The boy sat between Cade and Wickham in the back of the buggy and watched the ridges pass with an expression that Cade, in his own private journal, described as one of gradual recognition. They drove for approximately 4 hours following the road that Trout had been on when he found the boy. When they reached the switchback with the flat stone, the boy asked to get out. Wickham helped him down.
The boy walked to the flat stone, placed one hand on it, and stood very still for what Cade estimated was 3 or 4 minutes. Then he pointed without turning his head up the wooded slope on the west side of the road, and he said that the door was on the other side of that ridge, past the second creek at the base of a leaning tree. Corwin, who had been marking their position on a survey map, looked up at the ridge and then down at the map. He told Wickham, in a low voice that the ridge the boy was pointing at did not correspond to any surveyed feature in the county records.
The map showed the ridge, but it did not show any creeks on the far side because the far side of that ridge had never, according to the historical society's records, been walked by a survey team. It was, in the language of the survey maps of that period, a “blank interval”, meaning that it fell between two survey grids and had been skipped by the original surveyors, presumably because it was steep and inaccessible, and no timber or coal interest had ever requested a mapping of it. It was, in short, a piece of the county that officially did not exist. Wickham decided on the spot that they would walk to the top of the ridge.
Cade objected on the grounds that the boy was in no condition for such a climb. Wickham agreed to leave the boy at the buggy in Cade's care and to take Corwin alone. The two men set out at approximately 2:00 in the afternoon. They carried a pistol each, a hand lantern, a coil of rope, and Corwin's notebook and compass.
They returned to the buggy at approximately 6:00 in the evening. Corwin was pale and shaking. Wickham was silent. Neither man would say what they had seen at the top of the ridge, and neither man would speak of it in Cade's presence during the ride back to Pickens.
But Wickham that night made an entry in his ledger that his sister quotes at length in a letter dated the 20th of April. The entry, according to the letter, described the top of the ridge as being unnaturally flat, as though a small clearing had been cut into it. And at the center of the clearing, half-buried in leaves and moss, was a stone slab approximately 6 feet across and 8 feet long, and set into the stone slab was an iron ring the size of a dinner plate. And beneath the iron ring, when Wickham and Corwin tried to shift the slab and could not, they had heard quite distinctly the sound of something moving on the other side.
Wickham did not go back to the ridge the next day. He wrote in the ledger, according to his sister's summary, that he wanted to consult a man who lived in a hollow about 6 miles east of Pickens, an old man named Absalom Kettle, who was known throughout the county as someone who had lived in that country all his life and who knew things about it that were not written down anywhere. Wickham had known Kettle since he had first taken office in 1883. He had over the years occasionally consulted the old man about matters that fell outside the ordinary run of sheriff's business.
Those cases included a missing girl in 1891 who was found alive in a cave that no one but Kettle had known was there; a series of livestock killings in the winter of 1896 that Kettle traced not to a bear, but to a man who had gone mad after his wife's death and was living in the woods above his own farm; and a boundary dispute in 1898 that Kettle settled by producing from a locked chest a hand-drawn deed dated 1779 that no one else in the county had known existed. Wickham trusted him.
He rode out to the hollow the morning of the 12th of April alone, and he took with him a single sheet of paper on which he had transcribed the boy's description of the ones below. Kettle was 81 years old that spring. He lived in a log cabin that his grandfather had built in the 1790s on a piece of land that had been in his family for four generations. He was a widower, childless, and he kept himself with a small kitchen garden and a rifle.
He was known to be uncannily accurate with the rifle, and among the older families he was also known for speaking the way people had before the Civil War, using words that had gone out of common use by the 1860s. He was also known in certain circles to have been raised by his grandmother who had been raised by her grandmother and who had told her stories that her grandmother had told her going back by Kettle's own reckoning to a woman who had come down into the valley in 1743 and who had, according to family tradition, been the first white settler to speak with the ones who were already there. Wickham sat with Kettle in the cabin for the better part of the day. There is no written record of what was said between them.
Wickham did not enter the conversation in his ledger, and Kettle, who could read, but wrote only with great difficulty, did not keep a journal. But Wickham, in his letter to his sister, dated the 20th of April, mentions that Kettle had listened without interrupting to the entire description of the boy and the boy's story, and had then, when Wickham finished, gotten up from his chair, walked to a low chest in the corner of the cabin, unlocked the chest with a key he wore on a leather thong around his neck, and taken from the chest a bundle wrapped in oil cloth. He had brought the bundle back to the table and had unwrapped it in front of Wickham. And inside the bundle had been a single object, which Wickham described in the letter as being like nothing he had ever seen in his life.
It was a piece of metal, roughly the shape and size of a man's palm, dark gray in color, and cool to the touch, even after being handled. On one side, it was smooth. On the other side, it was inscribed with a pattern of small marks that Wickham, who had spent a good deal of time in his youth studying botanical illustrations, said resembled nothing so much as the veins of a leaf, though arranged in a geometry that was not organic. He wrote to his sister that when he touched the smooth side of the metal, he felt a faint vibration, so slight that he was not sure at first he had felt it at all, but persistent enough that when he set the metal down and picked it up again, the vibration was still there.