stood there, the eight of them, like a small living compass. Wilhelmina came out and clapped her hands sharp and quick, and the spell broke. The chickens scattered, walking again like normal birds.

She did not say anything about it. She did not look at my grandfather. He understood, watching her, that this was something she had seen before, something she was not going to discuss. On the evening of the 9th, he was sitting in the smokehouse just after sundown, writing his notes, when he heard a sound he could not place.

Something soft being dragged across the outside wall. Not a footstep, not a voice, just a slow, dragging touch. Once, then a pause, then again in the same place, as if testing the wall. He held very still.

After perhaps a minute, the dragging stopped. In the morning he went around the smokehouse and looked carefully at the wall. There was a single mark, about the height of his shoulder, a long, faint scuff in the wood, as if something had pressed against it and then slid sideways for half a foot. The wood was old.

The scuff could have been there for years. He told himself that. He almost believed it. On the 10th of October, the bell rang again.

He was about a mile and a half from the settlement, on the eastern edge of the parcel, in a stand of cedar near a slow, black creek. The sound came at 3:58 in the afternoon. He noted the time, picked up his instruments, and started back. He had been moving for perhaps ten minutes when he realized the woods had gone silent.

Not the silence of a windless afternoon. The kind you get when every animal in the woods has decided, all at once, to hold its breath. No birds, no insects, no squirrels in the leaves. Nothing.

And in that silence, somewhere behind him, he heard a footstep. Just one. A long pause, then another. He did not turn around.

He kept walking. He told me he understood, in that moment, that turning around was a thing the woods wanted him to do, and he understood just as clearly that he must not. So he walked. And the steps walked behind him, not closer, not farther, matched to his pace, for nearly twenty minutes.

He came out of the trees at the edge of the settlement, and the steps stopped. He did not look back even then. He went into the smokehouse, barred the door, and sat down on the cot, and his hands were shaking so hard he could not light the lamp for almost ten minutes. He said it was the first time in his adult life he had been afraid in that particular way.

Not the fear of a falling tree or a slipping foot. The fear of having been considered, looked at, the way a hawk looks at a field. That night was the first of the long nights. The wind came up around midnight.

The pines made the sound pines make. Sometime after 1:00 in the morning, by the light of his pocket watch, he heard somebody walking around the smokehouse. Slow, even steps, all the way around the building, once, then twice. Then they stopped at the door.

He held his breath. A voice on the other side of the door said, in perfect English, with no accent at all, “Please open the door. I am cold. ”

He did not open the door.

The voice said, “Please, I have come a long way. ”

He did not open the door. After a long time, the voice said his name. “Obadiah.

”

It said it the way his mother had said it, pulled out, gentle on the second syllable, the way she had called him in for supper when he was a young man on the farm in Berks County. And his mother had been dead for nineteen years. He told me he wept then, sitting on the cot in the dark, not from fear, from something more complicated than fear, from the wrongness of hearing a voice you loved coming out of a thing that had no business knowing it. The voice waited at the door for what he believed was nearly an hour.

Then it walked away. He heard the steps go around the smokehouse one more time, and then nothing. In the morning, when the sun had been up for the full hour Lebrecht had told him about, he opened the door. The yard was empty.

There were no footprints. The ground was soft from the dew, soft enough that his own boots left clear marks the moment he stepped down. But there were no footprints from the night before. None at all.

He went to the main house. Wilhelmina was at the kitchen door. She looked at him and said, in Pennsylvania Dutch, “Who did it call? ”

He told her.

She nodded. She said, “Mine called my sister last winter. My sister has been dead since before we came here. ” She said it the way you might say, “The bread is on the second shelf.

” She handed him a tin cup of coffee and went back to her work. Most men, hearing what he had just heard, would have packed their bag and walked the seven miles to Chatsworth that morning and gotten on the first train back to Camden. He did not. When I asked him, all those years later, why he did not, he said, “The work was not finished.

