My neighbor found an alien rock… and now he talks to it
"I found an alien rock!" Darryl called out, cutting across the yard toward the grill where we were making burgers like every Sunday.
"Darryl, nobody wants to hear about your nonsense," Bob said, the oldest in our trailer park, pressing down a patty.
But Darryl insisted this time was different. He reached our little circle of plastic chairs, dug into his jacket pocket, and pulled out a weird green glowing stone about the size of a large marble.
He'd found it near the gas station by the dirt road, surrounded by scorched plants. "It came from the sky, Bob. This thing was sent by alien."
"Or by the devil," Aryna, his wife, called from under the oak tree where she sat with the women. "It creeps me out. Get that evil thing out of our house, Darryl."
"Goddammit, honey." Darryl's eyes went red. "Can't you see that religion of yours is just a psyop?"
They were at it again, right there in the middle of the cookout. It wasn't unusual. They lived in the trailer right next to mine, and most nights I could hear them going at it through the walls for every stupid reason.
Darryl worked at a manufacturing plant for twelve years until an accident left him with a permanent limp. He then spent most of his hours scrolling through conspiracy theories on Facebook.
Aryna was Belarusian, raised in a strict Orthodox family, and somehow ended up in Georgia married to Darryl. A match made in hell.
While they argued about it, I managed to hold the stone for a few seconds. And I'll admit, there was something unsettling about it. The green shifted constantly, never settling on the same shade twice, and its glow had a quality I can't quite put into words. Not warm, not cold. Just wrong, in a way that made me want to keep looking at it.
Then Darryl snatched it from my hand, and stomped back toward his trailer.
***
I should mention, back then we all lived in a trailer park about 50 miles south of Atlanta. I lived alone, working through my own personal issues. Most of us were.
Bob founded the park years back after getting out of prison, and had become something of an unofficial mayor of the place. So it was him that gave us the first hint of something going sideways after that rocked showed up.
He knocked on my door late one night.
"John, I need you to take care of my dog." He shoved the leash into my hands while his Rottweiler sat still at his feet. Bob was coughing between words, hunched.
I asked what was going on. He said the cough hadn't stopped in two days and he needed to drive into the city to see a doctor. I wished him well and took the dog in.
Bob never came back. Somewhere on the ridge road that separates the districts, he must have had some kind of episode behind the wheel, because his truck went over the embankment. They found it the next morning.
Looking back, Bob's death was only the beginning.
Not too long after, one of the women there, Charlene, lost custody of her two girls, and was back on heroin within the week. I could smell it from the road.
Pete, the mechanic two spots down, developed a skin infection on both forearms the doctors couldn't identify, and lost two fingers one morning.
That was just the a few of the stories we kept hearing from people that lived there.
Even myself, I'd been sober for seven months at the time. Then one morning I woke up and the craving was just there, fully formed, like it had never left. I bought a bottle that same afternoon.
Darryl and Aryna kept at it every night, screaming matches that seemed to grow past what any normal argument could sustain. The few times I saw him outside, he wore a cap pulled low, and his skin had gone pale and dry in a way that looked almost scaly under the right light.
I didn't think much of it then.
A few Sundays later, Aryna showed up to the cookout alone. I sat down next to her and tried to make conversation. Asked about the village she grew up in, a subject she usually loved talking about.
She cut me off before I even finished the question.
"You need to talk to Darryl about that devil's rock, John. It's making people sick."
I asked her what she meant.
"Everything went wrong the moment that thing came into our house." She pressed her hand over her hair. "Darryl won't stop staring at it. Day and night, just sitting there with it in his hands. He stopped looking for that remote job he spent months chasing, and haven't showered for a week. That's not a normal rock, John. It's draining him."
She paused, trying to hold herself together.
"And my cancer, I was sure it was gone for good. The doctors said so." Her voice cracked. "It came back."
She broke down then, crying quietly in the plastic chair while the grill smoke drifted past us.
I told her I'd go talk to him. I stood up, walked over to their trailer, and rang the bell.
Darryl had always liked me. Probably because I never openly judged him. I'd listen to his theories with a straight face and let them pass without argument. So when he opened the door and saw me, his face cracked into a grin.
But the man who answered that door was not the neighbor I'd known.
His skin had turned a yellowish color, brittle-looking, like cracked sand. Red blotches spread across his face and disappeared into thin patches of hair under his cap. He waved me in and handed me a beer without asking. The living room was a mess, two recliners facing each other, fast food bags and papers covering most of the floor.
"This thing is special, John." He started before I could steer the conversation anywhere. "Folks on reddit are saying it might be some kind of interdimensional communication device."
"Darryl," I cut in. "You look like hell. What happened to you?"
"Allergies or something, I don't know." He waved it off and went right back to the rock, which he pulled from around his neck. He'd put it on a cord and was wearing it like a pendant.
I tried a few more times to bring up Aryna, or the cookouts he'd stopped coming to, but it was useless. The man had room for one thing in his head. I finished my beer and left without telling Aryna how it went.
Back in my trailer I poured a whiskey to take the edge off. One drink became nine, and somewhere along the way I ended up on the floor with Led Zeppelin on my phone, pretty drunk but not drunk enough to block out the screaming from Darryl's trailer.
