I thought I heard a faint voice speaking unintelligible words into my ear; I dismissed it as a figment of my imagination. But the longer I watched the statue, the more I understood. Strange knowledge washed across my brain. I was standing on the brink of something huge. The evidence was unmistakable. The statue, the book in her hands, the symbol carved onto its cover, the images of the creatures dancing on the half-buried pedestal under the child’s bare feet. The words “oracle, henge, and monolith” repeated through my mind. These places truly existed-just like I’d read in The Myth of the Stone Children. And yet, reason would not allow me to believe that I had found a piece of the Garden’s wall.

Certainly, this was a powerful place. Its energy was palpable. But there must be some sort of explanation, I thought. I was certain that if I stood there long enough, the answer would come to me.

I remembered the silver pendant the Romanian woman had given me. According to the texts I read, the archangel’s key had the ability to lead whoever possessed it to the places where Eden ’s wall fell. Was it possible that the same thing had happened to me? If so, then my friend at the university had been wrong-the relic was not a fake. The pendant I had brought home was no mere souvenir. Looking into the stone child’s eyes, I knew that the key, which had once unlocked the Garden of Eden’s gate, was buried at the bottom of my sock drawer! The girl seemed to speak to me without words. The longer I stared at the statue, the more I felt I knew what I needed to do.

I walked all the way home, went upstairs to my bedroom, and removed the silver necklace from the drawer. It seemed to pulse in my hand with a cold heat. I was instantly filled with a great purpose. I knew then that the moment I had found this object, my destiny had been to come to Gatesweed and discover the statue in the woods-but there was something else, one final action I felt compelled to take.

I turned to a blank page in a notebook on my desk. Instinctively, I pressed the tip of the pendant to my notebook’s paper. To my surprise, a black line appeared like a pen mark. Then, for a reason I could not name, I drew the symbol that was carved into the stone child’s book.

Looking back, I now realize that at that moment, I had begun to tear a dangerous hole in the delicate fabric that protects our world from the mysterious ones that border it. I’d do anything now to take it all back.

“This is crazy,” said Eddie.

“Do you think he’s telling the truth?” said Maggie. “What if this is all just fiction?”

“After everything we’ve seen recently?” said Harris. “I think we can assume that he’s telling the truth.”

It had finally gotten dark out. Maggie cleared her throat and started rubbing her eyes. On the other side of the park, a car honked its horn. It was the first time since they’d opened the book that afternoon that they heard proof of the world outside their own private circle.

“Do you want some water?” Harris asked Maggie, who had been reading the last section aloud.

“No. I’m fine,” she said. “I actually feel like I don’t even really need the piece of paper to translate anymore.”

“What do you think is going to happen to him?” Eddie asked.

Harris closed his eyes, as if shutting out the inevitable conclusion.

Maggie shook her head. “I have an idea,” she said, “but I don’t want to spoil it.” Then she began where she had left off.

Using the pendant like a pencil, Nathaniel continued to write down bits and pieces of images and ideas-dark basements, secret keys to hidden doors, statues, ghosts, and demon dogs. From these notes, a story began to materialize.

Nearly a month after finding the statue in the woods, he began writing what would become his first novel, The Rumor of the Haunted Nunnery. After he finished, Nathaniel typed it up to send to agents and publishers. To his surprise, one of them wanted it, and shortly thereafter, it was published. He was thrilled that people were finally reading something he’d written.

He wrote all of the books using the pendant. On the first page, he wrote the title and his name. Below these words, he drew the Hebrew symbol. On the next page, he began the tale. If someone were to ask why he wrote the books that way, he wouldn’t have been able to provide a logical answer. It was something he just had to do-as if the silver pendant, or the statue in the woods, or something was providing unconscious instruction. But the process worked. When he used the pendant to write, he became especially inspired. He felt that if he questioned why, it might all go away, so he stopped asking questions. For a while.

As the books continued to sell, Nathaniel began to read reports in the newspapers of strange occurrences in Gatesweed. Several pets had disappeared under mysterious circumstances. A few children claimed to have seen unusual animals wandering through the woods near Nathaniel’s driveway. Several people actually asserted that these animals had attacked them. A twelve-year-old boy named Jeremy Quakerly vanished from his bedroom in the middle of the night. Finally, the body of an elderly schoolteacher was found in the middle of a cornfield on one of the county roads past the mills. The incident was ruled an accident, but a rumor spread throughout Gatesweed that on the death certificate, the coroner had listed the cause of death as a fall from a great height. She had died in her bathrobe.

Nathaniel heard some people claim that these reports echoed what he had written in his stories, but he convinced himself they were coincidences. Or he attempted to, at least. Nathaniel understood that any writer has his share of critics, so he tried to ignore the cruel looks and harsh whispers that followed him in town.

He sometimes wandered through the woods behind the apple orchard, exploring the clearing where the mysterious statue stood. There, he contemplated his fortune. Was there validity to the rumors? What was he actually doing when he used the pen to write his stories? Was the legend of the archangel’s key actually true? Other than the fact that the piece of metal could write on paper, did it actually hold mystical properties like the scholars said it should? After all, a pencil could write on paper too. Nathaniel would stand at the edge of the statue’s clearing and shake his head in disbelief. He told himself that this world was meant to remain mysterious. Deep down, though, he believed it was easier to choose ignorance.

Everything changed one afternoon, years later, when I wandered near the Nameless Lake. Of course, I’d seen the small body of water before, having used it as a set piece for the end of The Rumor of the Haunted Nunnery. That day, I stepped onto the pebbly shoreline, allowing my boots to send small ripples out into the water, something I hadn’t done before. Some time later, several dogs leapt from the water and chased me halfway through the woods. By the time I’d made it home, my mind was racing. I couldn’t fathom what I’d seen. All the reports I’d read in the newspapers, all the unsolved crimes I’d dismissed as coincidence-the missing pets, the strange wild animal attacks, the child’s disappearance from his bedroom, the schoolteacher’s death-came flooding back. People in Gatesweed had whispered for years that I was responsible for the odd happenings around town. Now I’d seen it with my own eyes. Apparently, at least, my monster lake-dogs were real.

How could that be? All my doubts about the pendant were suddenly half erased. If the legend of the key was real, was it possible that using the pendant to write my books had somehow made the dogs appear in the woods behind my house? Was it possible that some of the other monsters from my books were real too? If the stone child supposedly marked a place where the fabric between the worlds is thin, maybe I had caused the fabric to rip? If that was true, was I responsible for everything that had happened?