” And after a long pause, “I wanted to know. ”

He stayed nine more days. In those nine days he heard the bell three more times. Each time he was back in the smokehouse before sundown.

Each time something came to the door at night. On the 12th of October, it was a voice he did not know, a man’s voice who said he was a surveyor too, lost in these woods for a great while, and would he please be allowed in. The voice was reasonable. The voice was patient.

It described in some detail the route a surveyor might have taken into the Barrens from the south. It used the correct technical words. It mentioned the names of two engineers in Camden that my grandfather had, in fact, met two years before. What frightened him most about that night was not the voice itself, but how convincing it was.

He sat on the cot and listened to a man who sounded, in every respect, like a fellow professional in trouble. And he had to keep telling himself, every few minutes, that the man was not real. That whatever was on the other side of the door had taken those engineers’ names from somewhere, from the air, from his own mind perhaps, and was using them to make a key to fit his lock. That voice stayed at the door until almost 3:00 in the morning.

When it finally went away, my grandfather realized he had been holding his pencil in his hand the whole time and had broken the lead. The 13th and 14th were quiet. He worked, came home early, went to bed, slept badly but slept. Lebrecht and Wilhelmina did not speak much.

There was a kind of held breath about the settlement. On the afternoon of the 14th, Maria Pretz came to the smokehouse and brought him a small bundle of dried sage and a little leather cord. She did not say what it was for. She tied it above the inside of his door.

She nodded at him. She left. On the 15th, the voice did not speak at all. It only breathed, slowly, for most of the night.

He could see where he had hung an old piece of canvas over the gap at the bottom of the door. The canvas moved with each breath, in and out, in and out. The breath was deep, deeper than a man’s. He timed it with his pocket watch.

Each breath was nearly twelve seconds. A man at rest takes three to four. He did not sleep at all that night. He sat on the cot against the back wall with his blanket around his shoulders and watched the canvas move.

He told me he had spent some part of that night thinking about whether the thing on the other side of the door was breathing because it needed to, or because it knew that breath was a thing that comforted him in his own kind and was using it to lull him. He could not decide. The thought, he said, was almost as bad as the breath itself. On the 16th and 17th, the bell did not ring.

He worked, came home, noticed on the morning of the 17th that one of Wilhelmina’s chickens was missing. He asked her gently if it had wandered off. She said, in German, “No, they do not wander. ” He did not press her.

That evening at supper, Reinhardt Pretz finally smiled again, a small and tired smile, and said in English, “The count is good. ” And Maria beside him said only, “Today. ”

On the 18th, the voice was Wilhelmina’s. She was crying.

She said her husband had fallen in the creek and was hurt, and please, please come. She could not lift him alone. He almost opened the door. He told me that.

He had his hand on the bar, and then he remembered what Lebrecht had said: not until the sun has been up for one full hour. He took his hand off the bar. The voice cried for another twenty minutes. Then it stopped.

In the morning, when he came out, Wilhelmina was at her kitchen door, alive and well, hanging out a sheet to air. She had not left the main house all night. Lebrecht had been with her the whole time. He asked them.

He asked very carefully. They both said the same thing with the same flat quietness: “We do not go out. We have learned. ”

On the 20th of October, my grandfather walked the eastern edge of the parcel one more time to set his last stakes.

The bog iron forge was on that edge, a quarter mile inside the trees. He had not gone near it in all his weeks of work. The men had told him plainly that the forge was where the worst of it lived, and he had agreed to keep his survey points clear of the building. But on the 20th, his last day of measurements, he found that one of his stakes from a week before had been moved.

Not pulled up. Moved six feet to the east. He stood there for a long time looking at it. Then he looked through the trees toward the forge, and he could see, even from a quarter mile away, that the door of the forge was open.

He knew, just by looking at it, that the door had not been open the day he had first walked the parcel. He knew it the way you know a clock has stopped. Some things you do not need confirmation for. And then he did the foolish thing.