Plates shattering, voices cracking, the kind of fight that sounds like it's breaking something for good. I heard it very clearly, then I passed out.
***
The next morning I went outside to breath some fresh air with a hangover and found Darryl sitting in the grass in front of his trailer, knees pulled to his chest, crying.
“Aryna left last night, John. She packed her clothes and rode off with a cousin,” he said, his voice breaking.
I told him she'd come back. That happened before.
But a few days passed and she didn't. Darryl came apart quietly and alone.
He stopped leaving his trailer. The only signs of life were the lights flickering on past midnight, a laughter drifting out through the walls that didn't sound like someone enjoying anything, and a voice, his voice, talking to something that didn't answer.
In the park, every household seemed to be going from bad to worse. When a young couple who'd just moved in lost their baby to a miscarriage, and another someone's wife had a breakdownn and had to be dragged to a mental institution, people started talking.
The cookouts turned into something else. The people remembered Aryna's theories about the rock, and with the flow of sickness lined up as evidence, the accusations started forming. Every misfortune since Darryl's discovery got laid out in order, like a case being built.
A tall man with a thick mustache, who'd quietly taken over as park mayor after Bob died, pulled me aside one afternoon.
"Let's go talk to Darryl," he said. "Something's wrong with that man and it's scaring the park. You're the closest thing he's got to a friend here. I think we should go together."
I agreed.
We went to his trailer that night, the tall man and I, with the kind of quiet that comes when nobody really wants to be doing what they're doing. It had been close to two weeks since I'd seen Darryl outside.
We knocked and he answered within seconds. His face was worse than the last time, the red blotches now open and weeping, new ones spreading across his forehead and down his neck. He still had the cap on, and had added a long-sleeve sweatshirt despite the Georgia heat.
The green rock was on a cord around his neck.
The sight of him stopped the tall man cold. It was Darryl who broke the silence.
"Come in, please!"
We stepped inside carefully. The place had gotten worse. Broken plates and dirty dishes mixed in with papers and fast food bags across the floor, all the way to the two recliners. The smell hit the back of the throat.
"You came to see the rock, didn't you?" Darryl asked, his voice carrying something between excitement and mania. "It's going to change everything. Aryna was wrong about all of it."
"Darryl, that's not why we're here," I started, still standing. "The community is worried. People are talking, and they're starting to think that maybe you should..."
"The rock decides," he snapped, and the shift in his voice was fast enough to make both of us go still. "Those people don't decide a damn thing."
The tall man straightened up and looked him in the eye.
"You're going to have to leave the park, Darryl. The community is in agreement. We need you to pack up and go, effective..."
The words stopped at a loud crack, followed by smoke, and the tall man dropped like a tree.
Darryl was holding a gun. I don't know where it came from, but I knew what it did when I saw the hole in the tall man's head. My body locked up and my hands went up on their own.
"Sorry about that, John," Darryl said, the gun pointed at me. His voice was calm in a way that was worse than the yelling. "Sit down so I can explain."
I sat. He settled into the recliner across from me.
He stayed quiet for a moment, looking at the rock on the cord around his neck like he was listening to something I couldn't hear.
"It talks to me, John," he said, with a calm that was worse than anything he'd shouted before. "Not the way people talk. It goes deeper than that. It tells the truth about people."
He looked me in the eye.
"She told me about you. About your drinking. About how you ruined your marriage."
I didn't answer.
"And that young couple who lost their baby," he continued, shaking his head slowly. "Their sin did that. The rock just showed what was already there."
That's when I noticed the tray table beside his recliner, the kind people use to eat while watching television. There was a plate on it. And on the plate a severed hand.
I recognized it by the nail polish. Aryna painted her nails dark blue, always the same shade, bought from a drugstore in the city.
My stomach turned but I didn't move. I couldn't.
Darryl took his cap off slowly, the way a man does when he gets home after a long day. He started scratching, first his forehead, then his skull, with an intensity that kept building until he couldn't stop. The dry yellow skin began to give way, and underneath was red raw flesh, like a wound that had never closed. And rising through it, pushing out slowly, two dark pointed shapes. Was it… horns?
Then he laughed.
It didn't start as a laugh. It started low, almost like a cough, and grew without control, shifting pitch in the middle, rising and falling like more than one thing was laughing through him at the same time. He threw his head back and let it out, loud and broken, filling every corner of that trailer.
That's when I saw the gun. It was sitting on the tray table, next to the plate, less than a foot from his hand.
He was looking at the ceiling, laughing, so I took the opportunity and ran outside with everything I had.
I expected the shot. I expected to feel something. But what I heard, as I hit the door and took the steps in one stride and ran across the dirt without looking back, was only the laughing continuing behind me, growing distant but not stopping, like he hadn't even noticed I was gone.
I called the police from outside, and the lights in the other trailers came on one by one, and people stepped out, drawn by the noise or by something in the air that told them to.
Nobody went near his trailer.
A fire started from the back, a few minutes after I crossed the door, and moved fast. By the time the cops came in there wasn't much left to save. The whole structure folded in on itself before sunrise.
They spent two days going through the wreckage.
They found bones that belonged to Aryna.
But they never found Darryl. Or the rock.