I know that everyone is probably worried about me being gone so long, so posting this is the first thing I'm doing after getting back. I haven't even changed my pants yet, even though they have mud on them! At least you guys care. My mother didn't even say anything when I came through the door just now.

It was really windy out Monday night, with the trees waving in the wind and shadows dancing all over the place. But the wind died down as I got near the tree.

I took a flashlight with me to the tree. I wasn't sure that I'd find anything, but I couldn't just drop it without wondering forever if I was going crazy. I had to know for sure. And boy did I find out! When I got to the tree, it looked pretty much like it did last time, right down to the full moon, and it looked like the opening was there. At first I thought that I was wrong again, that there wasn't any space behind the roots at all. It looked like it might be an optical illusion. The space beneath the tree was deep in shadows, and I had to crouch down and shine my light between the roots to see that there was an opening back there. I know that it wasn't like that on Saturday.

I crawled in of course. Inside looked pretty much the same as before, but with the flashlight I could see that it wasn't a natural cave. Or at least I don't think so. It was carved out of stone, not dirt like I had thought at first. There was dirt around the entrances, with the roots and things, and some of the tree's roots made a tangled pattern on the ceiling, but it was mostly made out of a slate-blue stone that sparkled a little as I played the flashlight over it. The cave didn't
have any straight lines, but it still didn't look natural. It looked like something had clawed it out of bare rock.

That symbol I saw before was there, of course, but it wasn't just carved on the floor either. There was another one repeated on one of the walls. Three straight lines and one curved one.

Now, there's no way I would have gone that far without seeing if I could keep going to the other side, so I crossed the chamber to the downhill side, where light was creeping around the roots of the tree.

And I was in that twilight place again. The tree was the exact same tree as on the other side, and the woods looked the same, as near as I could tell. Nothing seemed to be out of place except for that weird half-light in the sky. The thing I don't quite understand was that it was the same side of the tree. It's not like I went in the front and came out in the back, but that I went in on the front and came out on the front. It made no sense.

Naturally, the first thing I checked was the back of the tree. It was in most respects a perfectly ordinary sycamore, with patchy grey bark and gnarly branches. But there was a carving there: three straight lines and one curved one. I shivered. Looking at it made me feel uncomfortable somehow, like I was supposed to remember what it was for but couldn't.

In the past month I've had a lot of time to think about what I would do if I found myself in that place again, so I've sort of had a plan in place. First step: avoid the low, wet places where the willows are growing. Toward the eastern side of the forest behind my house there are some hills. Not very big ones, but higher than most places in the immediate area.

A lot of stuff happened after that, as you can imagine from me being gone two whole days, but I'm exhausted right now. I'm going to bed, and I'll have to post the rest tomorrow.