He walked toward the forge. He told me, when I asked him about it, “I had been listening to that thing speak to me for two weeks. I wanted to see what was on the other side of the door. ”

He reached the forge a few minutes before 3:00 in the afternoon.

The bell had not rung. The day had been quiet. The forge was a low stone building, perhaps thirty feet by twenty, with a tile roof half collapsed on the southern side. The door was standing open about two feet.

He stopped at the threshold and looked in. The inside was dim, but the roof had fallen enough that a column of pale October light came down into the middle of the floor. There was the old iron furnace at the back, cold for twenty years. A long work table broken in the middle.

A pile of tools rusted into a single mass against the far wall. And on the floor, in the column of light, a circle of small stones, perhaps two feet across, arranged carefully. Each stone about the size of a fist. When he saw the circle of stones, he understood he was looking at something that was being kept, maintained.

It had its place, and the place had been marked, and somebody had been marking it for a long time. He stepped back from the door, took out his field book, and drew a diagram of the circle. Eleven stones. He counted them twice.

He noted the orientation: the longest line of the circle ran roughly north and south. He closed the field book. He was about to turn away when he heard, from somewhere inside the forge, somewhere behind the broken work table, a single clear sound. A small bell, handheld, held for too long.

He turned and walked away from the forge. He did not run. He walked. He was halfway back to the settlement when he realized the woods had gone silent again.

And this time, the steps that came behind him did not match his pace. They were faster. He still did not turn around. He kept walking.

And the steps got closer. He told me, when he told me this part, he was sitting on his porch in Lancaster County twenty-five years later, and his hands were folded in his lap, and they were shaking. The thing got close enough behind him that he could hear something else, not breath, a kind of dry slow click, like two pieces of dry wood being tapped together. And just when he believed he could not bear it, just when he knew he was going to break and turn and look, the bell from the forge rang one more time, far behind him.

And whatever was at his shoulder turned around and went back. He came out of the trees and went straight to the main house. Lebrecht was at the door. Lebrecht looked at him, and past him, at the trees, and his face did a thing my grandfather had not seen it do before.

He said, in German, “Which one were you at? ”

My grandfather said, “The forge. ”

Lebrecht closed his eyes for a moment. He said, “You saw the circle.

”

“Yes. ”

“Then we have to put it back tonight, before sundown. Did you move anything? ”

“No.

I touched nothing. ”

Lebrecht nodded. He said, “Then perhaps it is only angry. Perhaps it is not loose.

We will see. ”

What my grandfather learned that afternoon in the kitchen of Lebrecht and Wilhelmina Hummelstein was the thing the families of Eberly’s Crossing had been doing for thirty-six years. The bog iron operation, when it was still active in the 1840s, had brought in workers. Some were from the Lehigh Valley, like the families.

Some had come from elsewhere. There had been an incident in the year 1849 that none of the families would speak of plainly. Lebrecht said only that something had been buried at the forge that should not have been buried there. Something had been done, and whatever that something was, it had not stayed quiet.

Maria Pretz, who had walked over from her own house when she saw my grandfather come back from the forge, sat at the kitchen table with them. She filled in the parts Lebrecht did not have. She had heard them from her father, who had been a young man of twenty-two in 1849 and had remembered the original incident the rest of his life. There had been a foreman at the ironworks, a man not from the valley, not from any of the families, brought in by the company in Camden to manage the labor.

He had done something to one of the workers under him. What that something was, Maria would not say in front of my grandfather, and he understood not to ask. The other workers had taken matters into their own hands one night. The foreman had been put into the forge.

The fire had been built up. And what came out of the forge afterward, Maria said, was not the foreman, and was not a thing they had a name for. It had stood in the doorway and looked at them, and it had spoken in their voices, the voices of the men who had built up the fire. It had spoken their wives’ names.

