“It’s beautiful, Vincent.”  Catherine ran her hand over the crystals embedded in the rock.  “Is this rose quartz?”  

“The children lit the candles to watch them sparkle in the light.”  Vincent looked around the new chamber.  “Mouse and Jamie discovered this place when they were digging through the adjoining wall.”  

“It looks … enchanted.”  

“More like prehistoric.  We found remnants of stone tools, Catherine.  Someone must have harvested these crystals thousands of years ago.”

He touched her elbow and guided her to another part of the chamber.  “Look at this.”

“Is that an altar stone?”

“I think it is.”

“There’s a place in New Hampshire–”

“I know, I’ve read about it.”

There was movement in the far corner of the chamber.  Vincent approached the shadows where a boy sat gazing at the wall.  The candles there were arranged to show the fire in the heart of the quartz.

“Eric?”  

The boy stirred.  “It’s better here.  I don’t miss her so much.”

Vincent took his hand and helped him up.  “You should go get your supper.”               

Eric left the chamber without looking back.

Catherine moved to stand beside Vincent.  “How is he?”

“Grieving, healing.  He goes off alone sometimes.  We keep watch, but he has to work through Ellie’s loss himself.”

Catherine ran her hand over the wall.  “He’s right.  It is better here.”   

“There are some stones that give off energy.  Quartz is one of them.  Some think it has healing powers.”

Catherine sat down before the wall, and Vincent joined her.  

“It is peaceful somehow, watching the lights dance in the crystals.  When I was little, I used to turn out the lights and lay under the Christmas tree watching the colors blinking.  Can we just sit here awhile?”

Vincent pulled her close.  “I found a new poem.  It’s called ‘Moon Compasses’ by Robert Frost.” 

He began to quote the poem and Catherine allowed herself to relax and just listen.

‘I stole forth dimly in the dripping pause 
Between two downpours to see what there was.’

She loved the sound of his voice.  It was comforting, like when her mother sang to her when she was little …

‘And a masked moon had spread down compass rays
To a cone mountain in the midnight haze.’

Her grandfather used to sing to her when she was very young.  She had almost forgotten …

‘As if the final estimate were hers,
And as it measured in her calipers,’

She settled back against him, losing herself in the drone of his voice.

‘The mountain stood exalted in its place.
So love will take between the hands a face …’

Vincent ended the poem and glanced at Catherine, who was asleep with her head on his shoulder.  He remained still, so as not to wake her, and gazed into the flickering crystalline lights.

* * *

… Catherine stood on a hill above a gray and rolling sea.  Her heart was in turmoil, like the ragged waves that crashed upon the rocks.  A young man stood beside her, gazing out at the frothing ocean, and he took her hand.

Catherine looked down and saw the long dress she wore whipping in the wind, swirling about her ankles like a costume from another time.  She looked into the face beside her and saw a craggy countenance with kind eyes, and she knew she loved him.  The turbulence in her heart was for him, a deep sense of worry and fear.

The vision faded and she was on the hill again, alone.  She stumbled aimlessly and paused beneath a great tree whose branches were bent and twisted by the constant wind from the sea, and she wept.

The dream startled her awake.  She was in the new chamber.  With Vincent.  Her head moved against his shoulder and his eyes focused on her.

“I guess quartz does have some interesting – properties,” she said, still disturbed by the dream.

* * *

That night in her apartment, Catherine was puzzled and unsettled.  The woman on the hill was her, but not her.  She tried to recall details.

The woman’s dress looked like something out of the 1800s.  And she had long dark hair.  The young man … what kind of costume was he wearing?  She had the impression of a heavy wool coat or jacket.  His hair was red-brown and wild, but the day was windy.  Mostly she remembered his eyes, gentle and kind, in a face that looked chiseled from granite.  

Suddenly, she knew something – a truth beyond question.  He was going out onto that sea in a ship.  That was the reason for the panic in the dream and the subsequent despair.  He went out to sea and never came back.  

Catherine didn’t understand how she could know this, but she must find out if any of it was true.

The next day was Saturday, and she spent it in the library going through old newspaper accounts of shipwrecks off the New England coast; inexplicably, she felt this is where she would find something.  Over the centuries there were many reports of hurricanes, gales, wrecks washed up on shore, broken against rocks in fierce Atlantic storms.  Eighteen-forty-six off Marblehead, eleven schooners lost.  Eighteen-ninety-eight off Cape Cod, one-hundred souls lost in a gale.  Salem, a fishing vessel lost in the winter. 

… Loss of the steamer Portland with all on board, nearly 100 souls … Captain Goodwin and five men, it is feared that the vessel and crew are utterly lost … miles and miles of coastline piled high with wreckage …

An account from Marblehead of a single crew member who had survived by swimming to shore in raging seas.  

Catherine turned off the machine and headed for the park.

She tapped a message on the pipes and waited for Vincent to open the secret door.   

“Catherine “

“Vincent, when we were in the new chamber, did you dream?”

“I wasn’t asleep, Catherine.”

“Vincent, we have to talk.”

When she finished the story, Vincent was silent for a time.  “There’s so much we don’t know about life and death.”

“Vincent, I have to find this place to know if it really exists.”

“Where will you start?”

“I don’t know.  But I keep being drawn to Marblehead.”

“A fishing port for a couple of centuries.”

“You know of it?

“I read a lot.  Catherine what do you think you’ll find?”

“I just know I have to go there.”

