The Jug Rock Cipher - Epilogue: The Map That Wasn't Burned

 

Three Weeks Later – Shoals Library Archive Room

The winter wind rattled the old windows as Kate sorted through a new box of documents donated by a descendant of one of the early Dover Hill families.

Most of it was routine—birth ledgers, land receipts, pressed flowers yellowed with age. But at the bottom of the box, wrapped in a sheet of oilskin, she found a folded bundle of papers.

A single sheet caught her eye.

A hand-drawn map.

Old. Early 1800s.

The markings were familiar.

Jug Rock. The Bluff. Hindostan. Dover Hill.

But this map had something Ray’s never did.

A fifth mark.

No label.

Just a symbol in the forested hills southeast of Shoals.

A triangle—right side up.

And beneath it, a word written in faded ink:

"Listening."

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Meanwhile – Somewhere in the Woods Near Indian Creek

A hiker found the stone by accident.

It wasn’t on the trail.

He’d followed a deer path, slipped on wet leaves, and rolled into a ravine. When he stood up, there it was—partially exposed in the earth. Smooth. Carved.

The triangle. Three dots.

And a deep groove in the rock, warm to the touch, though the air was bitter cold.

As he stared at it, unsure whether to call the DNR or post it online, he heard something—soft and low.

Not the wind.

A hum.

As if the ground itself remembered a song.