It had walked out of the forge and into the trees, and they had not seen it leave. But it had not gone far. They had felt it in the trees that night and every night after. It had begun to come to the doors.

It had taken three of the workers in the first month before Maria’s father, who had a careful mind and a steady hand, had figured out the rules. The bell, the hour, the door, the morning. He had been the one, with his own father, who had built the circle of stones at the floor of the forge, the eleven stones that were a kind of seam in the fabric of the place, holding the thing inside the building for most of the day and letting it out only between 4:00 and 5:00 in the afternoon, only as far as the nearest living creature, only to test and listen. Maria’s father had been the one who taught the families that came after.

Each new arrival was taught the rules in order, in German, at the kitchen table of the main house, with the twelfth stone wrapped in its cloth in the middle of the table between them. Each of them had agreed, before they were taught, that they would carry the keeping for as long as they lived in the settlement. That was the bargain. The first family had moved on in the late 1840s after the ironworks closed.

Maria’s father had gone to Lancaster County to her grandmother’s farm, taking with him a great heaviness he did not speak of. He had told Maria, on his deathbed in 1873, that his greatest regret was not having destroyed the forge before he left. “But destruction,” he had said, “was a kind of opening. You could not be sure when you broke the lid off a thing that the thing inside would not come out faster.

Better to keep the lid and pass on the keeping. ”

Maria had nodded. She had married Reinhardt the next year. She had brought him to the settlement, and she had taught him the rules.

And here they all were, three families and eight adults in October of 1887, still keeping the lid on. The Hummelsteins had inherited the keeping of the circle. They checked the stones once a month. They kept the door of the forge closed.

In those thirty-six years they had lost only one person, Lebrecht’s brother, in 1863, who, Lebrecht admitted finally, had not really stayed out by accident. He had wanted to know, too, just like my grandfather had wanted to know. He had walked to the forge at dusk. They had found his clothes the next morning folded on the table in the meeting room, folded by hands that were not theirs.

Wilhelmina sat at the kitchen table while Lebrecht talked. At one point she got up, went to a cupboard, and took out a small cloth bundle. She unwrapped it. Inside was a single stone, about the size of a fist.

She set it on the table and said, in German, “This is the twelfth one. We keep one out, so we know the count, so we know if any have been moved. ”

My grandfather looked at the stone. He told me it was the most ordinary stone you have ever seen, gray, smooth on one side, rough on the other, the kind of stone you would skip across a creek as a young man.

And he said, looking at it, he had the strong, clear feeling that the stone was looking back at him. That afternoon, before sundown, Lebrecht and my grandfather walked together to the forge. Wilhelmina stayed at the house. She stood at the kitchen door and watched them go, with the twelfth stone wrapped again in its cloth and held in her two hands.

They reached the forge. The door was still open. Lebrecht did not enter. He told my grandfather to stand at the door but not to step inside.

And he, Lebrecht, walked once around the building. He stopped at each of the four corners. He spoke a few words in German at each corner, words my grandfather did not know, words he believed were older than the German he had been taught as a young man. Then he came back to the door and looked at the circle of stones for a long time.

He said, “They are all there. ” He counted them. Eleven. He let out his breath.

He said, “Then it has only been listening. It has not been loosed. ” And he closed the door of the forge and barred it from the outside with a piece of iron he had brought. They walked back to the settlement as the sun touched the tops of the pines.

Lebrecht told my grandfather to go to the smokehouse, bar his door, and not come out until morning, no matter what. He went. He barred the door. He sat on the cot.

That night was the worst of all the nights. It started about an hour after dark. But it was not just one voice this time. It was several.

They spoke at once sometimes. Sometimes they took turns. They were voices my grandfather knew: his mother, his father, a sister who had died as a young woman of typhus in 1848, a man he had worked with in his first year as a surveyor, who had been gored by a bull in the autumn of 1852 and bled to death in a field. They all spoke to him.