* * *

Within miles of the coast the trees began to change.  Their trunks leaned and limbs clawed at the sky as though hanging on for dear life.  Typical of trees constantly hammered by a sea wind.  The air changed also.  There was the tang of salt and the overpowering sewer-smell of sediment in backwater pools uncovered when the tide went out.

Catherine drove slowly around Marblehead, but she didn’t see any hill that looked familiar like the one in the dream.  A sign led her to some of Marblehead’s historical sites.  Old Burial Hill and the Fishermen’s Monument erected in 1848 to commemorate sixty-five fishermen lost during the hurricane of 1846.

Catherine searched the names on the monument.  She had no idea what she was looking for.  Anything that might spark something.  A feeling, an intuition … something.

She left the monument and drove slowly past Abbott Hall.  

Her next stop was Marblehead Light overlooking the mouth of the harbor and shoreline of Beverly and Manchester-By-The-Sea.  In Chandler Hovey Park.  She stared at the sign.  Chandler.  

Catherine turned back toward Abbott Hall to see what she might find there.  She discovered many of the same accounts she had read about in the library back home.  Some of them mentioned Salem, not far from here.  Impulsively, she asked the curator for directions.

* * *

“Ah, Vincent.”  Father eyed the pile of books on the table in his chamber.  “What are you researching?”

“The history of healing stones.”

Father nodded.  “The new chamber.”  He made his way down the steps.  “Well, there’s quite a history of beliefs surrounding stones.  Long ago, some stones were ground fine and added to wine to cure certain ills.  I have my doubts about the survival rates.”  

“What do you know about quartz?”

“A significant energy source used to power timepieces, as you know.”

“It is said to give off healing energy also.”

Father smiled.  “Well, I couldn’t vouch for the medical veracity of those claims.”  

“There are truths beyond science, Father.”

“Yes, that’s certainly true, but you don’t actually believe in this nonsense.”

“I have questions,” Vincent said thoughtfully.  “There are things about it that aren’t easy to explain scientifically.” 

* * *

As Catherine drove into Salem, she saw a museum that advertized re-enactments of the witch trials, complete with audio and video-enhanced effects.  She decided to skip that particular attraction.  But there was a sign directing tourists to an uphill street toward a historic area related to Salem’s dark past.  Instinctively, she turned onto the street.

The paved road became a narrow track that led to a park above the city.  There were benches and visitors and kids playing on the grass.  Catherine found herself on a hill overlooking the gray Atlantic with fog rolling in obscuring the town.  Suddenly, she was overwhelmed by the same feeling she had experienced in the dream.

She wandered across the hilltop until she saw an old tree – centuries old.  Some of its limbs were as large as trees themselves.  She put her hand against the bark and had a disquieting impression of coming back to a place she knew.  As she walked slowly around the trunk of the tree, she had the strangest feeling.   She looked around; there should be a bench here, a stone bench.  She searched for impressions in the grass; of course they would be long since overgrown. 

Catherine stood looking up at the ancient earth-being that had seen so much in its long life.  I wish you could speak.  You’ve seen everything.  I wish you could tell me.

* * *

In these massive arms centuries were soothed and rocked to sleep.  Fevered days were cooled by leaf fingers against the pulse of the sky.  Venerable limbs shaped by the pull of earth, the shadowed stars, whispers of air laden with far-off scents, the awareness of other trees.  Ghosts and solitude.

In the procession of decades, humans came seeking shelter.  Aching love, crushing hatred, tears that drowned the soul of the universe.  All pooled and settled in the earthen sinews, the harboring heart of the ancient tree. Molecule by molecule, quantum particles invaded, were absorbed by the life force forever working, creating layers of cellulose and sap and bark.  Apparitions, ghosts of memory, breathed through leaves, floated up and out and down, drifted insubstantial and trembling.  

Catherine stayed by the tree for a long time, letting impressions, sensations, intuitions come to her.  She wasn’t sure she understood any of it.  But then she considered her unlikely life and Vincent.  So much had already happened that defied logic, that flew in the face of everything she thought she knew.

The young man who had stood beside her in the dream …  She knew those eyes.  She would know them in any time, any century.

It was nearly evening when she got into the car and began the drive home.

* * *

In the new chamber before the sparkling, candle-lit crystals, they sat watching the lights.

“It was just a dream, Vincent.  And yet I can’t explain it.  It’s like everything was leading me to that place.”

“There’s so much we don’t know, Catherine.  Things the ancient people knew, knowledge that’s been lost.”

“We’ve become so sophisticated, so technological we think we have it all figured out.  What do you think?”

“I don’t know what to believe either.”

She stirred against his shoulder.  “It’s late, I should go.”

Vincent stood and took her hand.  As they walked along the dimly-lit tunnel, Catherine suddenly stopped him with a hand on his chest.  She searched his eyes, his face.  Despite everything, she knew something with great conviction one thing with certainty.

“I’ll always find you.”

“We’ll always find each other, Catherine.”

When she was gone and the secret door was secured, Vincent found himself making his way back to his chamber.  His mind was still preoccupied with all that had happened.  He realized his footsteps had taken him another way, down a different tunnel.  

Vincent sat in candlelight gazing at the crystal wall.  There was something mesmerizing about the lights, the fire in the heart of the stones.  He tried to picture the great tree Catherine had described, the ocean, the fog …

In the quiet of the chamber his eyes began to close.  To sleep, perchance to dream …