Dale and Emily Fanelli discovered the black beach by accident in early 2001 while driving up the Maine coast on their honeymoon. They had stopped at a scenic overlook to stretch their legs and would have continued on their way if Emily had not climbed over the guardrail and beckoned her new husband to follow her. Dale complied. Emily always appeared to be happy and carefree when she was breaking the rules, and she was irresistible to Dale in these moments. She took him by the hand and led him to the edge of the cliff, a steep fifteen-foot drop into the raw, seething ocean below. The scene was breathtaking. Not far off to the right, towering above the rocky coastline, stood a lovingly restored 19th-century lighthouse, recently painted bone white and circled by a lovingly manicured ring of rose bushes, red to perfectly match the color of the roof high above. The town of Fremont was a mile distant beyond the lighthouse point, mostly hidden except for the tops of two white church steeples and two brick municipal buildings.
Emily spotted the path on the walk back to the car. It was little more than a pale imprint in the flat granite, running parallel to the ocean—more a ghostly suggestion than an actual path. It led downhill through a field of surf-smoothed gray boulders, terminating at a four-story-high spire of granite at the water’s edge. It was Emily’s idea to remove their sneakers and skirt the edge of the spire in the knee-deep surf. Once they rounded the spire, they gazed upon the beach for the first time.
The beach appeared to have been carved out of a gigantic block of basaltic rock eons ago. The pebbly, charcoal-colored sand was entirely free of trash or footprints or any other evidence that humans had ever transgressed there, and if not for the distinctive cairn situated at the exact center point of the beach, the newlyweds might have safely concluded that they were the first humans to ever set foot there.
For the next eleven years, the couple faithfully returned to Fremont each summer to rent the same little Cape Cod cottage overlooking the ocean, and they began the tradition of spending an entire day at the black beach during this week-long annual vacation. They would eat breakfast in the diner that serves omelets in little black cast iron skillets and play putt-putt at Pirate Cove, a mini-golf course shaped like a 17th-century man-of-war, but the day spent at the black beach was always the highlight of the trip. When the children began to arrive, the couple continued this tradition, careful to cultivate it in them. Dale and Emily had both grown up in intact families and they understood the importance of tradition, the ways a family is knitted together over time around rituals that created expectations and lasting memories. Thus the pilgrimage to Fremont became a family affair, and in this way, the secret of the black beach was shared among the five of them—Dale, Emily, Peter, Jillian, and Dale Junior.
Of the five of them, only Emily felt any discomfort with the beach, but she kept it to herself because she did not want to spoil Dale’s near-religious devotion to the place. In fact, she loved to see Dale standing on that beach, lean and fully expressive, shirtless in his bathing suit with his angular face and the sculptural cut of his dark brown hair, like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. He was relaxed and enthusiastic in these moments, his best self. They both agreed that the day they discovered the beach together was one of their “perfect days” as a couple, and she was as excited as he was to return every year. It was the cairn that unsettled her. Something about that odd chimney-shaped pile of stones on the beach made the hair rise up on the back of her neck.
On their third trip to Fremont, Emily remarked to Dale that there was never anyone else at the beach when they were there, even when there were other cars in the overlook parking lot.
“Everyone wants to walk over to the lighthouse,” Dale said. “That is the bigger attraction.”
“Obviously,” Emily replied, “but don’t you think it’s weird that we’ve never seen anyone on the beach. There’s no litter, not even coming in from the ocean. It’s a little creepy, right?”
Dale was dismissive.
“Maybe it’s the off season,” he said. “And what about the cairn? Somebody made that.”
Yes, she thought, what about the cairn? On that first magical day at the black beach, they had carefully inspected the tower of rocks. Five feet high and cylindrical, the cairn was constructed from flat black rocks that had obviously been carefully chosen and stacked to give the tower strength from bottom to top. There was no evidence of when the pile had been built, though the way the sand had long ago swallowed the base of it suggested that the cairn had been there for a very long time.
Peter and Jillian were born a year apart, and when they were old enough to talk and argue with each other, they debated the cairn’s age.
