The Nightmare Box

The box was bigger than I was. When my father hauled it into my room, it sounded as heavy as lead when he thumped it down on the carpet. He smiled, and said, “enjoy!” and I have not slept a wink since that moment.

It was a great brick of a chest with a basement smell, a combination of dust, damp wood, and rusted metal. Flaking black paint revealed an ugly shade of olive underneath. It looked like it had been hauled off a sunken ship or recovered from a haunted mansion. If my father had come into the room and instead plopped down a rhinoceros or a huge wheel of cheese, I would not have been half so confused. What possible use could I have for this?

The box once belonged to my grandfather. I hadn’t seen him since I was a child; I recall a stooped man with wild gray hair. He was as vague to me as the reason for the box being in my room. My father seemed to think I would appreciate it, even though there wasn’t even anything inside it. Not at first.

My mother’s spring cleaning efforts had left my room empty: no haphazard piles of clothes, no toys strewn around. Even the books on my shelf were orderly. The worst part was that cleanliness had been brought about by my own hand. Returning it to normal would have to be a gradual process, a subtle return to normal. If it happened all at once I would have to clean again.

While struggling through my homework, after dinner was over and bedtime loomed, the box kept drawing my eye. It crouched green and black against the wall, all precise angles, and the room was so tidy; I had the sensation of being in the school library among the long square rows of shelves, or trapped inside a checkerboard. I was at my desk poised over a worksheet menacing me with mathematics: “If a train leaves the station at 12:30 and travels 200 miles, and it arrives at its destination at 6:00, how fast was it traveling?”

The question was fundamentally flawed. Packed with useless information. The author had foolishly omitted the speed at which the train was traveling, which meant the question was impossible to answer. The numbers provided were of no help; the departure and arrival times had nothing to do with the speed. And that box with all its repugnant order was exactly as hollow as the question.

I turned the worksheet over and drew a picture of a train. It was traveling so fast that the wheels had caught fire and one had tumbled away, still ablaze. I lifted the heavy lid of the box and dropped the picture inside. Now it wasn’t empty.

I settled into my bed with unease. The weight of the box seemed to absorb all the light in the room, yet every nightlight shadow pointed toward it. The box drew in both the dark and the light. Soon the crowding shadows began sway and fester, and I could not afford to close my eyes. They could strike at any moment. Creaking under the weight of the box, the floor began to drop away. I listened as itt gave a millimeter, a foot, a mile.

My room was flooded with a sudden bright light pounding through the blinds. Outside, directly behind my head, there was a loud engine and a howl of wind, some monstrosity moving past at a terrific pace. Watching the bars of light scour the room, I waited in terror for a great burning wheel to smash through the wall. I swore I heard the steel on steel grinding of the train on its tracks. But after just a moment, it was over. The engine plunged into the night’s distance. I was too shaken to go to the window. And even if I looked, I knew it might see me and come back.

Gathering my courage, I gently lifted the top of the box and reached in. I felt around the dark interior, scratched the warped and knotted bottom, but the picture was not in there. It had been eaten and spit out as something real. And that had been merely a train. What terror would the box summon if it had nothing inside it? I had to regain control.

I went again to my desk and clicked on my desk lamp. Fighting with sluggish hands and working through half-lifted eyelids, I drew the first thing that came to mind. A pine cone. Hardly dangerous at all, and certainly not scary. Hoping to sate its hunger, I slipped the picture into the box and sank back into bed. Shadows crept in, their talons poised around the box, but I closed my eyes tight and did my best to ignore them.

Whatever evil locked inside the box began to stir in the early hours of morning. I came around to it slowly. I thought I heard a scraping and a shifting, but I was mostly asleep. Until there was a loud crack outside and the crunch and pop of timber.

Moonlight streamed in from between the curtains and cast the shadow of a tremendous pine tree. A freak wind storm had kicked up and the tree was groaning in the gale. The thick bulk was getting larger, as though it would crush the house. I kicked my feet out of bed and stumbled to the window. The tree was blue and white in moonlight and teetering unsteadily. For a moment I was frozen in place watching it. But it continued to shimmy, and the window blew hard, but it did not fall.

As quietly as I could, I dragged the box out of my room. I managed to stub my toe not once, but twice. It sat glowering at me from the hallway. I closed my bedroom door and got back in bed. When I closed my eyes, my alarm clock went off a moment later. Morning had come in an instant. I shook my head and steeled myself in case this was another nightmare, but it was over. I was free. Completely exhausted, but free.

When I opened my bedroom door, the room beyond was completely black. Cold wind came into the room, and I glanced back to see that my bedroom was dark again, too. When my eyes adjusted, I could see the ground almost a mile down. My room was perched at the top of an impossibly tall tree. I clung to the doorframe as it began to shift and sway. On my knees, suddenly covered in cold sweat, I knew I had to close the door. I reached for the doorknob and my fingers missed. I nearly slipped over the threshold and tumbled to the ground far below. My fingers were cold on the doorframe and I held on so hard that my fingers began to hurt.

The entire room was lurching and groaning like a ship on choppy seas. My shirt flapped in the wind and my ears were freezing. A gust blew the door completely open and it lay flat against the opposite wall, far out of my reach. I climbed to my feet and tried to reach again. I pressed myself against the door. I leaned and tiptoed until one foot was dangling over the void, and as I stretched as far as I could, the room was listing. Once I had the doorknob in hand, my foot slipped. The cold darkness rushed at me and I plummeted through the trees. Buffeted by the cutting wind, I spun and fell back-first. Far above me, the block of my room impaled in the treetops was dark against the moon.

The moment before impact, before the sickening thud of my body hitting the ground, I snapped awake.

My alarm clock was beeping its ugly tone over and over again. I was hot all over — sweating beneath the covers on my bed. Morning light spilled in and played along the wall where the box had been. My door was closed, and I made my way slowly toward it. Was the box outside in the hall? Had it existed at all?

I turned the doorknob and listened. I could hear bare feet on the carpet. I opened the door a crack. The hallway was there, right where it ought to be. My mother, already dressed, was walking down the hall.

“Oh, you’re finally awake,” she said, and then she stubbed her toe on the big, dark chest lying in the hall.

“What is this thing doing out here? We ought to get rid of that.”

“I agree,” I told her.

After breakfast, I dragged it down the stairs. In the process of maneuvering it out the door, my father stopped me.

“Hey, what’s the big idea?” he asked. “You don’t want your grandfather’s trunk?”

“It’s evil,” I told him.

“Of course it’s evil. It came from your mother’s side of the family.”

“It gave me nightmares.”

“Nightmares?”

I eased the trunk down so that it lay across the threshold of the front door. “I don’t want it in the house, dad.”

“All right,” he said. “I’ll throw it in the garage.”

I picked up one end and prepared to throw it outside, but then I did a little mental calculation. His bedroom was on the garage side of the house. The nightmares would be his problem now.

“Suit yourself,” I said. I lifted the heavy lid and withdrew my homework. “What are you going to put in it?”

“Your mother’s collection of old dolls,” he said, hefting the big chest. “It could even hold the Halloween decorations.”

I imagined Mom’s creepy old dolls lolling in shoeboxes in the garage. The huge spider that we mounted on the door in October also came to mind.

I slept soundly all through the week. Mom and Dad didn’t. On Saturday, they furiously emptied the trunk and set it beside the trash cans at the end of the driveway.

Garbage day came and I waited eagerly by the front window. When they hoisted the chest into the truck and drove off, the trees on our block all shifted in the wind. The truck plunged into the distance when it left the neighborhood and took the wind with it.