HORROR FICTION
The Box
A Short Story About a Mysterious Box
Ted stared at the box. He was standing in his doorway, looking into the apartment, having spotted it as he entered. There was no sign of Joel, except perhaps the box. Ted had kicked Joel out that morning, and given him until he got back from work to clear his shit out. Joel’s shit was gone, and this box that Ted had never seen before was sitting on the floor about three feet from the door. It looked odd, and out of place. He did not know why, but the damn thing gave him the creeps. He could not pinpoint why. In fact, he could not even understand why he thought it was odd. Staring at it, studying every last line of it, it seemed ordinary enough. It was a plain square wooden box. There were no markings on it, no paint, stain, etchings, or anything else that would have indicated whatever its purpose or nature could have been. It was just a wooden box with a wooden lid, both made out of what appeared to be the same material, some casually unidentifiable wood that was likely common. Still, the damn thing unnerved him, and he was getting more tense the longer he stared at the confounded thing. Resisting an urge to kick it aside, Ted made his way past it into his apartment to set down his bag at his desk. Taking out his phone, he snapped a quick photo of the box and sent it to Joel with the simple question, ‘WTF?’.
He never got a reply.
Ted spent the rest of that evening at his computer, trying to concentrate on the work he had brought home to finish, yet constantly finding himself either glancing at the box or compulsively checking his phone for a message from Joel, despite not having heard the telltale incoming message indicator. Distracted and disturbed, Ted eventually went to bed after despairing of ever getting anything productive done that night. His sleep was fitful and dreamless. One time he shot up in bed, wide awake, blood pounding in his ears as his heart attempted to scare the crap out of him. Fully awake, Ted swore and turned on the light. What the hell had caused that, he wondered, seeing no cause for concern anywhere in the room. Listening for a half hour or more as his heart calmed itself, Ted heard nothing but his own blood pulsing through his veins. The night was quiet.
The next morning, Ted got up, got dressed, and pausing only briefly to frown again at the box, went to work. Work was as dull and meaningless as it always had been, with the only noticeable difference being that he had to do more of it today to make up for the work he had been unable to accomplish the night before. He stayed late to finish it all, and it was nighttime before he managed to drag himself back home.
As he was placing the key to his apartment to the lock in the door, Ted paused. He was confused, not knowing why he had paused. He stayed frozen like this for a few moments before he realized that once more his heart was pounding loudly and he was feeling a vague sense of apprehension. Trying to get a hold of his entirely illogical emotional discombobulation, Ted forced his hand to shove the key the rest of the way into the lock and turn it. His will won out over his growing unease, and he slowly opened the door, uncertain of what to expect once inside. To what should have been his relief, everything was as he had left it, including the box. Regarding the solitary oddity in his apartment with a mild approbation, he wondered if this had been the cause of his perturbation, and if so, how.
Ted was not a believer in the mystical, nor in the extrasensorial, the fantastical, or any other manner of inexplicable phenomenon. He knew, logically, that there was likely nothing about this damn box that could be causing his body and mind to react in such an incomprehensible fashion. Yet, as he stared at the plain wooden box of unsophisticated and unremarkable construction, he uncontrollably shivered. He finally realized he was afraid of it, even if he did not, could not, know why. Irritated at this, and his inability to gain control over his reaction, Ted entered his apartment and slammed the door shut, stalking past the box into his room, in an attempt to disregard it.
Ted strove to maintain this forceful approach to the problem over the next few days, endeavoring to dismiss the ever growing unease he felt whenever he made his way through the main room, the less restful and shorter sleep he got each night, the slowly sinking dread every time he came close to his front door each day after work. As the week drew to a close, and his fingers shook in rebellion as he struggled to place his key into his door, Ted swore. Why was he letting this get to him? It was just a damn box! He would toss the blasted thing out, just as soon as he was inside! Grabbing his key with both hands, he jabbed it at the lock, missing the first two times, finally striking home, and while fighting a rising terror, he turned the key and swung open the door forcefully.
He could not look away, his gaze having immediately been drawn to the damnable wooden shape sitting with a shuddering stillness in front of him. The box no longer appeared harmless. It oozed malicious hostility. As the blood in his eyes pulsed and jarred his vision, the box seemed to throb aggression in time to the beating of his heart. Stealing his nerve, Ted strode into his blighted apartment and habitually closed the door behind him. With a determined purpose, he stepped toward the box. The color drained from his cheeks, and his hands trembled. He took another step and froze.