They all asked him to open the door. They told him things only those people would have known. His mother said the name of the dog he had loved as a young man. His father said the location of a small wooden box buried in the yard of the old farm that contained a letter my grandfather had written and never sent.

The sister sang a hymn the two of them had sung together by the kitchen stove in Pennsylvania Dutch when they were young. He did not open the door. Around midnight the voices changed. They started speaking to each other about him as if he were not there.

His mother said to his father in their slow, familiar German, “He was always the careful one. ” His father said, “Careful is not the same as wise. ” His sister laughed, a small, clear laugh he had not heard in nearly forty years. The man who had been gored by the bull said, in English, “He is sitting on the cot.

He has the blanket over his shoulders. He is looking at the door. ” The voices described what he was doing in real time. Whatever was outside could see him somehow, through the wood or in some other way in the dark of the smokehouse, and was telling the others what it saw.

It said, “His right hand is on his knee. ” It said, “Now he has moved his right hand to his beard. ” It said, “Now he is afraid. ”

He told me on the porch in 1912 that he had spent the night with his hands pressed over his ears, and even then he could hear them.

He began sometime around 2:00 in the morning to recite under his breath the 23rd Psalm in Pennsylvania Dutch the way his mother had taught him when he could not sleep. He went through it once, then again, then a third time. The voices laughed at him gently, the way you laugh at a stubborn old man trying to hold his ground. They had not stopped.

But they had not gotten in. He said the Psalm, by his count, perhaps forty times before the dawn came. The voices did not stop until just before dawn. The last voice he heard was his sister’s, saying his name soft the way she had said it when she was dying and he had sat by her bed in the room above the kitchen.

And then the woods went quiet. The sun came up. He waited the full hour. When he opened the door, the yard was empty.

There were no marks. He walked across to the main house. Lebrecht and Wilhelmina were at the kitchen table, two people who had also not slept. Wilhelmina’s hand was wrapped in a piece of cotton cloth.

Lebrecht said, “When you went to the forge, it heard you. It is sometimes very bad after somebody has gone close. I am sorry. ” He said, “You did not know.

” Wilhelmina poured coffee. My grandfather noticed her hand and asked about it. She said, “Nothing. A small cut from the work in the kitchen.

” He did not ask again. Years later he told me he wondered if she had kept the twelfth stone in her hand all night and pressed it hard, and the rough side had cut her, and she had not noticed. He left Eberly’s Crossing the next morning, the 22nd of October 1887. He had to walk to Chatsworth, seven miles, with his instruments on his back.

Lebrecht walked the first three miles with him. They did not speak much. When Lebrecht turned to go back, he said only one thing, in his careful English this time: “Do not write of this to anyone. Do not put it in any book.

The thing in the forge does not like to be spoken of. Speaking of it is a kind of opening. ”

My grandfather promised. And he kept the promise.

He never wrote of it. He never put it in a book. He told me once, on a porch in the spring of 1912, when he was an old man and believed I should know. He died in 1914, in his bed in the house in Lancaster County, quiet and peaceful, as good a death as any man can ask for.

I took his field books after he was gone and went through them. The book from October of 1887 was there: the diagrams, the notes on the parcel, the location of every stake. And on a page near the back, the diagram of the circle of eleven stones in the forge. He had written next to it in his small, even hand, “11.

12th held back at the house. ” He had also written a date, October 21st, 1887, and one word in German: “listening. ”

I went looking for Eberly’s Crossing in the autumn of 1928. I was a man in my forties by then.

I drove down to Chatsworth and asked at the post office. The man there had heard the name. He said, “The place that burned. ” It had burned in the spring of 1901, the whole settlement, the forge with it.

The three families had moved on before the fire, sometime in the late 1890s. He did not know where they had gone. He gave me the rough direction. Then he said, “You are the second person this year to ask about that place.

”

I asked him who the first one had been. He said, “A woman, older. Spoke German more than English. She came in in the spring looking for the same place.

