Walter Finnegan froze mid-step, staring at the familiar lump behind his shed. After the long winter melt, it looked higher again—just enough to unsettle him. Marie insisted he imagined it, but he knew the yard too well. Something beneath the soil was pushing upward, year after year.
He had dug there a decade earlier, back when they first bought the place. Several feet down, he’d found nothing but tangled roots and damp earth, so he’d shrugged it off as an old tree stump lost to time. But the mound kept rising, slow and stubborn, defying explanation.
On a warm spring morning, curiosity finally outweighed patience. Walter grabbed his shovel, stepped into the soft ground, and dug deeper than ever before. The blade scraped something unnervingly solid. Then came a sharp metallic clang, so out of place in the quiet yard that it stopped his breath cold.