It began two weeks ago in a field opposite my home. The field has a few trees, wonderful green grass and gentle sloping hills; I cross it everyday on the way home. Then it appeared. At first a black square where there had been only grass for as long as I could remember. Its edges were long enough for two men to lie along, flat and framing an empty patch of earth. I didn’t pay it much attention, but I kept my distance.
The next day it had grown and was one foot off of the ground, two the next. I waited, far away, until it got dark that day to see the builder. No one came. It was three feet off of the ground when it was light.
Each morning as I awoke and looked out at the field I could see it. Sinister and perverse. Ominous and somehow sentient–aware that it was out of place and not bothered. I realized that it was becoming a cabin.
My path home got closer and closer to it each day until, a week after it had first appeared, I found myself staring at it from a foot away. It’s walls were dark but not suggestive of an emptiness like the sky. It was closer to charcoal–dirty and cold. An unholy blend of ancient coal-blackened machinery smelling of archaic otherworldliness, and primal savage rock that had once been buried under the Earth. It was horrifying.
I went to see it on the way home each day after that, staying for longer each time. A few days ago its windows began to glow with a fire from the inside, but it wasn’t warm. The sickening walls made the fire seem evil–not the giver of life but the destroyer.
It was finished yesterday, I know because there were no changes this morning. I’m going inside tonight. I don’t think I will be back for some time.
