Kali and Christine
"So how far are we from this stone circle again?" asked a grumpy Kali, hooking her fingers in the straps of her pack and lifting the weight off her shoulders.
"We're almost there," answered Christine, her camping partner and best friend.
It was a dreary day in the Lake District, typical whenever anyone planned on taking a camping trip or hiking up a mountain in the middle of England. Kali and Chris had been trekking uphill since early morning, seeking out a stone circle hidden in one of the valleys. They could barely see the summit through all the fog, but it was there, and just over that was their destination.
"Don't know why we came back to this country," muttered Kali, struggling to force another leg up the hill. Chris was about to give her a smart answer, but before she could an old couple passed them up, giving hearty smiles and a "good day to you" wave. Both girls smiled politely in return.
"How do they do that?" grumbled Chris once they were out of earshot. "They're just as far up this mountain as we are, and they're not even panting. I want to be like that when I'm one hundred and two."
"They're not that old, Chris. And they don't carry thirty pound packs on their backs."
"Oh, yeah."
The two women were both, in fact, American, having returned to England for a visit before finishing college and getting on with their lives. Not too long ago, they had lived "across the pond," and had gone on many camping trips together while in high school. Despite the muttering and grumbling, they enjoyed long hikes immensely and had stayed close throughout their college careers for want of better camping buddies.
Less than an hour later, they reached the crest of the peak and began walking along the ridge. Suddenly the clouds broke, and lo and behold, the stone circle was about two hundred meters downhill, marked by a ray of sunlight. Immediately they began their descent, not bothering to rest at the top. They only had a few hours of daylight left to get to their campsite, and both planned on spending some quality time with some ancient Celtic history on the way.
The circle consisted of jagged, uneven stones sticking out of the ground, smaller up close than when Chris and Kali had seen them from the summit. Kali paused just outside the edge of the circle while her friend went straight on to the center. She looked up at the sky and squinted. Strangely, there was a single break in the clouds through which the sun kept shining – right into the middle, where an altar might have been. She shrugged it off as just the typically odd English weather and turned her attention to the giant rock beside her. There was a symbol scratched into the stone less than a centimeter deep, though hardly thousands of years old. Its edges were sharp and sudden – definitely not worn down by years of English weather. It could have been made yesterday. Not only that, but there was a dark red tint around it. She lifted her hand to trace the scratching, but was distracted when Christine called her over.
"Come look at this," she waved.
There was an even stranger sight to see in the center of the circle, where a thin wisp of smoke rose from what used to be an open fire. Around it were tiny pieces of bone, and an unpleasantly pungent smell hung in the air.
"I thought open fires were illegal here?" noted Kali.
"They are." Chris nudged one of the bones with her boot, frowning.
Kali kneeled to get a closer look. "Sheep, maybe? There's always some around here." Sheep bones should be smaller, though…
"That's gotta be it."
There was a red splotch on the grass, as if someone had spilled something. Kali leaned down and touched it, rubbing it between her fingers and squinting at it thoughtfully. She could have sworn it was blood, but didn't believe it until she sniffed it.
"It is blood!" she exclaimed.
"What the hell," said Chris. "It's all over the place – this is wrong."
They both backed up and looked at the ground, and sure enough it was covered in lines of red. Strange and eerie symbols seemed to center around the fire, and Chris recognized them aloud as something pagan but couldn't guess their meaning. Another circle in the grass closed them in. If they didn't know any better, they'd say it looked like a ritual ground.
"Okay, this is really creeping me out. Let's get out of here," said Kali, and Chris quickly agreed, not bothering to leave the way she came. She led the way out the north-west side, planning to circle back on the outside. Kali, after a moment of indecision, turned to walk the way she came, but her boot caught between two stones wedged in the ground. She tried to recover her balance quickly, but the pack was too heavy and it was too late. With a shocked cry she fell sideways… and didn't get up.
"Kali?" Christine called, already on the outside. When she didn't receive an answer she rushed over to her friend. She gasped and knelt down, staring at the great gash in Kali's head. Blood dripped onto the ground – Kali's blood. Chris stared at it stupidly before reminding herself to exhale, then looked around. The sun disappeared and raindrops began to fall, getting heavier with every passing second. Chris put a hand on her friend's shoulder and shook her, but nothing happened. A flash of lightning cracked the sky and the explosion of thunder was so sudden Chris jumped backward. The wind picked up rapidly.
"Oh, God, don't let this be happening," Chris prayed, trying to pull herself together to figure out what to do next. She knew what she was supposed to do, but the weather…
She turned her face to the sky, but the force of the wind turned the drops of rain to needles in her eyes. Another flash came, this time striking one of the stones nearby. The crash was deafening, and Chris covered her ears in pain, doubling over in a protective ball around Kali. Then came another flash, which hit another stone, and another flash and another – so quick and relentless that she just closed her eyes and waited for the end.