Dread sinks deeper and deeper into my bones, even as I keep going, but when I reach the little clearing, it dissipates like a lost sneeze. I’ve been here so many times before. I’ve been everywhere on Lute Island so many times before, apart from the dig site, and this spot has been the one I’ve felt drawn to most often. There’s the oak with one bough bent low as if in deference, there’s the glimmer of light peeking from between the branches, jumping from one inlet to the next, there’s the bit of maroon string someone tied to a trunk that nobody ever bothered to remove, and there, finally, the rock. The tithe stone.

There’s nothing remarkable about it. If it weren’t for the plaque, it would look like someone put it there last week, flat and long, dug deep into the bank of the hill, a makeshift table for a picnic. The dip in the center looks naturally formed. Maybe water pooled there from a falling rivulet, persistent over millennia. If it had been dug out with blood all this time, surely it should still be a little, I don’t know, rusty looking.

I touch it, the dip. I’ve never done that before. No chills ripple through me. Nothing to indicate that this was the spot where people gave up their lives in a barbaric ritual, the exact place where the sacrificial rock descended time and again, smashing through hair, scalp, skull, brain matter, orbital bones, all the way down to the tithe stone. And for what god? Nobody even seems to know.

I read all about the ancient Celtic deities when I first moved here—that old academic instinct to research more and more in order to assimilate—and the irony was, I wound up knowing more than anybody else around here. I was taken with it, though, with the names, their connections to other gods, Irish, Roman. They died out through disbelief, neglect, the wave of Christianity that swept through the Isles and washed them away. But once, there was Taranis the thunderer for good weather, three-faced Lugus for good trade, horned Cernunnos for good health, the Tuatha Dé Danann, the Shining Ones, buried in the earth, sleeping, waiting.

Something ripples through me, thinking about them. Some memory, frustratingly vague. A tickle, like a dream I’ve forgotten.

I close my eyes and press my hand down; I do it, idiot that I am, but it doesn’t help me remember. I feel, hear, smell nothing to give me the impression that anything greater or stranger than myself is present here.

With my other hand, I’m still pinching that stubbed-out half-smoked cigarette. And before I know what I’m doing, I start grinding it into the stone, my jaw set at a painful angle, so incongruously angry.

I wait, again, for the judgment of the spirits here. For truth. Something.