“I’ll bet it was here during the Civil War,” Jillian said.
“No way, it was built by Indians,” Peter shot back with complete confidence. “They sacrificed children right here,” he teased his sister. “They burned them up.”
“Stop scaring your sister,” Emily lectured, and Peter, who was always keen to please his mother, immediately ceased his morbid speculation.
A few years later, when Peter studied the Vikings in the fifth grade, he was absolutely certain that Vikings had landed at the black beach and built the cairn to honor the gods. On the ride up to Maine from New Jersey that summer, he shared his theory about how a Viking explorer named Peter the Axe Smasher had landed his longboat on the beach after being lost at sea.
“Peter, the Axe Smasher,” Jillian rolled her eyes. “More like Peter the Bed Wetter.”
Emily, for her part, never went near the cairn again after that first day on the beach. The endless debates about who had piled those stones into a tower eventually became part of the family lore, but Emily could not shake the feeling that the cairn was dangerous. The perfect round hole at the top of the pile reminded her of the top of a volcano, and she imagined that it led down a very long passage into the molten bowels of the earth, to a primeval place of monstrous heat and elemental forces. There was something about those rocks too, each one an impenetrable shade of black and clearly thrown up from the depths of some volcanic conflagration eons ago. They appeared to be fashioned from the essence of darkness itself. The very sight of these rocks piled so deliberately gave her the creepy crawlies.
A typical afternoon at the black beach involved swimming; lying on towels and blankets on the beach; tossing the Avengers frisbee back and forth in a triangle between Peter, Jillian, and Dale; and lunch, which usually consisted of sub sandwiches cut into kid-friendly portions and store-bought potato salad and grapes.
It was exactly like this in the summer of 2014, when Peter was 12 and Jillian 11 and Dale Jr. 7. They had done the swimming and the frisbee toss and finished the sub sandwiches, and now the children were growing restless. Emily lay on a towel on her stomach in her orange bikini with the back strap unfastened, almost asleep. Dale was sitting cross-legged on a small folding beach chair nearby with a bottle of beer in one hand watching Dale Jr. build a castle in the black sand at the water’s edge. Behind him, he could hear Jillian and Peter arguing about a sneaker.
“Give that back to me,” Jillian whined.
“Come and get it,” Peter taunted.
“Don’t you put it in there.”
“Come and get it if you can.”
Dale could not have explained well what happened next. He felt a sudden sickening sensation that was like a wall of compressed air smacking his entire body, and beneath him, a crackling around his buttocks and the soles of his bare feet as if the packed sand had softened for a second and then re-solidified. And the light changed. The sky, which had been mostly clear and blue with a few cumulus clouds hovering over the flat ocean horizon, was now suddenly overcast and gray, as if some divine hand had flipped a switch.
“Oh, damn, you’re in trouble now Peter,” came Jillian’s voice from behind him.
When Dale turned around, he saw Jillian and Peter standing at the base of the cairn. Jillian was holding her sneaker in one hand. Not two feet away from her was the cairn, its top folded over in a strange new asymmetry. Black rocks were scattered on the sand near Peter’s feet where they should not have been.
As soon as Jillian saw her father turn, she immediately began to cry.
“He did it, Daddy,” she wailed. “He made me do it.”
“I did not,” Peter shot back. “You pulled the shoe out of the hole. I didn’t make you knock it over.”
“You put the shoe in the hole,” Jillian accused.
“Hey, hey, it’s no one’s fault,” Dale said as he stood. “It was an accident. We’ll put it back the way it was. No big deal.”
Dale stared at the rocks that had tumbled from the top of the cairn. There were about ten, each one about the size of his sneaker. It would be easy enough to reconstruct the top of the cairn, he thought.
He reached down to pick up the nearest rock, but as soon as his hand touched it, he could feel its unnatural warmth, as if he was yanking it from a fire pit the morning after a bonfire.
“What happened to the sun?” Emily asked.