Terror seized at him, and he struggled to look away from the box and toward his legs, wondering why he could not move them. He could not see anything holding them, yet they would not move. His eyes snapped back to the box and he could swear he could see heat radiating from it, a heat of hatred and fear. He could hear his heart in his ears, and noticed for the first time that the whole room seemed transformed. It felt darker than before, and less colorful. In fact, he could not now recall what color it had been, or if it had ever had color at all. All he could see were the walls closing in, bending at odd angles to crush down upon him. Cringing in dread, Ted fell to his knees, only to scream in shock as he found his face mere feet from the horrible box.
Each breath caught in his throat and he had to force the air painfully in and out with an increasingly difficult conscious effort, as his throat tried to seize up and suffocate him in cascading waves of panic. Ted tried to scream again, but found that the only sound he could produce was a hoarse strangled cough. In a blind hysteria, he saw a faint hope calling out to him from beyond the box. His room! He could escape to the safety of his room! The front door forgotten in his scramble to survive, Ted clawed his way around the box, always keeping as far away as the room allowed, as he circled toward and finally achieved the doorway to his room, crawling in and slamming the door shut behind him, shutting out his view of the horrid room and the box at its twisted center.
His room was safe. He was safe in his room. Everything was normal on this side of the door, he tried to convince himself. As he backed himself against his bed and the far wall, Ted twitched and convulsed as his muscles struggled to relax. Eventually he was able to breathe without effort, and he rapidly inhaled, painfully, lungfuls of untainted air. As his body finally let go of their frightful seizure, Ted collapsed into a sobbing exhausted heap, and eventually passed out from the effort and stress.
He awoke screaming, and realized he was clawing at the wall behind him, trying desperately to dig his way through, further away from the box. It was dark, night had fallen, or so he hoped. He was no longer certain of anything, his mind a perplexed and blubbering roil of anxiety and dismay. Why had he come home? Why had had come in? Why had he not fled? He could not know the answers, there were no answers, and that scared him even more.
His gaze was transfixed upon his door, and the unseeable box beyond, he did not blink. He could not blink for fear of something indescribably hideous seizing upon that moment of temporary blindness to do indescribable things to him. Panic and dread were now perpetually upon him, and he occasionally whimpered as he thought he caught sight of some flicker of movement from the dark cracks around the edge of the door.
Ted started to giggle spasmodically as he looked about at his various possessions, at all of the things lying about uselessly in his room, desperately trying to think of anything useful to do with any of them to effect his escape from that abhorrent box in the other room, trying desperately to think of anything at all, each successive moment finding it harder and harder to conjure anything cognizant other than pure blind horror. The light in his room flickered! Or had it? He was having increasing difficulty distinguishing reality and the maddened imaginings of his own delirium.
Finally, he did blink, but only because he thought he was going blind. It had gotten darker, he knew it had gotten darker, he could see the darkness seeping in toward him from the door! That whole side of his room was vanishing into shadow, being swallowed up by the encroaching presence of the box! Screeching and scrambling, Ted started clawing desperately at the wall behind him, dislodging bits of wallpaper and plaster, tearing his nails and ripping his skin. His fingers started slipping on the blood, but he did not notice, his eyes flooding with tears, obscuring everything about him as he screamed and screamed, not daring to look back at the ominous darkness he knew was flooding toward him, to envelope him in oblivion.
____________
The smell emanating from the apartment was reported a week later. The smell was unmistakable to the officers who came and broke down the door, a smell they were far too familiar with in the routine discharge of their duties. All too often they were called out to investigate a domicile where someone without social connections had entered of their own volition and exited only with the aid of a gurney. When the officers broke in Ted’s door, they found an empty room with nothing out of the ordinary in the main room, except for a solitary box sitting in the middle of the floor.
When they entered Ted’s room, several of the officers found the need to vacate their stomachs. The horror show that greeted them would haunt them forever, the emaciated corpse pressed against the far wall barely resembled a human, with all of its muscles taut or pulled. There were several bones protruding from the skin, and the arms were worn down to the elbows, a testament to the effort it had taken to dig such deep furrows in the brick exterior beyond the plaster of the inner wall. Along with the blood spattered all over the remains of the wall, there was one word carved, ‘box’.
Curiosity is relentless when aroused, and the officers were naturally more subject to the impulse. Once they had gotten over their initial shock, and then over their natural apprehension, one brave officer dared to walk over to the now foreboding box. He lifted the lid with the toe of his boot and peered inside. Kicking the lid off entirely, he stared into it, then back at the tortured form of Ted in his final repose, and finally again at the word on the wall. The officer wondered aloud at the nature of madness as he looked down once more into the empty box.
