Tess panicked, yanked back, and ripped the sleeve losing her balance in the process. For a moment she teetered on the edge of the gooseberries, a ballerina once again pirouetting on the alabaster rocks of the jetty, and then she fell sprawling and tumbling down the hill. She bounced over twigs and stones but somehow managed to skirt between the trunks of the hickories and oaks and other trees that dotted the hillside, until at last she came to a painful rest at the foot of the abandoned field.

Thorns and briars clung to her ruined shirt, and she could feel a knot forming on her knee, but otherwise she had landed unscathed. Tess liked the outdoors and she was accustomed to a few falls, so she considered herself lucky, brushed off her dirt-stained pants, and rose, ready to resume her search for Ricky. She wanted to hurry, get home, and put this afternoon in the past.

A simple wooden fence enclosed the field, consisting of circular posts placed at regular intervals and connected by three rails each spaced a foot above or below the other. A rusted chicken-wire mesh stretched between the rails and down into the earth beneath. In its prime the fence likely served its purpose, but now it sagged and drooped, in places held aloft by no more than the tension placed on the rust-stained mesh. No longer did it offer a barrier to entry, but rather let out a siren call to all adventurous children to clamber over its decaying corpse and explore the long lost mysteries it once contained.

Normally Tess would have heeded that call and then run through the fallow field searching for hints of its past, but currently she felt a stronger pull to find Ricky and distance herself from the brambles above and the growing heat of the day. She longed for her air-conditioned home and for the soothing words of her mother as they gathered around her crafts table and drew pictures of cats, and unicorns, and maybe a few dinosaurs as well - truth be told, she liked drawing dinosaurs and dragons far more than cats and unicorns, but again, good girls do as they're told, and cats and unicorns seemed expected if not explicitly requested.

So, longing for that peaceful afternoon, rather than immediately scaling those rails Tess scanned the field noting how only one corner of the fence could be seen and how the woods circled back upon the quiet earth and reclaimed the rest of the forgotten farm, the fence, posts, rails, mesh, and all disappearing into the obscurity of the trees and brush. No scarecrows or tobacco barns jutted up from the lost rows of crops, and nowhere did there exist a place where Ricky could have hid.

At a loss, Tess began to climb once more up the hill and towards the gooseberry bramble, hoping perhaps that from the high ground she might catch a glimpse of her cousin. As she climbed, she shouted once more, though this time with less anger, a growing hint of concern, and a returning flood of panic.

"Ricky!"

Her voice echoed out through the clearing as another flock of birds took flight. This time it was a group of ravens, their black wings glistening in the dim embers of the sun peeking down through a part in the clouds. Her father had told her that a group of ravens was not called a flock, but an unkindness. He always had random facts at the ready for her.

Tess watched the unkindness of ravens peppering the sky in its chaotic flight and found the term appropriate. The beating of those wings and the caws raining down from the bird-filled sky bore no goodness, and brought forth no happy thoughts. As she watched, a single raven turned its glass-like eyes down upon her. The bird stood out from the rest, larger by far, and its feathers shimmering with an oil-like sheen. Its beak yawned open impossibly far and it let out a terrible caw, then swooped down towards Tess.

Without thinking, she dropped to the hillside and scrambled into a pocket of the gooseberry thicket as the bird dove again and again trying to reach her, until at last it stopped, caught itself in the brambles within which she hid. She waited a moment to be sure that it could not free itself, then crawled out from her hiding place.

The bird writhed in the brambles, letting out short horrific squawks of pain and fear. She could see the thorns pressing between its oil-slick feathers as those wings beat against the encircling tangle. Some of that sheen seemed now wetter than it had been before. The bird's glassy eyes once so malevolent fell upon her pleading, and it snapped its beak at her even as its entreaties began to wane. Tess did not know what to do.

She turned away, not wanting to look in those entreating eyes, and as she did she caught sight of something new and yet very, very old. In the center of the field there now rose a small square-like building from the barren land. The walls were a white plaster, flat and unadorned save for a scattering of boarded up windows, and one odd circular protrusion near the flat roofline. There, just two-feet below the top of the squat building a fountain-like ring of concentric circles grew one from the other until from the last rose out a small three-footed antennae, stretching up towards the clouds.

Beside the fountain-like protrusion, just below the roofline and above a faded, painted rectangle that ran the course of the building like a failed, poor-man's frieze, jutted out four letters each two feet tall. They spelled out K X K Z. Adding to its mystery, no road ran to its gates, nor did a lot surround its foundations. The building stood behind an aged chain-link fence, thrust up through the fallow field as if it were as much a part of the natural landscape as the streams that wound through the hills and the hickories and the oaks that graced the hillsides.

Had she missed this building before? Could she have scanned that field and not have seen it?  Tess did not believe that this was possible, and so she concluded that the building had not been there before at all. In such a small clearing, she could not have overlooked it. So, the building had not been there and now it was, a magical mystery that only a child like Tess could accept as fact and shrug off as if that was just the way things were, as true as her parents' divorce and the blue of the sky.

The raven cawed pitifully behind her, but Tess could not face it. She knew that soon it would be dead, strangled by the gooseberry brambles and she did not want to once again face death.

She scurried down the slope, pulled herself over the sagging fence, and hurried towards the unearthly radio station. If she could see it, perhaps Ricky had seen it, too. She couldn't go home without him, and so she steeled her nerves and braced herself. She would have to find a way inside.