While the family Fanelli was focused on the cairn, no one was paying attention to Dale Jr, who had quite unobtrusively meandered across the length of the beach in his oversized Hulk bathing suit and was now standing at the limestone spire, staring up at it. This blind spot around Dale Jr. was not an unusual situation. Both Emily and Dale would sometimes catch themselves completely unaware of his presence and then, panicking, begin frantically looking around for the boy. He was usually somewhere nearby, quite safe, humming to himself like a toy with a failing battery.
‘Third wheel.’ That’s what Jillian called him. Dale would wince and scold his daughter for saying this aloud, but there was an uncomfortable nugget of truth at the heart of her insult. Dale Jr. had in fact been an “accident,” an unplanned pregnancy, and though Emily and Dale loved him fiercely, he seemed to exist slightly out of phase with the rest of the family. Jillian and Peter were like two halves of a whole person, always fighting and grappling, but also able to complete each other’s sentences. They were in sync. But Dale Jr. was a dreamy child, always lagging behind the other two, always lost in some kind of curious examination of a rock or a tree or an insect.
“Dale, come back here,” his father called out.
Dale Jr. ignored his father and kept staring up at the top of the spire.
“Dale, come on.”
Dale Sr. saw then how close the boy was to the water’s edge because an unusually large wave broke on the beach, sliding over the sand and splashing up around the boy’s little stick legs. With just a bit more force, the wave might have knocked the boy over and then carried him out to sea.
Dale took off running after his son, who, ignoring his father’s calls, continued to walk closer to the spire. When Dale finally reached him, the boy had almost cleared the white granite pillar and was standing in water up to his waist. He grabbed Dale Jr. by the shoulders more roughly than he should have.
“I told you to stop,” he said, breathless.
At that point, they were just beyond the spire, standing at the only spot on the beach from which to view the lighthouse, the parking lot, and the Fremont skyline.
Something was wrong. At first, it was merely an uncomfortable feeling, but then Dale saw it clearly: The lighthouse was now a dull, gray color, as if it had been neglected for many years, and when Dale squinted his eyes, he could see that one of the windows near the top had been smashed out. Gazing downward, he could see that the roses were gone.
Dale stared at the lighthouse in disbelief, and then his gaze shifted to the parking lot.
The flagpole was gone, and the lot was now a patch of gravel at the side of the road. And his car was gone.
Just then, he heard Jillian behind him on the beach, taunting her brother.
“You broke the stupid rock pile. You are in so much trouble.”
Dale’s mind was normally neatly ordered and ploddingly pre-planned. He left little room for unexpected events, but when they did occur, he would slip into a state of numb surprise, paralyzed and mute while his rational mind tried to catch up to what his senses were telling him. This was not possible, his brain was screaming, and yet the condition of the lighthouse did not lie. A shift had occurred in the area outside of the beach. If it had just been the missing car, his mind might have quickly locked on an explanation. A thief can steal a car. But the condition of the lighthouse could not be explained.
“Jillian, Peter,” he shouted back to his children. “I want you to put those rocks back exactly where they were.”
Dale walked back to his family, holding his son’s hand, half dragging him across the sand. He controlled the urge to pick him and run.
When their father and brother reached them, Jillian and Peter were trying to place the rocks back on top of the cairn. Their work was rushed and haphazard, because they were more concerned about the dark look in their father’s eyes than any pretense to restore the cairn to exactly its original state.
When they were finished, Dale reached up to adjust some of the rocks. They now felt cold to the touch as he gripped them, twisting and tweaking as he attempted to restore the tower’s original symmetry. Then he stepped back to examine the cairn. Its cylindrical shape had been restored, but he had no idea if all of the rocks had been put back in their original place.
“You stay here,” he ordered his children. Then he walked back towards the spire.
It was an illusion, he told himself as he strode towards the edge of the beach again, his heart beating fast. An hallucination. What I saw wasn’t real.
When Dale rounded the spire, he felt the icy air immediately. His calves in the knee-deep water went suddenly numb.
