What comes later is, of course, the question the boy Thaniel could not answer or would not. He had told Wickham only that the ones below were waiting for the children to be ready. He had not been able to say what they would be ready for. But there are hints scattered throughout the 14 documented cases that suggest the answer.
The most complete of these hints comes from a case in 1923 in which a girl of about 11 years was found near the town of Norton, Virginia, and was taken in by the family of the local Baptist minister. The girl told the minister over a period of some months before her own disappearance from the family's home in the spring of 1924 that the ones below were building something. She did not know what. She knew only that they had been building it for a very long time, and that when it was finished, the children would be needed to operate it.
She did not know how or for what purpose. She knew only that the children who had been marked had been marked precisely so that they could do this work, and that the work could not be done by anyone who had not been prepared for it from infancy. There is one final piece of the story of the boy at Pickens that deserves to be told and it is a piece that surfaced only in the last 20 years in a way that no one who studied the case in the 20th century could have predicted.
In 2006, a woman named Lorena Vestal, who was then in her mid-80s and living in a nursing home in Elkins, West Virginia, gave a recorded interview to a graduate student named Aaron Dole, who was researching regional folklore for a master's thesis at Marshall University. Vestal had been born in Pickens in 1920, the granddaughter of a woman who had known Cassie Peele personally and who had, according to Vestal, inherited a small collection of Peele's private papers upon her death in 1936. Among those papers had been a single sheet folded twice that Peele had, according to family tradition, removed from the sheriff's parlor on the morning after the boy Thaniel disappeared. It was a sheet that had, according to Peele, been left on the writing desk where Wickham had done his work, and it had been in the boy's handwriting, though how the boy had learned to write, since no one in the household had taught him, and he had never been observed to hold a pen, was a question Peele had never been able to answer.
The sheet, which Vestal produced during the interview and which was subsequently photographed and cataloged by Dole, contained a single sentence written in a hand that was neat, even and childish only in the sense that the letters were formed slowly and with deliberate care. The sentence read as follows: “Tell them we do not want the surface. We want the middle. And when we have the middle, everything above and below will be one. And there will be no more arrangement because there will be no more two sides.”
Vestal, when asked what she believed the sentence meant, said that her grandmother had refused to speculate, and that her grandmother had told her only that Peele had wept when she found the sheet, and had folded it and put it in her apron pocket, and had never spoken of it to anyone in the household during the 11 months that remained of Wickham's life. Vestal died in 2009. Dole's thesis was completed and filed at Marshall University in 2008. The photograph of the sheet along with the recorded interview is on file at the university's special collections library and can be requested by any researcher who wishes to see it.
The sheet itself, the physical original, was in Vestal's possession at the time of the interview. When her estate was inventoried after her death, the sheet was not among her effects. Her family assumed at the time that it had been misfiled or misplaced. It has never been recovered.
There is no marker at the flat stone on the switchback above Elk Fork. There is no plaque in Pickens noting that Sheriff Wickham once lived in the house that is now, according to the county records, a private residence owned by a family that has held the deed since 1961. The stone slab at the top of the ridge, if you can find it under the leaves and moss, is still there. And the iron ring is still set into the stone, and no one in the 124 years since Wickham and Corwin tried and failed to lift it has been able to move it either.
The county maps still show a blank interval on the far side of the ridge. The far side of the ridge has still, so far as any surveyor has publicly reported, never been walked. The older families in the county still call the stone by its old name. And the children who grow up there are still told quietly and only when it becomes necessary that they should not sit on the sitting rock, not for any length of time, not for any reason, and above all not alone.
What the boy Thaniel wrote on the sheet of paper that Cassie Peele took from the writing desk was not, whatever it meant, a threat that any of the men who read it in their own time knew how to answer. And it is not clear that any of us in our own time know how to answer it either. The arrangement that Kettle described has been broken in ways that we can measure and in ways that we probably cannot. What comes of that breaking is a question that the boy Thaniel could not or would not put into words the sheriff could understand.
But the sheet is gone and Wickham is gone. And the 14 documented cases are only the ones we know about. And the ridges are still there. And the corridor runs in Reeves's mapping from the Cumberland Gap all the way to the north. And someone is still sitting occasionally on the flat stone waiting.