She asked the same questions. ” She had not given a name. She had walked off in the same direction I was about to walk. I did not catch up to her.

But I have wondered in the years since if she was Maria Pretz. She would have been seventy-four that year. She would have been the only one of the eight, by my counting, who might still be alive. She would have been the only one who knew what to look for.

I found the place. There is not much to find. The foundation of the largest house was still there, square stones in the grass. The smokehouse was a black mark on the ground.

The stone meeting room had partially survived, one wall standing, the others piles of stones gone soft with moss. The forge was gone. The stone walls had been pulled down, not by fire, by hands. Somebody had unbuilt it.

The stones were stacked neatly in two long piles next to where the building had been. The earth where the floor had been was bare. There was no circle of stones on it. There was nothing on it.

Whatever had been there had been taken, or buried, or scattered. I stood for a long time on the spot where my grandfather had stood at the threshold. I did not feel watched. I want to be honest about that.

I felt instead that I was standing in a place that had been emptied the way a room feels after the person who lived in it has died and everything has been moved out. Quiet. A little cold. But empty.

I walked the ground around where the forge had been, looking, I admit, for the eleven stones or for the twelfth. I did not find them. But in the grass, about thirty feet from the corner of the foundation, I found a small object. A piece of dark gray stone, smooth on one side, rough on the other, about the size of a fist.

I held it for a long time. I turned it over in my hand. I told myself it could be any stone. The Pine Barrens are full of stones.

I told myself it had nothing to do with anything. And then I put it down exactly where I had picked it up and walked away, and I did not look back at it. I do not know if it was one of the twelve. I do not know if leaving it there was the right thing to do.

But I have not regretted leaving it. Some things, when you find them, the kindest thing is to leave them where they are. I do not know what the families did before they left. I do not know if they buried the thing in the forge somewhere else, or took it with them.

I do not know if the twelve stones are in a box somewhere in the basement of a Pennsylvania Dutch farmhouse, kept by a granddaughter of Wilhelmina Hummelstein who knows what they are and counts them once a month. I do not know if the burning of the settlement was an accident or a precaution. I do not know if the thing in the forge is, in fact, gone. In 1928, when I left the place that had been Eberly’s Crossing, the sun was getting low.

I had spent longer there than I had meant to. I started walking back toward the road and the motor car. I had been walking for perhaps half an hour in the long shadows when I heard it. A single low brassy tone, held too long, from somewhere behind me in the trees.

I did not turn around. I kept walking. I reached the motor car at the edge of the road just as the sun went down. I got in.

I started it. I drove. I did not stop until I had reached Chatsworth. I have not been back to the Pine Barrens since.

I am an old man now. I will not go back. Some places you visit once, and that is the count you are allowed. My grandfather, in the last year of his life in 1914, when he was already weak, told me one detail he had never told me before.

On the morning he walked away from Eberly’s Crossing, when Lebrecht had walked the first three miles with him, Lebrecht had given him something, a small thing wrapped in oilcloth. He had told my grandfather not to open it for at least a year, and not to open it inside a house. To open it, when he opened it, in the middle of an open field in full daylight, alone. My grandfather had carried it home and put it in a drawer in his desk in Lancaster County.

He had not opened it for nearly two years. When he finally did, in the spring of 1889, in the middle of a fallow pasture on his own land, he unfolded the oilcloth and found inside it a small dried sprig of an herb he did not know. Brown with age, tied with a strip of white cloth and nothing else. He buried it that afternoon at the corner of the pasture under a flat stone.

He told me he did not know, even at the end of his life, whether the herb had kept him safe in some way during those two years, or whether it had been only a kindness from Lebrecht, the small gift of a man who knew that nothing he gave could really help, but who wanted to give something anyway. My grandfather thought, on the porch that last spring, that it had been the second. That it had been only a kindness.

But he was glad, he said, that he had buried it carefully and put a stone over it, just in case it was the first.