The sky over Fremont was now completely overcast, but the gunmetal gray cloud cover possessed a kind of grim permanence, like an impenetrable shelf of rock that had been thrust up from the ground and now loomed over the town. There were patches of snow in the empty parking lot and the flagpole, which had been restored, was bare. His car was still not there, but there was an odd-shaped black pickup truck parked in the lot. He had never seen a truck quite like it. Only one of the white church spires was visible over the lighthouse point, and there was a blackened finger of burned wood sticking up where the other should have been.
His gaze moved left, to the lighthouse.
The structure was toppled over, lying half on land and half in the water like a rotting whale carcass. Sections of it were little more than a rubble of broken bricks, but there were a few intact portions still. Weeds were poking out of the brick piles, and at the midpoint, a lone pine tree had sprung up out of one of the broken windows.
Dale closed his eyes and walked slowly backwards towards the beach. Once he was on the other side of the spire, he opened his eyes again. The sun was shining over the beach, but he was still shivering.
The walk back to his family was excruciating. His numb feet dragged in the sand. His mind was roiling.
This is no illusion, he thought The numbing cold had been real. The collapsed lighthouse was still vivid in his mind’s eye.
By the time he reached the cairn, Emily was sitting upright on the towel and staring at him.
“Your lips are blue,” she said, furrowing her brow. “And you’re shivering.”
Dale said nothing to Jillian and Peter, who were still standing near the cairn. He reached up with trembling hands and began adjusting the stone pile again, making small turns and twists, tapping gently on the rocks to see if they would shift and fall into place somehow.
“What are you doing?” Emily asked.
“Where is your phone,” Dale barked. “Let me see the pictures from last year.”
Emily, hearing the tension in her husband’s voice, dug the phone from her purse and began scrolling.
“Last year what?” she asked.
“Last year at the beach,” he said. “The pictures with the cairn.”
“Here it is,” she handed the phone to him.
There were three pictures of the cairn. Dale scrolled through all of them, using his thumb and forefinger to expand each.
“I think I got it,” he murmured.
There was a big rock out of place near the top. According to the picture, it should have been placed lower in the pile.
Dale gently removed five of the ten rocks that had been dislodged by his children and piled them in the sand. Then he squinted at the phone again as if he were staring at the box top to a puzzle.
He finally reassembled the top of the cairn according to the photo, and when he placed the final rock, he felt another unsettling shift in the atmosphere. They all felt it. He could tell from his wife’s expression that she was beginning to understand the cause of it.
Emily stood, scooped up the frisbee from the sand, and handed it to Jillian.
“Go play,” she said gently. “And take Dale Jr. with you. Play with him this time. Don’t just ignore him.”
The kids ran off further up the beach, away from the spire.
Now they were alone.
“What’s going on over there?” she gestured to the spire.
Dale explained what he had seen on the other side of the spire, and its suspected connection to the cairn. He was trembling all over now, not from the cold—that had passed—but from the shock of their predicament.
Emily listened carefully. She had known that the cairn was dangerous all along. It was almost a relief to know that she had been right about it.
“I’m going to walk over there now,” she said calmly, handing her phone back to him. “You are going to place those stones according to the photos until we get it right.”
Emily walked slowly towards the spire. Her mind was alive with the possibilities. Was it really this simple, a pile of stones to determine the fate of the planet? It seemed so arbitrary, so pointless, and yet, wasn’t this the universal reality reduced to a micro scale? The earth was itself a composite of rocks, and the destiny of life clinging to it had been altered by other rocks periodically slamming into it, rearranging its symmetry, its orbit, and its atmosphere. Viewed from this perspective, there was something completely logical about their predicament.
She waded into the surf and rounded the base of the spire.
The scene on the other side was nothing like Dale had described it. His latest adjustments to the cairn had even more radically altered the landscape. The cold and overcast sky were gone. It was sunny now, and warm, like a spring morning. The lighthouse was also gone, as if it had never existed, and there were no buildings visible behind the lighthouse point. No parking lot or highway either. The air was buzzing with the rise and fall of cicadas, and she could see little clouds of insects swirling over the grass, just as she remembered from when she was a girl. The rocky coastline was blooming with wildflowers.
Emily felt a sudden compulsion to step forward and wade through to the other side. It was so beautiful, so completely unspoiled. She wanted to climb up on those rocks and wander through the waist-high grass, picking Tiger Lilies and blue violets.
She could feel her curiosity beginning to pull her forward, but she stopped herself. What if I do not exist in this world, she thought. The force and clarity of this thought was like someone speaking it into her ear from a foot away. What if I do not exist? She stared at the surf swirling around her legs and slapping against the base of the spire, down through the foaming salt water to the murky black sand below, and her own two bare feet. Where was the line, she wondered, between the beach and that world?
Emily turned to face her husband, who was standing at the cairn, staring back at her. She shook her head.
Dale felt panic clutching at his throat. There was no plan for this. No escaping it. He stared at the black cliff at the back of the beach. Maybe they could climb over it somehow, he thought. Maybe that would bring them back to their world.
He stared down the other side of the beach, but he knew the answer to his question already. That way was a jumble of car-sized boulders smashed constantly by the ocean.
Again, Dale activated the photo app and stared at the configuration of rocks in the photograph. He examined the top of the cairn again. All of the stones appeared to be exactly where they should be.
Dale could feel his chest beginning to tighten. We could just go, he thought, just walk out. It’ll be OK.
But he knew that it would not be OK.
“Dad.”
His daughter’s voice was coming from too far off. He did not look over at her.
“Dad.”
Dale finally turned in her direction.
“What honey?”
“The sneaker,” she said. “The sneaker should fit in the hole perfectly.”
Dale picked up his daughter’s sneaker and reached up to push the tip down into the hole, but it would not fit. He leaned into the top of the cairn and examined the rocks forming the top layer. One of them was tilting into the hole and slightly askew. Dale reached up and adjusted it so that the roundness of the opening was restored, a perfect round entry point at the center of the rocks. He pushed the sneaker in again. This time, the shoe went two-thirds of the way in and stopped.
Dale pulled it gently from the hole and reached up with his arm to give Emily the thumbs up signal.
Emily, seeing her husband’s signal, waded back to the other side of the spire.
The scene on the other side had been restored to its original aspect. The parking lot and flagpole were there, with their Honda CRV parked exactly where it should be. The two church steeples and the red brick buildings were all there too. The lighthouse soared into the sky, bone white and perfectly restored, the bed of red and orange roses flourishing at the base.
Emily ran back to the cairn and threw her arms around her still trembling husband.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said.
The family Fanelli gathered their belongings, repacking the picnic basket and the big duffle bag that Dale slung over his shoulder. Jillian and Peter were happy to leave, but Dale Jr’s face turned red and he began to cry.
“I don’t want to go,” he wailed.
“Don’t be a baby,” Jillian taunted.
“Be nice to your brother,” Dale scolded.
As they rounded the spire, Emily stayed back until the other four had passed, with Dale Jr bringing up the rear, dragged by the hand by his father. She stared back at the cairn one more time.
“You almost got us,” she hissed. “Fuck you.”
When they had all rounded the spire, Dale took the lead with his family walking single file behind him. They skirted the big boulders, up the incline to where the ghost path passes near the guardrail. They all climbed over the rusty metal barrier and walked to the car.
Dale reached the car first and unlocked the doors. He walked around to the back and lifted the hatchback. Another great day at black beach, he thought.
He watched his family approaching across the parking lot and felt a sudden swelling of pride. The Family Fanelli, he thought as he watched them climb into the car on by one—Emily, Jillian, and Peter. There was a wonderful symmetry to their little clan, every piece fitted in its perfect place.
Dale turned the key in the ignition.
“Daddy, can we go up in the lighthouse next year?” Jillian asked.
“Sure we can,” Dale said.
As the car turned left onto the coastal road, Emily felt a sudden flash of panic, though she did not know why. Have I forgotten something, she thought. In a quick burst of energy, she dug her hands into her purse and then turned to face the backseat.
“Did we get everything,” she asked.
“We got everything,” Jillian replied.